1.7 Five Key Words 9

1.7 Five Key Words 9 a dramatic way to carry out some of its cognitive processes (a hypothesis for which there is no current evidence), this doesn’t imply that these quantum phenomena are necessary in order to carry out the given cognitive processes. For example there is evidence that birds use quantum nonlocal phenomena to carry out navigation based on the Earth’s magnetic fields [GRM~ 11]; yet scientists have built instruments that carry out the same functions without using any special quantum effects. The importance of quantum phenomena in biology (except via their obvious role in giving rise to biological phenomena describable via classical physics) remains a subject of debate [AGBD* 08]. Quantum “magic” aside, it is also conceivable that building AGI is fundamentally impossible for some other reason we don’t understand. Without getting religious about it, it is rationally quite possible that some aspects of the universe are beyond the scope of scientific methods. Science is fundamentally about recognizing patterns in finite sets of bits (e.g. finite sets of finite-precision observations), whereas mathematics recognizes many sets much larger than this. Selmer Bringsjord [BZ03], and other advocates of “hypercomputing” approaches to intelligence, argue that the human mind depends on massively large infinite sets and therefore can never be simulated on digital computers nor understood via finite sets of finite-precision measurements such as science deals with. But again, while this sort of possibility is interesting to speculate about, there’s no real reason to believe it at this time. Brain science and AI are both very young sciences and the “working hypothesis” that digital computers can manifest advanced AGI has hardly been explored at all yet, relative to what will be possible in the next decades as computers get more and more powerful and our understanding of neuroscience and cognitive science gets more and more complete. The CogPrime AGI design presented here is based on this working hypothesis. Many of the ideas in the book are actually independent of the “mind can be implemented digitally” working hypothesis, and could apply to AGI systems built on analog, quantum or other non-digital frameworks — but we will not pursue these possibilities here. For the moment, outlining an AGI design for digital computers is hard enough! Regardless of speculations about quantum computing in the brain, it seems clear that AGI on quantum computers is part of our future and will be a powerful thing; but the description of a CogPrime analogue for quantum computers will be left for a later work. 1.7 Five Key Words As noted, the CogPrime approach lies squarely in the integrative cognitive architecture camp. But it is not a haphazard or opportunistic combination of algorithms and data structures. At bottom it is motivated by the patternist philosophy of mind laid out in Ben Goertzel’s book The Hidden Pattern [Goe06al, which was in large part a summary and reformulation of ideas presented in a series of books published earlier by the same author [Goe94], [Goe93a], [Goe93b], [Goe97], [Goe01]. A few of the core ideas of this philosophy are laid out in Chapter 3, though that chapter is by no means a thorough summary. One way to summarize some of the most important yet commonsensical parts of the patternist philosophy of mind, in an AGI context, is to list five words: perception, memory, prediction, action, goals. In a phrase: “A mind uses perception and memory to make predictions about which actions will help it achieve its goals.” HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012925