Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Notational Standards
discussion à
The next generation knowledge tools
Communication from Paul
Werbos (long time Director of Neuroengineering at one of the science funding
agencies.)
Curious.
In two days, I am to travel to China to talk about intelligent
systems and the mind to a large audience there. I am finding it challenging to
really realign my mindset and prepare.
One colleague said in passing: "Ah! Please try to learn more
about their strange and mysterious mindset, and why they are doing so much
better than us in preparing future graduate students."
And it occurred to me... in many ways, the ancient Chinese mindset
seems to me like just a matter of realistic common sense, and it is the weird
lost-in-meta-hallucination stuff we have that is more mystifying to me.
If we find them mystifying, maybe that is a statement about us
more than a statement about them.
Even Lao Tsu... how many Westerners interpret him as a kind of
stage magician or postmodernist deconstructionist, when he is merely groping as
best he can to talk about what he sees in front of him...
As for intelligent systems -- well, perhaps they more naturally
understanding the importance of what we sometimes call "subsymbolic
reasoning." Which should be obvious to anyone who tracks the evolution of
brains.
I am reminded of the western psychologist or AI person who
attacked a rather boring and ordinary neural network model of aplysia, saying,
in effect, "It does not even begin to tell us about the metalogical
reasoning process by which the aplysia explains itself to itself as it reasons about
the decisions it must make in its life..."
That's the kind of mindset I find more mystifying (though its
links to aplysia behavior really can begin to provide an explanation...).
OK, this is just a quick tip of an iceberg...
Best,
Paul