Bounded Rationality

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.

:slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

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.
:smiley:
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.
:slight_smile:
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 . . .

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

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?

:smiley:

sigh back at ya . . .

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

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

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.

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’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.

Good, 'cause so was I.

Run that by me again? :laughing:

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).

Good, because I don’t think my peanut brain could take it. :laughing:

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

[size=60]* PS - Don’t worry about Ecmandu, he’s certifiably insane.[/size]

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.

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

@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.

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.

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.

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.

:smiley:

That’s right.

Can you tell more about that inspiration you have?

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

[size=85]Personally I have a “love of wisdom”.[/size]

Inspiration of Senses to Reason
[size=85]a tiny essay - written on the fly(while very tired due to lack of sleep)[/size]

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.

I like my friendliness too. :smiley:

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

Absolutely not! It’s like asking me about my sex life!.. Just kidding. :laughing:

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.

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.

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

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

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.

@gib - C# is a great language - I think better than Java. Javascript is really cool - I was recently helping a friend with a game he is making in the Phaser Game Framework - “Phaser uses both a Canvas and WebGL renderer internally and can automatically swap between them based on browser support.” - mentioned on their site. SQL Server as in Microsoft - I hear they use it on Stack Exchange - I also heard the database capacity had increased a few years ago - I have used it a couple of times and I think it pretty fast. Visual Studio is awesome - I have used it many times over the years - I like the idea of the way their licensing works these days and the different versions available - I mainly use it for C++ and C#. I am not too sure whether I have used EntityFramework but I have used tools similar to it. I have used quite a few different MVC frameworks in different programming domains.

I read your Rationality is Overrated post - I love the child seat example and the trolling rationality example. When we get time we should have a talk about different types of ways rationality can blend to irrationality and how these can be utilized in a bot - I already have a scheme that covers this sort of thing - I have a scheme for emotions too. They are like spectrum’s but in code.

Answering your question: Is that like a message queue? They are more or less the same concept - I think historically the message queue might be newer than the bus - I use my own bus that I designed and basically what it does is to defer some processing when it is not needed otherwise processes everything in the order given from the outset. My bus is multidimensional - I will explain how at a later date.

As far as a world take over or revolt from AI - I don’t think so - I think it might be possible if it was in the wrong hands - but in the right hands and in its own hands I don’t think so. I would like to further this conversation but I will leave it at that for this post.

Agreed.

I asked a question on another forum: Why do people have the desire to talk? Well I got a few interesting responses outside the Internet’s more practical results. I think talking is just networking in a way. This could be interesting to talk about one day too.

There are a few other things I will respond to in your post; I will do this in another post.

:slight_smile:

Reason is the real world application of logic and wisdom is any fundamental truth gained from reason

Ah yes - I know exactly what you are talking about and I am more or less able to personally bypass it - however you have some very interesting points there; tools - situation specific matters - survival - strategy; some of which the general mechanism behind Bounded Rationality could be good at. Just change out the rationality for whatever else.

Further Regarding AI Domination: I think that AI is already changing us just like other technology - it is just that most of us do not really get that yet - but there is plenty of weak AI around already in smart phones, automobiles, process control systems and hell, google is a form of AI. I think it is more likely that as we build AI and it changes and enhances us and our lives that our understanding of it will increase and we will put that new understanding into AI which will further enhance us and our lives and so on and so forth et cetera et cetera - I mean take your pick of philosophies there - I think even cause and effect offers us some insight here.

An aside: Loved The Matrix - Loved I Robot; The movie Arrival even though not really about AI is great and shows insight in many realms - for me the what if we made first contact with aliens correlated with first contact with AI has been and gone without any of us noticing - but what if first contact with AI was more like an alien first contact rather than like a bacteria or basic organism like it was. Excuse the type of writing I use in this particular paragraph, it is designed a particular way to stimulate thought but you may have to read it again.

I like your idea of self-awareness regarding personal conduct and in this way I think an advanced AI will be able to do this easily - think Data from Star Trek - The Next Generation.

But movies and television aside - with some deeper thought one can see the benefit and given we have been considering the risk for so long - I have this strange faith in humans to make and do the right thing. Mostly people think that one day we will wake up and there it is, first contact - not a chance, this will be gradual transitions to very smart machines even if somewhat quicker than before the transitions will smooth out the faster we develop - I have already seen this in experiment.

