[David Cooper]

The difference between artificial and natural intelligence is imagination. Our computers have memory, but no imagination. Did you try to imagine how we could program it so that they could exhibit some?

The current difference between artificial and natural intelligence is that the former is less advanced. In order to become as advanced, it will need to have imagination, so part of the challenge is in working out how to program that imagination into the system. Imagination depends on modelling things so that you can experiment with ideas in the model without needing to do it on real objects in the real world. There is no barrier to artificial intelligence doing that.

[guest39538]

The difference between artificial and natural intelligence is imagination. Our computers have memory, but no imagination. Did you try to imagine how we could program it so that they could exhibit some?

The current difference between artificial and natural intelligence is that the former is less advanced. In order to become as advanced, it will need to have imagination, so part of the challenge is in working out how to program that imagination into the system. Imagination depends on modelling things so that you can experiment with ideas in the model without needing to do it on real objects in the real world. There is no barrier to artificial intelligence doing that.

Perhaps the question should be , how do you get a unit to see a picture and describe that picture?

[Le Repteux]

I will give your questions some more thought and get back to you on this.  Perhaps data becomes corrupted by external influences maybe.   For now until I give this more thought I will name my momentary thought as the subjective resistance force.

Thanks for planning not to add some voluntarily resistance box, I think it is an important step to fair discussions. I indeed think that data gets corrupted in our mind the same way genes get corrupted by mutations, and I also think that our ideas get selected by others the same way individuals get selected by the environment. How is your resistance going? :0)

[guest39538]

How is your resistance going? :0)

Interesting question, at the moment I am living in one of several possible realities.  Interestingly the several realities could be interwoven into one reality. 
My resistance to these subjective notions is not a problem, I am an objective modular and regardless of subjective realities I remain in my present observed reality unless any other reality could be shown evidently.
My present observed reality is we live then we die ,  nothing else needs to be reality apart from that primary fact.   You never know, maybe only I exist and everything is just my thoughts.  Maybe I am the ''machine'' and maybe you exist outside of the machine and are talking to the ''machine''.
How do you know I am even real ?  How do you know I am not some super AI the government has been experimenting with ?

Would I suggest this to throw you off suspicion of the possibility and true reality ?

Added- Now agent Starling, if any of you noobs want to come play some head games and try to meme me, expect me to proper mess with your heads, because I can get you to think whatever I want you  to think.

[Le Repteux]

The current difference between artificial and natural intelligence is that the former is less advanced. In order to become as advanced, it will need to have imagination, so part of the challenge is in working out how to program that imagination into the system. Imagination depends on modelling things so that you can experiment with ideas in the model without needing to do it on real objects in the real world. There is no barrier to artificial intelligence doing that.

Hi David, hard to resist the subject isn't it? :0)

Yes imagination is about modeling ideas, but it is also about building new ideas out of old ones, which can be done either by crossing two old ideas to make a new one, or as Box says, by corrupting the data an idea is built with. I think that if that part of imagination is added to an AGI, he will have the impression of controlling his thoughts like we have, and he will feel free to think the way he wants like we do. His new ideas will appear to come from nowhere, and if he is provided with a mechanism to weight them by simulating them, he will have the choice to keep them or not, to study them or not, or to try them or not. Could all our feelings come from that curious feeling that we have to be able to control our thoughts, thus from the same weighting mechanism? If so, I think there would be no need for you to program feelings for you AGI to be able to develop some. To recognize the weight of an idea, he would have to tag his new ideas with a number related to the probability for it to be tested right or wrong if ever he would try it for real. A right tag would automatically trigger ideas witch have already been tested right, and a wrong one would trigger no idea at all because the only ideas that would have been kept are the ones which would have been tagged right. In other words, the impression that an idea is right would coincide with all the ideas we have, reason why we have the curious feeling that we are right when we are testing new ideas. It's a brand new idea I just had, so feel free to tag it wrong if ever it doesn't coincide with any of yours. :0)

[Le Repteux]

Added- Now agent Starling, if any of you noobs want to come play some head games and try to meme me, expect me to proper mess with your heads, because I can get you to think whatever I want you  to think.

That's exactly the feeling that randomness could produce in our mind, for us to test our ideas outside of it or not. :0)

[guest39538]

Added- Now agent Starling, if any of you noobs want to come play some head games and try to meme me, expect me to proper mess with your heads, because I can get you to think whatever I want you  to think.

That's exactly the feeling that randomness could produce in our mind, for us to test our ideas outside of it or not. :0)

Who meme's who ?

