RE: When Subgoals Attack

From: Gordon Worley (redbird@rbisland.cx)
Date: Wed Dec 27 2000 - 14:31:55 MST


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At 10:28 AM -0500 12/25/2000, Ben Goertzel wrote:
>One thing I've found in doing practical Webmind work is that the "society of
>mind"
>metaphor is only partially apt.

Since you have some experience, I'll assume that what you are writing
to true for practical purposes as of now. This will be relavent in a
moment.

>A brain requires a higher degree of overall
>"fascist"
>regulation of its parts than a society does, although it also requires a lot
>of free-flowing
>self-organization within the top-down-imposed constraints.

Now, I haven't done much in the realm of AI, but I have done a good
bit of AL and see no reason why, given enough processing power, lots
of automata couldn't form an intelligence from their society. I've
seen it happen on the small scale (some of the automata get together
and their interactions causes the group to do something intelligent
(a *very* simple example is a glider in Conway's Game of Life)). For
practical purposes, the only problem is processing power, which will
be less of a problem in the future. You make use of the word brain,
though, so trying to replicate a brain would, of course, require a
certain amount of control that exist in human brains, but, for an
intelligence, it should be possible to do it by creating a system of
automata with the right rules of interaction to form a societal
intelligence that will outwardly seem like any other, but on the
inside work in a very different way.

>Like many other things, it's a question of balance

Well, I don't buy this balance thing. Things must reach perfection
(or at least that's how my mind wants them to be), and to do so they
cannot rest at some point inbetween options for perfection unless
they are at such a spot that the balance is exact, meaning another
perfection. Reaching that perfect balance is practically impossible,
since it is all too easy to fall off of the perfect point by doing x
or y that moves off of the point, but also it assumes that there are
two or more perfect ways to do something, which is possible, but not
very likely. Prehaps my main personal reason for being an anarchist
is that I see no form of government (other than self government, if
you want to get technical) as perfect, so the only way to perfection
is to eliminate it.</rant>
- --
Gordon Worley
http://www.rbisland.cx/
mailto:redbird@rbisland.cx
PGP: C462 FA84 B811 3501 9010 20D2 6EF3 77F7 BBD3 B003

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