[agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory
Nobody has mentioned this yet. http://www.physorg.com/news146319784.html Quotes: However, Roy's controversial ideas on how the brain works and learns probably won't immediately win over many of his colleagues, who have spent decades teaching robots and artificial intelligence (AI) systems how to think using the classic connectionist theory of the brain. Connectionists propose that the brain consists of an interacting network of neurons and cells, and that it solves problems based on how these components are connected. In this theory, there are no separate controllers for higher level brain functions, but all control is local and distributed fairly equally among all the parts. In his paper, Roy argues for a controller theory of the brain. In this view, there are some parts of the brain that control other parts, making it a hierarchical system. In the controller theory, which fits with the so-called computational theory, the brain learns lots of rules and uses them in a top-down processing method to operate. In his paper, Roy shows that the connectionist theory actually is controller-based, using a logical argument and neurological evidence. He explains that some of the simplest connectionist systems use controllers to execute operations, and, since more complex connectionist systems are based on simpler ones, these too use controllers. If Roy's logic correctly describes how the brain functions, it could help AI researchers overcome some inherent limitations in connectionist algorithms. Connectionism can never create autonomous learning machines, and that's where its flaw is, Roy told PhysOrg.com. Connectionism requires human babysitting of their learning algorithms, and that's not very brain-like. We don't guide and control the learning inside our head. etc BillK --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory
Here's a link to the paper: http://wpcarey.asu.edu/pubs/index.cfm?fct=detailsarticle_cobid=2216410author_cobid=1039524journal_cobid=2216411 -- Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/ --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory
2008/11/20 Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Here's a link to the paper: http://wpcarey.asu.edu/pubs/index.cfm?fct=detailsarticle_cobid=2216410author_cobid=1039524journal_cobid=2216411 This doesn't sound especially controversial to me. Clearly there are systems in the brain which control parameters of the body, such as heart rate and temperature, in the classical control theory sense. Feedback control is probably not just limited to these more obvious examples though, and regulates other psychological processes. It's not difficult to criticize trivial connectionist systems, such as MLP, where obviously there is no explicit control or regulation going on - merely an elaborate transformation from inputs to outputs. But in larger conectionist systems such as Edelman's Darwin automata there are parts of the system which control or regulate other parts. It could be argued that control systems are essential for scalability of a system without loss of coherence. There may not be any overall uber-controller in the brain though. If this were the case then cutting the corpus colossum would cause major psychological disintegration, which doesn't appear to happen. --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/hunting-for-a-brainy-computer/ ===[ Rafael C.P. ]=== --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
The basic assumptions behind the project, from the webpage of its team lead at http://www.modha.org/ : The mind arises from the wetware of the brain. Thus, it would seem that reverse engineering the computational function of the brain is perhaps the cheapest and quickest way to engineer computers that mimic the robustness and versatility of the mind. Cognitive computing, seeks to engineer holistic intelligent machines that neatly tie together all of the pieces. Cognitive computing seeks to uncover the core micro and macro circuits of the brain underlying a wide variety of abilities. So, it aims to proceeds in algorithm-first, problems-later fashion. I believe that spiking computation is a key to achieving this vision. --- I have problem with each of these assumptions and beliefs, though I don't think anyone can convince someone who just get a big grant that they are moving in a wrong direction. ;-) Pei On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 8:29 AM, Rafael C.P. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/hunting-for-a-brainy-computer/ ===[ Rafael C.P. ]=== agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
RE: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Pei Wang: --- I have problem with each of these assumptions and beliefs, though I don't think anyone can convince someone who just get a big grant that they are moving in a wrong direction. ;-) With his other posts about the Singularity Summit and his invention of the word Synaptronics, Modha certainly seems to be a kindred spirit to many on this list. I think what he's trying to do with this project (to the extent I understand it) seems like a reasonably promising approach (not really to AGI as such, but experimenting with soft computing substrates is kind of a cool enterprise to me). Let a thousand flowers bloom. However, when he says things on his blog like In my opinion, there are three reasons why the time is now ripe to begin to draw inspiration from structure, dynamics, function, and behavior of the brain for developing novel computing architectures and cognitive systems. -- I despair again. Dr. Wang, if you want to get some funding maybe you should start promoting NARS as a theory of the brain :) --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
RE: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory
Yeah. Great headline -- Man beats dead horse beyond death! I'm sure that there will be more details at 11. Though I am curious . . . . BillK, why did you think that this was worth posting? - Original Message - From: Derek Zahn To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2008 9:43 AM Subject: **SPAM** RE: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory From the paper: This paper has proposed a new paradigm for the internal mechanisms of the brain, one that postulates that there are parts of the brain that control other parts. Sometimes I despair. -- agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 3:06 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yeah. Great headline -- Man beats dead horse beyond death! I'm sure that there will be more details at 11. Though I am curious . . . . BillK, why did you think that this was worth posting? ??? Did you read the article? --- Quote: In the late '90s, Asim Roy, a professor of information systems at Arizona State University, began to write a paper on a new brain theory. Now, 10 years later and after several rejections and resubmissions, the paper Connectionism, Controllers, and a Brain Theory has finally been published in the November issue of IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics – Part A: Systems and Humans. Roy's theory undermines the roots of connectionism, and that's why his ideas have experienced a tremendous amount of resistance from the cognitive science community. For the past 15 years, Roy has engaged researchers in public debates, in which it's usually him arguing against a dozen or so connectionist researchers. Roy says he wasn't surprised at the resistance, though. I was attempting to take down their whole body of science, he explained. So I would probably have behaved the same way if I were in their shoes. No matter exactly where or what the brain controllers are, Roy hopes that his theory will enable research on new kinds of learning algorithms. Currently, restrictions such as local and memoryless learning have limited AI designers, but these concepts are derived directly from that idea that control is local, not high-level. Possibly, a controller-based theory could lead to the development of truly autonomous learning systems, and a next generation of intelligent robots. The sentiment that the science is stuck is becoming common to AI researchers. In July 2007, the National Science Foundation (NSF) hosted a workshop on the Future Challenges for the Science and Engineering of Learning. The NSF's summary of the Open Questions in Both Biological and Machine Learning [see below] from the workshop emphasizes the limitations in current approaches to machine learning, especially when compared with biological learners' ability to learn autonomously under their own self-supervision: Virtually all current approaches to machine learning typically require a human supervisor to design the learning architecture, select the training examples, design the form of the representation of the training examples, choose the learning algorithm, set the learning parameters, decide when to stop learning, and choose the way in which the performance of the learning algorithm is evaluated. This strong dependence on human supervision is greatly retarding the development and ubiquitous deployment of autonomous artificial learning systems. Although we are beginning to understand some of the learning systems used by brains, many aspects of autonomous learning have not yet been identified. Roy sees the NSF's call for a new science as an open door for a new theory, and he plans to work hard to ensure that his colleagues realize the potential of the controller model. Next April, he will present a four-hour workshop on autonomous machine learning, having been invited by the Program Committee of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN). - Now his 'new' theory may be old hat to you personally, but apparently not to the majority of AI researchers, (according to the article). He must be saying something a bit unusual to have been fighting for ten years to get it published and accepted enough for him to now have been invited to do a workshop on his theory. BillK --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory
