>> True enough, but Granger's work is NOT total BS... just partial BS ;-)
In which case, clearly praise the good stuff but just as clearly (or even more
so) oppose the BS.
You and Richard seem to be in vehement agreement. Granger knows his neurology
and probably his neuroscience (depending upon where you draw the line) but his
link of neuroscience to cognitive science is not only wildly speculative but
clearly amateurish and lacking the necessary solid grounding in the latter
field.
I'm not quite sure why you always hammer Richard for pointing this out. He
does have his agenda to stamp out bad science (which I endorse fully) but he
does tend to praise the good science (even if more faintly) as well. Your
hammering of Richard often appears as a strawman to me since I know that you
know that Richard doesn't dismiss these people's good neurology -- just their
bad cog sci. And I really am not seeing any difference between what I
understand as your opinion and what I understand as his.
----- Original Message -----
From: Benjamin Goertzel
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2007 8:00 AM
Subject: Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
On 10/22/07, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> If I see garbage being peddled as if it were science, I will call it
> garbage.
Amen. The "political correctness" of forgiving people for espousing total
BS is the primary cause of many egregious things going on for far, *far*
too
long.
True enough, but Granger's work is NOT total BS... just partial BS ;-)
I felt his discussion of the details by which the basal ganglia may serve as a
reward mechanism added something to prior papers I'd read on the topic.
Admittedly
our knowledge of this neural reward mechanism is still way too crude to yield
any
insights regarding AGI, but, it's still interesting.
On the other hand, his "simplified thalamocortical core and matrix
algorithms" are
way too simplified for me. They seem to sidestep the whole issue of complex
nonlinear dynamics and the formation of strange attractors or transients.
I.e., even
if the basic idea he has is right, in which thalamocortical loops mediate the
formation
of semantically meaningful activation-patterns in the cortex, his
characterization of
these patterns in terms of categories and subcategories and so forth can at
best
only be applicable to a small subset of examples of cortical function....
The difference
between the simplified thalamocortical algorithms he presents and the real
ones seems
to me to be the nonlinear dynamics that give rise to intelligence ;-) ..
And this is what
leads me to be extremely skeptical of his speculative treatment of linguistic
grammar
learning within his framework. I think he's looking for grammatical
structure to be
represented at the "wrong level" in his network... at the level of individual
activation-patterns
rather than at the level of the emergent structure of activation-patterns....
Because his
simplified version of the thalamocortical loop is too simplified to give rise
to nonlinear
dynamics that display subtly patterned emergent structures...
-- Ben G
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