How the best people reason/beyond the limits of the human brain

Picking up on something Dave said in response to the thread. COGAI vs AIKR


On Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 11:52 PM Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> wrote:
    *If we can successfully reproduce how the best people reason, we will
be in a strong position to improve on that by going beyond the limits of
the human brain.  *

  Dave also pointed out that he would consider best people those who score
well during school exams

There are clear arguments to show that scoring well at exams is often the
results of good training and many conditions, including physical fitness,
lifestyle, emotional environment and that furthermore, often the best
reasoning ability cannot be captured by passing tests
(in the case of people who can catch a snake, or navigate without compass
or GPS etc)
ie, reasoning is not always related to good exam results

But those arguments aside,  I d like to bring up a well known and
documented example of a woman who was
very sick and left for dead.  without going too close to her, for fear of
fetching a disease, people asked her at some distance
if she had any dying wish,  any last minute wish  . she left a message of
farewell to be delivered to her family
and also requested her urine to be taken into a bottle and handed over to
the first person who would cross the gate
at a certain given place.  This was agreed and done

*":So ... I asked them to take my urine in a bottle and give it to whomever
they met first at the Boudhanath Stupa entrance. By now I was
semi-conscious, but they were kind enough to do this favor for me. The
person who took my urine met a man at the gate who turned out to be a
Tibetan physician. He tested my urine and diagnosed that I had been
poisoned with meat, prescribed some medicine and even sent me some blessing
pills. My health improved dramatically and I had many good dreams. .”*


Now, I know this is not your typical reasoning, and we cannot expect this
from  everyone nor our future AI systems
but we should keep these examples in mind when considering what is possible
for an enlightened mind and beyond the ordinary

She is now alive and well and in Kathmandu, if anyone wants to look her up
sometimes and learn more about beyond ordinary reasoning,
https://nalanda-monastery.eu/index.php/en/teachers-of-nalanda/khadro-la?start=1

PDM

On Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 11:52 PM Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> wrote:

> On 5 Feb 2021, at 13:11, Paola Di Maio <paoladimaio10@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> an afterthought
>
> in respect to mimicking how humans reason and communicate well,
> each human  is different, we can generalize up to a point
>
> and mimicking may result in some kind of parrot engineering ....
> useful to start with but nowhere near intelligence at its best
>
>
> You’re missing the big picture.  If we can successfully reproduce how the
> best people reason, we will be in a strong position to improve on that by
> going beyond the limits of the human brain. The more we understand, the
> further and faster we can go. This is an evolutionary path that will go
> very much faster than biological evolution. At the same time we can make AI
> safe by ensuring that it is transparent, collaborative and embodies the
> best of human values.
>
> Human-like AI will succeed where logic based approaches have struggled.
> 500 million years of evolution is not to be dismissed so easily.
>
> I remember the enthusiastic claims around “5th generation computer
> systems” and logic programming at the start of the 1980’s, and had plenty
> of fun with the prolog language. However, the promise of logic programming
> fizzled out. Today, 40 years on, much of the focus of work on knowledge
> representation is still closely coupled to the mathematical model of logic,
> and this is holding us all back. We need to step away and exploit the
> progress in the cognitive sciences.
>
> I am especially impressed by how young children effortlessly learn
> language, given the complexity of language, and the difficulties that adult
> learners face when learning second languages. Another amazing opportunity
> is to understand how some children are so much better than others when it
> comes to demanding subjects like science and mathematics. Moreover, warm
> empathic AI will depend on understanding how children acquire social skills.
>
> Let’s lift up our eyes to the big picture for human-like AI.
>
> Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
> W3C Data Activity Lead & W3C champion for the Web of things
>
>
>
>
>