CIS 5590.004. Artificial General Intelligence

Symbol and Abstract Reasoning

1. Symbol and Language

A language is a system of symbols, and has representation and communication capabilities. Controversial opinions:

• Language as second-signal system
• Language of Thought Hypothesis
• Linguistic relativity
• Language and thought are not the same thing

Issue in "Connectionist AI": "symbol grounding", "variable binding"

2. Reasoning and Natural Language

Statistical school in NLP: correlation patterns in actual usage

• Large language model: predicting the next token
• Natural Language Inference: judging the logical relation between texts

• Different "symbols": nouns vs. pronouns
• Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence

3. Reasoning and Mathematics

• Symbols and variables in reasoning system, unification
• Combinatorial explosion and control strategy

• Pólya's heuristics and plausible reasoning
• "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences"

4. Reasoning in NAL-6

• Variable terms and substitution
• Abstract terms and interpretation
• Reasoning in and out of a subsystem
• Two types of "logic": innate/procedural/unconscious vs. acquired/declarative/conscious
• Various types of "symbol": object-level vs. meta-level, constant vs. variable
• Linguistic terms as symbols
• Translation as substitution

Reading

• Non-Axiomatic Logic: A Model of Intelligent Reasoning, 2nd Edition, Chapter 10