Supermodelling

A memory: splashing down from the boat into warm turqoise water off the coast of Belize, hand holding my regulator in place, a chaos of refracted sunlight and the familiar sound of going under the surface.

Our lives seem bound by these events; we guard them jealously — even the painful ones… they arise unbidden to remind us of who we are, who we were.

Perhaps these episodic memories are flash-frozen snapshots of concept activations, chained together in sequence, formed during times of novelty or stress… neural pathways recording grist for the mill of metaphor. Causal traces stored against future need.

I’m not sure we can be human minds without them.

But: can there be minds without them? Minds in general? Minds in the abstract?

There is a tension between thinking about our own minds (the only minds we know of), and trying to puzzle out exactly what the necessary core of minds must be. Perhaps there are many different approaches to mind, different ways of collating data and putting it to use in predicting and controlling the world.

Shall we be heavily inspired by human minds, hopefully grasping at sufficiency, or shall we discard all but reasoned necessity?

Is metaphor just a convenient mechanism? A shortcut mapping of similarities taking advantage of evolution’s empirical observation that form often does imply function? That crude similarities lead to better than random guesses? Are such tricks good ideas for computer minds? Are they necessary for effective communication with human beings? If we scrape away all the tricks, is anything left?

There is very little work available on the abstract approach to mind. I’d like to find more, but most of the reading material at hand involves vague descriptions of human psychological phenomena. We take what we can get I suppose.

Here’s something that bugs me and that I need to study along with these root puzzles about concepts and models: why are automatic theorem provers and automatic computer program generators so pathetic? It seems as if the distilled rationality of formal logic (probabilistic, nonmonotonic, purple, whatever) should capture the essence of abstract mind… but we apparently have not or cannot codify physics in a useful generative way. In fact, it seems we cannot even do much of a job of formalizing that most formal of subjects: mathematics itself — at least not in such a way that anything interesting comes from the effort.

Why is that? I wonder.