Inquiry Driven Learning Environments

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IDLE.  Note 1

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| Author:   Jon Awbrey
| Version:  Draft 4.00
| Created:  10 Sep 1993
| Revised:  20 Oct 2003

Extensions Of Mind:  Essays And Reports On Intelligent Systems

1.  Components of Intelligence

1.1.  Abstract of Argument

A threefold scheme is proposed for organizing the various
functions of intelligence.  Three generic categories are
outlined that cut across multiple levels of reasoning and
representation and that serve to classify in broad terms
a multitude of more specialized components.  These three
modalities are intended to be regarded as components of
intelligence more in the mathematical sense of the word,
that is, as generative dimensions of variation, and not
of necessity in the mereological sense of "components",
that is, spatially discrete and localized parts.

These abstract components or schematic categories may be labelled
as "deductive", "inductive", and "abductive", when considered as
types of reasoning, or as "syntactic", "semantic", and "pragmatic",
when treated as aspects of representation.  It is a working hypothesis
of the philosophy that I am taking up here that these three dimensions
are irreducible and exhaustive, at least when they are taken at their
own proper level of approximation, but the character of their relative
independence as dimensions does not seem to involve that of interacting
trivially with each other.  In fact, the evidence of my own experience
with implementing some fraction of their capabilities leads me to the
following provisional conclusion:  In order to build a live, real-time
capacity for "understanding" it will be necessary to integrate all three
of these dimensions of intelligence so thoroughly about a common family
of data structures that each of the distinct aspects will operate more
like an alternate perspective on the same facts than as a separately
embodied module of code.  Along the way, partly in support of this
deliberately short list of functionalities, a particular slant
on the aims of AI will be advanced.

Jon Awbrey

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