Early AI systems tended to constrain themselves to micro-domains that could be sufficiently described using simple ontologies and binary predicate logics, or restricted themselves to hand-coded ontologies altogether. ...AI systems will probably have to be perceptual symbol systems, as opposed to amodal symbol systems...

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For Turing it wasn't quite so bad. ...[T]uring could see that the solution is to understand that mathematics was computational all along. ...For instance pi in classical mathematics is a value. It's also a function, but it's the same thing. In computation, a function is only a value when you can compute it, and if you cannot compute the last digit of pi, you only have a function. You can plug this function into your local sun, let it run until the sun burns out... This is it. This is the last digit of pi you will know. But it also means that there can be no process in the physical universe, or in any physically realized computer that depends on having known the last digit of pi. ...Which means that there are parts of physics that are defined in such a way that cannot strictly be true, because, assuming that this could be true leads into contradictions.

Because a naked ontological dualism between mind and body/world is notoriously hard to defend, it is sometimes covered up by wedging the popular notion of emergence into the "explanatory gap"... "strong emergence" is basically an anti-AI proposal.

If we want to understand music we have to go beyond understanding sound. We have to understand the transformations that sound can have if you play a different pitch. We have to arrange the sound in a sequencer that gives you rhythms, and so on, and then we want to identify some kind of musical grammar that we can use to... control the sequencer. So we have stacked structures that simulate the world. ...If you want to model a world of music you need to have the lowest level of the precepts, then the higher levels of mental simulations, which give the sequences... and the grammars of music... [B]eyond this you have the conceptual landscape that you can use to describe the different styles of music. ...[I]f you go up in the hierarchy, you get to more and more abstract models, more and more conceptual models, and more and more analytic models. ...[T]hese are causal models...

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Attempts in psychology at overarching theories of the mind have been all but shattered by the influence of behaviorism, and where cognitive psychology has sprung up in its tracks, it rarely acknowledges that there is something as "intelligence per se", as opposed to the individual performance of a group of subjects in an isolated set of experiments.

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[T]he genome defines the rule book by which our brain is built. The brain boots itself, in a development process, and this booting takes some time... formation learning in which some connections are formed, basic models are built of the world so we can operate in it. How long does this booting take... about 80 megaseconds. That's the time a child is awake until it's 3 1/2 years old. By this age you understand Star Wars, and I think everything after Star Wars is cosmetics.

AI’s gradual demotion from a science of the mind to the nerdy playpen of engineering was accompanied not by utterances of disappointment, but by a chorus of glee, uniting those wary of human technological hubris with the same factions of society that used to oppose evolutionary theory or materialistic monism...

The easiest answer is existence is the default. ...So this is the lowest number of bits that you need to encode this. ...Nonexistence might not be a meaningful notion. ...If everything that can exist, exists... it probably needs to be implementable. The only thing that can be implemented is finite automata so maybe the whole of existence is... a superposition of all finite automata, and we are in some region of the fractal that has the properties that it can contain us. ...Imagine that every automaton is... an operator that acts on some substrate [something that can store information], and as a result you get emergent patterns.

[I]f you look at the progression of AI models, it... went the opposite direction. ...AI started with linguistic protocols, which were expressed in formal grammars, and then it got to concept spaces, and now it's about to address percepts. ...At some point in the near future it's going to get better at mental simulations and at some point after that we'll get to attention directed and motivationally connected systems that make sense of the world, that are in some sense able to address meaning. This is the hardware that we have...

Arguably most people are not generally intelligent, because they don't have to solve problems that make them generally intelligent. ...[I]t's not yet clear if we are smart enough to build AI and understand our own nature to this degree... [I]t could be a matter of capacity, and for most people it's... a matter of interest. They don't see the point because the benefits of attempting this project are marginal, because you're probably not going to succeed... and the cost... requires complete dedication of your entire life.

[T]he relationship between cognition and neurobiological processes might be similar to the one between a car engine and locomotion. ...[A] car's locomotion is facilitated mainly by its engine, but the understanding of the engine does not aid much in finding out where the car goes. ...[T]he integration of... parts, the intentions of the driver and even the terrain might be more crucial ...