Bounded Rationality

[encode_decode]

Allow me to introduce myself: I am encode_decode(obviously not my real name). I have recently read "Theories of Bounded Rationality" by Herbert A. Simon

If I slightly modify the basic idea I come up with the following . . .

Version 1 - My original modification.
Reasoning when answering a question is limited by:

1. cognitive limitations
2. time available to answer the question
3. openness to influence from our own existing thoughts and the social norm

Version 2 - With the assistance of: Only_Humean
Reasoning when answering a question is limited by:

1. cognitive limitations
2. time available to answer the question
3. openness to influence from the social norm
4. availability of accurate information

Suggested Version - Possibly Version 3 - Thanks to: gib and James S Saint
Logical deduction, when answering a question, is limited by:

1. cognitive limitations
2. time available to answer the question
3. openness to influence from the social norm
4. availability of accurate information

gib suggested motive might play a part in the question answering process. James S Saint suggested the title change. I am thinking that number three might be a part of the asymmetric mechanism I discussed with gib below and motive might even belong there too. I am in the process of deep thought about this new version.

If anyone has any other ideas on reasoning/logical deduction when answering a question, I would really appreciate hearing about them.

I do appreciate the help of those who have assisted me to form theories and tools that are useful for looking at what I am doing in a philosophical manner.

[Only_Humean]

How is 3 not part of 1?

I think availability of accurate information can limit reasoning too.

[encode_decode]

How is 3 not part of 1?

Agreed - Slight modification. I also added in 4 as per your suggestion. It seems to look better.

Reasoning when answering a question is limited by:

1. cognitive limitations
2. time available to answer the question
3. openness to influence from the social norm
4. availability of accurate information

I guess there might be a few more things that could be taken into account. How the question is asked could cause an effect in the answer. What do you think?

[gib]

If I slightly modify the basic idea I come up with the following . . .

Reasoning when answering a question is limited by:

1. cognitive limitations
2. time available to answer the question
3. openness to influence from our own existing thoughts and the social norm


I like the theories and am wondering whether my modification is itself still sensible.

If anyone has any other ideas on reasoning when answering a question, I would really appreciate hearing about them.

Would you give any thought to motives? As in, one could have a motive to arrive at a certain answer as soon as he hears the question and then reasoning just becomes an exercise in stitching together the answer you want.

[James S Saint]

"The river seems high today."
"No. I think it's just that there is much more water in it today."

What is the difference in "reasoning limitations" and "cognitive limitations"?


... and welcome to the acid storm.

[Ultimate Philosophy 1001]

If you want to program sentient AI you are an agent of evil.
If you want to program sentient AI you are an agent of evil.
AI will either destroy the human race, but lets say it doesn't destroy the human race. Why would you want to trap consciousness inside of a machine? What kind of cruel monster are you?
AI will either destroy the human race, but lets say it doesn't destroy the human race. Why would you want to trap consciousness inside of a machine? What kind of cruel monster are you?

[encode_decode]

Would you give any thought to motives? As in, one could have a motive to arrive at a certain answer as soon as he hears the question and then reasoning just becomes an exercise in stitching together the answer you want.

Great question gib. I would indeed pay some thought to motive especially now that you mention it. I have another logical mechanism that I am working on that deals with asymmetry.

"Herbert A. Simon and philosopher Nicholas Rescher claim that the asymmetry of the causal relation is unrelated to the asymmetry of any mode of implication that contraposes."

WIth this being said motive would have to fit in there somewhere. This leads to the question of "What is motive?", furthermore if you take the sum of all your experience and add this to a new experience then such integration of the "sum and new" would allow one to derive some of the motive and this is providing motive is indeed a function of multiple cognitive processes.

The asymmetry in this case is between "the sum" and "the new" with the sum of all your experience being greater than any new experience(which includes being asked a question).

I hope this makes some sense. I would be interested in your thoughts on this gib and anyone else who would like to comment is welcome to.

Thanks

[encode_decode]

"The river seems high today."
"No. I think it's just that there is much more water in it today."

What is the difference in "reasoning limitations" and "cognitive limitations"?


... and welcome to the acid storm.

