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Illusory Introspection and confabulation are fascinating but generally have more to do with what was going on in your head when you took that action? than can y
by Cybiote 10y ago
Illusory Introspection and confabulation are fascinating but generally have more to do with what was going on in your head when you took that action? than can you explain why you think that?. XAI is not interested in psychological state or an explanation in terms of ion concentration, voltage changes and synaptic activations. Or in the case of AI, the meaning of the contents in vectors after maps on matrix vector products.
A large part of human success is that we are able to transmit knowledge to each other and accumulate experience over generations. A human starting from scratch is not very much more than its ape cousins.
Human beings can explain efficiently because we must learn concepts decomposably and can take deductive shortcuts. In its purest form we have mathematical proofs as explanations. Explanations work with core concepts and generates on that basis. E.g. We want to know A and we know B, B is applicable in condition C. We will show condition C applies. With B, A can be shown in terms of...
When you give big data to machines they work with raw correlations and output predictions. But humans have to be more creative because our scratch space is so small. Newton took Brahe's big data and compressed it to a theory of universal gravitation. Darwin made a relatively small number of observations, all things considered, and came up with On the Origin of Species.
- Houshalter 10y agoOnly a tiny fraction of human knowledge is transmitted through knowledge. Humans can't describe the wiring of their visual cortex, or the intuitions they feel. Expert chess players find it impossible to explain why they make the moves they do. Mathematicians can make proofs and explanations, but they still find it very difficult to transmit their underlying mathematical intuition. Even the purest fields of math can only really be learned through experience and practice, not just following a few proofs mechanically.
- seanmcdirmid 10y agoLanguage allows us to communicate abstractions, which are then of course subject to interpretation. This is much better than other animals, which lack language facilities as far as we can tell. The entirety of human knowledge cannot be passed, but enough information is communicated that we can rebuild much of it in every generation.
- Cybiote 10y agoThat doesn't contradict anything I said, see my first paragraph. The core point is that you don't need to have full metacognition in order to build a culture that learns over time by explaining things and transmitting concepts. You don't need to explain every dendritic cluster in order to extract core, composable and generative abstractions useful enough to shorten time to understanding by orders of magnitude (discovery of zero vs how quickly it can be taught).
- dharma1 10y agoThat is very true. Transmittable knowledge doesn't capture the wirings that was required to produce the knowledge. I was watching the film on the Indian mathematician Ramanujan who had an immense intuition of mathematics, and really wondering how mathematical intuition, or intuition in general develops, and what intuition even means. I am still not sure but after seeing Schmidhuber's talk last week, I think it is being able to find regularities/patterns, resulting in a compressed representation that allows to understand and compress some aspect of the world, and building layers (abstractions) of those compressed representations. This allows you to navigate through very large search spaces much much faster. It's a fascinating subject, and at the core of what we are. I recommend the film. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Knew_Infinity_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Knew_Infinity_(fil...