[agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
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. - 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=8660244id_secret=56240391-7b4448
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
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 -- 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=8660244id_secret=56245822-75b432
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
And I really am not seeing any difference between what I understand as your opinion and what I understand as his. Sorry if I seemed to be hammering on anyone, it wasn't my intention. (Yesterday was a sort of bad day for me for non-science-related reasons, so my tone of e-voice was likely off a bit ...) I think the difference between my and Richard's views on Granger would likely be best summarized by saying that -- 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? -- Ben - 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=8660244id_secret=56269619-052656
[agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience [...]
On Oct 21, 2007, at 6:47 PM, J. Andrew Rogers wote: On Oct 21, 2007, at 6:37 PM, Richard Loosemore wrote: It took me at least five years of struggle to get to the point where I could start to have the confidence to call a spade a spade It still looks like a shovel to me. In what looks not like a spade or a shovel but like CENSORSHIP -- my message below was in response to http://www.mail-archive.com/agi@v2.listbox.com/msg07943.html Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 06:18:27 -0700 (PDT) From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (A. T. Murray) Subject: Re: [agi] More public awarenesss that AGI is coming fast To: agi@v2.listbox.com Reply-To: agi@v2.listbox.com J. Andrew Rogers wrote: [...] There is enough VC money for everyone with a decent business model. Honestly, most AGI is not a decent business model. Neither is philosophy, but philosophy prevails. Otherwise Mentifex would be smothered in cash. It might even keep him quiet. I don't need cash beyond the exigencies of daily living. Right now I'm going to respond off the top of my head with the rather promising latest news from Mentifex AI. ATM/Mentifex here fleshed out the initial Wikipedia stub of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_of_Mind several years ago. M*ntifex-bashers came in and rewrote it, but traces of my text linger still. (And I have personally met Jerry Fodor years ago.) Then for several years I kept the Modularity link on dozens of mind-module webpages as a point of departure into Wikipedia. Hordes of Wikpedia editors worked over and over again on the Modularity-of-mind article. At the start of September 2007 I decided to flesh out the Wikipedia connection for each Mentifex AI mind-module webpage by expanding from that single link to a cluster of all discernible Wikipedia articles closely related to the topic of my roughly forty mind-modules. http://www.advogato.org/article/946.html is where on 11 September 2007 I posted Wikipedia-based Open-Source Artificial Intelligence -- because I realized that I could piggyback my independent-scholar AI project on Wikipedia as a growing source of explanatory AI material. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/aima-talk/message/784 is where I suggested (and I quote a few lines): It would be nice if future editions of the AIMA textbook were to include some treatment of the various independent AI projects that are out there (on the fringe?) nowadays. Thereupon another discussant provided a link to http://textbookrevolution.org -- a site which immediately accepted my submission of http://mind.sourceforge.net/aisteps.html as Artificial Intelligence Wikipedia-based Free Textbook. So fortuitously, serendipitously the whole direction of Mentifex AI changed direction in mere weeks. http://AIMind-I.com is an example not only of a separate AI spawned from Mentifex AI, but also of why I do not need massive inputs of VC cash, when other AI devotees just as dedicated as I am will launch their own mentifex-class AI Mind project using their own personal resources. Now hear this. The Site Meter logs show that interested parties from all over the world are looking at the Mentifex offer of a free AI textbook based on AI4U + updates + Wikipedia. Mentifex AI is in it for the long haul now. Not only here in America, but especially overseas and in third world countries there are AI-hungry programmers with unlimited AGI ambition but scant cash. They are the beneficiaries of Mentifex AI. Arthur -- http://mentifex.virtualentity.com - 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=8660244id_secret=56273452-4f8ff3
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
Mark Waser wrote: 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. You know, you're right: I do spend a lot less time praising good stuff, and I sometimes feel bad about that (Accentuate The Positive, and all that). But the reason I do so much critiquing is that the AI/Cog Sci/Neuroscience area is so badly clogged with nonsense and what we need right now is for someone to start cutting down the dead wood. We need to stop new people coming into the field and wasting years (or their entire career) reinventing wheels or trying to fix wheels that were already known to be broken beyond repair 30 years before they were born. About the Granger paper, I thought last night of a concise summary of how bad it really is. Imagine that we had not invented computers, but we were suddenly given a batch of computers by some aliens, and we tried to put together a science to understand how these machines worked. Suppose, also, that these machines ran Microsoft Word and nothing else. As scientists, we then divide into at least two camps. The neuroscientists take these computers and just analyze wiring and other physical