Chapter 15 Emergent Networks of Intelligence
15.1 Introduction
When one is involved with engineering an AGI system, one thinks a lot about the aspects of the system one is explicitly building — what are the parts, how they fit together, how to test they’re properly working, and so forth. And yet, these explicitly engineered aspects are only a fraction of what’s important in an AGI system. At least as critical are the emergent aspects — the patterns that emerge once the system is up and running, interacting with the world and other agents, growing and developing and learning and self-modifying. SMEPH is one toolkit for describing some of these emergent patterns, but it’s only a start.
In line with these general observations, most of this book will focus on the structures and processes that we have built, or intend to build, into the CogPrime system. But in a sense, these structures and processes are not the crux of CogPrime’s intended intelligence. The purpose of these pre-programmed structures and processes is to give rise to emergent structures and processes, in the course of CogPrime’s interaction with the world and the other minds within it. We will return to this theme of emergence at several points in later chapters, e.g. in the discussion of map formation in Chapter 42 of Part 2.
Given the important of emergent structures — and specifically emergent network structures — for intelligence, it’s fortunate the scientific community has already generated a lot of knowledge about complex networks: both networks of physical or software elements, and networks of organization emergent from complex systems. As most of this knowledge has originated in fields other than AGI, or in pure mathematics, it tends to require some reinterpretation or tweaking to achieve maximal applicability in the AGI context; but we believe this effort will become increasingly worthwhile as the AGI field progresses, because network theory is likely to be very useful for describing the contents and interactions of AGI systems as they develop increasing intelligence.
In this brief chapter we specifically focus on the emergence of certain large-scale network structures in a CogPrime knowledge store, presenting heuristic arguments as to why these structures can be expected to arise. We also comment on the way in which these emergent structures are expected to guide cognitive processes, and give rise to emergent cognitive pro- cesses. The following chapter expands on this theme in a particular direction, exploring the possible emergence of structures characterizing inter-cognitive reflection.
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