Hmmm... I skimmed over the paper at http://wpcarey.asu.edu/pubs/index.cfm and I have to say I agree with the skeptics. I don't doubt that this guy has made significant contributions in other areas of science and engineering, but this paper displeases me a great deal, due to making big claims of originality for ideas that are actually very old hat, and bolstering these claims via attacking a straw man of simplistic connectionism. The idea that engineering control theory could be applicable to the brain is hardly original. As one among many, many examples, James Albus has published a lot of stuff along these lines since the 1970s http://www.isd.mel.nist.gov/personnel/albus/publications.htm including a great talk at the recent AAAI BICA symposium focusing on brain theory specifically http://binf.gmu.edu/~asamsono/bica/albus.htm Also, Stephen Grossberg's brain theories, going back to the 60s, have posed a strong role for controllers and analogues of engineering style control theory in the brain. The simplistic connectionism this author argues against **is** a real point of view held by some theorists, but it's hardly a consensus ... it's kind of an unpopular, 20-years-old, worn-out meme by now... And his proposed alternative is simply far less fleshed out that Grossberg's , Albus's or many other theorists' ideas with similar (but deeper and broader) conceptual foundations... Double thumbs down: not for wrongheadedness, but for excessive claims of originality plus egregious straw man arguments... -- Ben G On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 10:37 AM, BillK [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 3:06 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yeah. Great headline -- Man beats dead horse beyond death! I'm sure that there will be more details at 11. Though I am curious . . . . BillK, why did you think that this was worth posting? ??? Did you read the article? --- Quote: In the late '90s, Asim Roy, a professor of information systems at Arizona State University, began to write a paper on a new brain theory. Now, 10 years later and after several rejections and resubmissions, the paper Connectionism, Controllers, and a Brain Theory has finally been published in the November issue of IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics – Part A: Systems and Humans. Roy's theory undermines the roots of connectionism, and that's why his ideas have experienced a tremendous amount of resistance from the cognitive science community. For the past 15 years, Roy has engaged researchers in public debates, in which it's usually him arguing against a dozen or so connectionist researchers. Roy says he wasn't surprised at the resistance, though. I was attempting to take down their whole body of science, he explained. So I would probably have behaved the same way if I were in their shoes. No matter exactly where or what the brain controllers are, Roy hopes that his theory will enable research on new kinds of learning algorithms. Currently, restrictions such as local and memoryless learning have limited AI designers, but these concepts are derived directly from that idea that control is local, not high-level. Possibly, a controller-based theory could lead to the development of truly autonomous learning systems, and a next generation of intelligent robots. The sentiment that the science is stuck is becoming common to AI researchers. In July 2007, the National Science Foundation (NSF) hosted a workshop on the Future Challenges for the Science and Engineering of Learning. The NSF's summary of the Open Questions in Both Biological and Machine Learning [see below] from the workshop emphasizes the limitations in current approaches to machine learning, especially when compared with biological learners' ability to learn autonomously under their own self-supervision: Virtually all current approaches to machine learning typically require a human supervisor to design the learning architecture, select the training examples, design the form of the representation of the training examples, choose the learning algorithm, set the learning parameters, decide when to stop learning, and choose the way in which the performance of the learning algorithm is evaluated. This strong dependence on human supervision is greatly retarding the development and ubiquitous deployment of autonomous artificial learning systems. Although we are beginning to understand some of the learning systems used by brains, many aspects of autonomous learning have not yet been identified. Roy sees the NSF's call for a new science as an open door for a new theory, and he plans to work hard to ensure that his colleagues realize the potential of the controller model. Next April, he will present a four-hour workshop on autonomous machine learning, having been invited by the Program Committee of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN). - Now his
Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory
BillK wrote: Nobody has mentioned this yet. http://www.physorg.com/news146319784.html I got a draft version of the paper earlier this year, and after a quick scan I filed it under 'junk'. I just read it through again, and the filing stays the same. His basic premise is that connectionists argued from the very beginning that they wanted to do things in a way that did not involve a central executive. They wanted to see how much could be done by having large numbers of autonomous units do things independently. Turns out, quite a lot can be achieved that way. But it seems that Asim Roy has fundamentally misunderstood the force and the intent of that initial declaration by the connectionists. There was a reason they said what they said: they wanted to get away from the old symbol processing paradigm in which one thing happened at a time and symbols were separated from the mechanisms that modified or used symbols. The connectionists were not being dogmatic about No Controllers!, they just wanted to stop all power being vested in the hands of a central executive ... and their motivation was from cognitive science, not engineering or control theory. Roy seems to be completely obsessed with the idea that they are wrong, while at the same time not really understanding why they said it, and not really having a concrete proposal (or account of empirical data) to substitute for the connectionist ideas. To tell the truth, I don't think there are many connectionists who are so hell-bent on the idea of not having a central controller, that they would not be open to an architecture that did have one (or several). They just don't think it would be good to have central controllers in charge of ALL the heavy lifting. Roy's paper has the additional disadvantage of being utterly filled with underlines and boldface. He shouts. Not good in something that is supposed to be a scientific paper. Sorry, but this is just junk. Richard Loosemore --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: BillK wrote: Nobody has mentioned this yet. http://www.physorg.com/news146319784.html I got a draft version of the paper earlier this year, and after a quick scan I filed it under 'junk'. I just read it through again, and the filing stays the same. I have to agree. The paper attacks a strawman by blanket assertions. Even worse, the attack itself is flawed: in section 2 he tries to define the concept of control, and, having trouble with free will-like issues, produces a combination of brittle and nontechnical assertions. As a result, in his own example (at the very end of section 2), a doctor is considered in control of treating a patient only if he can prescribe *arbitrary* treatment that doesn't depend on the patient (or his illness). -- Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/ --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory
yay ... we all agree on something ;-p On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 11:46 AM, Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: BillK wrote: Nobody has mentioned this yet. http://www.physorg.com/news146319784.html I got a draft version of the paper earlier this year, and after a quick scan I filed it under 'junk'. I just read it through again, and the filing stays the same. I have to agree. The paper attacks a strawman by blanket assertions. Even worse, the attack itself is flawed: in section 2 he tries to define the concept of control, and, having trouble with free will-like issues, produces a combination of brittle and nontechnical assertions. As a result, in his own example (at the very end of section 2), a doctor is considered in control of treating a patient only if he can prescribe *arbitrary* treatment that doesn't depend on the patient (or his illness). -- Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/ --- 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/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -- Robert Heinlein --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory
And btw, the notion that control is a key concept in the brain goes back at least to Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics from the 1930's !! ... Principia Cybernetica has a simple but clear webpage on the control concept in cybernetics... http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/CONTROL.html ben g On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 11:53 AM, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: yay ... we all agree on something ;-p On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 11:46 AM, Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: BillK wrote: Nobody has mentioned this yet. http://www.physorg.com/news146319784.html I got a draft version of the paper earlier this year, and after a quick scan I filed it under 'junk'. I just read it through again, and the filing stays the same. I have to agree. The paper attacks a strawman by blanket assertions. Even worse, the attack itself is flawed: in section 2 he tries to define the concept of control, and, having trouble with free will-like issues, produces a combination of brittle and nontechnical assertions. As a result, in his own example (at the very end of section 2), a doctor is considered in control of treating a patient only if he can prescribe *arbitrary* treatment that doesn't depend on the patient (or his illness). -- Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/ --- 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/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -- Robert Heinlein -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -- Robert Heinlein --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
