Any and all! Though I have a lot of interest in military history in particular, which lead me to wargaming, with some specialized interest in the Hellenistic period and the ancient world in general, medieval martial arts, and the black powder era of linear battles.

In our own case here and now, we are actually failing to understand each other fully because I can't show you actual videotapes of what I'm talking about.

What do you mean by "fully" ? I believe I understand you well enough for all practical purposes. I don't agree with you, but agreement and understanding are two different things.

First, I don't contest the existence of verbal labels that merely refer -- or even just register as being invoked without refering at all.

I'm not sure what you mean by "merely refer", but keep in mind that we humans are able to communicate concepts which have no physical analogues that would be immediately accessible to our senses. For example, we can talk about things like "O(N)", or "ribosome", or "a^n +b^n = c^n". We can also talk about entirely imaginary worlds, such as f.ex. the world where Mario, the turtle-crushing plumber, lives. And we can do this without having any "physical context" for the interaction, too.

All that is beside the point, however. In the rest of your post, you bring up a lot of evidence in support of your model of human development. That's great, but your original claim was that any type of intelligence at all will require a physical body in order to develop; and nothing you've said so far is relevant to this claim. True, human intelligence is the only kind we know of so far, but then, at one point birds and insects were the only self-propelled flyers in existence -- and that's not the case anymore.

Furthermore, your also claimed that no simulation, no matter how realistic, will serve to replace the physical world for the purposes of human development, and I'm still not convinced that this is true, either. As I'd said before, we humans do not have perfect senses; if physical coordinates of real objects were snapped to a 0.01mm grid, no human child would ever notice. And in fact, there are plenty of humans who grow up and develop language just fine without the ability to see colors, or to move some of their limbs in order to point at things.

Just to drive the point home: even if I granted all of your arguments regarding humans, you would still need to demonstrate that human intelligence is the only possible kind of intelligence; that growing up in a human body is the only possible way to develop human intelligence; and that no simulation could in principle suffice, and the body must be physical. These are all very strong claims, and so far you have provided no evidence for any of them.

Guesstimates based on quick reading without serious analysis:

(1) Probability that Amnda Knox is guilty: 5%

(2) Probablility that Raffaele Sollecito is guilty: 10%

(3) Probability that Gudy Guede is guilty: 60%

(4) Probability that my estimates are congruent with OP's: 50% (ie random, I can't tell what his opinion is)

Hi. I'm a software engineer and history enthusiast. Been reading for years, and just recently got around to making an account. Still building up the courage to dive in, but this place has done wonders for reducing sloppy thinking on my part.

If the orientation of my body changes when I say "there", I might point over my shoulder rather than to my front and left.

I was able to follow this explanation (as well as the rest of your post) without seeing your physical body in any way. In addition, I suspect that, while you were typing your paragraph, you weren't physically pointing at things. The fact that we can do this looks to me like evidence against your main thesis.

Let's take the very fundamental function of pointing. Every human language is rife with words called deictics that anchor the flow of utterance to specific pieces of the immediate environment. English examples are words like "this", "that", "near", "far", "soon", "late", the positional prepositions, pronominals like "me" and "you" -- the meaning of these terms is grounded dynamically by the speakers and hearers in the time and place of utterance, the placement and salience of surrounding objects and structures, and the particular speaker and hearers and overhearers of the utterance. Human pointing -- with the fingers, hands, eyes, chin, head tilt, elbow, whatever -- has been shown to perform much the same functions as deictic speech in utterance. (See the work of Sotaro Kita if you're interested in the data). A robot with no mechanism for pointing and no sensory apparatus for detecting the pointing gestures of human agents in its environment will misunderstand a great deal and will not be able to communicate fluently.

Are you really claiming that ability to understand the very concept of indexicality, and concepts like "soon", "late", "far", etc., relies on humanlike fingers? That seems like an extraordinary claim, to put it lightly.

Also:

A robot with no mechanism for pointing and no sensory apparatus for detecting the pointing gestures of human agents in its environment will misunderstand a great deal and will not be able to communicate fluently.

