Samantha Atkins wrote:
> > Your hypothesis seems to be that the architecture of the human mind is poor
> > at communicating with other minds, and that some other architecture
> might do
> > much better. You might be right, but I suspect that what you are seeing is
> > mainly the intrinsic difficulty of communication, which any architecture
> > will have to deal with. AI researchers will be very happy to have an
> > architecture that even comes close to being as good as the human mind, and
> > there's no obvious reason to expect them to do much better any time
> soon. ...
>
>I think you have missed my point. My premise is that it is not the
>inherent difficulty of communication that is the problem but the very
>way the human brain is built and therefore learns and stores information
>that is the difficulty. My its nature "learning" in the human brain (or
>similarly build artificial brains) takes place by the associations
>formed and stored. But this bundles up all learning with everything
>else that is so cross-associated and makes both separation of the
>learning and efficiently transferring it to another such mind quite
>difficult.
But this problem you describe of the excessive context dependence of
things learned *is* exactly the inherent difficult of communication.
All learning is naturally context dependent, and it takes substantial
cognitive effort to strip out person-specific context in order to try
to communicate what you've learned to other people. Your hypothesis is
that some other architecture will do better at abstracting from
person-specific context when learning, which would then directly make
communication easier.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:50:16 MDT