Brentano’s intentionality confronts Hegelian self-identity — In 1874, Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint proposed that every mental event — thought, belief, feeling, etc — is directed towards some object or content. This notion, which he labelled intentionality, has an intuitive appeal. A moment’s introspection seems to confirm that every one of your thoughts is “about”…

The vicious cycle that keeps ML out of robotics — Thanks to James B. for the inspiration behind this article. If you’ve been following the progress of Machine Learning (ML) in industry over the last decade, you may be aware of a growing gap between the capabilities demonstrated in academic papers and the prevalence or viability of ML in production…

Concepts are aspects of the observer, not the world — “Making computers learn presents two problems — epistemological and heuristic. The epistemological problem is to define the space of concepts that the program can learn… …The heuristic problem of algorithms for learning has been much studied and the epistemological mostly ignored.” — Concepts of Logical AI, McCarty Humans have the…

A case study of why numbers must be affordances — This is the eighteenth post in a series on AGI. You can read the previous post here. You can also see a list of all posts here. In 2021, an article in Scientific American announced that the debate over whether numbers are innate in the human mind or if they…

World-models are built of affordances, not facts — This is the seventeenth post in a series on AGI. Read the previous post here. See a list of all posts here. In the previous two posts we’ve been working on the assumption that in order to create a more general AI one should take a narrow AI and gradually…

Including summaries and links — Introduction A Comprehensive List of the Obstacles on the Road to AGI (link): The goal of AGI research is simple: to understand the mind with enough detail to recreate it, or perhaps create something better. Developing AGI presents a mountain of challenges, and it is easy to lose hope in ever…

A critique of Emergentism in Artificial Intelligence — Emergence is the notion that in a complex system, the interactions of the whole may exhibit properties that are not present in the individual parts. It is most often applied to examples in physics and nature, such as the collective behaviours of ant colonies, the self-organizing principles of social groups…

Narrow AI are bounded by their hard-coded ontology — This post is the sixteenth in a series on AGI. You can read the previous post here. See a list of all posts here. In the previous post we discussed how narrow AI are defined by built-in assumptions about how they approach problems. We explored the case of Large Language…

How assumptions and constraints define narrow AI — This is the fifteenth post in a series on AGI. See the previous post here. See a list of all posts here. The first 14 posts focused on basic, automatic rules that describe the foundational units of cognition. …