From: Durant Schoon (durant@ilm.com)
Date: Tue Jun 19 2001 - 18:04:46 MDT
> From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
>
> Hm, I personally would say that the sentence is not the words.
Me neither. I like Minsky's thematic role frames, personally
(cf. Society of Mind)
> In other
> words, a thought, under the human cognitive architecture and the GISAI
> architecture as well, is made up a set of concepts aligned within a
> targeting structure; the concepts fire, load their prototypes
> (nouns/verbs), modify previously loaded concepts (adjectives/adverbs), and
> sometimes reach out to incorporate other current mental imagery
> (anaphora), and the result is a thought. If I were to try and communicate
> unambiguously, I'd try to do it using direct importation and exportation
> of finished thoughts using a very *low-level* encoding, as close to the
> modality level as possible, rather than trying to come up with an
> unambiguous definition for each of the component concepts. In other
> words, export pixels from the visual cortex rather than trying to use a
> common dictionary referent for "green". My basic take would be that
> thoughts are experiences, even if they're experiences that start out as
> sentences, and that trying to unambiguously communicate a thought between
> posthumans should be done the same way that experiences would be
> communicated between posthumans.
Sounds good, but let's say that posthuman Cindy and posthuman Mindy both
road on a roller coaster. Cindy wants to refer to the experience when
communicating with Mindy. Would Cindy always want to transfer ver *entire*
experience. Or, rather, if sufficient in this case, merely transmit a symbol
that refers the experience (or relevant parts of the experience, known to be
shared). The reference (word, symbol, token) would be much smaller in
most cases. In fact, Mindy might not want Cindy's actual experience floating
around in near contact to Mindy's mental structures.
How about a mix? Sometimes the entire low level structure gets transmitted,
sometimes just the references are sent. So sometimes, words would be
important.
-- Durant Schoon
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