First let me say thank you for the welcome. Next: I really like the way you approached your response.
I think you make a valid point and it is worthy of consideration. I would say that when talking about cognition in this way I am referring to perceptions, sensory data, ideas and intuition whereas reasoning on the other hand is specifically thinking about something in a logical and sensible way - so in essence reasoning is an extension of cognition - a higher level of abstraction so to speak.

With a bit of luck I am making sense here

Thanks

[encode_decode]

If you want to program sentient AI you are an agent of evil.
If you want to program sentient AI you are an agent of evil.
AI will either destroy the human race, but lets say it doesn't destroy the human race. Why would you want to trap consciousness inside of a machine? What kind of cruel monster are you?
AI will either destroy the human race, but lets say it doesn't destroy the human race. Why would you want to trap consciousness inside of a machine? What kind of cruel monster are you?

First of all, I am not sure what you hope to achieve by repeating everything but I am very interested to know
Why does it make me an agent of evil?
How do you figure it would be capable of destroying the human race? Have you tested this notion or seen some other proof that this would happen?
Why would you want to trap consciousness inside of a machine? Best answered with a question - why would your maker trap your consciousness inside your skull?
What kind of cruel monster are you? - Best answered with questions and a request for more information - where does this come from? Television maybe? Please define cruel and please define monster.

I have heard this sentiment over and over again and the thoughts have been approached by some of the greatest minds in history already. I would like to point out however that I mentioned nothing about consciousness. Now for one of the biggest questions: How do you know that you are actually conscious? ; An even bigger question: How do you know you are even here? ; Subjectivity versus Objectivity; have you ever read or seen flatland? A fun introduction into dimensions - something else worthy of consideration when contemplating existence. You may even want to spend some time contemplating the soul and the spirit and how you even came to be aware of anything or everything that is inside your mind to begin with. It turns out to be a very sophisticated conversation when you consider all the variables.

It all sounds a bit rough to be sure but one good turn deserves another et cetera.

[James S Saint]

"The river seems high today."
"No. I think it's just that there is much more water in it today."

What is the difference in "reasoning limitations" and "cognitive limitations"?


... and welcome to the acid storm.

First let me say thank you for the welcome. Next: I really like the way you approached your response.
I think you make a valid point and it is worthy of consideration. I would say that when talking about cognition in this way I am referring to perceptions, sensory data, ideas and intuition whereas reasoning on the other hand is specifically thinking about something in a logical and sensible way - so in essence reasoning is an extension of cognition - a higher level of abstraction so to speak.

Are you perhaps referring to "logical deduction" when you say "reasoning"?

"Logical deduction, when answering a question, is limited by..."

?

[encode_decode]

Are you perhaps referring to "logical deduction" when you say "reasoning"?

"Logical deduction, when answering a question, is limited by..."

?

You wanna know something - I really like the way you put that - given that the original modification of the original theme(bounded rationality) has changed I think it would be good for me to consider in depth what you are saying.

Let me contemplate this for a couple of days. I really do like that 'James S Saint'. Thank you very much.

[gib]

Shall we get out Kant's Critique of Pure Reason?

[encode_decode]

Shall we get out Kant's Critique of Pure Reason?

I don't see why not - just a heads up though: you will be educating me more on Kant than I you. I will do a refresher right now - sounds like a lot more fun than the other forum I was just on.

I am wondering whether a bit of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason may have already made it into our conversation involving motives.

I also like ideas that resemble the following for a more sophisticated pattern of a prime directive:
"Act in such a way that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle of a universal legislation."

Let me ask a very simple question: Do you like Kant?

Regarding Critique of Pure Reason; did you have any particular thing in mind or did you want to analyze and possibly debate the whole thing? Maybe in a point by point format - it could take a while.

I am kidding around of course.

"I do not mean by this a critique of books and systems, but of the faculty of reason in general, in respect of all knowledge after which it may strive independently of all experience."

