3.0 Research Purpose And Philosophy

1. Conversion of a Functionalist

It should be obvious by now that I strongly disagree with the theories of functionalism, and that I feel that most of the work done in connectionism is going down the wrong path. However, this was not always true of me. I have been interested in the field of Artificial Intelligence and robotics since I was a little boy and saw my first Star Wars movie. I remember thinking how cool it would be to build my own C3PO to do all of my dreaded chores. From that time on I was hooked. As I grew up I taught myself to program the computer and wrote a number of simple AI applications. When I was a teenager I wrote a expert-system based application (lots of if-then rules) that could play poker. It had a simple system to use its past experiences to become a better player (choose which rules to follow based on the current hand and past experience). Eventually it was able to beat me and my friends a decent amount of the time. I also did a lot of reading on the subject, all of it preaching the functionalist faith. I did not understand a whole lot of the explicit details at that time, but I did come away with a strong belief that the brain was a computer and that all you had to do to build thinking robots like C3PO, Data, or Daneel was to be able to write a thinking program.

I began work on a new project my senior year in high school. I wanted to build a handwriting recognition system. I just knew I could build a system that would work incredibly and be the first step to making really intelligent machines. For the first time I was really forced to think about how we think, instead of just reading about what other people said should work. After a lot of hard work I discovered that something that seems so simple that we just take it for granted, like recognizing a written symbol, is really incredibly complex. And that while something like playing a poker game can be characterized by formal relations and if-then logic fairly well, it is horribly difficult to do that with mental processes like recognition. There are simply to many possibilities and exceptions for it to be programmed in explicitly. I began to doubt the prevailing dogma that thought can be explicitly programmed. I began searching for other ideas on how the brain works, and by shear luck I stumbled across the book Neural Darwinism By Gerald Edelman. I only understood a fraction of the book at the time. If you have ever read anything by him then you know that he is very difficult to understand. But it was enough to set me on a new path in my quest to create intelligent machines. He believes that understanding the structure and development of the brain is critical in understanding intelligence. Studying his books then led me to study Searle's books, and to learn about genetic algorithms, chaos theory, emergent behavior, etc. The more I read, the less realistic the idea of functionalism seemed.

2. Research Philosophy

I do not have any set philosophy really. I believe that there are a few different philosophical ideas out there that are going in the right direction, but will require a lot of work to either confirm or disprove. The two I like best are Searle's Biological Realism and Edelman's Neural Darwinism. They are similar in several ways. Searle focuses more on the philosophy, and Edelman is more concerned with the physiological details of how things like consciousness arise. Some of my core beliefs on the mind can be summarized as follows:

3. Purpose

That leads to the next big question. Why? Or more accurately "What is it good for?" Why do I spend my time doing all of this studying and working to build this stuff? My answer is that I believe that if we can truly get machines that even have the intelligence of insects, it can cause dramatic changes to every part of human existence that will be even more helpful and exciting than the computer revolution. There is virtually no human endeavor that could not be made more efficient, less costly, and less polluting with the addition of some machine intelligence. Everything from construction, agriculture, mass production, sanitation, recycling, the military, and keeping your yard maintained and your house clean could benefit greatly from even a simple machine intelligence. I will not go into all of the possible uses that I have fantasized about building. But I would like to mention a few of the possible uses in some more detail in the following two pages. The first talks about some ideas for a subject I am very passionate about, space exploration. The other page discusses some possible uses for Machine Intelligence (MI) in military projects