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. Yes, maybe I should market NARS as a theory of the brain, just a very high-level one. ;-) Pei On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 10:06 AM, Derek Zahn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Pei Wang: --- I have problem with each of these assumptions and beliefs, though I don't think anyone can convince someone who just get a big grant that they are moving in a wrong direction. ;-) With his other posts about the Singularity Summit and his invention of the word Synaptronics, Modha certainly seems to be a kindred spirit to many on this list. I think what he's trying to do with this project (to the extent I understand it) seems like a reasonably promising approach (not really to AGI as such, but experimenting with soft computing substrates is kind of a cool enterprise to me). Let a thousand flowers bloom. However, when he says things on his blog like In my opinion, there are three reasons why the time is now ripe to begin to draw inspiration from structure, dynamics, function, and behavior of the brain for developing novel computing architectures and cognitive systems. -- I despair again. Dr. Wang, if you want to get some funding maybe you should start promoting NARS as a theory of the brain :) agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
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 --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 7:56 PM, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And btw, the notion that control is a key concept in the brain goes back at least to Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics from the 1930's !! ... Principia Cybernetica has a simple but clear webpage on the control concept in cybernetics... http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/CONTROL.html I don't like that definition for basically the same reason, but it maybe explains where Asim Roy comes from. At least they are not literally insisting on control being a property of the system itself, according to this remark: Of course, two systems can be in a state of mutual control, but this will be a different, more complex, relation, which we will still describe as a combination of two asymmetric control relations. Controller-controlled relation is a model assigned to the system, not an intrinsic property of the system itself. Also, there is no may or could apart from semantics of search algorithm, which is a thing to keep in mind when making claims like the following, about freedom of controller, and especially when trying to use this notion of freedom to establish asymmetry: The controller C may change the state of the controlled system S in any way, including the destruction of S. -- Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/ --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory
So, basically, you don't disagree with his paper to much. You just don't like his attitude.;) Danged AI researchers that think they know it all! ;) You don't think you could call it excessive PR where he is trying to dislodge an entrenched view? The thing is, the simplistic connectionism he's railing against is **not** an entrenched view in the AI community at large ... it's just an entrenched view in a particular subcommunity of the AI community And it's not as though he has *disproved* their entrenched view, he has just argued in favor of an alternative view, which I am more sympathetic to, but which is also well known.. Perhaps the reason his paper got rejected so many times was not that it was so radical, but rather that it contained so little novel content ;-) Occasionally, the peer review system actually can be right... ben g --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 3:52 PM, Ben Goertzel wrote: I skimmed over the paper at http://wpcarey.asu.edu/pubs/index.cfm and I have to say I agree with the skeptics. I don't doubt that this guy has made significant contributions in other areas of science and engineering, but this paper displeases me a great deal, due to making big claims of originality for ideas that are actually very old hat, and bolstering these claims via attacking a straw man of simplistic connectionism. snip Double thumbs down: not for wrongheadedness, but for excessive claims of originality plus egregious straw man arguments... So, basically, you don't disagree with his paper to much. You just don't like his attitude.;) Danged AI researchers that think they know it all! ;) You don't think you could call it excessive PR where he is trying to dislodge an entrenched view? BillK --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Ed Porter wrote: Richard, In response to your below copied email, I have the following response to the below quoted portions: ### My prior post That aspects of consciousness seem real does not provides much of an “explanation for consciousness.” It says something, but not much. It adds little to Descartes’ “I think therefore I am.” I don’t think it provides much of an answer to any of the multiple questions Wikipedia associates with Chalmer’s hard problem of consciousness. ### Richard said I would respond as follows. When I make statements about consciousness deserving to be called real, I am only saying this as a summary of a long argument that has gone before. So it would not really be fair to declare that this statement of mine says something, but not much without taking account of the reasons that have been building up toward that statement earlier in the paper. ## My response ## Perhaps --- but this prior work which you claim explains so much is not in the paper being discussed. Without it, it is not clear how much your paper itself contributes. And, Ben, who is much more knowledgeable than I on these things seemed similarly unimpressed. I would say that it does. I blieve that the situation is that you do not yet understand it. Ben has had similar trouble, but seems to be comprehending more of the issue as I respond to his questions. (I owe him one response right now: I am working on it) ### Richard said I am arguing that when we probe the meaning of real we find that the best criterion of realness is the way that the system builds a population of concept-atoms that are (a) mutually consistent with one another, ## My response ## I don’t know what mutually consistent means in this context, and from my memory of reading you paper multiple times I don’t think it explains it, other than perhaps implying that the framework of atoms represent experiential generalization and associations, which would presumably tend to represent the regularities of experienced reality. I'll grant you that one: I did not explain in detail this idea of mutual consistency. However, the reason I did not is that I really had to assume some background, and I was hoping that the reader would already be aware of the general idea that cognitive systems build their knowledge in the form of concepts that are (largely) consistent with one another, and that it is this global consistency that lends strength to the whole. In other words, all the bits of our knowledge work together. A piece of knowledge like The Loch Ness monster lives in Loch Ness is NOT a piece of knowledge that fits well with all of the rest of our knowledge, because we have little or no evidence that such a thing as the Loch Ness Monster has been photographed, observed by independent people, observed by several people at the same time, caught in a trap and taken to a museum, been found as a skeletal remain, bumped into a boat, etc etc etc. There are no links from the rest of our knowledge to the LNM fact, so we actually do not credit the LNM as being real. By contrast, facts about Coelacanths are very well connected to the rest of our knowledge, and we believe that they do exist. ### Richard said and (b) strongly supported by sensory evidence (there are other criteria, but those are the main ones). If you think hard enough about these criteria, you notice that the qualia-atoms (those concept-atoms that cause the analysis mechanism to bottom out) score very high indeed. This is in dramatic contrast to other concept-atoms like hallucinations, which we consider 'artifacts' precisely because they score so low. The difference between these two is so dramatic that I think we need to allow the qualia-atoms to be called real by all our usual criteria, BUT with the added feature that they cannot be understood in any more basic terms. ## My response ## You seem to be defining “real” here to mean believed to exist in what is perceived as objective reality. I personally believe a sense of subjective reality is much more central to the concept of consciousness. Personal computers of today, which most people don’t think have anything approaching a human-like consciousness, could in many tasks make estimations of whether some signal was “real” in the sense of representing something in objective reality without being conscious. But a powerful hallucination, combined with a human level of sense of being conscious of it, does not appear to be something any current computer can achieve. So if you are looking for the hard problems in consciousness focus more on the human subjective sense of awareness, not whether there is evidence something is real in what we perceive as objective reality. Alas, you have
Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory
??? Did you read the article? Absolutely. I don't comment on things without reading them (unlike some people on this list). Not only that, I also read the paper that someone was nice enough to send the link for. Now his 'new' theory may be old hat to you personally, but apparently not to the majority of AI researchers, (according to the article). The phrase according to the article is what is telling. It is an improper (and incorrect) portrayal of the majority of AI researchers. He must be saying something a bit unusual to have been fighting for ten years to get it published and accepted enough for him to now have been invited to do a workshop on his theory. Something a bit unusual like Mike Tintner fighting us on this list for ten years and then finding someone to accept his theories and run a workshop? Note who is running the workshop . . . . not the normal BICA community for sure . . . . - Original Message - From: BillK [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2008 10:37 AM Subject: **SPAM** Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 3:06 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yeah. Great headline -- Man beats dead horse beyond death! I'm sure that there will be more details at 11. Though I am curious . . . . BillK, why did you think that this was worth posting? ??? Did you read the article? --- Quote: In the late '90s, Asim Roy, a professor of information systems at Arizona State University, began to write a paper on a new brain theory. Now, 10 years later and after several rejections and resubmissions, the paper Connectionism, Controllers, and a Brain Theory has finally been published in the November issue of IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics – Part A: Systems and Humans. Roy's theory undermines the roots of connectionism, and that's why his ideas have experienced a tremendous amount of resistance from the cognitive science community. For the past 15 years, Roy has engaged researchers in public debates, in which it's usually him arguing against a dozen or so connectionist researchers. Roy says he wasn't surprised at the resistance, though. I was attempting to take down their whole body of science, he explained. So I would probably have behaved the same way if I were in their shoes. No matter exactly where or what the brain controllers are, Roy hopes that his theory will enable research on new kinds of learning algorithms. Currently, restrictions such as local and memoryless learning have limited AI designers, but these concepts are derived directly from that idea that control is local, not high-level. Possibly, a controller-based theory could lead to the development of truly autonomous learning systems, and a next generation of intelligent robots. The sentiment that the science is stuck is becoming common to AI researchers. In July 2007, the National Science Foundation (NSF) hosted a workshop on the Future Challenges for the Science and Engineering of Learning. The NSF's summary of the Open Questions in Both Biological and Machine Learning [see below] from the workshop emphasizes the limitations in current approaches to machine learning, especially when compared with biological learners' ability to learn autonomously under their own self-supervision: Virtually all current approaches to machine learning typically require a human supervisor to design the learning architecture, select the training examples, design the form of the representation of the training examples, choose the learning algorithm, set the learning parameters, decide when to stop learning, and choose the way in which the performance of the learning algorithm is evaluated. This strong dependence on human supervision is greatly retarding the development and ubiquitous deployment of autonomous artificial learning systems. Although we are beginning to understand some of the learning systems used by brains, many aspects of autonomous learning have not yet been identified. Roy sees the NSF's call for a new science as an open door for a new theory, and he plans to work hard to ensure that his colleagues realize the potential of the controller model. Next April, he will present a four-hour workshop on autonomous machine learning, having been invited by the Program Committee of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN). - Now his 'new' theory may be old hat to you personally, but apparently not to the majority of AI researchers, (according to the article). He must be saying something a bit unusual to have been fighting for ten years to get it published and accepted enough for him to now have been invited to do a workshop on his theory. BillK --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your
Re: [agi] My prospective plan to neutralize AGI and other dangerous technologies...
Ben, Mapping RRA to Hegel's space isn't trivial, but here goes... On 11/19/08, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have nothing against Hegel; I think he was a great philosopher. His Logic is really fantastic reading. And, having grown up surrounded by Marxist wannabe-revolutionaries (most of whom backed away from strict Marxism in the mid-70s when the truth about the Soviet Union came out in America), I am also aware there is a lot of deep truth in Marx's thought, in spite of the evil that others wrought with it after his death... It's refreshing to be able to discuss the structure of problems rather than simply planning the future of the world as: 1. We will build AGIs. 2. The AGIs will create a Singularity. 3. Then, something wonderful (or horrible) will happen. I just think that Hegel's dialectical philosophy is clearer than your reverse reductio ad absurdum, That is because he saw a process that he didn't fully understand, leaving the participants to argue their many positions for decades/centuries until many consensus resolution were identified. Things always look simpler when you ignore the necessary details. BTW, there was once a government run by consensus - where all differences were argued until everyone agreed. That was early Islam, first under Mohamed and later under 4 subsequent caliphs who worked with Mohamed until his death. Of course, this is ONLY possible given some sort of understanding of RRA, yet historical accounts do NOT include anything like RRA (that I have found). Then, things came unraveled. In a logical world (if this is even possible given illogical people), consensus should be possible. Allowing for a few idiots, it should take 90% majority to pass any law or do anything that is potentially destructive (as though there were anything that a government could do that is NOT potentially destructive). In short, the whole rule by majority thing is severely flawed, though it may be OK to choose representatives. and so I'm curious to know what you think your formulation *adds* to the classic Hegelian one... A clear path to resolving differences rather than leaving it to unstructured argument, compromise, etc., as Hegel did. It directly challenges BOTH sides of an intractable dispute to seek and find the shared bad assumptions and NOT compromise, or to shut up because they are simply not smart enough to participate. From what I understand, your RRA heuristic says that, sometimes, when both X and ~X are appealing to rational people, there is some common assumption underlying the two, which when properly questioned and modified can yield a new Y that transcends and in some measure synthesizes aspects of X and ~X Usually, neither X nor ~X are even deducible from Y. For example, in the abortion debate, the pro-life side is happy because abortions are more effectively stopped than if a law had been passed, and the pro-choice is happy because there are no laws in place. Neither side can even get to the contentious point that they were at before. I suppose Hegel would have called Y the dialectical synthesis of X and ~X, right? Not being a Hegel scholar, that's the way that I see it. Hegel just failed to take the next step of mapping out exactly how to reach a dialectical synthesis, which is what RRA does. BTW, we are certainly not seeing the fall of capitalism now. Marx's dialectics-based predictions made a lot of errors; for instance, both he and Hegel failed to see the emergence of the middle class as a sort of dialectical synthesis of the ruling class and the proletariat ;-) ... and America failed to see the coming disappearance of the middle class, that throws society back into Marx's realm. ... but, I digress!! I don't think so, as we are now thinking about things at the level that a future AGI would have to be able to think at to provide societal guidance. If we can't function at this level ourselves, how are we ever going to create AGIs that do this? So, how would you apply your species of dialectics to solve the problem of consciousness? This is a case where, clearly, rational intelligent and educated people hold wildly contradictory opinions, ... which is a pretty clear demonstration that consciousness doesn't work very well. This was EXACTLY my point when discussing Dr. Eliza (that also has its obvious limitations), that other methods can potentially avoid the logical traps of the conscious process. e.g. X1 = consciousness does not exist X2 = consciousness is a special extra-physical entity that correlates with certain physical systems at certain times X3 = consciousness is a kind of physical entity X4 = consciousness is a property immanent in everything, that gets focused/structured differently via interaction with different physical systems All these positions contradict each other. How do you suggest to dialectically synthesize them? ;-) No, properly restating the above question:
