Metacognition, metaphor and AGI

In the recent post on abstract thought, I mentioned a couple of meta concepts: metacognition and metaphor.

• Metacognition is the ability to think about thinking.  I've discussed it before, particularly in this post and these two posts.
• Metaphor is a bit harder to define, though there is no shortage of definitions, but the core of it involves using the understanding of one thing to understand a different thing.  I've also discussed this before, particularly in this post and this one.

When I was writing the post on abstract thought, I had it in mind that these two abilities have more to do with what we would call "general intelligence" (artificial or not), so I wanted to try to get into that here, without knowing exactly where I'll end up.

In that earlier post, I identified two kinds of abstraction:

• Defining things in terms of properties, for example, a house is a building that people live in.  I concluded that this isn't essential to general intelligence.  At this point, I'd say it's more a by-product of how we think, particularly how we think about words.
• Identifying discrete objects (in some general sense) out of the stream of sensory input we encounter, for example, being able to say "that sound was a dog barking".  I concluded that this is basic equipment for dealing with the world.  At this point, I'd say it's worth noting that LLMs don't do this at all. They have it done for them by the humans that produce the words they're trained on and receive as prompts.  On the other hand specialized AIs, like speech recognizers, do exactly this.

It was the first kind of abstraction that led me back to thinking about metaphor.

Like the second kind of abstraction, metaphor is everywhere, to the point that we don't even recognize it until we think to look.  For example:

• the core of it (a concept has a solid center, with other, softer parts around it)
• I had it in mind (the mind is a container of ideas)
• I wanted to try to get into that (a puzzle is a space to explore; you know more about it when inside it than outside)
• without knowing exactly where I'll end up (writing a post is going on a journey, destination unknown)
• at this point (again, writing a post is a journey)
• this is basic equipment (mental abilities are tools and equipment)
• led me back to thinking (a chain of thought is a path one can follow)
• to the point (likewise)

While there's room for discussion as to the details, in each of those cases I'm talking about something in the mind (concepts, the process of writing a blog post ...) in terms of something tangible (a soft object with a core, a journey in the physical world ...).

Metaphor is certainly an important part of intelligence as we experience it.  It's quite possible, and I would personally say likely, that the mental tools we use for dealing with the physical world are also used in dealing with less tangible things.  For example, the mental circuitry involved in trying to follow what someone is saying probably overlaps with the mental circuitry involved in trying to follow someone moving in the physical world.

This would include not only focusing one's attention on the other person, but also building a mental model of the other person's goals so as to anticipate what they will do next, and also recording what the person has already said in a similar way to recording where one has already been along a path of motion.  If some of the same mental machinery is involved in both processes -- listening to someone speak, and physically following them -- then on some level we probably experience the two similarly.  If so, it should be no surprise that we use some of the same words in talking about the two.

The overlap is not exact, or else we actually would be talking about the same things, but the overlap is there nonetheless.  This can happen in more than one way at the same time.  If you're speaking aggressively to me, I might experience that in a similar way to being physically menaced, and I might say things like Back off or Don't attack me, even while I might also say I'm not following you if I can't quite understand what you're saying, but I still feel like it's meant aggressively.

It's interesting that these examples of metaphor, about processing what someone is saying, also involve metacognition, thinking about what the other person is thinking.  That's not always the case (consider this day is just rushing by me or it looks like we're out of danger).  Rather, we use metaphor when thinking about thinking because we use metaphor generally when thinking about things.

If you buy that metaphor is a key part of what we think of as our own intelligence, is it a key part of what we would call "general intelligence" in an AI?  As usual, that seems more like a matter of definition.  I've argued previously that the important consideration with artificial general intelligence is its effect.  For example, we worry about trying to control a rogue AI that can learn to adapt to our attempts to control it.  This ability to adapt might or might not involve metaphor.  It might well involve metacognition -- modeling what we're thinking as we try to control it, but maybe not.

Consider chess engines.  As noted elsewhere, it's clear that chess engines aren't generally intelligent, but it's also clear that they are superhuman in their abilities.  Human chess players clearly use metaphor in thinking about chess, not just attack and defense, but space, time, strength, weakness, walls, gaps, energy and many others.  Classic AB chess engines (bash out huge numbers of possible continuations and evaluate them using an explicit formula) clearly don't use metaphor.

The situation with neural network (NN) engines (bash out fewer possible continuations and evaluate them using a neural net) is slightly muddier, since in some sense the evaluation function is looking for similarities with other chess positions, but that's the key point: the NN is comparing chess positions to other chess positions, not to physical-world concepts like space, strength and weakness.  You could plausibly say that NNs use analogy, but metaphor involves understanding one thing in terms of a distinct other thing.

Likewise, neither sort of chess engine builds a model of what its opponent is thinking, only of the possible courses of action that the opponent might take, regardless of how it decides to take them.  By contrast, human chess players very frequently think about what their opponent might be thinking (my opponent isn't comfortable with closed positions, so I'm going to try to lock up the pawn structure).  Human chess players, being human, do this because we humans do this kind of thing constantly when dealing with other people anyway.

One the one hand, metaphors only become visible when we use words to describe things.  On the other hand, metaphor (I claim here) comes out of using the mental machinery for dealing with one thing to deal with another thing (and in particular, re-using the machinery for dealing with the physical world to deal with something non-physical).  More than that, it comes out of using the same mental machinery and, in some sense, being aware of doing it, if only in experiencing some of the same feelings in each case (there's a subtle distinction here between being aware and being consciously aware, which might be interesting to explore, but not here).

If we define an AGI as something of our making that is difficult to control because it can learn and adapt to our attempts to control it, then we shouldn't assume that it does so in the same ways that we do.  Meta-thought like explicitly creating a model of what someone (or something) else is thinking, and using metaphor to understand one thing in terms of another may be key parts of our intelligence, but I don't see any reason to think they're necessarily part of being an AGI in the sense I just gave.

The other half of this is chains of reasoning like "If this AI can do X, which is key to our intelligence, then it must be generally intelligent like we consider ourselves to be" rests on whether abilities like metacognition and metaphorical reasoning are sufficient for AGI.

That may or may not be the case (and it would help if we had a better understanding of AGI and intelligence in general), but so far there's a pretty long track record of things, for example being able to deal with natural language fluently, turning out not to necessarily lead to AGI.