Re: A Critique of Prof. Hubert Dreyfus' "Why Heideggerian AI failed"- a call for comments
Isaac
I have critiqued in great detail a recent white paper by Prof. Hubert
Dreyfus entitled "Why Heideggerian AI Failed and how Fixing it would Require
making it more Heideggerian" . I can email a copy of it to whom ever is
interested. For his bio, see:
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/
I want to stimulate discussion on this topic by posting my critiques little
by little and getting comments from the AI community on the news groups.
However, before I start I want to get a feel for how many know of his work
and/or would be interested in an intellectual debate for and against his
many anti-AI positions.
I hope many will respond to this posting with interest so I can begin
posting each part of this paper I find issues with and my reasoned critique
for others to comment on.
Thanks,
Ariel-
Immortalist
OK, please explain what Heideggerian AI is and why & how people defend
and oppose it. Can you put it in one paragraph?
Isaac
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidegger
I think this passage from his paper might help sum it up for you:
"
II. Symbolic AI as a Degenerating Research Program
Using Heidegger as a guide, I began to look for signs that the whole AI
research program was degenerating. I was particularly struck by the fact
that, among other troubles, researchers were running up against the problem
of representing significance and relevance - a problem that Heidegger saw
was implicit in Descartes' understanding of the world as a set of
meaningless facts to which the mind assigned what Descartes called values,
and John Searle now calls functions.[i]
But, Heidegger warned, values are just more meaningless facts. To say a
hammer has the function of being for hammering leaves out the defining
relation of hammers to nails and other equipment, to the point of building
things, and to the skills required when actually using the hammer- all of
which reveal the way of being of the hammer which Heidegger called
readiness-to-hand. Merely assigning formal function predicates to brute
facts such as hammers couldn't capture the hammer's way of being nor the
meaningful organization of the everyday world in which hammering has its
place. "[B]y taking refuge in 'value'-characteristics," Heidegger said, "we
are . far from even catching a glimpse of being as readiness-to-hand."[ii]
Minsky, unaware of Heidegger's critique, was convinced that representing a
few million facts about objects including their functions, would solve what
had come to be called the commonsense knowledge problem. It seemed to me,
however, that the deep problem wasn't storing millions of facts; it was
knowing which facts were relevant in any given situation. One version of
this relevance problem was called "the frame problem." If the computer is
running a representation of the current state of the world and something in
the world changes, how does the program determine which of its represented
facts can be assumed to have stayed the same, and which would have to be
updated?
As Michael Wheeler in his recent book, Reconstructing the Cognitive World,
puts it:
[G]iven a dynamically changing world, how is a nonmagical system ... to take
account of those state changes in that world ... that matter, and those
unchanged states in that world that matter, while ignoring those that do
not? And how is that system to retrieve and (if necessary) to revise, out
of all the beliefs that it possesses, just those beliefs that are relevant
in some particular context of action?[iii]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[i] John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, (New York: The Free
Press, 1995).
[ii] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.,
(New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 132, 133.
[iii] Michael Wheeler, Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step,
(Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book, The MIT Press, 2007), 179.
"
best,
Ariel B.
"Immortalist" <reanima...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:f19ba074-76e2-4a63...@h23g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
Immortalist
I have not really understood what your saying here or your goal yet
but for some reason my thinking directs me the the idea that it is not
a million facts but just a thousand rules that allow the device to
walk through about any problem like this dated example below. A set of
rules that approximate most eventualities but in a much compressed
form compared to the manipulation of facts in memory and interaction
with inputs. Maybe I am off the mark but it seems like AI is dead till
it can do the fractal, I mean somehow incorporate the Evolutionary and
genetic algorithm...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm
http://ai.bpa.arizona.edu/~mramsey/ga.html
...Brooks's ideas gelled in a cockroachlike contraption the size of a
football called "Genghis." Brooks had pushed his downsizing to an
extreme. Genghis had six legs but no "brain" at all. All of its 12
motors and 21 sensors were distributed in a decomposable network
without a centralized controller. Yet the interaction of these 12
muscles and 21 sensors yielded an amazingly complex and lifelike
behavior.
Each of Genghis's six tiny legs worked on its own, independent of the
others. Each leg had its own ganglion of neural cells-a tiny
microprocessor-that controlled the leg's actions. Each leg thought for
itself! Walking for Genghis then became a group project with at least
six small minds at work. Other small semiminds within its body
coordinated communication between the legs. Entomologists say this is
how ants and real cockroaches cope-they have neurons in their legs
that do the leg's thinking.
