Images, AI and the way our minds work
September 11, 2008 Leave a Comment
What has me excited about this image search is the ability to roughly draw an image and then have the search engine match like images. One of the current discoveries in relation to how our mind works is how it processes our environment. Instead of seeing everything exactly, our mind makes symbolic matches and fills in the blanks. So, when we see a scissor, if we’re not focusing our mind and vision directly on it, our mind sees the outline shape and then matches it, filling in the blanks. It’s also how our mind creates things symbolically. It’s how we know what a tree is, no matter what the variation.
Something like this could be a leap forward for AI and programs that learn and evolve. Being able to make like concepts symbolically and then storing it has the possibility for emergence of being, for creating what is the most elusive of AI ideals- that of consciousness, of creating something that has a similar way of thinking and acting and logic solving as we do.
It also makes me think about Socrates and Plato, and how he had it backwards. The parable of the cave, his concept of objects descending from abstract symbols, the idea that reality is not what we make of it. He was so close- certainly the parable of the cave is very close to how we see reality (not in exactness, but as rendered through shadows of our perception), but his ideas on objects descending from symbols is completely flawed and backwards.
Symbols come from objects, not the other way around. He wasn’t describing reality, he was describing inner life, our mental construct of reality. We perceive the world through symbols, but the world is not constructed of symbols, we are. And in a way, through this reversal of reality and mental landscape, he created one of the greatest misconceptions- that of a separation of mind and body. If reality does not descend from symbolic concepts, but rather the other way around, then the mind and body are not really separate. The mind is like all other symbols, grown out of reality.
Or something like that. Just musing some more.
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