On 10/22/07, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >> -- I think Granger's cog-sci speculations, while oversimplified and > surely wrong in parts, contain important hints at the truth (and in my prior > email I tried to indicate how) > >> -- Richard OTOH, seems to consider Granger's cog-sci speculations total > "garbage" > >> This is a significant difference of opinion, no? > > As you've just stated it, yes. However, rereading your previous e-mail, I > still don't really see where you agree with his cog sci (as opposed to what > I would still call neurobiology which I did see you agreeing with). >
It's of course quite non-obvious where to draw the line between neuroscience and cognitive science, in a context like this. However, what I like in Granger paper, that seems cog-sci-ish to me, is the idea that functionalities like -- hierarchical clustering -- hash coding -- sequence completion are provided as part of the "neurological instruction set" The attractive cog-sci hypothesis here, as I might reformulate it, is that higher-level cognitive procedures could palpably take these functionalities as "primitives", sort of as if they were library functions provided by the brain.... So, one way to summarize my view of the paper is -- The neuroscience part of Granger's paper tells how these library-functions may be implemented in the brain -- The cog-sci part consists partly of ----- a) the hypothesis that these library-functions are available to cognitive programs ----- b) some specifics about how these library-functions may be used within cognitive programs I find Granger's idea a) quite appealing, but his ideas in category b) fairly uncompelling and oversimplified. Whereas according to my understanding, Richard seems not to share my belief in the strong potential meaningfulness of a) All this is indirectly and conceptually relevant to Novamente because we have to make decisions regarding which functionalities to supply as primitives to Novamente, and which functionalities to require it to learn... However, the cognitive theory underlying NM is totally different than, and much more complex than, Granger's overall cognitive theory... -- Ben G ----- 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=56329795-c7f0d9