characteristics. After a while these folks can tell you all about the different bits they have named and how they are connected: DDR3 memory, SLI, frontside bus, water cooling, clock speeds, cache, etc etc etc. Then there is another camp, the cognitive scientists who try to understand the Microsoft Word application running on these computers, without paying much attention to the hardware. The cog sci people have struggled to make sense of Word (and still don't have a good theory, even today), and over the years they have embraced, and then rejected, several really bad theories of how Word works. One of these, which was invented about 70 years ago, and discarded about 50 years ago, was called behaviorism and it had some pretty nutty ideas about what was going on. To the behaviorists, MS Word consisted of a huge pile of things that represented words (word-units), and the way the program worked was that the word-units just had an activation level that went up if there were more instances of that word in a document, or if the word was in a bigger font, or in bold or italic. And there were links between the word-units called associations. The behaviorists seriously believed that they could explain all of MS Word this way, but today we consider this theory to have been stupidly simplistic, and we have far for subtle, complex ideas about what is going on. What was so bad about the behaviorist theory? Many, many things, but take a look at one of them: it just cannot handle the instance-generic distinction (aka the type-token distinction). It cannot represent individual instances of words in the document. If the word the appears a hundred times, that just makes the word-unit for the so much stronger, that's all. It really doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell you that that is a big, fat problem. The one virtue of behaviorism is that amateurs can pick up the talk pretty quickly, and if they don't know all the ridiculous limitations and faults of behaviorism, they can even convince themselves that this is the beginnings of a workable theory of intelligence. So now, along comes a neuroscientist (Granger, although he is only one of many) and he writes a paper that is filled with 95% talk about wires and busses and caches and connections and then here and there he inserts statements out of the blue that purport to be a description of things going on at the Microsoft Word level (and indeed the whole paper is supposed to be about finding the fundamental circuit components that explain Microsoft Word). Only problem is that whenever he suddenly inserts a few sentences of Microsoft Word talk, it is just a vague reference to how the circuitry can explain the things going on in what sounds like a *behaviorist* theory! His statements look wildly out of place: its all SLI bus connects with a
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
-- 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). - Original Message - From: Benjamin Goertzel To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Monday, October 22, 2007 10:26 AM Subject: Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience And I really am not seeing any difference between what I understand as your opinion and what I understand as his. Sorry if I seemed to be hammering on anyone, it wasn't my intention. (Yesterday was a sort of bad day for me for non-science-related reasons, so my tone of e-voice was likely off a bit ...) I think the difference between my and Richard's views on Granger would likely be best summarized by saying that -- 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? -- Ben -- 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=8660244id_secret=56325849-3cdbfb
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience [...]
Arthur, There was no censorship. We all saw that message go by. We all just ignored it. Take a hint. - Original Message - From: A. T. Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Monday, October 22, 2007 10:35 AM Subject: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience [...] On Oct 21, 2007, at 6:47 PM, J. Andrew Rogers wote: On Oct 21, 2007, at 6:37 PM, Richard Loosemore wrote: It took me at least five years of struggle to get to the point where I could start to have the confidence to call a spade a spade It still looks like a shovel to me. In what looks not like a spade or a shovel but like CENSORSHIP -- my message below was in response to http://www.mail-archive.com/agi@v2.listbox.com/msg07943.html Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 06:18:27 -0700 (PDT) From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (A. T. Murray) Subject: Re: [agi] More public awarenesss that AGI is coming fast To: agi@v2.listbox.com Reply-To: agi@v2.listbox.com J. Andrew Rogers wrote: [...] There is enough VC money for everyone with a decent business model. Honestly, most AGI is not a decent business model. Neither is philosophy, but philosophy prevails. Otherwise Mentifex would be smothered in cash. It might even keep him quiet. I don't need cash beyond the exigencies of daily living. Right now I'm going to respond off the top of my head with the rather promising latest news from Mentifex AI. ATM/Mentifex here fleshed out the initial Wikipedia stub of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_of_Mind several years ago. M*ntifex-bashers came in and rewrote it, but traces of my text linger still. (And I have personally met Jerry Fodor years ago.) Then for several years I kept the Modularity link on dozens of mind-module webpages as a point of departure into Wikipedia. Hordes of Wikpedia editors worked over and over again on the Modularity-of-mind article. At the start of September 2007 I decided to flesh out the Wikipedia connection for each Mentifex AI mind-module webpage by expanding from that single link to a cluster of all discernible Wikipedia articles closely related to the topic of my roughly forty mind-modules. http://www.advogato.org/article/946.html is where on 11 September 2007 I posted Wikipedia-based Open-Source Artificial Intelligence -- because I realized that I could piggyback my independent-scholar AI project on Wikipedia as a growing source of explanatory AI material. