[Inquiry] Re: Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems

[Jon Awbrey]

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PRO.  Note 20

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1.1.4.2.  Remembrance

The purpose of memory, on the other hand, requires states that can
be duly constituted in fashions that are diligently preserved by the
normal functioning of the system.  The expectation must be faithfully
met that such states will be maintained until deliberately reformed by
due processes.  Intelligent systems cannot afford too indiscriminately
to confound the imperatives to "forgive" and "forget".  Reversibility
applies to exploratory operations taking place interior to the dynamic
image.  An irreversible recording of events is generally speaking the
best routine strategy to keep in play between outer and inner dynamics.
But reversibility and its opposite must interact in subtle ways even
to maintain the stability of stored representations.  After all, when
physical records are disturbed by extraneous noise without the mediation
of attention's due process, the ideal system would work to immediately
reverse these unintentional distortions and ungraceful degradations of
its memories.  To abide their time, memories should lie in state spaces
with stable equilibria, resting at the bottoms of deep enough potential
wells to avoid being tossed out by minor quakes.

A collection of classic and recent papers on the significance of
reversibility questions for the topics of information acquisition
and computational intelligence is gathered together in (Leff & Rex,
1990).  The bearing of irreversible processes on the complex dynamics
of physical systems is treated in (Prigogine, 1980).  Monographs on the
physics of time asymmetry and the time direction of information flow are
found in (Davies, 1977) and (Reichenbach, 1991).  Relationships between the
periodicity properties of formal languages and the ultimately periodic behavior
of finite automata are discussed in (Denning, Dennis, & Qualitz, sec. 6.4) and
in (Lallement, sec. 7.1).  Cultural and existential reflections on the themes
of eternal return, repetition, and reconstruction can be found elaborated in
(Kierkegaard, 1843) and (Eliade, 1954).  The "landscape", topographic, or
potential-surface metaphor for system memories, for example, as developed
in the self-organizing "memory surface" model of (de Bono, 1969), was
influential in the early history of AI and continues to have periodic
reincarnations, for example, (Amit, sec. 2.3).  Distributed models of
information storage emphasizing sequential memory and reconstructive
retrieval are investigated in (Albus, 1981) and (Kanerva, 1988).

Work in cognitive science and AI, in the history of its ongoing revolutions
and partial resolutions, has shown a recurring tendency to lose sight of the
breadth and power that originally drew it to examine such faculties as memory
and imagination.  The fact that this form of forgetfulness happens so often is
already an argument that there may be some reason for it, in the psychology and
sociology of science if not in the nature of the subject matter.  No matter what
the cause the pattern is seen again and again.  The spirit of the original quest
that imparts a certain verve to the revolutionary stages of a field's development
repeatedly devolves into a kind of volleyball game, an exercise engaged in by
opposing parties to settle, by rhetorical hook or strategic crook, which side
of a conceptual net the whole globe in contention shall be judged to rest.
But most of the purportedly world-shattering distinctions are rendered by
and large ineffective by the lack of any operational, much less consensual,
definitions.  The most heated border disputes arise over concepts for which
no clear agreement exists even as to the proper direction of inquiry, whether
the form of argument demanded ought to be working from a definition or groping
toward a definition of the concept at issue.

It may be inevitable as a natural part of the annealing process of
any specialized instrument of science to periodically enter phases
of chafing over indeterminate trifles.  But it remains a good idea
to preserve a few landmarks sighting on the original aims and goals
of the inquiry.  In the instance of memory, imagination, and their
interaction in the media of representation and expression, a wider
field of illumination on their natural scopes is maintained by this
sample of sources:  (Sartre, 1948), (Yates, 1966), and (Krell, 1990).
The critique of pragmatic thinking for "differences that don't make
a difference" is long-standing and well-known, for example, (James,
1907).  The form of reasoning that argues toward a definition is
bound up with the question of abductive reasoning as described
by C.S. Peirce.  An interesting contemporary discussion of
the problematics of definition appears in (Eco, 1983).

Jon Awbrey

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