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Richard, The main problem is that if you interpret spike timing to be playing the role that you (and they) imply above, then you are commiting yourself to a whole raft of assumptions about how knowledge is generally represented and processed. However, there are *huge* problems with that set of implicit assumptions not to put too fine a point on it, those implicit assumptions are equivalent to the worst, most backward kind of cognitive theory imaginable. A theory that is 30 or 40 years out of date. The gung-ho neuroscientists seem blissfully unaware of this fact because they do not know enough cognitive science. Richard Loosemore I don't think this is the reason. There are plenty of neuroscientists out there who know plenty of cognitive science. I think many neuroscientists just hold different theoretical presuppositions than you, for reasons other than ignorance of cog sci data. Interdisciplinary cog sci has been around a long time now as you know ... it's not as though cognitive neuroscientists are unaware of its data and ideas... -- Ben G --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Steve Richfield wrote: Richard, Broad agreement, with one comment from the end of your posting... On 11/20/08, *Richard Loosemore* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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. There are plenty of experiments that show that consecutive closely-spaced pulses result when something goes off scale, probably the equivalent to computing Bayesian probabilities 100%, somewhat akin to the overflow light on early analog computers. These closely-spaced pulses have a MUCH larger post-synaptic effect than the same number of regularly spaced pulses. However, as far as I know, this only occurs during anomalous situations - maybe when something really new happens, that might trigger learning? IMHO, it is simply not possible to play this game without having a close friend with years of experience poking mammalian neurons. This stuff is simply NOT in the literature. 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. Still, even with my above comments, you conclusion is still correct. The main problem is that if you interpret spike timing to be playing the role that you (and they) imply above, then you are commiting yourself to a whole raft of assumptions about how knowledge is generally represented and processed. However, there are *huge* problems with that set of implicit assumptions not to put too fine a point on it, those implicit assumptions are equivalent to the worst, most backward kind of cognitive theory imaginable. A theory that is 30 or 40 years out of date. The gung-ho neuroscientists seem blissfully unaware of this fact because they do not know enough cognitive science. Richard Loosemore --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Hmmm... I don't agree w/ you that the hard problem of consciousness is unimportant or non-critical in a philosophical sense. Far from it. However, from the point of view of this list, I really don't think it needs to be solved (whatever that might mean) in order to build AGI. Of course, I think that because I think the hard problem of consciousness is actually easy: I'm a panpsychist ... I think everything is conscious, and different kinds of structures just focus and amplify this universal consciousness in different ways... Interestingly, this panpsychist perspective is seen as obviously right by most folks deeply involved with meditation or yoga whom I've talked to, and seen as obviously wrong by most scientists I talk to... -- Ben G On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 5:26 PM, Ed Porter [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Richard, Thank you for your reply. I started to write a point-by-point response to your reply, copied below, but after 45 minutes I said stop. As interesting as it is, from a philosophical and argumentative writing standpoint to play wack-a-mole with your constantly sifting and often contradictory arguments --- right now, I have much more pressing things to do. And I think I have already stated many of my positions on the subject of this thread sufficiently clearly that intelligent people who have a little imagination and really want to can understand them. Since few others beside you have responded to my posts, I don't think there is any community demand that I spend further time on such replies. What little I can add to what I have already said is that I basically I think the hard problem/easy problem dichotomy is largely, although, not totally pointless. I do not think the hard problem is central to understanding consciousness, because so much of consciousness is excluded from being part of the hard problem. It is excluded either because it can be described verbally by introspection by the mind itself, or because it affects external behavior, and, thus, at least according to Wikipedia's definition of p-consciousness, is part of the easy problem. It should be noted that not affecting external behavior excludes one hell of a lot of consciousness, because emotions, which clearly affect external behavior, are so closely associated with much of our sensing of experience. Thus, it seems a large part of what we humans consider to be our subjective sense of experience of consciousness is rejected by hard problem purists as being part of the easy problem. Richard, you in particular seems to be much more of a hard problem purist than those who wrote the Wikipedia definition of p-consciousness. This is because in your responses to me you have even excluded as not part of the hard problem any lateral or higher level associations of one of your bottom level red detector nodes might have. This, for example, would arguably exclude from the p-consciousness of the color red the associations between the lowest level, local red sensing nodes, that are necessary so the activation of such nodes can be recognized as a common color red no matter where they occur in different parts of the visual field. Thus according to such a definition, qualia for red would have to be different for each location of V1 in which red is sensed --- even when different portions of V1 get mapped into the same portions of the semi stationary representation your brain builds out of stationary surroundings as your eyes saccade and pan across them. Thus, your concept of the qualia for the color red does not cover a unified color red, and necessarily includes thousands of separate red qualia, each associated with a different portion of V1. Aspects of consciousness that (a) cannot be verbally described by introspection; (b) have no effect on behavior, and (c) cannot involve any associations with the activation of other nodes (which is an exclusion you, Richard, seem to have added to Wikipedia's description of p-consciousness) --- defines the hard problem so narrowly as to make it of relatively little, or no importance. It certainly is not the central question of consciousness, because a sense of experiencing something has no meaning unless it has grounding, and that requires associations in large numbers, and, thus, according to your definition could not be part of the hard problem. Plus, Richard, you have not even come close to addressing my statement that just because certain aspects of consciousness cannot be verbally described by the introspection of the brain or by affects on external behavior of the body itself does not mean they cannot be subject to further analysis through scientific research --- such as by brain science, brain scanning, brain simulations, and advances in understanding of AGIs. I have already spent way, way too much time in this response, So, I will leave it at that. If you want to think you have won the argument
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 1:40 AM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The main problem is that if you interpret spike timing to be playing the role that you (and they) imply above, then you are commiting yourself to a whole raft of assumptions about how knowledge is generally represented and processed. However, there are *huge* problems with that set of implicit assumptions not to put too fine a point on it, those implicit assumptions are equivalent to the worst, most backward kind of cognitive theory imaginable. A theory that is 30 or 40 years out of date. Could you give some references to be specific in what you mean? Examples of what you consider outdated cognitive theory and better cognitive theory. -- Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/ --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Ben: I'm a panpsychist ... You think that all things are sentient/ conscious? (I argue that consciousness depends on having a nervous system and being able to feel - and if we could understand the mechanics of that, we would probably have solved the hard problem and be able to give something similar to a machine (which might have to be organic) ). So I'm interested in any alternative/panpsychist views. If you do think that inorganic things like stones, say, are conscious, then surely it would follow, that we should ultimately be able to explain their consciousness, and make even inanimate metallic computers conscious? Care to expand a little on your views? --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
well, what does feel mean to you ... what is feeling that a slug can do but a rock or an atom cannot ... are you sure this is an absolute distinction rather than a matter of degree? On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 6:15 PM, Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben: I'm a panpsychist ... You think that all things are sentient/ conscious? (I argue that consciousness depends on having a nervous system and being able to feel - and if we could understand the mechanics of that, we would probably have solved the hard problem and be able to give something similar to a machine (which might have to be organic) ). So I'm interested in any alternative/panpsychist views. If you do think that inorganic things like stones, say, are conscious, then surely it would follow, that we should ultimately be able to explain their consciousness, and make even inanimate metallic computers conscious? Care to expand a little on your views? --- 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/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -- Robert Heinlein --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