In the mobot Genghis, walking emerges out of the collective behavior
of the 12 motors. Two motors at each leg lift, or not, depending on
what the other legs around them are doing. If they activate in the
right sequence-Okay, hup! One, three, six, two, five, four!-walking
"happens."
No one place in the contraption governs walking. Without a smart
central controller, control can trickle up from the bottom. Brooks
called it "bottom-up control." Bottom-up walking. Bottom-up smartness.
If you snip off one leg of a cockroach, it will shift gaits with the
other five without losing a stride. The shift is not learned; it is an
immediate self-reorganization. If you disable one leg of Genghis, the
other legs organize walking around the five that work. They find a new
gait as easily as the cockroach.
In one of his papers, Rod Brooks first laid out his instructions on
how to make a creature walk without knowing how:
There is no central controller which directs the body where to put
each foot or how high to lift a leg should there be an obstacle ahead.
Instead, each leg is granted a few simple behaviors and each
independently knows what to do under various circumstances. For
instance, two basic behaviors can be thought of as "If I'm a leg and
I'm up, put myself down, " or "If I'm a leg and I'm forward, put the
other five legs back a little." These processes exist independently,
run at all times, and fire whenever the sensory preconditions are
true. To create walking then, there just needs to be a sequencing of
lifting legs (this is the only instance where any central control is
evident). As soon as a leg is raised it automatically swings itself
forward, and also down. But the act of swinging forward triggers all
the other legs to move back a little. Since those legs happen to be
touching the ground, the body moves forward.
Once the beast can walk on a flat smooth floor without tripping, other
behaviors can be added to improve the walk. For Genghis to get up and
over a mound of phone books on the floor, it needs a pair of sensing
whiskers to send information from the floor to the first set of legs.
A signal from a whisker can suppress a motor's action. The rule might
be, "If you feel something, I'll stop; if you don't, I'll keep going."
While Genghis learns to climb over an obstacle, the foundational
walking routine is never fiddled with. This is a universal biological
principle that Brooks helped illuminate-a law of god: When something
works, don't mess with it; build on top of it. In natural systems,
improvements are "pasted" over an existing debugged system. The
original layer continues to operate without even being (or needing to
be) aware that it has another layer above it.
When friends give you directions on how to get to their house, they
don't tell you to "avoid hitting other cars" even though you must
absolutely follow this instruction. They don't need to communicate the
goals of lower operating levels because that work is done smoothly by
a well-practiced steering skill. Instead, the directions to their
house all pertain to high-level activities like navigating through a
town.
Animals learn (in evolutionary time) in a similar manner. As do
Brooks's mobots. His machines learn to move through a complicated
world by building up a hierarchy of behaviors, somewhat in this order:
Avoid contact with objects
Wander aimlessly
Explore the world
Build an internal map
Notice changes in the environment
Formulate travel plans
Anticipate and modify plans accordingly
The Wander-Aimlessly Department doesn't give a hoot about obstacles,
since the Avoidance Department takes such good care of that.
http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch3-b.html
> One version of
> this relevance problem was called "the frame problem." If the computer is
> running a representation of the current state of the world and something in
> the world changes, how does the program determine which of its represented
> facts can be assumed to have stayed the same, and which would have to be
> updated?
>
> As Michael Wheeler in his recent book, Reconstructing the Cognitive World,
> puts it:
>
> [G]iven a dynamically changing world, how is a nonmagical system ... to take
> account of those state changes in that world ... that matter, and those
> unchanged states in that world that matter, while ignoring those that do
> not? And how is that system to retrieve and (if necessary) to revise, out
> of all the beliefs that it possesses, just those beliefs that are relevant
> in some particular context of action?[iii]
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> [i] John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, (New York: The Free
> Press, 1995).
>
> [ii] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.,
> (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 132, 133.
>
> [iii] Michael Wheeler, Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step,
> (Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book, The MIT Press, 2007), 179.
>
> "
>
> best,
> Ariel B.
>
> "Immortalist" <reanimater_2...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
Isaac
either the philosophical/technical underpinnings of Dryfus's paper or the
philosophers he cites are being right and wrong and why. I have many
critiques which I would begin posting for debate if is see comments that are
on point.
