Edward,
I was not criticising you or your opinion of Granger's paper, but only
pointing out that the paper itself had two sides to it: a neuroscience
side (which appeared detailed and well-researched, as far as I could
tell) and a cognitive side (which consisted of a few sentences of
handwaving about ideas that are deeply flawed).
I spoke up because I just finished writing a paper with one of the most
widely known, and widely respected, critics of this kind of cognitive
neuroscience (Trevor Harley is Dean of the School of Psychology at the
University of Dundee). I brought you something from the frontier of
research in this area, in the hope that it would save you some effort.
I understand your frustration with my critical attacks.
But I write these critiques because I have been working in this area
since 1981, and have been lucky enough to have been a mathematical
physicist, a cognitive scientist, an AI researcher and a professional
software engineer. I am in the unenviable position of trying to talk to
cognitive scientists about computational matters (and getting blank
looks, ruffled feathers or hostility) and talking to AI researchers
about cognitive science (and getting the same kind of response). I do
write non-critical work, but most of it is not in the public domain (a
lot of it is proprietary, and becoming more so), so that puts me in the
awkward position of seeing ridiculous things being said, then
criticising them, and then being criticised myself for pointing out that
there are problems.
I will continue to criticise, because there are a number of people who
read what I write, find it illuminating, and then write to me privately
saying that I should not be discouraged when, as so often happens, some
people don't feel comfortable about it.
I would have stopped discussing these issues long ago, were it not for
these behind-the-scenes requests to continue.
Richard Loosemore
Edward W. Porter wrote:
Richard,
I was not citing this article as God’s 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 Granger’s title brash? Yes. But so, I have read, were a lot of
Rodney Brooks’s 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 don’t 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
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