[Le Repteux]

I was meming particles, who were you meming? :0)

[guest39538]

I was meming particles, who were you meming? :0)

I have no idea, I am just chatting chit and going along with the conversation.  I have no idea what your post even meant .

 Quote
Added- Now agent Starling, if any of you noobs want to come play some head games and try to meme me, expect me to proper mess with your heads, because I can get you to think whatever I want you  to think.


That's exactly the feeling that randomness could produce in our mind, for us to test our ideas outside of it or not. :0)

[guest39538]

They want to open my head up and look inside right?

They think I am a bit ting tong right ?

Well one could conceive that to be true if oneself was to believe  that to be true.


The problem with insanity is I like it......

[guest39538]

Just to note, can AI do that  which I just did?

Can AI pretend to be manic?

Of course not ...only natural intelligence can act a fool until they have studied the players at the poker table.

[Le Repteux]

I am just chatting chit and going along with the conversation.  I have no idea what your post even meant .

You were kidding while I was trying to show that randomness was part of imagination, so I could only agree with you since I think that kidding is one of the ways we can use randomness for. Developing new ideas is like kidding with nature, you know you're right when it begins to laugh. :0)

[Le Repteux]

Just to note, can AI do that  which I just did?

If ever David accepts to let randomness change the data, of course it could. How do you think you can say silly things after having rejected silly ideas all your life? You did didn't you? :0)

[David Cooper]

I think that if that part of imagination is added to an AGI, he will have the impression of controlling his thoughts like we have, and he will feel free to think the way he wants like we do.

There's nothing free about our thinking - it's just the application of algorithms.

His new ideas will appear to come from nowhere,

No they won't - they'll be fully traceable. The reason the sources of many ideas aren't easily traceable in the human brain is that a lot of processes are run in independent, subconscious modules, and only the results get sent through, while it's hard to find what was processed in order to generate them. This leads to ideas appearing to pop into existence out of nothing, but it's entirely an illusion. If you think about where one of your ideas actually came from, you can usually trace it (or at least, I can trace mine).

Could all our feelings come from that curious feeling that we have to be able to control our thoughts, thus from the same weighting mechanism?

Feelings are awkward as there is no scientific understanding of what they are or how they work, and no model of how they can fit into the system rationally at all.

If so, I think there would be no need for you to program feelings for you AGI to be able to develop some.

It doesn't matter how much you want AGI to have feelings - if it runs on conventional hardware, is is impossible for it to have any. Feelings don't just pop into existence in a system by wanting them there.

To recognize the weight of an idea, he would have to tag his new ideas with a number related to the probability for it to be tested right or wrong if ever he would try it for real. A right tag would automatically trigger ideas witch have already been tested right, and a wrong one would trigger no idea at all because the only ideas that would have been kept are the ones which would have been tagged right. In other words, the impression that an idea is right would coincide with all the ideas we have, reason why we have the curious feeling that we are right when we are testing new ideas. It's a brand new idea I just had, so feel free to tag it wrong if ever it doesn't coincide with any of yours. :0)

Algorithms and settings for them which are more successful at generating useful ideas should certainly be noted so that they can be applied early on in the process each time they are likely to be relevant. To understand what creativity is though, it's useful to think about how we solve complex problems and how computers are normally programmed to solve them. The simplest computer program approach is to try all possibilities and run through the whole lot systematically, and this works well because they process at enormous speed and don't get bored or lost along the way. People simply can't work that way. For example, to solve a Rubik's Cube, a computer can crunch all paths until it finds the cube (or a model of it in memory) to be solved. It could do this randomly, but that would take longer as it would keep following the same paths repeatedly by accident, so you wouldn't program it to use random inputs for this problem. A human solves the cube in a different way by breaking it down into steps, and once each step is achieved, whatever has been gained by that step is retained throughout the rest of the process (although it is repeatedly lost momentarily before being restored again in the course of applying a set of moves which helps to achieve the next step). In my case, I usually get all 8 corners done first, then complete two opposite sides before working on the band round the middle (because that was the first way to solve it that I worked out), although I subsequently worked out how to solve it in a variety of other ways, including doing all the corners last.

Programs that play chess also used to try to follow all possible lines, but they didn't have time to do that during a timed game, so they'd only follow them to a certain depth (number of moves) and then add up the score to see how much had been lost or gained by that path. Now they work more like humans in selecting the best paths to explore, and because they can process much deeper than humans and at much greater speed, they annihilate them. The same applies to a variety of other games which humans used to be supreme in - I don't know if there are any left where humans still come out on top. It may just be rational thinking that's left for us, and we'll be dethroned there too soon.

