Re: More on levels of sequence organization

Posted by Frank Wimberly-2 on May 05, 2019; 12:51am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/More-on-levels-of-sequence-organization-tp7593148p7593209.html

If you're moving up from the phoneme to the word to the phrase level and some result in the last disambiguates between two phonemes, what difference does it make that you've violated some strict hierarchy?

The case can be made that Raj Reddy won the Turing award based partly on his leadership of the Hearsay project.  I think they were trying to get speech understanding to work more than they were trying to understand how humans do it.

Frank 

On Sat, May 4, 2019, 6:26 PM glen∈ℂ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Right. But that's the point, I think. To what extent are semantics invariant across these supposed "levels"? My argument is that "levels" are figments of our imagination. The best we can say is that iteration constructs something that we find convenient to name: "level". But what reality is actually doing is mere aggregation and the meanings of the primitives are no different from the meanings of the aggregates.

These private algorithms are a fiction, allowed (in some abstracted idealism) by our general purpose computers. Constructive logic/math disallows, to some extent, that complete abstraction. Every constructive method will, at some point, puncture the "levels".  More to the point, *every* model that includes (a priori or not) "levels" is false and will eventually be falsified.

You're asking something like "who cares?" or "does it matter?". Maybe not. But if we're trying to talk about consciousness and what a Turing machine knows or the difference between specific and general intelligence, it *is* reasonable, maybe even necessary.

On 5/4/19 10:50 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Considering how we go back-and-forth in long threads here, trying to sort out semantics, I don't see why it is reasonable to expect a generative learning approach to employ internal neurons that have easily interpretable meanings.  Same with ADF:  "Here's a program written in a private language, how does it work?"  Like an Egyptologist trying to figure out hieroglyphics and understand the ancient culture.

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