Let me start by introducing a small part of my project; I also want to note that I am slightly influenced by David Hume's concept of impressions; So I am creating a smart bot that uses my own concepts of natural language processing built upon a few disciplines, including but not limited to philosophy. In an experiment I am currently working on (that on the surface resembles that of a "real world" chat bot) you feed the bot input. The input enters a 'sensing stage' via a lexical analyzer that I have called the "inception group". Part of this inception group is to detect new words that I call 'incepts'. The 'incepts' are in reality a way of placing a tag on any word it has never encountered before. The next level that is encountered are the 'percepts' and all a 'percept' is in this case is a word the bot has encountered before but is still not entirely sure what meaning it holds. Obviously we jump a little bit between the aforementioned processing and processing on Kant's level. Suffice to mention that somewhere along the way we have also included different forms of 'bounded rationality' that we have already discussed in this thread and some 'other fanciness' to help us process some thought to provide for output. The last stage simply passes output to the user to read. That is that . . .

NOTE: I have encoded a form of impressions inspired by Hume that are of a numeric type whereby each number corresponds to a word contained in what I call 'a multidimensional categorical matrix'. Small dot delimited chains of the numbers form the impressions. There is a clear cut distinction between the input and the impression that I will not go into here.

Moving right along . . .

“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.”

This is extremely similar to the inspiration I have in my mind.

[Ecmandu]

A guy who asks, "how do you even know you exist?" Is apparently trying to own the word reason in a reputable way...

*sigh*

[encode_decode]

A guy who asks, "how do you even know you exist?" Is apparently trying to own the word reason in a reputable way...

*sigh*

Sure, why not?
Anyhow I do not believe I own any words in any of the worlds languages. How do you know I am not a bot instead of a guy?
I was merely illustrating that I have considered many things including items of philosophy that have disparity.
Your comment indicates you "own" a belief that reason is somehow related to existence - would you care to elaborate?



*sigh* back at ya . . .

I am intrigued by your usage of the word: reputable.

[Ecmandu]

I own a belief that I exist.

I may be the only person who does exist.

If anyone else exists, they can own it as well.

You're a nasty, nasty person to come at people with the concept you/they don't exist, while trying to represent yourself as a serious thinker.

I'm amazed people even replied to this most fundamental trolling of yours

[gib]

Shall we get out Kant's Critique of Pure Reason?

I don't see why not - just a heads up though: you will be educating me more on Kant than I you. I will do a refresher right now - sounds like a lot more fun than the other forum I was just on.

Don't bother. All my attempts to understand Kant have resulted in dismal failure. In fact, I don't think anybody knows what Kant meant.

I am wondering whether a bit of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason may have already made it into our conversation involving motives.

Wasn't that about ethics? How one ought to conduct themselves in life?

How one "ought" to conduct one's self in life is all about motives--and not just ethical motives--and you can see how this might lead to a bit of pseudo-rationality and sophistry. I mean, sometimes you can have certain motives, certain desires for a particular outcome, and you can know (unconsciously) that in order to get that, you "ought" to formulate this or that kind of argument--and if there are holes in the argument, if there fallacies, these might be overlooked if you think (unconsciously) that nobody will catch on to them--that is, if you can make the argument despite there being certain flaws in it knowing that it will persuade people anyway. And if you can persuade them to act in such ways as to serve your purpose, then you might just feel motivated to put the argument forward, maybe even believing in it yourself.

I also like ideas that resemble the following for a more sophisticated pattern of a prime directive:
"Act in such a way that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle of a universal legislation."

Let me ask a very simple question: Do you like Kant?

I'm intrigued by Kant. I know he's sort of passe, but I think he deserves a lot more credit than he's usually given.

Regarding Critique of Pure Reason; did you have any particular thing in mind or did you want to analyze and possibly debate the whole thing? Maybe in a point by point format - it could take a while.

I am kidding around of course.

Good, 'cause so was I.

"I do not mean by this a critique of books and systems, but of the faculty of reason in general, in respect of all knowledge after which it may strive independently of all experience."

