Re: Aaron Sloman's "The Irrelevance of Turing Machines to AI" article

From: Wolf Kirchmeir (wwolfkir_at_sympatico.ca)
Date: 08/03/04 

Date: Tue, 03 Aug 2004 12:37:53 -0400

Sergio Navega wrote:
[...]
> I agree, but there's an important point to be made. The domains where
> children usually refine their discrimination abilities are linked to
> conceptual categories (as opposed to perceptual categories).
> Successive conceptually refined categories (such as "edible stuff",
> and then "food", later "liquid food" and finally "milk") are categories
> that are refined mostly because of top/down processes. The perception of
> stimuli in these cases may be the same for an adult and an infant,
> but the former has developed these categories while the latter hasn't.
> Perceptual categories (or bottom-up categories) are those which seek
> for similarity and clustering based on the raw elements captured by
> the senses. After some time, our brain becomes unable to discriminate
> all the sort of things that an infant appears to be discriminating
> (the example of the japanese children is evidence of such a thing).
>
> Sergio Navega.

Again, granted that "categorisation" takes place. But what, exactly, is
it? I submit it's behaviour. There is some pre-linguistic categorisation
going on, evidenced for example via the peekaboo game, and experiments
that are in carefully controlled versions of that game. There seems to
be no reason to assume that this stops with adulthood, although it would
be harder to dtect, since adults have this habit of talking. :-)

But mostly, categorisation is language use. The question is, how do I
get you to "understand" a new use of the language? How do I arrive at
that new use? The first question is easier to answer than the second - I
train you to use the language the same way I do, by, for example,
"agreeing with what you say" in repsonse to my speech. **

The second question is harder. Introspection and reports on "how I feel"
suggest there are unpleasant feelings attached to certain language uses,
and that these feelings may change to pleasant ones when a new use is
produced. Euphemisms seems to work this way, for example. (That is, the
discriminator in this case is a feeling. That feelings act as
reinforcers should be obvious.)

Metaphor is a little harder, but it seems to be a case of experimenting
with different usages until that positive feeling is evoked. The fact
that "poetry programs" can produce interesting and striking metaphors by
semi-random combinations of words supports this explanation: we, the
readers of thsoe random collocations, judge them as ointersting/etc. So
do reports by poets, who say they "search for" the right
phrase/image/etc, ie, they try out different words and phrases until one
"sounds right." That's a remarkably behaviorist account, allowing for
the non-technical terminology.

** When I was first teaching, a question that vexed me from the
beginning was, How do I know that a student has understood a tex? The
answer is, of course, that the only evidnce we have is his or her
language about the text. Tests and exams are designed to elciit such
language, but the relationship between text/exam answers and
understanding a text is obscure, to put it mildly.

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