Asa H and associationism

At a conference a few weeks ago a colleague suggested to me that Asa was a software implementation of Hume's associationism.  While I agreed in part I did point out that a lot more was also going on in Asa H besides association.  See, for example, my website www.robert-w-jones.com, cognitive scientist, theory of thought and mind. I referred him instead to John H. Andreae's work.

 But the Asa H experiments ARE relevant to philosophy (as described in many of my blogs).  According to David Hume the "self" is "...a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed each other..."  This is exactly what Asa's concept of its self is as I've described while it's been evolving.

Asa H discovers mind-body dualism

My artificial intelligence Asa H has formed a concept composed of the actions it is able to perform. This concept is, in turn, composed out of what might be termed a concept of mental action and a separate concept of physical action.  The concept physical actions is composed of things like moving, turning, grasping, lifting, etc., all actions that require substantial current draws on the NXT/EV3 batteries.  The concept mental actions is composed of things like extrapolation from the case base, searching through the case base, loading a data (case) file, sorting a file, etc., all actions that involve no large added current drains. (To increase its utility measures Asa prefers to take actions that do not require a large current drain.) Asa H makes this distinction between the mental and the physical.

Consciousness in Asa H

Typical Asa H light software (see my blogs of 10 Feb. 2011 and 14 May 2012) allows for simple adjustments to learning by setting parameters like L and skip. More complex software packages allow Asa to observe the amount of time it spends taking input, giving output, searching the case base, performing feature extraction, adding to memory, sorting memory, comparing, extrapolating, doing deduction, doing simulation, case updating, etc. and then correlate these efforts with the utility (rewards) observed/received over time (see chapter 0ne of my book Twelve Papers, the section titled self monitoring  www.robert-w-jones.com). Parameters like L and skip are, themselves, made inputs to the hierarchical memory and Asa learns a vector/concept like:

 thought = (search, deduction, simulation, sorting, extrapolating, comparing, remembering, etc.).

 Asa can be allowed to adjust the learning itself by making the parameters outputs of the memory hierarchy. Thinking can come to constitute a part of Asa's concept of its self:

 self = (sense, act, health, thought).

This is a further evolution of Asa's self concept. Asa can observe some of its own thought processes.

 In interaction with the world I have tried to give Asa the same sort of sensations and behaviors that a human might experience.  If Wittgenstein is right this might be necessary if humans and AIs are to understand each other. But what Asa sees of its own thought processes is quite different from what humans know of their own inner thoughts.  Will this prove to be a problem? Might the same thing be true if we met space aliens?

One, two, three and four dimensional memories for Asa H

In my blog of 7 Jan. 2015 I describe how to give my artificial intelligence Asa H a one dimensional memory for things like recorded speech and a two dimensional memory for things like images.  With Asa H now controlling a distributed set of Lego NXT and Ev3 robots it is also possible to establish a three dimensional memory with the agents distributed about in 3 space. Since this is recorded as a function of time it is a four dimensional pattern in memory.

This hardware and software configuration quickly forms the "action-at-a-distance" concept as it learns.

There is not one single fundamental level of reality

Some empiricists might tend to believe that there is a single most fundamental level of reality be it strings, or quantum fields, or what have you.  Schaffer has argued against this view (Nous, 37:3, pg 498, 2003). Concepts like Chalmers' indexical I (Constructing the World, Oxford U. Press, 2012, pg 390) or Wierzbicka's substantive I would correspond to the self concept that my AI Asa H is learning (see blogs of 5 Dec. 2015 and 4 March 2015). This concept resides on a fairly high level in the Asa H case memory hierarchy. Other concepts like Chalmers' quality color or Wierzbicka's touch or hear reside at much lower levels in Asa's hierarchical memory. Furthermore, I do not think we need to believe equally strongly in all of our concepts, even our most fundamental ones.  (Scientific pluralism again.)

Seaking ultimate O-terms

In his Aufbau project Carnap argued that all concepts could be constructed from a similarity relation and a few logical concepts (like AND, OR, NOT). These would be, in effect, Lewis' ultimate O-terms.  Asa H has (one or more) similarity measures and NOT built in (innate) and can learn sequences that implement AND or OR.

In addition to Anna Wierzbicka's 63 semantic primes Locke offered 8 ultimate conceptual primitives: extension, solidity, mobility,perception, motivity, existence, duration, and number (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book2, chapter 21, 1690). But some of these can be decomposed into other primitive concepts (more primitive ones?). Solidity can be learned as a sequence of actions involving touch, force or pressure application, and observed degree of deformation/deflection.  Mobility can be learned as a sequence of detecting, touching, grasping, lifting, and carrying. (Note that outputs, actions, as well as inputs, sensations, are involved.)

In this way we can try to find a more primitive (most primitive?) set of O-terms.  Or, by recombining the basic conceptual elements (subelements?) could we hope to operationalize our project to reconceptualize reality? Physicists, for example, might wish to combine Locke's perception and existence into one single concept.  The idea being that what exists is whatever can be detected/measured by sensors/instruments.

Empiricists like Lawrence Barsalou and Jesse Prinz believe that all the most primitive concepts are acquired by direct perception alone. (Furnishing the Mind, Bradford Book, 2004) In that case intelligences with the same senses might expect to share the same (or at least similar) fundamental concepts. We might expect Asa H to reconceptualize reality due to its ability to perform radio ESP, echolocation and ranging and to directly sense GPS location, electric fields, magnetic fields, atmospheric pressure,  and nuclear radiation.

Impact factors and citation analysis

I was talking with a college administrator at a conference this weekend and the discussion turned to measuring research quality. While I don't think they are totally useless I do believe that, like student evaluations of instruction, citation analysis of scientific research is largely a popularity contest.

I want the truth of a scientific idea to be measured by its agreement with observation and experiment. I don't believe science is democratic.  Human opinion can not be the deciding factor.

What about the most difficult of fields where only a handful of people are even capable of understanding the concepts involved? (Feynman said that nobody understands quantum mechanics.) There won't be many papers to cite or readers to have read them. Popular is not the same as good.