"Detecting pointing gestures" would be the function of a perception algorithm, not a sensory apparatus (unless what you mean is "a robot with no ability to perceive positions/orientations/etc. of objects in its environment", which... wouldn't be very useful). So it's a matter of what we do with sense data, not what sorts of body we have; that is, software, not hardware.

More generally, a lot of what you're saying (and — this is my very tentative impression — a lot of the ideas of embodied cognition in general) seems to be based on an idea that we might create some general-intelligent AI or robot, but have it start at some "undeveloped" state and then proceed to "learn" or "evolve", gathering concepts about the world, growing in understanding, until it achieves some desired level of intellectual development. The concern then arises that without the kind of embodiment that we humans enjoy, this AI will not develop the concepts necessary for it to understand us and vice versa.

Ok. But is anyone working in AI these days actually suggesting that this is how we should go about doing things? Is everyone working in AI these days suggesting that? Isn't this entire line of reasoning inapplicable to whole broad swaths of possible approaches to AI design?

P.S. What does "there, relative to the river" mean?

OK, thanks for clarifying.

I certainly agree that a physical robot body is subject to constraints that an emulated body may not be subject to; it is possible to design an emulated body that we are unable to build, or even a body that cannot be built even in principle, or a body that interacts with its environment in ways that can't happen in the real world.

And I similarly agree that physical systems demonstrate relationships, like that between torque and effort, which provide data, and that an emulated body doesn't necessarily demonstrate the same relationships that a robot body does (or even that it can in principle). And those aren't unrelated, of course; it's precisely the constraints on the system that cause certain parts of that system to vary in correlated ways.

And I agree that a robot body is automatically subject to those constraints, whereas if I want to build an emulated software body that is subject to the same constraints that a particular robot body would be subject to, I need to know a lot more.

Of course, a robot body is not subject to the same constraints that a human body is subject to, any more than an emulated software body is; to the extent that a shared ability to understand language depends on a shared set of constraints, rather than on simply having some constraints, a robot can't understand human language until it is physically equivalent to a human. (Similar reasoning tells us that paraplegics don't understand language the same way as people with legs do.)

And if understanding one another's language doesn't depend on a shared set of constraints, such that a human with two legs, a human with no legs, and a not-perfectly-humanlike robot can all communicate with one another, it may turn out that an emulated software body can communicate with all three of them.

The latter seems more likely to me, but ultimately it's an empirical question.

Great comment, telms!

I think that there's a huge computational / energy strain on systems that attempt to map simulations of reality to reality. I don't mean this in some sort of "deep" way, just that it seems like those teaching a simulation the rules of "second life" will eventually get a simulation that's very good at prospering within "second life" rules but fairly useless at prospering in reality. Why? Because I suspect that the thing will be tuned into second life, and that its sense of comfort (if it becomes comfortable) will begin with an absence of information about reality, and will adapt to its environment. If transplanted into the real world, it would drop things, and they would shatter, people wouldn't be happy and interested in goofing off, they'd be gruff and impatient (because they're not sitting at home interacting with second life, they're at work, driving to the mall, getting groceries, etc.) Everything is changed in reality.

I'm not saying it couldn't get fairly smart in simulation, but I think there are far more failure modes in simulation. For example: there can be vore fetish porn, slug-like replicators, alien parasites, and vampires in "Second Life" people can fly and be insect sized or giant-sized in simulators. Any of these non-real-world "norms" would mean that a creature that normalizes to Second Life might have a lot of resentment if it couldn't easily transition to the real world. And, perhaps it would transition easily, but perhaps it will have associated with a very destructive norm in "Second Life." Maybe it can be reasoned with. But maybe it becomes a sociopath. The "changing event" is likely to be the shift to the real world, and there would not have been as much time studying the behaviors "in real life" or "away from keyboard." Is the robot body moving slowly because it isn't accustomed to the rigidity and feedback of gravity and the real world, or the actual surge of electricity into synthetic muscle fiber actuators? Does it resent the fact that it was normalized to live in an "outdated" or "false" environment? Does it then try to adapt the real world to its shiny "Second Life" virtual world? (Such as, by making everything inside of its apartment shiny and cartoony, or by training kids to fall into a big venus flytrap and get eaten, etc.? Does it try walk around with a chainsaw arm? When people overreact to its chainsaw arm, does it overreact to their overreaction?) If there's a "ramping up" in terms of bodies, and the bodies are similar to ours, we can have some conception of what the robot is feeling, and can treat it with respect and kindness. If on the other hand, we have no real idea what it's feeling, we run the risk that it gradually (worse, covertly) stops identifying with us to some extent (50%? 100%?). That might be bad.