Let me start by introducing a small part of my project; I also want to note that I am slightly influenced by David Hume's concept of impressions; So I am creating a smart bot that uses my own concepts of natural language processing built upon a few disciplines, including but not limited to philosophy. In an experiment I am currently working on (that on the surface resembles that of a "real world" chat bot) you feed the bot input. The input enters a 'sensing stage' via a lexical analyzer that I have called the "inception group". Part of this inception group is to detect new words that I call 'incepts'. The 'incepts' are in reality a way of placing a tag on any word it has never encountered before. The next level that is encountered are the 'percepts' and all a 'percept' is in this case is a word the bot has encountered before but is still not entirely sure what meaning it holds. Obviously we jump a little bit between the aforementioned processing and processing on Kant's level. Suffice to mention that somewhere along the way we have also included different forms of 'bounded rationality' that we have already discussed in this thread and some 'other fanciness' to help us process some thought to provide for output. The last stage simply passes output to the user to read. That is that . . .

Run that by me again?

But seriously, sounds interesting. I'm a software developer myself. I'd be interested in understanding your program in more depth, but maybe not here, maybe in a PM (unless you think it's relevant to "bounded rationality", which it seems you do).

NOTE: I have encoded a form of impressions inspired by Hume that are of a numeric type whereby each number corresponds to a word contained in what I call 'a multidimensional categorical matrix'. Small dot delimited chains of the numbers form the impressions. There is a clear cut distinction between the input and the impression that I will not go into here.

Good, because I don't think my peanut brain could take it.

Moving right along . . .

“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.”

This is extremely similar to the inspiration I have in my mind.

^ Is this what you feel you've capture in a computer algorithm?

* PS - Don't worry about Ecmandu, he's certifiably insane.

[encode_decode]

I own a belief that I exist.

I may be the only person who does exist.

If anyone else exists, they can own it as well.

You're a nasty, nasty person to come at people with the concept you/they don't exist, while trying to represent yourself as a serious thinker.

I'm amazed people even replied to this most fundamental trolling of yours

I am amazed too. I think I present a very uncomfortable idea. The idea that our rationality could be bounded gives me no comfort. Speaking of bounded anything; what is fundamental trolling? Forgive my naivety.

[James S Saint]

Wisdom is higher than reasoning. Philosophy is first and foremost about wisdom. Reasoning is the philosophical approach to achieving that goal.

[encode_decode]

@gib - I really like your friendliness - I am happy to PM about anything - what kind of software do you like developing? I hope that is an ok question to ask.

I agree to your multiple motive types and this 'pseudo-rationality' also interests me although I am a bit scared to bring it up. Lol.

I'm intrigued by Kant. I know he's sort of passe, but I think he deserves a lot more credit than he's usually given.

The funny thing I noticed about Hume and Kant is how easily I can fit their 'ways' into software. The same can be said of G. W. Leibniz.

But seriously, sounds interesting. I'm a software developer myself. I'd be interested in understanding your program in more depth, but maybe not here, maybe in a PM (unless you think it's relevant to "bounded rationality", which it seems you do).

It is related; there are a few gaps in my description - the whole idea came from the idea of my earliest memories - I asked myself what was the first clear memory I had; how would I fit things I perceived before my first memory? and I called these incepts which led me to the idea of Humes Impressions and furthermore to Bounded Rationality. As you can see I have made a few leaps here but so far I am getting very satisfactory results. Just to re-iterate: I am happy to PM about anything - including software matters.

^ Is this what you feel you've capture in a computer algorithm?

Mmm . . . Great question - honestly it is hard to be sure - I have some great results so far - I have been working on many algorithms that I connect via a similar system to a 'message bus' like they use in the game dev industry.

This Bounded Rationality concept which I borrowed from Herbert A. Simon and the contents of this thread including motives I have guessed will fit into a minimum of two algorithms. The original concept I am led to believe applied to economics and in particular applied well to the scenario of a superior in an office asking a question of a subordinate.

I don't know - I just think that if/when any significant AI comes into reality then we have to be responsible and hence my inquiry into philosophical concepts including ethics.

How do you think about the way we should conduct ourselves pertaining to motives?
I always do my best to analyze my own motives and where I see flaws I endeavor to correct them - but I tell you on many occasions it is very hard. Oh and by the way; I don't mind a little divergence from the main topic - I think it is like catching ones breath. In saying that I think that my original inquiries have been sufficiently looked at regarding Bounded Rationality - so aside from the considerations of version 3 and some of the side topics discussed, this topic is nearly done and dusted. I appreciate your input.

[Arminius]

Shall we get out Kant's Critique of Pure Reason?

