Continuing my search for AGI I’ve been thinking about conscious and unconscious thought. Investigating these led me to explicit and implicit memory. This actually led me to the lecture by Eric Kandel (above), which goes into good detail the mechanisms by which animals learn. It’s not complete, though. Kandel only describes learning as an emphasizing of existing synapses, rather than the formation of connections to new neurons. To make things worse, he admits that this is not well understood by the scientific community… so I’m still mostly stuck.

All this pondering has led me to some interesting ideas, though. Earlier, I had associated conscious thought with logical thought, and unconscious with intuitive. Branching out from there I began to wonder if logical thought was the product of explicit memory, and intuitive from implicit memory. It now seems clear to me that this cannot be such a clearly-defined dualism, because mice possess an explicit memory and are not competent at logic. Logic is a procedure that is perhaps only available to conscious entities, but I should not jump to the conclusion that consciousness entails logic, either, as it seems to me that a lot of the conscious (deliberate) action taken by humans is not based on theory.

Humans possess both explicit and implicit memories, and have the capability to use intuition or logic to solve problems. If I’m right, and strong artificial intelligence requires replicating the capability of non-human animals, then I’d do well to first disregard logic, then disregard explicit learning of events and facts, and focus instead on how novel neural links form in nerves.

Of course, I always try to assume I’m wrong. So in hopes I’ll figure out how, I’m off to watch the syntience (artificial intuition) videos.

I was given How to Think About God by Mortimer J. Adler to read, but I find it very difficult to focus on the dry concepts while my eyes droop from fatigue. In the pages that I’ve read so far I’ve come across an interesting concept—that of a “supreme being.” Adler elaborates a bit on the concept by clarifying that a supreme being is one that is greater than any other, like the concept of infinity is greater than any number. As the author moves on from this to discuss things such as the existence or non-existence of such a being, I have trouble following because I fail to see the metric by which the greatness of a being is measured.

Adler brings up the Ontological argument provided by Anselm of Canterbury, where a being that comes into or out of existence is lesser than one that must always exist, which makes me think that he at least associates quantity of existence with “greatness”. This would imply that a being of infinite greatness would be all things, which would also imply that there is no distinction between the cosmos (all that is) and God (the greatest imaginable being). This seems consistent with the more pantheistic flavors of the major religions, but I’ve always had trouble seeing why the concept of a god is necessary in such a case, as Nature or the Universe would be synonymous.

In other thoughts, I read up on Artificial Intuition before I left, and I was struck by the connection to my thoughts after reading How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. Lehrer distinguishes between what I think of as our Head vs. our Gut. We use our head to do specific logical reasoning and self-examination, but most of our behavior is governed by the subconscious split-second intuition that we use for everything from picking favorites to moving limbs. Monica Anderson emphasizes this point as it relates to artificial intelligence, and describes how intuitive models of reality are far more likely to produce general AI (AGI) than a logic-focused, reductionist, approach.

I’m in total agreement here, but it’s a bit frustrating, because it implies that consciousness is not capable of examining intuitive mental structures in great detail. For example, if you make a split second decision on whether to sit next to a person on the bus, it is nearly impossible to determine why you decided as such (most reasoning will likely boil down to false rationalizations). So now I’ve been separated from my greatest tool; I can no longer build AI based on how I think my own thought works. My intuition (lol) says that the place to start examining intuition is with simple animal behaviors, so now I’m on the lookout for good fruit fly brain studies or whatever.

Well, not really. Right now I’m on the lookout for something to keep me occupied while I ride through Kansas.