40 3 A Patternist Philosophy of Mind
— Example: Each time the agent builds a certain structure, it observes itself building the structure, and its role as “builder of a tall tower” (or whatever the structure is) becomes part of its self-model. Then when it is asked to build something new, it may consult its selfmodel to see if it believes itself capable of building that sort of thing (for instance, if it is asked to build something very large, its self-model may tell it that it lacks persistence for such projects, so it may reply “I can try, but I may wind up not finishing it”).
As we proceed through the CogPrime design in the following pages, we will see how each of these abstract concepts arises concretely from CogPrime’s structures and algorithms. If the theory of [Goe06a] is correct, then the success of CogPrime as a design will depend largely on whether these high-level structures and dynamics can be made to emerge from the synergetic interaction of CogPrime’s representation and algorithms, when they are utilized to control an appropriate agent in an appropriate environment.
3.3 Cognitive Synergy
Now we dig a little deeper and present a different sort of “general principle of feasible general intelligence”, already hinted in earlier chapters: the cognitive synergy principle 7, which is both a conceptual hypothesis about the structure of generally intelligent systems in certain classes of environments, and a design principle used to guide the design of CogPrime. Chapter 8 presents a mathematical formalization of the notion of cognitive synergy; here we present the conceptual idea informally, which makes it more easily digestible but also more vague-sounding.
We will focus here on cognitive synergy specifically in the case of “multi-memory systems,” which we define as intelligent systems whose combination of environment, embodiment and motivational system make it important for them to possess memories that divide into partially but not wholly distinct components corresponding to the categories of:
e Declarative memory
— Examples of declarative knowledge: Towers on average are taller than buildings. I gener- ally am better at building structures I imagine, than at imitating structures I’m shown in pictures.
e Procedural memory (memory about how to do certain things)
— Examples of procedural knowledge: Practical know-how regarding how to pick up an elongated rectangular block, or a square one. Know-how regarding when to approach a problem by asking “What would one of my teachers do in this situation” versus by thinking through the problem from first principles.
e Sensory and episodic memory
— Example of sensory knowledge: memory of Bob’s face; memory of what a specific tall blocks tower looked like
2 While these points are implicit in the theory of mind given in [Goe06a], they are not articulated in this specific form there. So the material presented in this section is a new development within patternist philosophy, developed since [Goe06a] in a series of conference papers such as [Goe(9al.
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