Benjamin Goertzel wrote:
On 10/22/07, *Mark Waser* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:
> > -- I think Granger's cog-sci speculations, while oversimplified
and surely wrong in parts, contain important hints at the truth (and
in my prior email I tried to indicate how)
> > -- Richard OTOH, seems to consider Granger's cog-sci speculations
total "garbage"
> > This is a significant difference of opinion, no?
As you've just stated it, yes. However, rereading your previous
e-mail, I still don't really see where you agree with his cog sci
(as opposed to what I would still call neurobiology which I did see
you agreeing with).
It's of course quite non-obvious where to draw the line between
neuroscience and cognitive science, in a context like this.
However, what I like in Granger paper, that seems cog-sci-ish to me, is
the idea that functionalities like
-- hierarchical clustering
-- hash coding
-- sequence completion
are provided as part of the "neurological instruction set"
But each of these things has a huge raft of assumptions built into it:
-- hierarchical clustering ... OF WHAT KIND OF SYMBOLS?
-- hash coding ... OF WHAT KIND OF SYMBOLS?
-- sequence completion ... OF WHAT KIND OF SYMBOLS?
In each case, Granger's answer is that the symbols are vaguely
behaviorist units playing an incredibly simplistic role in a simplistic
system.
If we take his claims at face value, he has found library functions that
operate on junk that cannot possibly be "symbols" at a cognitive level.
If he had simply said that he had found hiererchical clustering of
neural signals, or hash coding of neural signals, or sequence completion
circuits at the neural signal level, I would say good luck to him and
keep banging the rocks together.
But he did not: he made claims about the cognitive level, and the only
way those claims could be meaningful and useful would be in a cognitive
level system that is manifestly broken.
Richard Loosemore
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