Enter the person

Part of my thesis is that, for all practical purposes, there are cognitive primitives, things we just know and somehow all other things that we find out are decomposed to such primitives. Discovering them would be akin to Euclid’s axiomatic foundation of geometry, only infinitely more challenging and rewarding. Automating or somehow contributing to the search for such primitives is still very tough, and it could be that alternative formalisations will be discovered that are equivalent but radically different, somehow depending on the relationship between their different parts rather than any “absolute values”, resembling algebraic views of geometry and geometric interpretations of algebra and mathematical analysis. For example, “3d-space” could be or couldn’t be a primitive, ie people instinctively know about three dimensions, or perhaps they always think of 2 plus some height corrections, or perhaps they are “programmed” to do ballistics by using an horizontal angle around their neck and a vertical angle.
In any case, the idea here is that a computer program without such primitives would see a very fluid universe, akin to the mystical or psychedelic experience. I don’t want to make epistemological statements on whether the earth is alive or the Ganges is a demigod and things like that, I simply want to claim that there are great reasons why we see things as inanimate, plants, animals and humans. In other words, I am asserting these are cognitive primitives (or closely associated with cp) ,”for sure”. The primitives should be seen as dimensions in feature space, where different values of a “feature” allow us to differentiate between animal and plant, and treat them differently. Surely a person has a personal history, important someones, aptitudes and aversions, loads of other things. Which would qualify as “primitives”? Well, it is quite obvious that “object” should be a cp, and objects have personal history, which can be attached without much ado to objects as different as the earth, you, the word “marriage” and the concept “marriage”. But then there are other interesting things for the survival of animals and humans, for example their pleasure seeking or survival drive could lead to regular unexpected solutions to their problems, whereas plants and rivers seem to operate in a different time scale and concept space. So, pleasure seeking or survival is a possible primitive, with a value close to 0 for non-animals.

Now, let’s ponder that previous statement: is it possible that a general intelligence will decode an organism (eg a human) and list what gives it pleasure? Well, it is possible, but rather unlikely. It is more likely that there are some primitive (mathematically, not morally) pleasures that we could list, and then assign these primitives and their derivatives to different time-human vectors (as objects are changing, we are forced to make all the object’s attributes relative to a point in their personal history). In other words, we need a routine that searches (eg in a biography or a chat session) for a persons desires, not a routine that deduces that people have desires or a statistics function that creates the concept “X” when a person has spent more than 1% of its waking time with another object, let’s say their new cabrio.

Discovering (more of) these primitives could be a project similar to that of subatomic physics: a few of the primitives will readily suggest themselves, others will be lurking underneath the ones we took for granted, and still others may announce their presence only in an artificial, high computation/high energy environment. As with physics, the absence of primitives may make itself felt by little discrepancies between Zia’s expectations from the world and Zia’s measurements of the world. (I am reminded here that concepts such as a measurement and experiment are still looking for good definitions and explanations, let’s just take them for granted now, I have the suspicion we will come back to them). In all cases, it is vital that Zia keeps measuring and simulating the world, and, for the purposes of the Loebner prize and Turing contests, that world is the world of persons!