Connectionists: Symbols and Intelligence

[Fellous, Jean-Marc - (fellous)]

Thank you for such stimulating discussions! I would like to share a few thoughts...

- On Symbolic thinking (or language) and Intelligence. It seems to me that symbolic representation may in fact be a symptom of a lack of intelligence of sort, emanating from our inability to communicate multi-dimensional concepts/thoughts. Language is a low dimensional sequential tool we have developed, for lack of a better one, to transform a highly parallel, distributed and multi-dimensional pattern of neural activity (a thought) into a decimated information flow, with an enormous information loss. The recipient is left with the enormously error prone task to re-inflate this information stream and recreate a multi-dimensional pattern in his/her own mind. This ought to be the worst way of communicating/representing information there is, but a necessary (?) one given our bodies and physical constraints. Intelligence would be if instead of communicating 'Apple' we were able to communicate the chunk of semantic net the concept of 'Apple' was related to, in each of us. Not to dimmish in anyway the need and importance to study language and symbolic representations, why try to develop GAI from symbolic/language type concepts that are only there because we cannot (physically) do better? Aren't we limiting ourselves right away?

- It strikes me that we may in fact be trying to overcome the language limitations by in fact adding symbols, using modern technologies. Specifically the use of Emojis. These new symbols may in fact fulfill our need to go beyond mono-symbolic sequential concepts and use 3D images (x,y,color) instead. Though it is still at its infancy, could this method of communication and representation of knowledge overtake eventually our word-based language? A natural evolution of sort? Can we predict that eventually emojis will be replaced by short 5D second-long animations (x,y, color, time, sound). Shouldn't GAI be based on these types of multi-dimensional symbols? It would be closer to human intelligence...

- And pushing the thought further: What about Mandarin or Cantonese? An average Mandarin speaker knows anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 symbols, and very few rules (we on the other hand know 26 letters and 100's of rules (e.g. phonetic, syntactic, grammatical)). And 4 tones that can change profoundly the meaning of a seemingly (to us) identical sound/symbol (i.e. tone may be seen as an additional dimension in spoken Mandarin). Mandarin-speakers may be symbolic thinkers, much more so than we are, it seems, and we have the same brains. Do they have a different kind of 'intelligence'? Shouldn't we spend more time and effort comparing the 2 systems (western and Mandarin), from NLP down to the neural level? Shouldn't we 'get out' of the Western symbolic system to understand it? Shouldn't a true/genuine GAI work the same way across cultures/languages/symbolic systems?

Thanks, and looking forward to any feedback!
Jean-Marc
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