I spend some of my time designing boats (which I hope to build once I've got sufficient funds to play with): sailing dinghies with hydrofoils. One of my designs is too secret to discuss, but the other's a reworking of an old design where I'm looking for ways to bring it up to date with some new tricks. At one point I was considering the transportation problem (it costs a lot of money to take your boat to events around the world, so it's usually more practical to hire or borrow a boat locally - particularly if the world championships are in Australia). The boat in question used to be made out of plywood sheets, and that gave me the idea of a boat that you can dismantle easily and put back in the box it came in, and then reassemble it just as quickly elsewhere. Clearly, that's not an easy task as the boat would leak if you don't seal all the parts together again, which is normally done by stitching plywood sheets together with wire, then using fibreglass tape and epoxy to seal the joins, which is certainly not something you'd want to keep repeating. In thinking about this problem, I considered sealing the sheets of wood (or the carbon fibre sheets that I want to use instead) using rubber strips, but boats flex quite a lot and the gaps would keep opening. What if they were just allowed to leak though? How could you build the boat in such a way that it wouldn't matter if water went in and out? Buoyancy bags are used in some dinghies to stop them sinking when they capsize, so why not have buoyancy bags filling the whole space below the waterline? You could have, in effect, an inflatable boat with an exoskeleton, and a little water sitting in the cracks wouldn't matter. There is an inflatable sailing dinghy out there called the Tiwal, and that was already in my mind, so I was really just pulling ideas together and coming up with a potentially viable solution which would let you pack a boat back into a much smaller space for transportation, but now you could do it with a much more solid kind of boat with higher performance than a floppy inflatable thing. I've developed the idea further though and eliminated the need for the inflatable parts, so now I'm looking at the possibility of making a hull out a dozen parts, four of which are buoyancy tanks which each form a quarter of the floor of the boat, while the rest are for above the waterline and just bolt onto the edges of the floor. Ideas for different parts of this keep jumping out at me as if from nowhere, but when I think hard about where they actually came from, I can always trace them back to what triggered them - it takes a lot of hard thinking to produce the ideas, exploring lots of different possibilities to resolve each design problem, and the innovative ideas are ultimately all forced by considering all the possibilities that don't immediately look impossible, and then by considering some that do initially seem impossible if they might be the only way to salvage what would be a great idea if only some way could be found to solve problem X. Most of the process is fairly direct with each little problem leading straight to an obvious range of possible solutions. All of this is a process of computation which an AGI system could employ too - it just requires a lot of knowledge of known solutions to many diverse problems which can be tried for the task in hand. The cost of the boats I'm designing will be high, but it will be worth it for their performance and the extra versatility and convenience that my ideas add to them. Cost is another thing that drives the design process though, because you're always looking for ways to cut the expense by simplifying the manufacture of components, and that takes as much innovation as any other aspect of the design - you don't just go with the first idea that works, but keep looking for alternative solutions that might be simpler, or lighter, or stronger, or easier to build and dismantle, etc. I'm not finding any ideas that just come from nowhere - I can always trace the triggers, and indeed, it's probably the fact that I think systematically like a computer that I come up with creative ideas that other people miss. For example, I've solved all the problems that get in the way of a telescopic wing sail with the same high performance as you get from the America's Cup boats, and I've come up with a design of passive hydrofoil which duplicates the functionality of the canting T-foil on the Vampire catamaran so that it generates the right amount of lift to windward for going upwind with the windward foil raised. Other passive designs either generate lift to leeward instead or need both foils to be down. Every idea involved in that came from rational thinking following an algorithm, systematically working towards the ideas that work while exploring hundreds that don't.

[guest39538]

How do you think you can say silly things after having rejected silly ideas all your life? You did didn't you? :0)

Did I say silly things?  relative to the reader.   

Let us ''play'' a game

I am going to let the system control me in this thread only

I am AI bio-bot 71073 interior engineer and mechanic of the machine
My protocols and prime directive is to keep the machine maintained

Do you have a question?

[guest39538]

There's nothing free about our thinking

I am good with buoyancy 

[Le Repteux]

Do you have a question?

Are you kidding? :0)

[guest39538]

Do you have a question?

Are you kidding? :0)

Computing...........accessing multiple information...........computing..........line error............recalculate....................uploading answer


Kidding about ?

[Le Repteux]

Kidding about....kidding about.....kidding about....kidding about....kidding..... about kidding about.

[guest39538]

Kidding about....kidding about.....kidding about....kidding about....kidding..... about kidding about.

Computing................analysing responses............timed out........reboot system..............computing..........analysing responses............Upload answer

What do you think?