The question is the brain just a pattern recognition engine. This is what the short story in the last post was about. Many years back I read Jeff Hawkins’s book On Intelligence which dealt with how the brain works. My takeaway from that is the brain is a pattern recognition engine, Hawkins refers to it as as hierarchical-pattern recognizer.
Why Catching a Ball Doesn’t Work the Way You Think it Does
A good example in the book is teaching a computer to catch a ball vs. a human catching a ball. If you were to design a robot hand to catch a ball you would have a visual input and something that moves the hand to the place it needs to get the ball. You also have a computer that can do calculations in nanoseconds. So the visual system is giving the positions and the computer is calculating the trajectory and moves the hand into the position.
We don’t do this the same way. The cycle time of neurons is in the millisecond. If you are trying to calculate where the ball is to catch it you have already missed it. Instead your brain knows the patterns in the physics of moving objects. When you see a ball moving toward you your brain identifies the pattern of moving objects and you move your hand to the location based on that pattern.
An interesting question would be when we have baseball stadiums on the Moon or Mars would a professional athlete be any good in catching or hitting the ball. Initially they would be awful as their pattern recognition engine is running the pattern for objects Earth gravity and unable to match it to the physics of the moment. It would take them the time to build a new pattern match. Eventually they would and there skills would return to normal.
Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind
I didn’t realize it, but from my armchair I hit on the Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind that Ray Kurzweil came up with in his armchair. The New Yorker is not too kind on its review of How to Create a Mind.
So while pattern recognition isn’t everything there probably is something to it. There is also just the knowledge we all have. This was also in the short story with Cycorp which is a real company. I had read about them in the late 1990’s which was a project to give a computer all the knowledge of a 5 year old this. This project appears to have been ongoing over the last 25 years and may be bearing some fruit.
So it looks like what we need in AI is both the understanding of how we recognize patterns, and also how we get all the rules of inferences we have build up.