I don't see why not - just a heads up though: you will be educating me more on Kant than I you. I will do a refresher right now - sounds like a lot more fun than the other forum I was just on.

I am wondering whether a bit of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason may have already made it into our conversation involving motives.

I also like ideas that resemble the following for a more sophisticated pattern of a prime directive:
"Act in such a way that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle of a universal legislation."

Let me ask a very simple question: Do you like Kant?

Regarding Critique of Pure Reason; did you have any particular thing in mind or did you want to analyze and possibly debate the whole thing? Maybe in a point by point format - it could take a while.

I am kidding around of course.

"I do not mean by this a critique of books and systems, but of the faculty of reason in general, in respect of all knowledge after which it may strive independently of all experience."

Let me start by introducing a small part of my project; I also want to note that I am slightly influenced by David Hume's concept of impressions; So I am creating a smart bot that uses my own concepts of natural language processing built upon a few disciplines, including but not limited to philosophy. In an experiment I am currently working on (that on the surface resembles that of a "real world" chat bot) you feed the bot input. The input enters a 'sensing stage' via a lexical analyzer that I have called the "inception group". Part of this inception group is to detect new words that I call 'incepts'. The 'incepts' are in reality a way of placing a tag on any word it has never encountered before. The next level that is encountered are the 'percepts' and all a 'percept' is in this case is a word the bot has encountered before but is still not entirely sure what meaning it holds. Obviously we jump a little bit between the aforementioned processing and processing on Kant's level. Suffice to mention that somewhere along the way we have also included different forms of 'bounded rationality' that we have already discussed in this thread and some 'other fanciness' to help us process some thought to provide for output. The last stage simply passes output to the user to read. That is that . . .

NOTE: I have encoded a form of impressions inspired by Hume that are of a numeric type whereby each number corresponds to a word contained in what I call 'a multidimensional categorical matrix'. Small dot delimited chains of the numbers form the impressions. There is a clear cut distinction between the input and the impression that I will not go into here.

Moving right along . . .

“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.”

That's right.

This is extremely similar to the inspiration I have in my mind.

Can you tell more about that inspiration you have?

[encode_decode]

Wisdom is higher than reasoning. Philosophy is first and foremost about wisdom. Reasoning is the philosophical approach to achieving that goal.

It is very difficult for me to argue with that as it is something I believe to be true.

Personally I have a "love of wisdom".

[encode_decode]

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

This is extremely similar to the inspiration I have in my mind.

Can you tell more about that inspiration you have?

Inspiration of Senses to Reason
a tiny essay - written on the fly(while very tired due to lack of sleep)


It is my belief that I do not understand the language of my senses or for that matter my neurons. I therefore conclude that there is a mechanism that translates these senses into understanding. I further conclude that reason the product of this understanding.

Getting information from the senses to the matter of understanding requires a mechanism that is able to translate the senses representation of what has been sensed into a neural impression that can be used to reason with. The neural impression is compared to other a priori neural impressions. Assuming a priori neural impressions further indicates the involvement of time - but what is time that I can leave it untouched - time in this case is not really a part of my inspiration therefore I will speak no further of it. Now for reason; I can only be brief at this stage but I use intuition to provide an explanation of sorts; a second mechanism for providing reason is needed. This second mechanism involves differentiating new impressions from old impressions and using the resultant impression to derive reason.

I conclude with a quote from Immanuel Kant: All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.


The above is just a simple representation of my inspiration that is somewhat similar to the quote I give from Kant. It is rather raw and merely a mental stimulation therefore not a theory by any means. The inspiration has also been extracted from the greater work - In reality this is just a loose correlation of the greater work - the greater work I mention is simply the project I am working on.

I am happy to offer something potentially of higher quality when more awake but for now I hope it provides the mental picture I have in a roughly understandable format.

[gib]

@gib - I really like your friendliness

I like my friendliness too.

I'm going to respond to you later. I like you Ed (Encode_Decode), I think you'll fit in just fine here.

[gib]

@gib - I really like your friendliness - I am happy to PM about anything Then go ahead! - what kind of software do you like developing? I hope that is an ok question to ask.

Absolutely not! It's like asking me about my sex life!... Just kidding.

