Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
AIList Digest Volume 2 Issue 068
AIList Digest Saturday, 2 Jun 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 68
Today's Topics:
Scientific Method - Perception,
Philosophy - Essence & Soul,
Parapsychology - Scientific Method & Electromagnetics,
Seminars - Knowledge-Based Plant Diagnosis & Learning Procedures
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 31 May 84 9:00:56-PDT (Thu)
From: ihnp4!houxm!hogpc!houti!ariel!norm @ Ucb-Vax.arpa
Subject: Re: "I see", said the carpenter... (PERCEPTION)
Article-I.D.: ariel.652
The idea of proof or disproof rests, in part, on the recognition that the
senses are valid and that perceptions do exist... Any attempt to disprove
the existence of perceptions is an attempt to undercut all proof and all
knowledge. --ariel!norm
------------------------------
Date: Wed 30 May 84 12:18:42-PDT
From: WYLAND@SRI-KL.ARPA
Subject: Essences and soul
In response to Minsky's comments about soul (AIList vol
2, #63): this is a "straw man" argument, based on a particular
concept of soul - "... The common concept of soul says that ...".
Like a straw man, this particular concept is easily attacked;
however, the general question of soul as a concept is not
addressed. This bothers me because I think that raising the
question in this manner can result in generating a lot of heat
(flames) at the expense of light. I hope the following thoughts
contribute more light than heat.
Soul has been used to name (at least) two similar
concepts:
o Soul as the essence of consciousness, and
o Soul as a form of consciousness separate from the body.
The concept of soul as the essence of consciousness we
can handle as simply another name for consciousness.
The concept of soul as a form of consciousness separate
from the body is more difficult: it is the mind/body problem
revisited. You can take a catagorical position on the existance
of the soul/mind as separate from the body (DOES!/DOESN'T!) but
proving or disproving it is more difficult. To prove the concept
requires public evidence of phenomena that require this concept
for their reasonable explanation; to disprove the concept requires
proving that it clearly contradicts other known facts. Since
neither situation seems to hold, we are left to shave with
Occam's Razor, and we should note our comments on the hypothesis
as opinions, not facts.
The concept of soul/consciousness as the result of
growth, of learning, seems right: I am what I have learned - what
I have experienced plus my decisions and actions concerning these
experiences. I wouldn't be "me" without them. However, it is
also possible to create various theories of "disembodied" soul
which are compatible with learning. For example, you could have
a reincarnation theory that has past experiences shut off during
the current life so that they do not interfere with fresh
learning, etc.
Please note: I am not proposing any theories of
disembodied soul. I am arguing against unproven, catagorical
positions for or against such theories. I believe that a
scientist, speaking as a scientist, should be an agnostic -
neither a theist nor an athiest. It may be that souls do not
exist; on the other hand, it may be that they do. Science is
open, not closed. There are many things that - regardless of our
fear of the unknown and disorder - occur publicly and regularly
for which we have no convincing explanation based on current
science. Meteors as stones falling from heaven did not exist
according to earlier scientists - until there was such a fall of
them in France in the 1800's that their existance had to be
accepted. There will be a 21st and a 22nd century science, and
they will probably look back on our times with the same bemused
nostalgia and incredulity that we view 18th and 19th century
science.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 31 May 1984 18:27 EDT
From: MINSKY%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA
Subject: Essences and Soul
I can't make much sense of Menger's reply:
Therefore claiming that essential aspects do not exist in the
phenomenon of consciousness is in the present state of
scientific knowledge an unreasonable reaction that
unnecessarily narrows the field of our investigation.
I wasn't talking about consciousness. Actually, I thnk consciousness
will turn out to be relatively simple, namely the phenomenon connected
with the procedures we use for managing very short term memory,
duration about 1 second, and which we use to analyse what some of our
mental processes have been doing lately. The reason consciouness
seems so hard to describe is just that it uses these processes and
screws up when applied to itself.
But Menger seems intent on mixing everything up:
However, we cannot extrapolate from our assumptions to
statements about the essence of one's being, first because
assumptions are not facts yet, secondly because intelligence
and consciousness may not be the same thing.
Who said anything about intelligence and consciousness? If soul is the whole
mind, then fine, but if he is going to talk about essences that change along
with this, well, I don't thing anything is being discussed except convictions
of self-importance, regardless of any measure of importance.
