Connectionists: Symbols and Intelligence

[Peter Helfer]

Jean-Marc,
Interesting point about emojis. - It's worth remembering, though, that the
emoticon, ancestor of the emoji, was invented precisely to restore to
impoverished written communication something of the richness of in-person
linguistic exchanges, which are far from one-dimensional. Not only are
gestures and other body language missing from written language, but also
prosody which carries a wealth of information. Interestingly, it has been
suggested that tonal languages, because they use tone to distinguish
between words, have less "bandwidth" for the type of
extra-syntactic/extra-lexicographic information that is carried by
intonation in other languages. So there would be a trade-off between
expressiveness and efficiency of communicating lexemes. - In any case, one
has to marvel at the richness of meaning and imagery that can be
communicated even in terse writing by a skilled writer or poet. Clearly, we
have found other means than copying large chunks of semantic nets to
communicate whole universes of meaning by invoking information that is
already present in the recipient's mind. Didn't Turing allude to this when
he suggested using "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" for the
imitation game? In comparison, the idea of needing to copy large volumes of
semantic information in order to communicate feels wrong in the same way
that requiring billions of examples to learn to answer simple questions
doesn't seem to be the way forward.

On Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 20:51 Fellous, Jean-Marc - (fellous), <
fellous at arizona.edu> wrote:

> 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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