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We routinely use terms like "dependency injection" for programming, "drop the beat" for music, "oscillating" for a set of political views and how they develop t

• mjburgess 6y ago
  > our basic assumption is not that everything is an ape. > great intellectual feats I think it is, exactly, a feat of the imagination to arrive an an explanation which does not require this premise. But it is not our default presumption. Hence 100,000 years of superstition, and 500 years of rare scientific moments. Concepts seeming abstract, is in some sense, a bit of an illusion. Concepts are, in my view, always psychomotor. They succeed in "abstracting" from our bodies, sure, by metaphor. But the genealogy of that metaphor is the psychomotor system of an ape. Consider your words: injection, drop, beat, oscillate... these are about how our bodies behave in (with, towards) our environment; and become "abstracted". I think there is something quite fundamentally apeish when we think of a song dropping a beat, in the sense that our relatedness to the song is actually facilitated by an apeish psychomotor state of "dropping something". Yes, we can reduce our engagement with some phenomenon to a purely cognitive model (pieces and their relations); but that is very hard, and typically is only useful is narrowly solving known problems. Innovation (, creativity, etc.), including the scientific, relies quite heavily on our being able to impart to alien things some intuitive apishness which we then, at best, abstract away. Many of course cannot perform this final abstraction. Which is why we speak of "The Economy" and other such apelike characters of the imagination.
  • Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    If you turn your argument around, almost every example can be used to support a different hypothesis: our terms and thinking is based on abstraction, a certain feat of processing information. Other earlier Great Apes and even other animals are simply less able to implement this abstraction, and because of this they only use the abstraction for computation of their simple lives like motor skills or "psychomotor states". Since we have more brainpower, we are able to implement a higher percentage of abstractability. Thus, the core aspect is the program of "abstractability" (or it would be more common to use the word consciousness or awareness). We implement it to a higher degree than other apes, but since we both implement parts of it, of course we are going to share some aspects of it in our lives. > Concepts are, in my view, always psychomotor Even this seems much more accurate to view the other way around: both psychomotor skills and concepts require computation and abstractability. Concepts are always based on abstraction. But psychomotor skills are also based on abstraction. And again, what does "political correctness" have to do with a psychomotor engine of an ape that can jump between trees, hold a balance and throw things at a distance? You would need to use some serious imagination to convince people that the most occam's razored hypothesis of that concept is based primarily(!) on mechanical skills? But I guess hey, we won't know for sure until we make AGI so who knows ;)
    • mjburgess 6y ago
      In a sense both views are correct. Our psychomotor states instantiate the abstraction which are drawn from them (or else, why abstract?). eg., there is a level of abstraction at which an ape "alerting" another ape is the same as an chemical "alerting" a cell My point is that these things are only equivalent to these abstractions in a very narrow kind of activity (cognition). A concept in the brain-body of an ape is a means for coordinating itself with respect to its environment: coordinating its eye, its hand, and latterly, its mind (, emotions, thought patterns, etc.). (NB. political correctness is here just a regulation on how we socially coordinate). That's just what we use concepts for. They also play a purely cognitive role in the sense that "circle" is both a guide to the motion of my hand in drawing a circle, and also a "Form" to which cognition can be purely and abstractly directed (ie., a shape with various properties...). But this cognitive role is derivative of their non-cognitive origins in, quite literally, structuring the meat of our bodies. It is this structuring process which is how we "conceptualise" the world. A dog is replete with many concepts; it is the dumb cognitive illusion of apes lacking self-awareness to think their linguistic cognition is where "concepts" lie. This is a cognitive shadow of how every animal navigates its environment. Your "AGI" remark indicates to me that you may take this cognitive view. I think this is the consequence of a mathematical discipline (computer science) being "let into the room" -- it should be thrown back out. Mathematics hasn't much to say about intelligence. The dumb walnut we call a frontal lobe possesses no models of how it actually works, and only the shadow of concepts it calls "abstractions". It is a delusional Cartesian place with little to offer self-understanding. Everything important for the development of intelligence, etc. will come from the non-cognitive (, bodily) aspects of mental function which will require building animals. Cognitive ai systems cannot conceptualise, they only automate the walnut.