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From: bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry W. Kort)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence
Summary: Comprehension, Cognition, Consciousness, and Insight
Keywords: C-cubed I
Message-ID: <43722@linus.UUCP>
Date: 20 Jan 89 03:22:13 GMT
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In article <2894@xyzzy.UUCP> throopw@xyzzy.UUCP (Wayne A. Throop) writes:

 > After all, it is not known how one goes about building rich and
 > accurate models of things, and tying these to perceptions.  All
 > I'm saying is that the position of "understanding is modeling" is
 > not an obviously flawed position to take, nor does the position
 > lack something as obvious as a distinguishing factor between
 > levels of understanding.

As it happens, I build models for a living. And, Wayne's comment
notwithstanding, I think I know how I do it.  :-)

In my work, I like to think of the modeling step as "capturing
the structure and behavior of the real system with the model."
Note that the English word, "comprehension", means "to capture
with."  So I agree with Wayne that modeling is a way of understanding
(comprehending) something.

After I capture/comprehend/understand the system, I use the model
to think about what would happen if I tweak one of the "knobs" on
the model.  I like to think of this activity as "cognition".
I can then add automatic feedback loops which maintain stable
behavior under nominal perturbing influences.

Next, I like to subject the model to abnormal conditions (like
overloading it, or introducing a fault condition).  Then I can
observe the behavior and see how the feedback loops compensate
for my nefarious disruption and disturbance of the peace.  Since
this step provides awareness of cause-and-effect patterns, I call
this step "consciousness".

Finally, I collect all the observations of behavior under overload
and fault conditions, and learn how to map the observable symptoms
back to the organic cause.  The diagnostic model is the inverse
model of the original system.  So I call this step "insight."

The whole process is referred to as CCCI (C-cubed I):
Comprehension, Cognition, Consciousness, and Insight.

--Barry Kort