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Simon D. Levy Department of Computer Science Washington and Lee University Lexington, VA 24450

Simon D. Levy Department of Computer Science Washington and Lee University Lexington, VA 24450 http://www.cs.wlu.edu/~levy.

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Simon D. Levy Department of Computer Science Washington and Lee University Lexington, VA 24450

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  1. Simon D. Levy • Department of Computer Science • Washington and Lee University • Lexington, VA 24450 • http://www.cs.wlu.edu/~levy The Fractal Beauty of Emergence: Re-EnVisioning Intelligence in Man and Machine

  2. Big Questions • What makes us human? • What keeps us from becoming more? • How do our metaphors hold us (and our artefacts) back?

  3. What Makes Us Human? • Soul / Spirit • Emotion • Consciousness • Intelligence • Language

  4. Language • Reference to distal objects/events • Reference to (others’) beliefs • Structure (syntax) • Rule-governed

  5. Language : Nature or Nurture? • Skinner (1940’s-50’s): Verbal Behavior • Chomsky (50’s…): Universal Grammar • - Acquisition automatic • - “Inexplicable” patterns across languages • - Trans-finite / recursive representations

  6. The Current Dogma • Language is fundamentally digital (recursive, symbolic, rule-based) computation • Like the rest of human psychology, this computation is largely determined by biological evolution • Chomsky: Accidental, non-adaptive • Pinker: Survival value of communication

  7. Emergence: Escaping the Nature/Nurture Dichotomy • “Inexplicable” patterns across languages • Language itself evolves adaptively • (Universal) patterns emerge under constraints of communication

  8. Language as Emergence • Sounds (phonemes) emerge as attractors in perception/action space [Browman / Goldstein / Studdert-Kennedy] • Universal syntactic patterns emerge from constraints on processing [Hurford / Kirby/ Batali]

  9. Fractals: Structure Without Rules • Trans-finite / recursive representations Fractal self-similarity mirrors self-similarity (embedding) in language…

  10. ... But I know, too,

  11. That

  12. the blackbird is involved in

  13. what

  14. I know. ... But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what –Wallace Stevens

  15. Language as a Fractal • Fractals can be directly implemented in neural-like networks [Tabor] • Neural architectures can be “super-Turing” in power [Siegelmann] • Human language may be located on the fractal “edge of chaos” [Crutchfield / Young] : kind of rule-governed, kind of wild

  16. Implications for AI / Cog. Sci. • Maybe our metaphors (not computing power) are what’s holding back human-like machine intelligence • Possibility of a “Grand Unification” between the way we think about images / art and the way we think about computation / thought / language

  17. Implications for Transhumanism • Dogma of biologically determined, hard-wired digital brains / computers loses appeal. • Humans are “natural-born cyborgs” [Clark] whose tools co-evolve adaptively with human wetware and environment.

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