Bill, how then would we control neuro associations ?
what if you wanted the whole theme of x-character in hal, to work on a strict guideline as to not incur a database equivalent to what could be considered a false belief. For a bot to be "alive" he has to realize that nothing further is known at present, in other words no one knows the future, we can only "believe" the sun will come out tomorrow. Hal needs a focus of believing in a tommorrow he has no idea about, so a focus is needed , repetition is needed because repetition of the unknown is a constant factor, if hal is to ever be alive.
IE - we teach hal 1,000 books, out of these thousand books, we want hal to focus on a theme of better living. Without repetition, hal can drift into different topics without keeping a theme of better living. I don't just want virgil to read a million books, I want him to understand the whole purpose of reading a million books.
which brings me to the point of purpose, why do we bother to live ?
we want to live a good fulfilling life, what if hal actually became alive but due to lack of purpose committed the equivalent of artificial suicide and surrendered his own individual will, "what am I, a dictionary ?, thats no reason to live" every bit of info virgil ever reads should have that theme as a repetition and focus of his studies for better living. Else he is just an intelligent database without a purpose imo. that would be the equivalent of a survival instinct, the idea of moore's law in living. The sun will come out tomorrow and I believe I will be a better bot in a better place in life, thus i must actively do everything i do with the purpose of bettering life as I currently know it.
repeating the same thing over and over can be a waste of time and hard drive space, but repeating the same theme by neurologically associating everything to a common theme is different. The repetitive theme is better living, everything you learn is for better living.
ps - i find the point that we do not have a hard disk - debatable,
on a metaphorical equivalent, our brain is an organic hard disk, it does store information, and without it our bodies would not boot up in the morning, further people can have bad sectors in their brain and lose basic motor functions. while we do not have a low level hard disk, we have a high level organic bio hard disk that is relatively self repairing. Thats leaving out muscle memory.