--- Minsky
------------------------------
Date: 31 May 84 15:31:58-PDT (Thu)
From: ...decvax!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-pbsvax!cooper
Subject: Re: Dreams: A Far-Out Suggestion
Article-I.D.: decwrl.894
Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA> summarizes an article in the May Dr. Dobb's
Journal called "Sixth Generation Computers" by Richard Grigonis. Among
other things it proposes that standing waves of very low frequency
electromagnetic radiation (5 to 20 Hz apparently) be used to explain
telepathy.
As the only person of I know of with significant involvement in both the fields
of AI and parapsychology I felt I should respond.
1) Though there is "growing evidence" that ESP works, there is none that
telepathy does. We can order the major classes of ESP phenomena by their a
priori believability; from most believable to least: telepathy (mind-to-mind
communication), clairvoyance (remote perception) and precognition (perception
of events which have not yet taken place). "Some-kind-of mental radio" doesn't
seem too strange. "Some-kind-of mental radar" is stretching it. While
precognition seems to be something akin (literally) to black magic. There is
thus a tendency, even among parapsychologists, to think of ESP in terms of
telepathy.
Unfortunately it is fairly easy to design an experiment in which telepathy
cannot be an element but precognition or clairvoyance is. Experiments which
exclude telepathy as an explanation have roughly the same success rate
(approximately 1 experiment out of 3 show statistical significance above the
p=.01 level) as experiments whose results could be explained by telepathy.
Furthermore, in any well controlled telepathy experiment a record must be made
of the targets (i.e. what was thought). Since an external record is kept,
clairvoyance and/or precognition cannot be excluded as an explanation for the
results in a telepathy experiment. For this reason experiments designed to
allow telepathy as a mechanism are known in parapsychology as "general ESP"
(GESP) experiments.
Telepathy still might be proven as a separate phenomenon if a positive
differential effect could be shown (i.e. if having someone else looking at the
target improves the score). Several researchers have claimed just such an
effect. None have, however, to the best of my knowledge, eliminated from their
experiments two alternate explanations for the differential: 1) The subjects
are more comfortable with telepathy than with other ESP and thus score higher
(subject expectation is strongly correlated with success in ESP). 2) Two
subjects working together for a result would get higher scores whether or not
one of them knows the targets. Its rather difficult to eliminate both of these
alternatives from an experiment simultaneously.
The proposed mechanism MIGHT be used to explain rather gross clairvoyance (e.g.
dowsing) but would be hard pressed to distinguish, for example, ink in the
shape of a circle from that of a square on a playing card. It is obviously no
help at all in explaining precognition results.
2) Experiments have frequently been conducted from within a Faraday cage (this
is a necessity if a sensitive EKG is used of course) and even completely sealed
metal containers. It was just this discovery which led the Soviets to decide
in the late 20s (early 30s?) that ESP violated dialectic materialism, and was
thus an obvious capitalist plot. Officially sanctioned research in
parapsychology did not get started again in the Soviet Union until the early
70s when some major US news source (the NY Times? Time magazine?) apparently
reported a rumor (apparently inaccurate) that the US DoD was conducting
experiments in the use of ESP to communicate with submarines.
3) Low frequency means low bandwidth. ESP seems to operate over a high
bandwidth channel with lots of noise (since very high information messages seem
to come through it sometimes).
4) Natural interference (low frequency electromagnetic waves are for example
generated by geological processes) would tend to make the position of the nodes
in the standing waves virtually unpredictable.
5) Low frequency (long wavelength) requires a big antenna both for effective
broadcast and reception. The unmoving human brain is rather small for this
since the wavelength of an electromagnetic wave with a frequency of 5 Hz is
about 37200 miles. Synthetic aperture radar compensates for a small antenna
by comparing the signal before and after movement (actually the movement in
continuous). I'm not sure of the typical size of the antennas used in SAP, but
the SAP aboard LandSAT operated at a frequency of 1.275 GHz which corresponds
to a wavelength of about 9.25 inches. The antenna is probably about one
wavelength long. To use that technique the antenna (in this case brain) would
have to move a distance comparable to a wavelength (37200 miles) at the least,
and the signal would have to be static over the time needed to move the
distance. This doesn't seem to fit the bill.
