Pei Wang wrote:
Derek,
I have no doubt that their proposal contains interesting ideas and
will produce interesting and valuable results --- most AI projects do,
though the results and the values are often not what they targeted (or
they claimed to be targeting) initially.
"Biologically inspired approaches" are attractive, partly because they
have existing proof for the mechanism to work. However, we need to
remember that "inspired" by a working solution is one thing, and to
treat that solution as the best way to achieve a goal is another.
Furthermore, the difficult part in these approaches is to separate the
aspect of the biological mechanism/process that should be duplicated
from the aspects that shouldn't.
I share your concerns about this project, although I might have a
slightly different set of reasons for being doubtful.
I watched part of one of the workshops that Mohdra chaired, on Cognitive
Computing, and it gave me the same feeling that neuroscience gatherings
always give me: a lot of talk about neural hardware, punctuated by
sudden, out-of-the-blue statements about "cognitive" ideas that seem
completely unrelated to the ocean of neural talk that comes before and
after.
There is a *depresssingly* long history of people doing this - and not
just in neuroscience, but in many branches of engineering, in physics,
in computer science, etc. There are people out there who know that the
mind is the new frontier, and they want to be in the party. They also
know that the cognitive scientists (in the broad sense) are probably the
folks who are at the center of the party (in the sense of having most
comprehensive knowledge). So these people do what they do best, but add
in a sprinkling of technical terms and (to be fair) some actual
knowledge of some chunks of cognitive science.
Problem is, that to a cognitive scientist what they are doing is
amateurish.
Another, closely related thing that they do is talk about low level
issues witout realizing just how disconnected those are from where the
real story (probably) lies. Thus, Mohdra emphasizes the importance of
"spike timing" as opposed to average firing rate. He may well be right
that the pattern or the timing is more important, but IMO he is doing
the equivalent of saying "Let's talk about the best way to design an
algorithm to control an airport. First problem to solve: should we use
Emitter-Coupled Logic in the transistors that are in oour computers that
will be running the algorithms."
>-|
Richard Loosemore
-------------------------------------------
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