Why Machine Won't Think...

(ref: [1] Jammer, Max "The Conceptual
Development of Quantum Mechanics" McGraw-Hill (1966) pp 178-179

[2] Persig, Robert "Lila: An Inquiry in Morals" Bantam (1991) Chapter 11

... In [1], Jammer quotes from Principles of Psychology ... The Stream
of Thought, like a bird's life, seems to be mde of an alternation of
flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where
every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by
a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial
imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held
before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without
chainging; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations,
static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters
contemplated in the periods of comparative rest... The rush of the
thought is so headlong that it almost always brings us up at the
conclusion before we can arrest it. Or if our purpose is nimble enough
and we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to be itself... The attempt
at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a
spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly
enough to see how the darkness looks.

.... in [2] Persig writes about
"Dynamic Quality"... But Dynamic Quality is not structured and yet it
is not chaotic. It is value that cannot be contained by static
patterns. ... Science values static patterns. Its business is to
search for them. When nonconformity appears it is considered an
interruption of the normal rather than the presence of the normal. A
deviation from a normal static pattern is something to be explained
and if possible controlled. The reality science explains is that
`reality' which follows mechanisms and programs. That other worthless
stuff which doesn't follow mechanisms and programs we don't pay any
attention to. ... A thing doesn't exist because we have never observed
it. The reason we have never observed it is because we have never
looked for it. And the reason we have never looked for it is that it
is unimportant, it has no value and we have other better things to
do. ... but 'spur of the moment' decisions... that directed the
progress of evolution are, in fact, Dynamic Quality itself. Dynamic
Quality, the source of all things, the pre-intelectual cutting edge of
reality, always appears as 'spur of the moment'. Where else could it
appear? ... Mechansims are the enemy of life. The more static and
unyielding the mechanisms are, the more life works to evade them and
overcome them

What current AI and machine learning is doing is capturing the "things
that don't change", recognizing the resting places, finding the common
elements of the flow of information. As such, it will not see the
flight between the static points. Neural nets compute the function
that extracts the 'static reality' from a flow of patterns. As such
they are only able to represent the resting places, not the flight
between the resting places. They only attack half the problem of
thought. Given two neural nets, what is the dynamic relationship
between them? What it the intuition that connects them? Is there an
imaginative story to connect one to another? Is there a
"rationalization machine" that can make up a connection between them?

Persig says "One can imagine how an infant in the womb acquires
awareness of simple distinctions such as pressure and sound, and then
at birth acquires more complex ones light and warmth and
hunger. ... We could call them stimuli but the baby doesn't identify
them as that. From the baby's point of view, something, he knows not
what, compels attention. This generalized 'something' Whitehead's 'dim
apprehension' is Dynamic Quality. When he is a few months old the
baby studies his hand or a rattle, not knowing it is a hand or a
rattle... If the baby ignores this force of Dynamic Quality it can be
speculated that he will become mentally retarded, but if he is
normally attentitive to Dynamic Quality he will soon begin to notice
differences and then correlations between the differences and then
repetitive patterns of the correlations. But it is not until the baby
is several months old that he will begin to really understand enough
about that enormously complex correlation of senatations and
boundaries and desires called an object to be able to reach for
one. This object will not be a primary experience. It will be a
complex pattern of static values derived from primary experience.

Is thinking possible without this primary experience, this 'Dynamic
Quality', this flight between resting places? Neural nets can
recognize a resting place, capturing what Persig calls 'Static
Quality' but how do we model the flight? Does this require senses?

The closest I can come to this question would be to think about a NN
that focuses on changes. It would be comprised of many sub-nets that
would recognize static parts of a scene. For example, a collection of
NNs, each of which recognize static things in a room scene such as
tables and books. But the 'main NN' would look for changes, e.g. the
bee that just entered the room. Not knowing what a bee is, not knowing
what it means to fly, but knowing the 'primary experience' of change
of position, how do we dynamically construct a new NN that recognizes
this 'bee thing' when it sees another one, having only seen one? How
is this new 'bee NN' added to the collection of 'static NNs' behind
the 'main NN' so that it 'knows about bees'? Besides change of
position, there are other primary values such as size, color, sound,
etc. Can we construct a new 'static NN' from 'primary NNs' that
recognize these primary 'sensations'?

How do you build a Neural Network to recognize 'size'?

'Pressure' is a primary sensation, requiring a sense organ. But 'size'
is not primary, though it is primitive (aka non-specific) and
derivable from something like images. We recognize cats from images
but how to we use images to recognize 'size'?