The more I study nature and biology, the more I see that anthropomorphism gets in the way of understanding animals as well. Certain birds, cats, dogs, and even rodents are intelligent, but thinking of their intelligence merely as inferior to humans is not the whole story. Different forms of intelligence have to be understood on their own terms — not through starting with an archetype of human intelligence and making incremental modifications to that archetype. That sort of thinking can lead to anchoring.

- Michael Anissimov

Read the whole thing on Michael’s blog.

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.