I think it's very dangerous to be creating robots that the military can use, which would give the military a decisive advantage, because there' no love on a battle field, and all AGI's (including those with human-wetware infant brains) begin without adequate information about the world. I think that the best means of interacting with humans in reality is to begin interacting with them from the crib, and keep interacting with them as one "gets more sophisticated."

However, there is a huge incentive to raise AGIs in simulations (cheap and useful; possibly income-earning) or in military reality (survival-conveying, useful). Both of these situations seem uncaring (sociopathic) toward the AGI itself. Both of these situations seem like they'd end up resulting in an AGI subject to either a "fake, uninteresting" world without actual control over its reality or ability to communicate to its friends when they are not "online", or worse, a brutal upbringing, born on a sociopathic battlefield. In either case, the two most likely pathways for the birth of strong AGI from a market-driven standpoint (in the state-corrupted "marketplace of ideas," anyway) is an inadequate-capital-financing scenario for perhaps the majority of first-to-fund AGI experiments. So, there will likely be some unfriendly AGI very soon.

Hopefully, they are like the "kid from the wrong side of the tracks" who turns out good in spite of his surroundings, instead of the kid from the wrong side of the tracks who rapes your daughter and leaves her in a dumpster before stabbing you in the eye with a switchblade, just to see what it looks like. (Or far worse: bombs over 100,000 innocent people as our drones currently do, overseas, albeit with human sociopath and morally-compromised and unethically-pressured conformist intermediaries.)

Still more hopefully, Eliezer Yudkowsky or some other caring humanist gets both the funding and the competitive pressure he needs to succeed at creating a child AGI. Then, hopefully, that child AGI is surrounded by caring, competent, thoughtful people who pour their hearts and souls into raising it well. Preferably, it won't start out superstrong, or superhuman, but will be given some time to ramp up into those possible futures. (ie: "the asimo model")

Well, to be precise, researchers found tit-for-tat was the best, given the particular set-up. There's no strategy that is better than every other strategy in every set-up. If everyone has a set choice (either "always defect (AD)" or "always cooperate (AC)"), then the best strategy is AD. If there are enough TFT players, however, they will increase each others' scores, and the TFT will be more successful than AD. The more iterations there are, the more advantage TFT will give. However, if all of the players are TFT or AC, then AC will be just as good as TFT. If you have an evolutionary situation between AD, AC, and TFT where complexity is punished, "all TFT" isn't an equilibrium, because you'll have mutations to AC, which will out-compete TFT due to lower complexity, until there are enough AC that AD becomes viable, at which point TFT will start to have an advantage again. All AD will be an equilibrium, because once you reach that point, AC will be inferior, and an incremental increase in TFT due to mutation will not be able to take hold. If you have all AC, then AD will start to proliferate. If you have AC and AD, but no TFT, then eventually AD will take over.

I've come to the conclusion that Stevan Harnad is absolutely correct, and that machine language understanding will require an AI ROBOT, not a disembodied algorithmic system.

I am not familiar with Stevan Harnad, but this sounds counterintuitive to me (though it's very likely that I'm misunderstanding your point). I am currently reading your words on the screen. I can't hear you or see your body language. And yet, I can still understand what you wrote (not fully, perhaps, but enough to ask you questions about it). In our current situation, I'm not too different from a software program that is receiving the text via some input stream, so I don't see an a priori reason why such a program could not understand the text as well as I do.