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/aima-talk/message/784 is where I suggested (and I quote a few lines): It would be nice if future editions of the AIMA textbook were to include some treatment of the various independent AI projects that are out there (on the fringe?) nowadays. Thereupon another discussant provided a link to http://textbookrevolution.org -- a site which immediately accepted my submission of http://mind.sourceforge.net/aisteps.html as Artificial Intelligence Wikipedia-based Free Textbook. So fortuitously, serendipitously the whole direction of Mentifex AI changed direction in mere weeks. http://AIMind-I.com is an example not only of a separate AI spawned from Mentifex AI, but also of why I do not need massive inputs of VC cash, when other AI devotees just as dedicated as I am will launch their own mentifex-class AI Mind project using their own personal resources. Now hear this. The Site Meter logs show that interested parties from all over the world are looking at the Mentifex offer of a free AI textbook based on AI4U + updates + Wikipedia. Mentifex AI is in it for the long haul now. Not only here in America, but especially overseas and in third world countries there are AI-hungry programmers with unlimited AGI ambition but scant cash. They are the beneficiaries of Mentifex AI. Arthur -- http://mentifex.virtualentity.com - 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=8660244id_secret=56326072-faf52d
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
About the Granger paper, I thought last night of a concise summary of how bad it really is. Imagine that we had not invented computers, but we were suddenly given a batch of computers by some aliens, and we tried to put together a science to understand how these machines worked. Suppose, also, that these machines ran Microsoft Word and nothing else. Amusingly, I used a very similar metaphor in a newspaper article I wrote about the Human Genome Project, back in 2001 (it appeared in the German paper Frankfurter Allgemaine Zeitung) http://www.goertzel.org/benzine/dna.htm Consider a large computer program such as Microsoft Windows. This program is produced via a long series of steps. First, a team of programmers produces some program code, in a programming language (in the case of Microsoft Windows, the programming language is C++, with a small amount of assembly language added in). Then, a compiler acts on this program code, producing an executable file – the actual program that we run, and think of as Microsoft Windows. Just as with human beings, we have some code, and we have a complex entity created by the code, and the two are very different things. Mediating between the code and the product is a complex process – in the case of Windows, the C++ compiler; in the case of human beings, the whole embryological and epigenetic biochemical process, by which DNA grows into a human infant. Now, imagine a Windows Genome Project, aimed at identifying every last bit and byte in the C++ source code of Microsoft Windows. Suppose the researchers involved in the Windows Genome Project managed to identify the entire source code, within 99% accuracy. What would this mean for the science of Microsoft Windows? Well, it could mean two different things. Option 1: If they knew how the C++ compiler worked, then they'd be home free! They'd know how to build Microsoft Windows! Option 2: On the other hand, what if they not only had no idea how to build a C++ compiler, but also had no idea what the utterances in the C++ programming language meant? In other words, they had mapped out the bits and bytes in the Windows Genome, the C++ source code of Windows, but it was all a bunch of gobbledygook to them. All they have a is a large number of files of C++ source code, each of which is a nonsense series of characters. Perhaps they recognized some patterns: older versions of Windows tend to be different in lines 1000-1500 of this particular file. When file X is different between one Windows version and another, this other file tends to also be different between the two versions. This line of code seems to have some effect on how the system outputs information to the screen. Et cetera. Our situation with the Human Genome Project is much more like Option 2 than it is like Option 1. -- Ben - 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=8660244id_secret=56327957-1b80ae
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
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=8660244id_secret=56329795-c7f0d9
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
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) *Everyone* is looking for how library functions may be implemented precisely because they would then *assume* that the library functions would then be available to thought -- thus a) is not at all unique to Granger and I would even go so far as to not call it a hypothesis. And I'm also pretty sure that *everyone* believes in the strong potential meaningfulness of having library functions. Granger has nothing new in cog sci except some of the particular details in b) -- which you find uncompelling and oversimplified -- so what is the cog sci that you find of value? - 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=8660244id_secret=56335298-578a1a
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
