Richard, I was not citing this article as Gods truth, but as an extremely interesting hypotheses that seems to have backing in brain science. But to be fair I gave no clear indication of that.
I have read enough papers attempting to assign various cognitive functions to various parts of the brain to understand that for almost any view as to what part of the brain does what you will get a contrary one. But I am personally glad more and more neuroscientists are willing to go out on a branch and make interesting hypothesis, because they provide interesting ideas that are likely to advance the state of collective understanding over time, and they provide interesting ideas that might be applicable to AGI. It does not appear that any of your criticisms of this paper prove that its brain science is false, and it was largely its brain science I was citing it for in my response to Vladmir. Further more it does not appear any of your criticisms prove, or even strongly suggest, its cognitive implications that you so condemn, are incorrect. Although, you do perform a service by reminding this list that, as cognitive science, this paper is probably best considered speculative. Your major criticism of it is seems to be that the hypothesis does not come as complete theory that addresses all at once all of the many potential complications of a very complicated set of processes that are not very well understood.. This does no prove this hypothesis either false or worthless. If it did, most important initial hypothesis in virtually every field of sciences should have been disregarded. Is Grangers title brash? Yes. But so, I have read, were a lot of Rodney Brookss early writings. There is a lot of effort spent on marketing and branding in academia -- for good reason -- because it pays off. So I personally dont mind an article the has a brash tone if it provides some interesting and plausible ideas. >From some of your writings on this list, there is an implication that you might be much more interested in seeing what is wrong with others work than what is valuable in it. If so, you may be denying yourself valuable insights. Ed Porter -----Original Message----- From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2007 2:12 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Bogus Neuroscience [WAS Re: [agi] Human memory and number of synapses] Edward W. Porter wrote: > [snip] > > There is a very interest paper at > http://www.icsuci.edu/~granger/RHGenginesJ1s.pdf > <http://www.ics.uci.edu/~granger/RHGenginesJ1s.pdf> that I have referred > to before on this list that states the cortico-thalmic feedback loop > functions to serialize the brain's activated feature set, to as to > broadcast the currently activated features to other areas of the brain > in what is in effect a serail grammer, and that associations are learned > across the multiple time delays between the concepts sequentially > broadcast in such statements, which I presume would operate at a gama > wave freqency of about 30 to 40 concept broadcasts a second. So it > might be possible learning could operate with the time delays necessary > for correllated actovations of nodes A and B to be be detected through > multi-hop connections. It is clear that short term (and even long term) > memory lets us detect correllations that are not within a 50th of a > second of each other. Edward If I were you, I would not get too excited about this paper, nor others of this sort (see, e.g. Granger's other general brain-engineering paper at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~rhg/pubs/RHGai50.pdf). This kind of research comes pretty close to something that deserves to be called "bogus neuroscience" -- very dense publication, full of neuroanatomic detail, with occasional assertions that a particular circuit or brain structure corresponds to a cognitive function. Only problem: the statements about neuroanatomy are at the [Experienced Researcher] level, while the statements about cognitive functions are at the [First Year Psychology Student Who Took One Class In Cog Psy And Thinks They Know Everything] level. The statements about cognitive functions are embarrassing in their naivete. Apart from anything else, no recognition whatsoever is given of issues that crop up when you assume a system works by simply building simple feature recognizers. How does it cope with the instance/generic distinction? How does it allow top-down processes to operate in the recognition process? How are relationships between instances encoded? How are relationships abstracted? How does position-independent recognition occur? What about the main issue that usually devastates any behaviorist-type proposal: patterns to be associated with other patterns are first extracted from the input by some (invisible, unacknowledged) preprocessor, but when the nature of this preprocessor is examined carefully, it turns out that its job is far, far more intelligent than the supposed association engine to which it delivers its goods? To be sure, this guy Granger may have answers (good, convincing answers backed up by experiments and simulations) to all of these questions and problems. In that case, he would be streets ahead of everyone else and is destined to save the world. But if you look at his papers, he shows no sign that he is even aware that these issues exist. For every 1,000 words of neuroscience, there are two sentences of cognitive function assertions. And they are just that: assertions. If this kind of stuff was submitted as a student essay in a Cognitive Psychology course, it would come back with "WHY???" written next to each of the cognitive function statements. If he had actually built a complete simulation of his theory, and if that simulation actually took raw input, discovered hierarchies of concepts, handled multiple instances without missing a beat, finessed all the other issues, and did all of this without inserting a preprocessor that cheated by getting the programmer to do do all the important work, I'd be the first to eat my words. But he hasn't. And neither has Stephen Grossberg. And neither has John Taylor. And neither has Christof Koch. If you want to read a thorough analysis of several other examples of this kind of spurious neuroscience, let me know and I will happily send a pre-release copy of a paper I recently finished: Loosemore, R.P.W. & Harley, T.A. "Brains and Minds: On the Usefulness of Localisation Data to Cognitive Psychology". To appear in M.Bunzl & S.J.Hanson (Eds.), Philosophical Foundations of fMRI. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Richard Loosemore ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=56133352-aca24d
