I don’t disagree with the general drift here. Not at all.
The place where I have issues is actually a little subtle (though not too much so). If RL appears in a watered-down form all over the cognitive system, as an aspect of the design, so to speak, this would be entirely consistent with all the stuff that you observe, and which I (more or less) agree with.
But where things get crazy is when it is seen as the core principle, or main architectural feature of the system. I made some attempts to express this in the earliest blog post on my site, but the basic story is that IF it is proposed as MAIN mechanism, all hell breaks loose. The reason is that for it to be a main mechanism it needs supporting machinery to find the salient stimuli, find plausible (salient) candidate responses, and it needs to package the connection between these in a diabolically simplistic scalar (S-R contingencies), rather in some high-bandwidth structural relation. If you then try to make this work, a bizarre situation arises: so much work has to be done by all the supporting machinery, that it starts to look totally insane to insist that there is a tiny, insignificant little S-R loop at the center of it all!
That, really, is why behaviorism died in psychology. It was ludicrous to pretend that the supporting machinery was trivial. It wasn’t. And when people shifted their focus and started looking at the supporting machinery, they came up with …… all of modern cognitive psychology! The idea of RL just became irrelevant, and it shriveled away.
There is a whole book’s worth of substance in what happened back then, but I am not sure anyone can be bothered to write it, because all the cogn psych folks just want to get on with real science rather than document the dead theory that wasn’t working. Pity, because AI people need to read that nonexistent book.
Okay. In that case I think we agree. Like I mentioned in my reply to ChristianKI, I do feel that RL is an important mechanism to understand, but I definitely don’t think that you could achieve a very good understanding of the brain if you only understood RL. Necessary but not sufficient, as the saying goes.
Any RL system that we want to do something non-trivial needs to be able to apply the things it has learned in one state to other similar states, which in turn requires some very advanced learning algorithms to correctly recognize “similar” states. (I believe that’s part of the “supporting machinery” you referred to.) Having just the RL component doesn’t get you anywhere near intelligence by itself.
I don’t disagree with the general drift here. Not at all.
The place where I have issues is actually a little subtle (though not too much so). If RL appears in a watered-down form all over the cognitive system, as an aspect of the design, so to speak, this would be entirely consistent with all the stuff that you observe, and which I (more or less) agree with.
But where things get crazy is when it is seen as the core principle, or main architectural feature of the system. I made some attempts to express this in the earliest blog post on my site, but the basic story is that IF it is proposed as MAIN mechanism, all hell breaks loose. The reason is that for it to be a main mechanism it needs supporting machinery to find the salient stimuli, find plausible (salient) candidate responses, and it needs to package the connection between these in a diabolically simplistic scalar (S-R contingencies), rather in some high-bandwidth structural relation. If you then try to make this work, a bizarre situation arises: so much work has to be done by all the supporting machinery, that it starts to look totally insane to insist that there is a tiny, insignificant little S-R loop at the center of it all!
That, really, is why behaviorism died in psychology. It was ludicrous to pretend that the supporting machinery was trivial. It wasn’t. And when people shifted their focus and started looking at the supporting machinery, they came up with …… all of modern cognitive psychology! The idea of RL just became irrelevant, and it shriveled away.
There is a whole book’s worth of substance in what happened back then, but I am not sure anyone can be bothered to write it, because all the cogn psych folks just want to get on with real science rather than document the dead theory that wasn’t working. Pity, because AI people need to read that nonexistent book.
Okay. In that case I think we agree. Like I mentioned in my reply to ChristianKI, I do feel that RL is an important mechanism to understand, but I definitely don’t think that you could achieve a very good understanding of the brain if you only understood RL. Necessary but not sufficient, as the saying goes.
Any RL system that we want to do something non-trivial needs to be able to apply the things it has learned in one state to other similar states, which in turn requires some very advanced learning algorithms to correctly recognize “similar” states. (I believe that’s part of the “supporting machinery” you referred to.) Having just the RL component doesn’t get you anywhere near intelligence by itself.