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Reinforcement Learning and Artificial
Intelligence (RLAI)
The empirical knowledge hypothesis
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The ambition of this web
page is to state, refine, clarify and, most of all, promote discussion of, the following scientific hypothesis:
(All)
world knowledge is translatable, without loss of meaning, into
statements about, and comparable with, future lowest-level sensations
and actions
and the slogan
Knowledge is prediction
Definitions:
World knowledge is knowledge about the world, that is,
particular to the world one finds oneself in. Knowledge that
would be true in any world, such as mathematical knowledge, is
specifically excluded.
Sensations and actions are the
lowest-level input and output signals available to the agent possessing
the knowledge. The agent is presumed to be situated in time, that
is, with respect to a single time series of experience, of sensations
and actions, the data of life, as discussed under the
experiential AI hypothesis.
The parenthetical "(All)" is
primarily a definitional issue. It is meant to cover all
commonsense world knowledge such as knowing the layout of your home,
knowing your name, knowing the capital of Slovakia, knowing the shape
of a wine glass, knowing that f=ma, knowing that the earth orbits the
sun,
etc. As discussed above, mathematical knowledge is explicitly
excluded. A more subtle issue concerns knowledge that is specific
to your world but not explicit, such as having a good set of features
for your world. One could consider this an exception to the
hypothesis, or one could consider such generalization-assisting
knowledge as also being a statement about future experience. But
this is a tricky fine point, and to focus on it would be to miss the
main thrust of the hypothesis, which is about knowledge as we regularly
think about it.
"translatable, without loss of meaning" means that the knowledge essentially is those
statements about the future. The knowledge is no more than the
sum of those statements, and the sum of those statements is all there
is to the knowledge. The knowledge is not about a process that
produces the data, except insofar as it is about the data itself.
The word "future" could be removed from
the statement of the hypothesis, thus including memory of old
sensations and actions as knowledge, while retaining most of the
hypothesis' meaning and impact. I personally have no problem with
this, though I slightly prefer the given form because it is
sharper. But peace, this is a question of how we choose to use
words, and either way is reasonable.
-RS