RE: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Ben, If you place the limitations on what is part of the hard problem that Richard has, most of what you consider part of the hard problem would probably cease to be part of the hard problem. In one argument he eliminated things relating to lateral or upward associative connections from being consider part of the hard problem of consciousness. That would eliminate the majority of sources of grounding from any notion of consciousness. I like you tend to think that all of reality is conscious, but I think there are vastly different degrees and types of consciousness, and I think there are many meaningful types of consciousness that humans have that most of reality does not have. When I was in college and LSD was the rage, one of the main goals of the heavy duty heads was ego loss which was to achieve a sense of cosmic oneness with all of the universe. It was commonly stated that 1000 micrograms was the ticket to ego loss. I never went there. Nor have I ever achieved cosmic oneness through meditation, although I have achieved temporary (say fifteen or thirty seconds) feeling of deep peaceful bliss. Perhaps you have been more brave (acid wise) or much lucky or disciplined meditation wise, and have achieve a seen of oneness with the cosmic consciousness. If so, I tip my hat (and Colbert wag of the finger) to you. Ed Porter -Original Message- From: Ben Goertzel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2008 5:46 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness Hmmm... I don't agree w/ you that the hard problem of consciousness is unimportant or non-critical in a philosophical sense. Far from it. However, from the point of view of this list, I really don't think it needs to be solved (whatever that might mean) in order to build AGI. Of course, I think that because I think the hard problem of consciousness is actually easy: I'm a panpsychist ... I think everything is conscious, and different kinds of structures just focus and amplify this universal consciousness in different ways... Interestingly, this panpsychist perspective is seen as obviously right by most folks deeply involved with meditation or yoga whom I've talked to, and seen as obviously wrong by most scientists I talk to... -- Ben G On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 5:26 PM, Ed Porter [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Richard, Thank you for your reply. I started to write a point-by-point response to your reply, copied below, but after 45 minutes I said stop. As interesting as it is, from a philosophical and argumentative writing standpoint to play wack-a-mole with your constantly sifting and often contradictory arguments --- right now, I have much more pressing things to do. And I think I have already stated many of my positions on the subject of this thread sufficiently clearly that intelligent people who have a little imagination and really want to can understand them. Since few others beside you have responded to my posts, I don't think there is any community demand that I spend further time on such replies. What little I can add to what I have already said is that I basically I think the hard problem/easy problem dichotomy is largely, although, not totally pointless. I do not think the hard problem is central to understanding consciousness, because so much of consciousness is excluded from being part of the hard problem. It is excluded either because it can be described verbally by introspection by the mind itself, or because it affects external behavior, and, thus, at least according to Wikipedia's definition of p-consciousness, is part of the easy problem. It should be noted that not affecting external behavior excludes one hell of a lot of consciousness, because emotions, which clearly affect external behavior, are so closely associated with much of our sensing of experience. Thus, it seems a large part of what we humans consider to be our subjective sense of experience of consciousness is rejected by hard problem purists as being part of the easy problem. Richard, you in particular seems to be much more of a hard problem purist than those who wrote the Wikipedia definition of p-consciousness. This is because in your responses to me you have even excluded as not part of the hard problem any lateral or higher level associations of one of your bottom level red detector nodes might have. This, for example, would arguably exclude from the p-consciousness of the color red the associations between the lowest level, local red sensing nodes, that are necessary so the activation of such nodes can be recognized as a common color red no matter where they occur in different parts of the visual field. Thus according to such a definition, qualia for red would have to be different for each location of V1 in which red is sensed --- even when different portions of V1 get mapped into the same portions of the
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
Ben, I suspect you're being evasive. You and I know what feel means. When I feel the wind, I feel cold. When I feel tea poured on my hand, I/it feel/s scalding hot. And we can trace the line of feeling to a considerable extent - no? - through the nervous system and brain. Not only do I feel it internally, but there are normally external signs of my feeling. You see me shivering/ wincing etc. And we - science - can interfere with those feelings and anaesthetise or heighten them. Now when the rock is exposed to the same wind or hot tea, if it does feel anything, it stoically and heroically refuses to display any signs whatsoever. It appears to be magnificently indifferent. And if it really is suffering, we wouldn't know what to do to alleviate its suffering. So what do you (or others) mean by inanimate things feeling? I'm mainly seeking enlightenment not an argument here - and to see whether your or others' panpsychism has been at all thought through, and is more than an abstract conjunction of concepts. I assume there is some substance to the philosophy - I'd like to know what it is. I Ben: well, what does feel mean to you ... what is feeling that a slug can do but a rock or an atom cannot ... are you sure this is an absolute distinction rather than a matter of degree? On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 6:15 PM, Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben: I'm a panpsychist ... You think that all things are sentient/ conscious? (I argue that consciousness depends on having a nervous system and being able to feel - and if we could understand the mechanics of that, we would probably have solved the hard problem and be able to give something similar to a machine (which might have to be organic) ). So I'm interested in any alternative/panpsychist views. If you do think that inorganic things like stones, say, are conscious, then surely it would follow, that we should ultimately be able to explain their consciousness, and make even inanimate metallic computers conscious? Care to expand a little on your views? --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 2:23 AM, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: well, what does feel mean to you ... what is feeling that a slug can do but a rock or an atom cannot ... are you sure this is an absolute distinction rather than a matter of degree? Does a rock compute Fibonacci numbers just to a lesser degree than this program? A concept, like any other. Also, some shades of gray are so thin you'd run out of matter in the Universe to track all the things that light. -- Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/ --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness
When I was in college and LSD was the rage, one of the main goals of the heavy duty heads was ego loss which was to achieve a sense of cosmic oneness with all of the universe. It was commonly stated that 1000 micrograms was the ticket to ego loss. I never went there. Nor have I ever achieved cosmic oneness through meditation, although I have achieved temporary (say fifteen or thirty seconds) feeling of deep peaceful bliss. Perhaps you have been more brave (acid wise) or much lucky or disciplined meditation wise, and have achieve a seen of oneness with the cosmic consciousness. If so, I tip my hat (and Colbert wag of the finger) to you. Not a great topic for public mailing list discussion but ... uh ... yah ... But it's not really so much about the dosage ... entheogens are tools and it's all about what you do with them ;-) ben --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Ben Goertzel wrote: Richard, The main problem is that if you interpret spike timing to be playing the role that you (and they) imply above, then you are commiting yourself to a whole raft of assumptions about how knowledge is generally represented and processed. However, there are *huge* problems with that set of implicit assumptions not to put too fine a point on it, those implicit assumptions are equivalent to the worst, most backward kind of cognitive theory imaginable. A theory that is 30 or 40 years out of date. The gung-ho neuroscientists seem blissfully unaware of this fact because they do not know enough cognitive science. Richard Loosemore I don't think this is the reason. There are plenty of neuroscientists out there who know plenty of cognitive science. I think many neuroscientists just hold different theoretical presuppositions