I'm out of my depth in signal detection theory, but it might be practical to
measure the potential of the wave at a single location relative to some static
reference and integrate over time. The static reference would require
something like a Faraday cage in ones head. Does anyone know if this is
practical? We'd still have a serious bandwidth problem.
The last possibility would be the techniques used in Long Baseline Radio
Interferometry (large array radio telescopes). This consists of using several
antennas distributed in space to "synthesize" a large antenna. Unfortunately
the antenna have to communicate over another channel, and that channel would
(if the antennas are brains) be equivalent to a second telepathy channel and
we have explained nothing except the completely undemonstrated ability of
human beings to decode very low frequency electromagnetic radiation.
In summary: Even if you accept the evidence for ESP (as I do) the proposed
mechanism does not seem to explain it.
I'll be glad to receive replies to the above via mail, but unless it's
relevant to AI (e.g. a discussion of the implications of ESP for mechanistic
models of brain function) we should move this discussion elsewhere.
Topher Cooper
(The above opinions are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my
employer, my friends or the parapsychological research community).
USENET: ...decvax!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-pbsvax!cooper
ARPA: COOPER.DIGITAL@CSNET-RELAY
------------------------------
Date: 23 May 84 16:04:38 EDT
From: WATANABE@RUTGERS.ARPA
Subject: Seminar - Knowledge-Based Plant Diagnosis
[Forwarded from the Rutgers bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
Date: June 14 (Thursday), 1984
Time: 1:30-2:30PM
Place: Hill 705
Title: Preliminary Study of Plant Diagnosis
by Knowledge about System Description
Speaker: Dr. Hiroshi Motoda
Energy Research Laboratory,
Hitachi Ltd.,
1168 Moriyamacho, Hitachi,
Ibaraki 316, Japan
INTRODUCTION:
Some model, whatever form it is, is required to perform plant
diagnosis. Generally, this model describes anomaly propagation and
can be regarded as knowledge about cause and consequence relationships
of anomaly situations.
Knowledge engineering is a software technique that uses knowledge in
problem solving. One of its characteristics is the separation of
knowledge from inference mechanism, in which the latter builds logic
of events on the basis of the former. The knowledge can be supplied
piecewisely and is easily modified for improvement.
Possibility is suggested of making diagnosis by collecting many piece
of knowledge about causality relationships. The power lies in the
knowledge, not in the inference mechanism. What is not in the
knowledge base is out of the scope of the diagnosis.
Use of resolution in the predicate calculus logic has shown the
possibility of using knowledge about system description (structure and
behavior of the plant) to generate knowledge directly useful for
diagnosis. The problem of this approach was its inefficiency. It was
felt necessary to devise a mechanism that performs the same logical
operation much faster.
Efficiency has been improved by 1) expressing the knowledge in frames
and 2) enhancing the memory management capability of LISP to control
the data in global memory in which the data used commonly in both LISP
(for symbolic manipulation) and FORTRAN (for numeric computation) are
stored.
REFERENCES:
Yamada,N. and Motoda,H.; "A Diagnosis Method of Dynamic System using
the Knowledge on System Description," Proc. of IJCAI-83, 225, 1983.
------------------------------
Date: 31 May 1984 1146-EDT
From: Wendy Gissendanner <WLG@CMU-CS-C.ARPA>
Subject: Seminar - Learning Procedures
[Forwarded from the CMU-AI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
AI SEMINAR
Tueday June 5, 5409 Wean Hall
Speaker: Kurt Van Lehn (Xerox Parc)
Title: Learning Procedures One Disjunct Per Lesson
How can procedures be learned from examples? A new technique is to use
the manner in which the examples are presented, their sequence and how
they are partitioned into lessons. Two manner constraints will be
discussed: (a) that the learner acquires at most one disjunct per lesson
(e.g., one conditional branch per lesson), and (b) that nests of
functions be taught using examples that display the intermediate results
(show-work examples) before the regular examples, which do not display
intermediate results. Using these constraints, plus several standard AI
techniques, a computer system, Sierra, has learned procedures for
arithmetic, algebra and other symbol manipulation skills. Sierra is the
model (i.e., prediction calculator) for Step Theory, a fairly well
tested theory of how people learn (and mislearn) certain procedural
skills.
------------------------------
End of AIList Digest
********************