Granger has nothing new in cog sci except some of the particular details in b) -- which you find uncompelling and oversimplified -- so what is the cog sci that you find of value? -- Apparently we are using cog sci in slightly different ways... I agree that he has nothing new and useful to say (in that paper) in cog psych However, he has some interesting ideas about the connections between cognitive primitives and neurological structures/dynamics. Connections of this nature are IMO cog sci rather than just neurosci. At least, that is consistent with how the term cog sci was used when I was a cog sci professor, back in the day... Also, as my knowledge of the cog-sci and neurosci literature is not comprehensive, I can't always tell when an idea of Granger's is novel whereas when he's just clearly articulating something that was implicit in the literature beforehand but perhaps not so clearly expressed. Analogously I know Jeff Hawkins has gotten a lot of mileage out of clearly-expressed articulations of ideas that are pretty much common lore among neurobiologists (though Hawkins does have some original suggestions as well...) (To a significant extent, Granger's articles just summarize ideas from other, more fine-grained papers. This does not make them worthless, however. In bio-related fields I find summary-type articles quite valuable, since the original research articles are often highly focused on experimental procedures. It's good to understand what the experimental procedures are but I don't always want to read about them in depth, sometimes I just want to understand the results and their likely interpretations...) -- Ben - 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=8660244id_secret=56337351-4ef3ca
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
I think we've beaten this horse to death . . . . :-) However, he has some interesting ideas about the connections between cognitive primitives and neurological structures/dynamics. Connections of this nature are IMO cog sci rather than just neurosci. At least, that is consistent with how the term cog sci was used when I was a cog sci professor, back in the day... I think that most neurosci practitioners would argue with you. (To a significant extent, Granger's articles just summarize ideas from other, more fine-grained papers. This does not make them worthless, however. In bio-related fields I find summary-type articles quite valuable, since the original research articles are often highly focused on experimental procedures. It's good to understand what the experimental procedures are but I don't always want to read about them in depth, sometimes I just want to understand the results and their likely interpretations...) So what I'm getting is that you're finding his summary of the neurosci papers (the other, more fine-grained papers) as what is useful. - 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=8660244id_secret=56347245-bce03f
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
But each of these things has a huge raft of assumptions built into it: -- hierarchical clustering ... OF WHAT KIND OF SYMBOLS? -- hash coding ... OF WHAT KIND OF SYMBOLS? -- sequence completion ... OF WHAT KIND OF SYMBOLS? In each case, Granger's answer is that the symbols are vaguely behaviorist units playing an incredibly simplistic role in a simplistic system. If we take his claims at face value, he has found library functions that operate on junk that cannot possibly be symbols at a cognitive level. If he had simply said that he had found hiererchical clustering of neural signals, or hash coding of neural signals, or sequence completion circuits at the neural signal level, I would say good luck to him and keep banging the rocks together. But he did not: he made claims about the cognitive level, and the only way those claims could be meaningful and useful would be in a cognitive level system that is manifestly broken. Well, I don't fully agree with your final paragraph... Suppose we take Greenfield's hypothesis that a fundamental role in cognition, perception and action is played by transient neural assemblies, that form opportunistically based on circumstance, but that are centered around cores that are tightly-interconnected neural subnets ... Potentially, Granger's primitive mechanisms could act on sets of neural signals coding for these cores, which then indirectly drive the cognitive activity that occurs mainly on the level of the transient assemblies that the cores induce... This is *not* what Granger says, but it seems generally plausible to me... BTW I am curious to hear something about what you think might be a correct 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=8660244id_secret=56347479-f61549
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
On 10/22/07, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think we've beaten this horse to death . . . . :-) However, he has some interesting ideas about the connections between cognitive primitives and neurological structures/dynamics. Connections of this nature are IMO cog sci rather than just neurosci. At least, that is consistent with how the term cog sci was used when I was a cog sci professor, back in the day... I think that most neurosci practitioners would argue with you. Cognitive science does not equal cognitive psychology. It's supposed to be an integrative discipline. When I co-founded the cog sci degree programme at the University of Western Australia in the 90's, we included faculty from biology, psychology, computer science, philosophy, electrical engineering, linguistics and mathematics. So what I'm getting is that you're finding his summary of the neurosci papers (the other, more fine-grained papers) as what is useful. I didn't read all the references, so I don't honestly know where his summarizing of others' ideas leaves off and his own original ideas begin If this were my main area of research I would dig in to that level of depth, but I've got an AGI to build ;-) ben - 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=8660244id_secret=56348307-a7af54
