Reflection on extreme representationalist perspective


I am focusing on the Schank/Abelson ('Abelson' for short) and the
Newell/Simon ('Simon' for short), though before digging in I'd like to
give a word to the textbook, "Human Reasoning...", which seems to be
existing in a plane independent of the rest of the course, at least
because it has gone entirely unmentioned.  I am enjoying it, and
greatly appreciating it, because I can see that it is challenging me.
Berkeley's Cog Sci program, despite Stuart Russell's best efforts,
left me in the 'eliminativist' camp--"reasoning rarely happens in real
life, and mainly in institutional contexts...fast and frugal
algorithms...constraints of time and energy...evolutionary
psychologists..."  I am looking forward to forcing myself to challenge
that view in the manner proposed by the authors.  I haven't been
following everything 100%, but I also haven't been giving it 100%.
I'm sure that I'll come through the book being able to articulate
either why I end up agreeing or disagreeing, but I don't know what
role you intend it to take in the course, so let me know if I should
be engaging more closely with it.


As for Simon and Abelson, what struck me most is that they are (or
were) considered to be in the same camp of AI.  Though the confines
Abelson had in mind for the structure of thought bear much resemblance
to Simon's, the latter gives less impression of having seriously
considered the uncompromising complexity of the domain.  This winter I
read Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity, entirely prepared to find
that the behaviorism I had been told about was just a straw man built
to pose weakly against its obviously superior successors.
Specifically, I was expecting Skinner to instead make the very
reasonable claim that there may be mental states, but we should
proceed as if there aren't.  What a surprise to find that his account
of cognition was just as unreasonable as I had been taught.  I feel
the same way about Simon and Newell's approach to intelligence.  I
would be happy to concede, and would have expected to hear, that
search offers a useful toy model of intelligence.  Instead I read that
search is being offered not just as a model of intelligence but as
sufficient for creating it.


In my undergrad, the preoccupation with search killed any potential
personal interest in AI.  At this point I can't read papers in this
tradition without my mind wandering through the possibilities offered
by one key counterfactual: "What if Turing had played Go instead of
Chess?"  I like to think that the field would have never gotten lost
in its search for intelligence in search, or so rooted in trees.  We
would instead have unleashed all of these important thinkers directly
on the hardest and most central of Hume's three directions:
Similarity.


I am grateful to all of these researchers for how easy they are to
pin down, in this respect they are scientists.  Abelson betrays his
ties to GOFAI with his equally responsible procedure, leaving me with
a clearly specified assumption to take special exception to.  I
couldn't say the same of Merleau-Ponty, whose attempts could never
have led so immediately to an actual implementation.  By contrast, my
introduction to the Restaurant Script was through algorithms and
structures for representing it, sterilized of all the wonderful
meaning, thoughtfulness and complexity of consideration offered in
these chapters (which I am only just seeing, leaving me a bit sad that
it took so long to vindicate Abelson).


The clearly specified assumption I was able to take exception to was
the second axiom of Conceptual Dependence Theory: "Any information in
a sentence that is implicit must be made explicit in the
representation of the meaning of that sentence"  Though I am tempted
to feel much satisfaction in my ability to immediately identify its
weakness, I can instead only find gratitude to Abelson and Schank for
providing clear falsifiable axioms on which to build an impressive
account.  It is much easier to destroy a tower than build one, and I
can't say that I could replace his theory, as old as it is, with
anything nearly so coherent and accounting for nearly as much of the
data.


I'd like to say that Abelson's much more serious engagement with the
real dirty subtleties of thought allowed the flexibility that has made
his lab with Sussman at MIT a center for countless exciting and
unconventional projects, like the various global-to-local compilers
and other impressive, incredibly decentralized approaches to emergence
and intelligence.  By contrast, insofar as Minsky's recent book can be
taken to represent the contemporary perspective on Newell and Simon's
school, the classic computational account of intelligence is going to
look the same dead as it did alive.