2008/10/4 Colin Hales <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Hi Will, > It's not an easy thing to fully internalise the implications of quantum > degeneracy. I find physicists and chemists have no trouble accepting it, but > in the disciplines above that various levels of mental brick walls are in > place. Unfortunately physicists and chemists aren't usually asked to create > vision!... I inhabit an extreme multidisciplinary zone. This kind of mental > resistance comes with the territory. All I can say is 'resistance is futile, > you will be assimilated' ... eventually. :-) It's part of my job to enact > the necessary advocacy. In respect of your comments I can offer the > following:
I started off doing chemistry at Uni, but I didn't like all the wet experiments. There are things like the bonds in graphite sheets that are degenerate, but that is of a completely different nature to the electrical signals in the brain. > You are exactly right: humans don't encounter the world directly (naive > realism). Nor are we entirely operating from a cartoon visual fantasy(naive > solipsism). You are also exactly right in that vision is not 'perfect'. It > has more than just a level of indirectness in representation, it can > malfunction and be fooled - just as you say. In the benchmark behaviour: > scientific behaviour, we know scientists have to enact procedures (all based > around the behaviour called 'objectivity') which minimises the impact of > these aspects of our scientific observation system. > > However, this has nothing to say about the need for an extra information > source. necessary for there is not enough information in the signals to do > the job. This is what you cannot see. It took me a long while to discard the > tendency to project my mental capacity into the job the brain has when it > encounters a retinal data stream. In vision processing using computing we > know the structure of the distal natural world. We imagine the photon/CCD > camera chip measurements to be the same as that of the retina. It looks like > a simple reconstruction job. I've never thought computer vision to be simple... > But it is not like that at all. It is impossible to tell, from the signals > in their natural state in the brain, whether they are about vision or sound > or smell. They all look the same. So I did not completely reveal the extent > of the retinal impact/visual scene degeneracy in my post. The degeneracy > operates on multiple levels. Signal encoding into standardised action > potentials is another level. The locations that the signals travel through would be a strong indication of what they are about. It also seems likely that the different signals would have different statistics. For example somehow the human brain can learn to get visual data from the tongue with a brainport. http://vision.wicab.com/index.php I'm not entirely sure what you are getting at, do you think we are in superposition with the environment? Would you expect a camera + signals going through your tongue to preserve that? > Maybe I can just paint a mental picture of the job the brain has to do. > Imagine this: > > You have no phenomenal consciousness at all. Your internal life is of a > dreamless sleep. > Except ... for a new perceptual mode called Wision. > Looming in front of you embedded in a roughly hemispherical blackness is a > gigantic array of numbers. > The numbers change. > > Now: > a) make a visual scene out of it representing the world outside: convert > Wision into Vision. > b) do this without any information other than the numbers in front of you > and without assuming you have any a-priori knowledge of the outside world. > > That is the job the brain has. Resist the attempt to project your own > knowledge into the circumstance. You will find the attempt futile. The brain starts with at least some structure that has implicit knowledge of the outside world (just as bones shows the genome stores information of what is strong in the world). The Blank slate does not seem a viable hypothesis. There are no numbers in the brain or even in a computer it is all electric signals distributed spatially, temporally and with different statistics that allow them to be distinguished. I'd be curious to read your thoughts in a bit more of a structured format, but I can't get a grasp of what you are trying to say at the moment, it seems degenerate with other signals :P Will ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