than you, for reasons other than ignorance of cog sci data. Interdisciplinary cog sci has been around a long time now as you know ... it's not as though cognitive neuroscientists are unaware of its data and ideas... I disagree. Trevor Harley wrote one very influential paper on the subject, and he and I wrote a second paper in which we took a random sampling of neuroscience papers and analyzed them carefully. We found it trivially easy to gather data to illustrate our point. And, no, even though I used my own framework as a point of reference, this was not crucial to the argument, merely a way of bringing the argument into sharp focus. So I am basing my conclusion on gathering actual evidence and publishing a paper about it. Since such luminaries as Jerry Fodor have said much the same thing, I think I stand in fairly solid company. Richard Loosemore --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Since such luminaries as Jerry Fodor have said much the same thing, I think I stand in fairly solid company. Wow, you said Fodor without being critical of his work. Is that legal? Trent --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Vladimir Nesov wrote: On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 1:40 AM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The main problem is that if you interpret spike timing to be playing the role that you (and they) imply above, then you are commiting yourself to a whole raft of assumptions about how knowledge is generally represented and processed. However, there are *huge* problems with that set of implicit assumptions not to put too fine a point on it, those implicit assumptions are equivalent to the worst, most backward kind of cognitive theory imaginable. A theory that is 30 or 40 years out of date. Could you give some references to be specific in what you mean? Examples of what you consider outdated cognitive theory and better cognitive theory. Well, you could start with the question of what the neurons are supposed to represent, if the spikes are coding (e.g.) bayesian contingencies. Are the neurons the same as concepts/symbols? Are groups of neurons redundantly coding for concepts/symbols? One or other of these possibilties is usually assumed by default, but this leads to glaring inconsistencies in the interpretation of neuroscience data, as well as begging all of the old questions about how grandmother cells are supposed to do their job. As I said above, cognitive scientists already came to the conclusion, 30 or 40 years ago, that it made no sense to stick to a simple identification of one neuron per concept. And yet many neuroscientists are *implictly* resurrecting this broken idea, without addressing the faults that were previously found in it. (In case you are not familiar with the faults, they include the vulnerability of neurons, the lack of connectivity between arbitrary neurons, the problem of assigning neurons to concepts, the encoding of variables, relationships and negative facts .. ). For example, in Loosemore Harley (in press) you can find an analysis of a paper by Quiroga, Reddy, Kreiman, Koch, and Fried (2005) in which the latter try to claim they have evidence in favor of grandmother neurons (or sparse collections of grandmother neurons) and against the idea of distributed representations. We showed their conclusion to be incoherent. It was deeply implausible, given the empirical data they reported. Furthermore, we used my molecular framework (the same one that was outlined in the consciousness paper) to see how that would explain the same data. It turns out that this much more sophisticated model was very consistent with the data (indeed, it is the only one I know of that can explain the results they got). You can find our paper at www.susaro.com/publications. Richard Loosemore Loosemore, R.P.W. Harley, T.A. (in press). Brains and Minds: On the Usefulness of Localisation Data to Cognitive Psychology. In M. Bunzl S.J. Hanson (Eds.), Foundations of Functional Neuroimaging. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Quiroga, R. Q., Reddy, L., Kreiman, G., Koch, C. Fried, I. (2005). Invariant visual representation by single-neurons in the human brain. Nature, 435, 1102-1107. --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Trent Waddington wrote: On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Since such luminaries as Jerry Fodor have said much the same thing, I think I stand in fairly solid company. Wow, you said Fodor without being critical of his work. Is that legal? Trent Arrrggghhh... you noticed! :-( I was hoping nobody would catch me out on that one. Okay, so Fodor and I disagree about everything else. But that's not the point :-). He's a Heavy, so if he is on my side on this one issue, its okay to quote him. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it.) Richard Loosemore --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Referencing your own work is obviously not what I was asking for. Still, something more substantial than neuron is not a concept, as an example of cognitive theory? On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 4:35 AM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Vladimir Nesov wrote: Could you give some references to be specific in what you mean? Examples of what you consider outdated cognitive theory and better cognitive theory. Well, you could start with the question of what the neurons are supposed to represent, if the spikes are coding (e.g.) bayesian contingencies. Are the neurons the same as concepts/symbols? Are groups of neurons redundantly coding for concepts/symbols? One or other of these possibilties is usually assumed by default, but this leads to glaring inconsistencies in the interpretation of neuroscience data, as well as begging all of the old questions about how grandmother cells are supposed to do their job. As I said above, cognitive scientists already came to the conclusion, 30 or 40 years ago, that it made no sense to stick to a simple identification of one neuron per concept. And yet many neuroscientists are *implictly* resurrecting this broken idea, without addressing the faults that were previously found in it. (In case you are not familiar with the faults, they include the vulnerability of neurons, the lack of connectivity between arbitrary neurons, the problem of assigning neurons to concepts, the encoding of variables, relationships and negative facts .. ). For example, in Loosemore Harley (in press) you can find an analysis of a paper by Quiroga, Reddy, Kreiman, Koch, and Fried (2005) in which the latter try to claim they have evidence in favor of grandmother neurons (or sparse collections of grandmother neurons) and against the idea of distributed representations. We showed their conclusion to be incoherent. It was deeply implausible, given the empirical data they reported. Furthermore, we used my molecular framework (the same one that was outlined in the consciousness paper) to see how that would explain the same data. It turns out that this much more sophisticated model was very consistent with the data (indeed, it is the only one I know of that can explain the results they got). You can find our paper at www.susaro.com/publications. Richard Loosemore Loosemore, R.P.W. Harley, T.A. (in press). Brains and Minds: On the Usefulness of Localisation Data to Cognitive Psychology. In M. Bunzl S.J. Hanson (Eds.), Foundations of Functional Neuroimaging. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Quiroga, R. Q., Reddy, L., Kreiman, G., Koch, C. Fried, I. (2005). Invariant visual representation by single-neurons in the human brain. Nature, 435, 1102-1107. -- Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/ --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Vladimir Nesov wrote: Referencing your own work is obviously not what I was asking for. Still, something more substantial than neuron is not a concept, as an example of cognitive theory? I don't understand your objection here: I referenced my own work because I specifically described several answers to your question that were written down in that paper. And I brougt one of them out and summarized it for you. Why would that be obviously not what I was asking for? I am confused. That paper was partly about my own theory, but partly about the general problem of neuroscience models making naive assumptions about cognitive theories in general. And why do you say that you want something more substantial than neuron is not a concept that is an extremely serious issue. Why do you dismiss it as insubstantial? Lastly, I did not say that the neuroscientists picked old, broken theories AND that they could have picked a better, not-broken theory I only said that they have gone back to old theories that are known to be broken. Whether anyone has a good replacement yet is not relevant: it does not alter the fact that they are using broken theories. The neuron = concept 'theory' is extremely broken: it is so broken, that when neuroscientists talk about bayesian contingencies being calculated or encoded by spike timing mechanisms, that claim is incoherent. If you really insist on another example, take one of the other ones that I mentioned in the paper: the naive identification of attentional limitations with a literal bottleneck in processing. I may as well jsut quote you the entire passage that we wrote on the matter. (There are no references to the basic facts about dual-task studies, it is true. Is it really necessary for me to dig those up, or do you know them already?): QUOTE from Loosemore Harley--- Dux, Ivanoff, Asplund and Marois (2006) describe a study in which participants were asked to carry out two tasks that were too hard to perform simultaneously. In these circumstances, we would expect (from a wide range of previous cognitive psychological studies) that the tasks would be serially queued, and that this would show up in reaction time data. Some theories of this effect