MindForth AI coder Mentifex comments on The Multiverse According to Ben

[menti...@gmail.com]

"Does Modern Evidence Refute Chomskyan Universal Grammar?"

https://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.com/2016/09/does-modern-evidence-refute-chomskyan.html

Mentifex said...

I suspect that some tiny increment in the human genome
made it possible for Homo Sapiens to make use of language.

From my vantage point as an AI-coding amateur neurotheoretician
(there's an oxymoron for you :-) I see a probability of how evolution
arrived at thinking. The first neurons were only a two-way street -- sensory
input neurons and motor output neurons. Then memory was added as
nodal linkages between the sensory and output neurons, so that specific
sensations could cause specific motor outputs.

A major development in AI/NI evolution (i.e., Natural Intelligence) was when
some sensory input fibers accidentally came loose from their connection to
a sense organ and thus by default became abstract fibers -- not concrete neurons connected concretely to any of the senses, but neurons still
lying in tandem with, and probably between, the sensory fibers on one side
and the motor fibers on the other side. These abstract fibers became the bedrock and foundation of concepts. Your dog, for instance, knows you,
because your dog has a concept of you, and of itself (for when you call
your dog's name), and even of its duty as a dog -- to fetch an object,
and not to chew the slippers or curtains or furniture. Your parrot that
can speak English words like "Polly want a cracker" has similar
nerve-fibers in control of the motor outputs of vocalizations.

The leap from canine or chimp intelligence to human intelligence came
in evolution when some of the abstract, conceptual fibers took abstraction
one step beyond and became abstractions of abstractions, that is,
a Chomskyan linguistic superstructure that could spiral through time,
adding or deleting syntactic elements as nodes of control of parts
of speech, typically subject-noun and predicate-verb and object-noun.
What Ben Goertzel calls "linguistic recursion" up above is most likely a circular linkage of the syntactic control fibers such that word order
in a child's mind can be established by trying out nodal sequences in communication with adults, and by not only adding nodes for any desired
part of speech, but by deleting nodes of gambits that fail to satisfy
adults by failing to convey intended meaning.

The leap in human evolution, maybe fifty thousand years ago when humans
surpassed Neanderthals, could have been as simple as genetically coding
for abstract nerve fibers that CANNOT associate to sensory fibers or motor fibers, but can ONLY associate to (that is, govern and control) abstract concept fibers, so that the Chomskyan transformational-grammar
superstructure arises not physically but only logically within the
otherwise and seemingly flat

http://github.com/PriorArt/AGI/wiki/MindGrid

MindGrid of concept fibers. Now recently in this current
Anno Domini 2016 the Mentifex AI Minds in Perl

http://github.com/PriorArt/AGI/blob/master/ghost.pl

and in Forth

http://www.nlg-wiki.org/systems/Mind.Forth

have radically simplified their conceptual implementation of the underlying

http://mind.sourceforge.net/theory5.html

Theory of Mind for AGI. It would be of utility, Dr. Ben, if you and
your robotics team could somehow join the Mentifex mind-design with your robotics actuators, somewhat as follows. In MindForth Robot AGI the
thinking module thinks about its motor options without immediately
causing them to go into action. The FreeWill or Volition mind-module
fires motor output signals only when the thinking module thinks _repeatedly_ about a given motor output (such as "RUN!") so that a kind of neural accumulator fills up and tips over into a motor output initiative -- a motor "GO" signal. In such a way, the Mentifex linguistic Mind should initiate
motor actions just by thinking prolongedly about a proposed action. Interruptions of the chain of thought -- of the fixation upon
a motor proposal -- cancel out the motor proposal. So this Comment
is my reaching out from the Mentifex AGI project to OpenCog and any
other receptive AGI project.
Bye for now.

Arthur
--
https://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.com/2016/09/does-modern-evidence-refute-chomskyan.html
http://wiki.opencog.org/wikihome/index.php/Ghost
http://www.sl4.org/archive/0205/3836.html
http://www.sl4.org/archive/0205/3837.html