The Game of Intelligent Design

I do occasionally stop working, and lately it’s been to pick up a book that’s been sitting on my bookshelf un-cracked for months. It’s Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought. I originally bought it for the author – other stuff by him is very good – and the title – how can it not appeal to a AGI fan? But after UPS dropped it off i got around to reading the jacket, and was disappointed. “Every time we swear, we reveal something about human emotions,” it says. I got over emotions as being insightful to AGI a long time ago. In general, emotions help us select motivations. This is certainly useful, but once that 0.001% of brain processing is done, it doesn’t help much in figuring out how the rest works. And so the book ended up on the shelf.

That was a mistake. Having grown tired of coding for once, i needed something else to do for a while, and so i wearily submitted and cracked the spine. Early into the second chapter Pinker shines light on how our usage of verbs reveals how humans perceive the world them.

Why is it that these two sentences sound fine:

But of these two, which are constructed exactly the same, only the first sounds right:

And of these two, again constructed exactly the same way, only the second sounds right:

All of the above examples appear to be achieving the same thing, i.e. getting water from one place to another, so it would seem that the cases that sound wrong to an English speaker’s ears are just arbitrarily chosen non-usages. But this is in fact not the case. Jared is imparting force, which displays a direct intention. Amy is passively allowing some amount of water to flow. And Bobby is imparting fullness to the glass. The verbs don’t only describe the manner of the movement of the water, but also describe the intentions of the actor and how states change.

These examples are only a small sample of the kinds of microclasses into which verbs can fall. The full list (at least, “full” according to the book, but with which i have no current means to argue) is (quoting directly from page 81):

• A cast of basic concepts: event, state, thing, path, place, property, manner
• A set of relationships that enmesh these concepts with one another: acting, going, being, having
• A taxonomy of entities: human vs. nonhuman, animate vs. inanimate, object vs. stuff, individual vs. collection, flexible vs. rigid, one-dimensional vs. two-dimensional vs. three dimensional
• A system of spatial concepts to define places and paths, like the meanings of on, at, in, to, and under
• A time line that orders events, and that distinguishes instantaneous points, bounded intervals, and indefinite regions
• A family of causal relationships: causing, letting, enabling, preventing, impeding, encouraging
• The concept of a goal, and the distinction between means and ends

If you’re onside with Pinker’s thesis (and i, for one, am) the above is a list of ways that humans categorize things in the real world. In the next section he goes on to list a number of ways in which these categorizations lead us astray, which allows the AGI theorist to consider new ways of thinking (i.e. new forms of intelligence) that would be able to avoid typical human failings.

This is all interesting enough. But by far what i found most interesting is how interesting i found it. Pinker’s style is to present puzzles, let you scratch your head over them for a bit, and then reveal the answer, after which you sit wondering why it wasn’t obvious. To my credit, apparently these puzzles caused a lot of linguist head-scratching for a long time, which only strengthens my point, which is: Why isn’t this obvious? How is it that children of 5 years age can have mastered the usage of hundreds of verbs without understanding the motivations for the different buckets they fall into? How is it that adults can continue to use them their entire lives and not know? There are two answers, i think.

One is that the motivations are so complicated or arbitrary that no one can figure them out. But once you know the motivations they seem obvious, so that’s not it. The other is that the motivations are so obvious that they never even come to mind. You can’t see the forest for the trees. Humans so naturally distinguish between causing, allowing, provoking, abetting, discouraging, and preventing that we don’t even think about it. They are just natural divisions of action. We generalize time-elapsed events into instantaneous points and back again effortlessly. Logically speaking, a division between human and non-human seems arbitrary, but socialization is such an important part of human life that the lack of such a division would be even more surprising.

Pinker calls the above “the stuff of thought”, but i’m inclined to grandly call it an intellectual architecture for making sense of the (human) universe, at least at a high level. There’s a great deal of work that needs to be done with basic sensory inputs before you get near this level, but it goes a lot further than 0.001% that an understanding of emotion gets us.