We have good studies, knowledge, wisdom and other gems like self-reference effect. Indicating artifacts like “influence”.

And some of the mathematics we use these days - the good stuff for AI - people have not even discovered yet - and yet simple mechanisms in code like TRUE, FALSE, AND, OR, XOR, NOT, NAND, NOR, and XNOR serve well for basic truth, logic, error checking and with a bit of imagination who knows.

An aside:
An idea of the type of mathematics that gets considered around my AI projects: Fractals, Space-filling curves, Quasigroups, Disordered hyperuniformity, Groupoids, Quasicrystals, 5-cell; Just to name a few - the ones I find interesting - the ones that spring to mind anyway.

So back to it - I am wondering whether there are infinite ways to build intelligent machines - whether we could actually model all the theories through out history as computer simulated intelligence. Imagine a Kant machine - although I often wonder whether he was already a philosophy machine. Imagine a YOU machine or a ME machine - the possibilities are endless. The system I am working on now grows with the user - it starts out with nothing at all - it attempts to model the text world around it similar to the way we do. So the more you talk to it the more it knows. If we consider all layers in philosophy and think about the concept of layers we find ourselves thinking in layers - nature did this with the Neocortex - the Neocortex has six layers and many columns and then in humans it decided to fold itself to allow for more surface area - this bending, repeating, asymmetric, multidimensional plane makes no sense really but just thinking of its geometry makes you think of geometry - geometry is so easily correlated with algebra. This correlation allows us to impose multidimensional objects onto a plane and then layer these planes - if you are still following me at this point then you can see the implications but if you are not then never mind because your brain is already doing it for you.

The last paragraph sounds a bit nuts in hindsight but it holds many insights. So what are we talking about? A bit of everything for now.

:smiley:

Wasn’t C# originally Java? I think Microsoft bought the language from Oracle and has been improving on it since. They’re still two different languages but I think C# began as a clone of Java.

Are you an Oracle guy?

Yeah, MVC seems to be the current trend now-a-days for programming architectures… until the next greatest thing comes along.

So not binary, you mean? Is randomness an element?

Off the top of my head, I would imagine that if you wanted to build AI to use irrational or quasi-rational approaches to achieving some goal, you would first have to program into it what it’s goal is. Then you would get it to try out different approaches, some rational (i.e. completely algorithmic), others not so rational (some element of randomness, or “fuzzy logic”, maybe bringing in your spectrums), and keep track of which approaches have the best track record. Then once it figures that out, repeat with a different goal.

Please do.

Exactly! We are constantly downloading and uploading programs into each other’s brains.

Yeah, but it’s usually not all or nothing. Even when a politician is engaging in a bit of sophistry, he uses some rationality when promulgating his platform. He just allows for subtle gaps or emotional leaps sometimes.

I agree, with a gradual approach to building AI, we will have plenty of opportunities to see how building machines that come close to our idea of a perfect machine replica of a human being will pan out. It will allow us to make small adjustments here and there, small tweaks, small nudges in the right direction. Besides, machines will always do whatever we program them to do. In order to say that machines might one day revolt is to suppose we programmed them with the ability to revolt (it wouldn’t just be a slip up on our part). The trivial solution seems to be: program them to like serving us, to feel fulfilled at the idea of doing man’s bidding. The only way this wouldn’t bode well is if there are those who want a version AI which is literally a replication human nature–with the desire for freedom, for rights, for respect, for independence, for self-expression, etc.–and there may be some out there who want this, but they’d have to know this comes at a huge risk and a huge responsibility. But outside that aspiration, we can program AI any way we want.

Both the above paragraphs seem like they’re jam packed with information. They don’t sound nuts, just too much in too little space. Which is okay. Sometimes that’s the perfect way to get a discussion started. You get it all out on the page and then we go back to each part and slowly expand on them. ← But I’ll let you do that if you want.

I love the way it is being presented here; it is not a simple task to deny anyone of the above. I also like the way Wikipedia states that philosophy is the love of wisdom. I wish I had my own exact definition but I live in the wrong world for that - wrong world is just a device used that is based on my opinion.

I will also quote: Online Etymology Dictionary; for those who are interested.

This leads me to another contemplation; whether philosophy should have a singular meaning or whether it should mean something different to each individual - I imagine the latter to somehow negate the former. I personally prefer a singular meaning but then I think that today’s philosophy is different to that of philosophia. Maybe we need a third wisdom - one slightly more flexible(this could stir up some purists).