The Mystery of the Human Psyche.

[Caroline]

Originally Posted by richrf

My view is that Life is all about exploring (curiosity). It seems that is what we all do from the moment we are born until we move on.

Rich

Move on to where Richrf exactly, please pray tell?

[richrf]

Originally Posted by Caroline

Move on to where Richrf exactly, please pray tell?

It is a secret. Nature loves to hide. [Heraclitus]

Rich

[Caroline]

So Heraclitus said it? But what about you rich? What do you really think please?
Thanks.

[Pathfinder]

Originally Posted by richrf

My view is that Life is all about exploring (curiosity). It seems that is what we all do from the moment we are born until we move on.

Rich

I think that this is a key quality of the human being as well. Every creature explores in the sense that they constantly search for food and mates. But they do so out of a survival instinct.

The human being is unique in that our curiosity extends into realms of artistic and intellectual talent that far surpasses the animal kingdom. Man seems to instinctively know that there is more to what he sees around him and feels compelled to explore the possibilities.

---------- Post added 09-19-2009 at 03:03 PM ----------

Originally Posted by paulhanke

... yes - it's called the enactive approach: Enactive Artificial Intelligence Tom Froese ... it is a response to the perceived shortcomings of the computational and embodied approaches to AI with regards to learning about the human mind ... the computational approach took no account of significance and meaning and resulted in its own version of mind-brain dualism: the symbol grounding problem (how do you make symbols mean something?) ... the embodied approach was an attempt to remedy this shortcoming by grounding intelligence in a body (via a sensorimotor loop) - while this has been an advance, significance and meaning still remain elusive (how do you make perception and action mean something?) ... the enactive approach is an attempt to supplement the embodied approach by grounding intelligence in the responsibility for its own bodily existence - "constitutive autonomy is a necessary condition for intrinsic teleology", as it has been put ... an interesting thing here is that this would position autopoiesis at the center of explanatory descriptions of both life and mind - hence the title of a philosophical exposition by Evan Thompson: "Mind In Life" ...

Well thanx for not using too many big words Paul lol.

So did you just say that some realm of science has endeavored to devise some sort of robotic brain that is attempting to understand the nuances of the human consciousness? And that at this point they have not been able to have much success?

My question still remains I think:

What exactly is it that they have designed?

[paulhanke]

Originally Posted by Pathfinder

So did you just say that some realm of science has endeavored to devise some sort of robotic brain that is attempting to understand the nuances of the human consciousness? And that at this point they have not been able to have much success?

My question still remains I think:

What exactly is it that they have designed?

... just to make sure we're on the same page on this, it is not the robotic brain that is attempting to understand the nuances of human consciousness, but rather humans who are attempting to understand the nuances of human consciousness by constructing robots with brains ... as for what has been achieved thus far, here it is in four acts:

Act I: a bunch of scientists introspect about how they think and hypothesize that conscious intelligence is symbol processing ... eventually, an artificial symbol-processing intelligence is constructed that beats the world chess champion ... however, by the time this occurs it has become obvious that this approach will not result a general human-like intelligence - any meaning or significance is that of the designers, not the intelligence ... symbol processing loses interest as a path toward understanding human intelligence, and moves off into industrial applications.

Act II: the next wave of scientists hypothesize that conscious intelligence can emerge from neuronal information processing ... eventually, artificial intelligences are designed and/or evolved to recognize anomalies in mammograms and to recognize (and produce) speech - yet again, however, any meaning or significance is that of the designers, not the intelligence (and yet again, interest moves off into industrial applications).

Act III: the next wave of scientists hypothesize that conscious intelligence can emerge from embodied neural nets ... it is discovered that isolated simple behaviors coupled together in a body and acting in a world can result in the emergence of complex behavior such as locomotion ... it is also discovered that what were thought to be complex computational problems (e.g., locomotion) could actually be vastly simplified by having a body in a world - things like gravity and joint tension can result in "morphological computation" that can offload computation away from the brain ... once again, unfortunately, the meaning/significance is that of the designers, not the intelligence (if you run a robotic puppy on a treadmill, you are providing it with meaning and significance - i.e., what is meaningful and significant is running on a treadmill).

Act IV: Enactive AI is proposed as an approach to get away from "extrinsic teleology" (meaning and significance supplied by the designer) and move toward "intrinsic teleology" (meaning and significance that arises within the intelligence) ... one way to proceed forward in this approach is to make the intelligence responsible in some way for its own existence ... give it the ability to learn and let it loose in the wild, and it will either die or it will learn how to maintain itself ... and in so doing, what will be learned is perception and action that is meaningful and significant for the intelligence ... that is, the trick to designing an artificial intelligence that displays "intrinsic teleology" is to take the designer out of the equation! .