Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!UCSD.EDU!pluto%beowulf From: pluto%beowulf@UCSD.EDU (Mark E. P. Plutowski) Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest Subject: Re: backward path and religions Message-ID: <19880830031815.5.NICK@HOWARD-JOHNSONS.LCS.MIT.EDU> Date: 30 Aug 88 03:18:00 GMT Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 82 Approved: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu To: comp-ai-digest@ucsd.edu Path: sdcsvax!beowulf!pluto From: Mark E. P. Plutowski Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest Subject: Re: backward path and religions Summary: Religion is to Science as Unconscious is to Conscious thought. Keywords: neural nets, explanation facility, backward chaining. Date: Sat, 27 Aug 88 21:11 EDT References: <19880826025229.6.NICK@HOWARD-JOHNSONS.LCS.MIT.EDU> Sender: nobody%sdcsvax@ucsd.edu Reply-To: Mark E. P. Plutowski Organization: EE/CS Dept. U.C. San Diego Lines: 67 In a previous article, LEO@BGERUG51.BITNET writes: > >In Pattern Recognition, an intelligent system with a backward path... >...can be used to try to find the appearance of a certain known >pattern in an input-signal... > >Secondly, consider a self-learning, self-organizing neural netwerk. >Furthermore, suppose this system is searching for answers to questions >...[of] which it has almost no knowledge. >...because of the self-learning, self-organizing character, >it will build answers, imaginary ones, if it >keeps asking long enough. To my opinion, this is the essence of >religions and superstitions. A nice argument, i concur in spirit ;-}. However, it begged a comment regarding what it means to be an _imaginary answer_. Not to kick off a long discussion about what it means to be imaginary, let me present my point up front. Loosely stated: Our answers come out of conscious thought, otherwise they would be impossible to record or communicate. But this conscious thought is driven by unconscious motivations, and wholistic formulations, which may or may not fit into the serial symbolic interface required to communicate with the rest of the world. {Given a neural network coupled to a symbolic interface, which is used to explain the actions of the network: the neural net perceives the optimum, and behaves in a way that exploits this perception. The symbolic interface tries to explain this behavior as it is able. Sometimes it's capabilities are sufficient, sometimes, however, the networks behavior falls into no neat semantic category, other than it "got the desired results," ie, it perceived the optimum.} From our unconscious thought, feelings, hunches, and intuition are expressed consciously as "common sense" "mathematically interesting" or "symmetrical" "elegant" and "beautiful." These concepts may be "felt" in a way uncommunicatable to others in a rational fashion. (Although this individual may indeed be perceiving a profound truth, since it is unscientific in nature, it is given a low certainty factor by the rest of the population.) This individual uses this perception to motivate the discovery of provable truths which can be written in a form communicatable to the general population. Then, it becomes science. Until then, it remains only personal belief, an imagination of what is possible. Aside: Einstein believed that imagination was the key to _his_ brand of science, as opposed to the 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration mix which was apparently the motivation of Edison's brand of science. P.S. thanks to the author of the posting i quoted above, for adeptly bringing this argument back to AI. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Plutowski INTERNET: pluto%cs@ucsd.edu Department of Computer Science, C-024 pluto@beowulf.ucsd.edu University of California, San Diego BITNET: pluto@ucsd.bitnet La Jolla, California 92093 UNIX: {...}!sdcsvax!pluto ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "it was as small as the hope in a dead man's eyes." (radio ad)