There's an SF movie on Amazon Prime called "Traveling Salesman", done somewhat in the style of "Twelve Angry Men", about the P=NP hypothesis. It's high on drama rather than explanation, but the sheer existence of such a thing makes me happy. Thought this group might appreciate it.
The Freakonomics web site is currently conducting online research that appears, to this properly hypothesis-blinded participant, to be investigating decision-making and estimated prior probability of success. You can participate yourself at http://www.freakonomics.com/experiments/. The study asks the participant to choose a yes/no decision that they would be willing to commit to...
There's an SF movie on Amazon Prime called "Traveling Salesman", done somewhat in the style of "Twelve Angry Men", about the P=NP hypothesis. It's high on drama rather than explanation, but the sheer existence of such a thing makes me happy. Thought this group might appreciate it.
Sad to say, my only experience with wargaming was playing Risk in high school. I'm not sure that counts.
Let me refer you to Computation and Human Experience, by Philip E. Agre, and to Understanding Computers and Cognition, by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores.
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, Antiochus. What areas of history are you interested in? I'm similarly interested in history -- particularly paleontology and archaeology, the history or urban civilizations (rise and collapse and reemergence), and the history of technology. I kind of lose interest after World War II, though. You?
I was able to follow this explanation (as well as the rest of your post) without seeing your physical body in any way. ... The fact that we can do this looks to me like evidence against your main thesis.
Ah, but you're assuming that this particular interaction stands on its own. I'll bet you were able to visualize the described gestures just fine by invoking memories of past interactions with bodies in the world.
Two points. First, I don't contest the existence of verbal labels that merely refer -- or even just register as being invoked without refering at all. As long as some labels are directly grounded to body/world, or refer to... (read 701 more words →)
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.
Yeah, I am advancing the hypothesis that, in humans, the comprehension of indexicality relies on embodied pointing at its core -- though not just with fingers, which are not universally used for pointing in all human cultures. Sotaro Kita has the most data on this subject for language, but the embodied basis of mathematics is discussed in Where Mathematics Comes From, by by Geroge Lakoff and Rafael Nunez . Whether all possible minds must rely on such a mechanism,... (read 352 more words →)
You make a very important point that I would like to emphasize: incommensurate bodies very likely will lead to misunderstanding. It's not just a matter of shared or disjunct body isomorphism. It's also a matter of embodied interaction in a real world.
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... (read more)
You make some good points. Please forgive me if I am more pessimistic than you are about the likelihood of AGI in our lifetimes, though. These are hard problems, which decompose into hard problems, which decompose into hard problems -- it's hard problems all the way down, I think. The good news is, there's plenty of work to be done.
Thanks for that explanation. The complexity factor hadn't occurred to me.
Some representative papers of Stevan Harnad are:
The Freakonomics web site is currently conducting online research that appears, to this properly hypothesis-blinded participant, to be investigating decision-making and estimated prior probability of success. You can participate yourself at http://www.freakonomics.com/experiments/.
The study asks the participant to choose a yes/no decision that they would be willing to commit to making on the basis of a random coin toss. (Well, actually, the random decay of an atomic nucleus, but they use coin flip graphics.) In my case, the only decision I was willing to make on such a random basis is something with very low risks: namely, the decision whether or not to quit twisting my hair. I accepted the obligation to change... (read 277 more words →)