interpret it as a consequence of a modality-independent “central bottleneck” in task performance. Dux et al. used time-resolved fMRI to show that activity in a particular brain area—the posterior lateral prefrontal cortex (pLPFC)—was consistent with the queuing behavior that would be expected if this place were the locus of the bottleneck responsible for the brain’s failure to execute the tasks simultaneously. They also showed that the strength of the response in the pLPFC seemed to be a function of the difficulty of one of the competing tasks, when, in a separate experiment, participants were required to do that task alone. The conclusion drawn by Dux et al. is that this brain imaging data tells us the location of the bottleneck: it’s in the pLPFC. So this study aspires to be Level 2, perhaps even Level 3: telling us the absolute location of an important psychological process, perhaps telling us how it relates to other psychological processes. Rather than immediately address the question of whether the pLPFC really is the bottleneck, we would first like to ask whether such a thing as “the bottleneck” exists at all. Should the psychological theory of a bottleneck be taken so literally that we can start looking for it in the brain? And if we have doubts, could imaging data help us to decide that we are justified in taking the idea of a bottleneck literally? What is a “Bottleneck”? Let’s start with a simple interpretation of the bottleneck idea. We start with mainstream ideas about cognition, leaving aside our new framework for the moment. There are tasks to be done by the cognitive system, and each task is some kind of package of information that goes to a place in the system and gets itself executed. This leads to a clean theoretical picture: the task is a package moving around the system, and there is a particular place where it can be executed. As a general rule, the “place” has room for more than one package (perhaps), but only if the packages are small, or if the packages have been compiled to make them automatic. In this study, though, the packages (tasks) are so big that there is only room for one at a time. The difference between this only-room-for-one-package idea and its main rival within conventional cognitive psychology is that the rival theory would allow multiple packages to be executed simultaneously, but with a slowdown in execution speed. Unfortunately for this rival theory, psychology experiments have indicated that no effort is initially expended on a task that arrives later, until the first task is completed. Hence, the bottleneck theory is accepted as the best description of what happens in dual-task
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
The neuron = concept 'theory' is extremely broken: it is so broken, that when neuroscientists talk about bayesian contingencies being calculated or encoded by spike timing mechanisms, that claim is incoherent. This is not always true ... in some cases there are solidly demonstrated connections between neurally computed bayesian contingencies and observed perceptual and motor phenomena in organisms... I agree that no one knows how abstract concepts are represented in the brain, but for sensorimotor stuff it is not the case that work on bayesian population coding in the brain is incoherent ben g --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Ben Goertzel wrote: The neuron = concept 'theory' is extremely broken: it is so broken, that when neuroscientists talk about bayesian contingencies being calculated or encoded by spike timing mechanisms, that claim is incoherent. This is not always true ... in some cases there are solidly demonstrated connections between neurally computed bayesian contingencies and observed perceptual and motor phenomena in organisms... I agree that no one knows how abstract concepts are represented in the brain, but for sensorimotor stuff it is not the case that work on bayesian population coding in the brain is incoherent No contest: it is valid there. But I am only referring to the cases where neuroscientists imply that what they are talking about are higher level concepts. This happens extremely frequently. Richard Loosemore --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 5:14 AM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Lastly, I did not say that the neuroscientists picked old, broken theories AND that they could have picked a better, not-broken theory I only said that they have gone back to old theories that are known to be broken. Whether anyone has a good replacement yet is not relevant: it does not alter the fact that they are using broken theories. The neuron = concept 'theory' is extremely broken: it is so broken, that when neuroscientists talk about bayesian contingencies being calculated or encoded by spike timing mechanisms, that claim is incoherent. Well, you know I read that paper ;-) A theory that is 30 or 40 years out of date, you said -- which suggested something that is up to date, hence the question. Neural code can be studied from the areas where we know the correlates. You could assign concepts to neurons and theorize about their structure as dictated by dynamic of neural substrate. They will be no word-level concepts, and you'd probably need to build bigger abstractions on top, but there is no inherent problem with that. Still, it's so murky even for simple correlates that no good overall picture exists. -- Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/ --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] MSRobot vs E3
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Battle-lines-forming-nascent-robotics/story.aspx?guid={FA2B30F1-B78B-4E33-91A4-F7F3D07DECCB}
---
agi
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Re: [agi] Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Richard, On 11/20/08, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Steve Richfield wrote: Richard, Broad agreement, with one comment from the end of your posting... On 11/20/08, *Richard Loosemore* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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. There are plenty of experiments that show that consecutive closely-spaced pulses result when something goes off scale, probably the equivalent to computing Bayesian probabilities 100%, somewhat akin to the overflow light on early analog computers. These closely-spaced pulses have a MUCH larger post-synaptic effect than the same number of regularly spaced pulses. However, as far as I know, this only occurs during anomalous situations - maybe when something really new happens, that might trigger learning? IMHO, it is simply not possible to play this game without having a close friend with years of experience poking mammalian neurons. This stuff is simply NOT in the literature. 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. Still, even with my above comments, you conclusion is still correct. The main problem is that if you interpret spike timing to be playing the role that you (and they) imply above, then you are commiting yourself to a whole raft of assumptions about how knowledge is generally represented and processed. However, there are *huge* problems with that set of implicit assumptions not to put too fine a point on it, those implicit assumptions are equivalent to the worst, most backward kind of cognitive theory imaginable. A theory that is 30 or 40 years out of date. OK, so how else do you explain that in fairly well understood situations like stretch receptors, that the rate indicates the stretch UNLESS you exceed the mechanical limit of the associated joint, whereupon you start getting pulse doublets, triplets, etc. Further, these pulse groups have a HUGE effect on post synaptic neurons. What does your cognitive science tell you about THAT? The gung-ho neuroscientists seem blissfully unaware of this fact because they do not know enough cognitive science. I stated a Ben's List challenge a while back that you apparently missed, so here it is again. *You can ONLY learn how a system works by observation, to the extent that its operation is imperfect. Where it is perfect, it represents a solution to the environment in which it operates, and as such, could be built in countless different ways so long as it operates perfectly. Hence, computational delays, etc., are fair game, but observed cognition and behavior are NOT except to the extent that perfect cognition and behavior can be described, whereupon the difference between observed and theoretical contains the information about construction.* ** *A perfect example of this is superstitious learning, which on its surface appears to be an imperfection. However, we must use incomplete data to make imperfect predictions if we are to ever interact with our environment, so superstitious learning is theoretically unavoidable. Trying to compute what is perfect for superstitious learning is a pretty challenging task, as it involves factors like the regularity of disastrous events throughout evolution, etc.* If anyone has successfully done this, I would be very interested. This is because of my interest in central metabolic control issues, wherein superstitious red tagging appears to be central to SO many age-related conditions. Now, I am blindly assuming perfection in neural computation and proceeding on that assumption. However, if I could recognize and understand any imperfections (none are known), I might be able to save (another) life or two along the way with that knowledge. Anyway, this suggests that much of cognitive science, which has NOT computed this difference but rather is running with the raw data of observation, is rather questionable at best. For reasons such as this, I (perhaps prematurely and/or improperly) dismissed cognitive science rather early on. Was I in error to do so? Steve Richfield --- 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=8660244id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