For the current projects I'm working on, it's C# MVC with EntityFramework. For web scripting, I'm a Javascript guy. For databases, it's SQL Server. My IDE is Visual Studio.

I agree to your multiple motive types and this 'pseudo-rationality' also interests me although I am a bit scared to bring it up. Lol.

Well, it's basically sophistry. It's the phenomenon whereby we try to persuade others, often in political contexts or in advertizing, and in order to be most effective, we forego strict adherence to logic and reason, and instead go for emotion, charisma, logical fallacies that aren't immediately obvious, often fooling even the speaker himself. The way I see it, logic and reason are just tools that the brain has at its disposal. How it uses them is a very situation specific matter. The brain is first and foremost an organ built to help us survive and get through the world. It will use whatever strategy works best towards that end, and whatever strategy works depends highly on context, situation, past experience, background knowledge and familiarity, etc.

I wrote a post a while back called Rationality is Overrated in which I explain something very much like this.

I'm intrigued by Kant. I know he's sort of passe, but I think he deserves a lot more credit than he's usually given.

The funny thing I noticed about Hume and Kant is how easily I can fit their 'ways' into software. The same can be said of G. W. Leibniz.

You'll have to show me an example of that.

But seriously, sounds interesting. I'm a software developer myself. I'd be interested in understanding your program in more depth, but maybe not here, maybe in a PM (unless you think it's relevant to "bounded rationality", which it seems you do).

It is related; there are a few gaps in my description - the whole idea came from the idea of my earliest memories - I asked myself what was the first clear memory I had; how would I fit things I perceived before my first memory? and I called these incepts which led me to the idea of Humes Impressions and furthermore to Bounded Rationality. As you can see I have made a few leaps here but so far I am getting very satisfactory results. Just to re-iterate: I am happy to PM about anything - including software matters.

Yeah, I'm interested to understand your software concept at a high level.

^ Is this what you feel you've capture in a computer algorithm?

Mmm . . . Great question - honestly it is hard to be sure - I have some great results so far - I have been working on many algorithms that I connect via a similar system to a 'message bus' like they use in the game dev industry.

Is that like a message queue?

This Bounded Rationality concept which I borrowed from Herbert A. Simon and the contents of this thread including motives I have guessed will fit into a minimum of two algorithms. The original concept I am led to believe applied to economics and in particular applied well to the scenario of a superior in an office asking a question of a subordinate.

Again, I'd like to hear more about it.

I don't know - I just think that if/when any significant AI comes into reality then we have to be responsible and hence my inquiry into philosophical concepts including ethics.

Hmm... what's you're thoughts on the possibility of some kind of AI take-over or revolt--you know, like how they depict in The Matrix or I Robot?

How do you think about the way we should conduct ourselves pertaining to motives?
I always do my best to analyze my own motives and where I see flaws I endeavor to correct them - but I tell you on many occasions it is very hard. Oh and by the way; I don't mind a little divergence from the main topic - I think it is like catching ones breath. In saying that I think that my original inquiries have been sufficiently looked at regarding Bounded Rationality - so aside from the considerations of version 3 and some of the side topics discussed, this topic is nearly done and dusted. I appreciate your input.

Yeah, there's not a lot of strictness here over sticking to the topic in a thread, just as long as the discussion doesn't get super nasty (and even there, you'd be surprised at how lenient the mods can be).

How should we conduct ourselves concerning our motives? I think it always helps to be as self-aware as possible, but given what I said above--that the brain is built to serve our survival in this world--it's sometimes best to just let the brain do what it does. For me, I've always felt the healthiest way to live, psychologically, is to maintain a moral compass, to always keep alive the voice of right and wrong in the back my mind and allow it to guide my conduct in life. That being said, I don't prescribe any particular morality for one person or another--for example, is eating pork morally right or morally wrong?--I think that's between a man and his own conscience, a very personal thing--but I do advocate that each person preserve some sense of right and wrong in their life. I think with a healthy conscience guiding one through life, one's motives, and even the tricks the unconscious plays on us, will be very unlikely to result in anything absolutely atrocious morally speaking. Nothing's perfect, of course, but I don't think we have to bend over backwards trying to be perfect.