BTW, evolutionary algorithms are not holding AI back. Often, the problem in
implementing a general genetic algorithm wrt to anything AI is that the
proper fitness function to use unknown and often intractable. Also,
millions of rules does not cut it either.
thanks again,
Ariel B.-
"Immortalist" <reanima...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:a8fb17b8-7420-44c9...@b38g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
Immortalist
> Thanks for your input, however, I am looking for on point comments about
> either the philosophical/technical underpinnings of Dryfus's paper or the
> philosophers he cites are being right and wrong and why. I have many
> critiques which I would begin posting for debate if is see comments that are
> on point.
>
> BTW, evolutionary algorithms are not holding AI back. Often, the problem in
> implementing a general genetic algorithm wrt to anything AI is that the
> proper fitness function to use unknown and often intractable. Also,
> millions of rules does not cut it either.
>
> thanks again,
> Ariel B.-
>
You need to give some samples from this paper. This here is
"alternative" philosophy world, in the "alt." domain. Is there a link
to the paper or is it one of the papers at the link you gave us.
Newsgroups have changed, 5 years ago...
Publius
news:491f9f87$0$33506$742e...@news.sonic.net:
> Minsky, unaware of Heidegger's critique, was convinced that
> representing a few million facts about objects including their
> functions, would solve what had come to be called the commonsense
> knowledge problem. It seemed to me, however, that the deep problem
> wasn't storing millions of facts; it was knowing which facts were
> relevant in any given situation. One version of this relevance
> problem was called "the frame problem." If the computer is running a
> representation of the current state of the world and something in the
> world changes, how does the program determine which of its represented
> facts can be assumed to have stayed the same, and which would have to
> be updated?
Dreyfus is pointing out one consequence of the lack of a useful definition
of "intelligence." It is problem which plagues most programs for producing
AI (which is not to deny that much progress has been made in that
endeavor).
We may define "intelligence" as, "The capacity of a system to generate
solutions to novel problems," and "problems" as, "Obstacles or impediments
preventing the system from attaining a goal."
Introducing goals into the definition gives us a handle on the "frame
problem": the problem is framed by the current goal. Attention is paid only
to world states which bear on the system's goals (as a background process).
If not enough information is in hand to solve the current problem, then the
system returns to "the world" to gather additional information. (There is
no need to "store millions of facts." Facts are gathered as they are
needed, i.e., in light of the present goal and problem).
Isaac
referencing, email me asking for it.
best,
Ariel-
"Publius" <m.pu...@nospam.comcast.net> wrote in message
news:Xns9B57F131CB7B0mp...@69.16.185.250...
Publius
news:4920099b$0$33547$742e...@news.sonic.net:
> Hey, your email bounced. If you want the white paper that I will be
> referencing, email me asking for it.
You need to remove the "nospam" in the address.
Isaac
subdomain. I thought it was maybe for auto SPAM control or such.
"Publius" <m.pu...@nospam.comcast.net> wrote in message
news:Xns9B5860E8B26Fmp...@69.16.185.250...
Isaac
> On Nov 15, 9:57 pm, "Isaac" <gro...@sonic.net> wrote:
>> Thanks for your input, however, I am looking for on point comments about
>> either the philosophical/technical underpinnings of Dryfus's paper or the
>> philosophers he cites are being right and wrong and why. I have many
>> critiques which I would begin posting for debate if is see comments that
>> are
>> on point.
>>
>> BTW, evolutionary algorithms are not holding AI back. Often, the problem
>> in
>> implementing a general genetic algorithm wrt to anything AI is that the
>> proper fitness function to use unknown and often intractable. Also,
>> millions of rules does not cut it either.
>>
>> thanks again,
>> Ariel B.-
>>
>
> You need to give some samples from this paper.
Once I see there is interest, I will start quoting passages and my critiques
of them. There are many, so it needs to be a little at a time.
>This here is
> "alternative" philosophy world, in the "alt." domain.
Why do you mention this? Is it in response to something I said?
>Is there a link
> to the paper or is it one of the papers at the link you gave us.
I emailed it last night to your address listed below. Maybe check the junk
mailbox. If it was blocked all together email me at gro...@sonic.net for a
copy of it.
> Newsgroups have changed, 5 years ago...
please clarify. I have not newsgroups since before 1995.