Sergio Pissanetzky wrote:

> This does not mean that inference "knows" everything. Inference works from
> knowledge, just as the child does. The child acquires that knowledge by
> learning from his "sensors", mostly vision and sensory-motor nerves in this
> case, and using his inference to derive meaning from the observation.
> Eventually, he will "know" what a peg is, and how to recognize one, and how
> to know if it is square or round and match it with a hole, and how to
> control his muscles to do all that. The inference does all that by finding
> associations. The child does not need a programmer to do all that. 

> With the inference and the computer, it is the same. The robot will need a
> camera and a mechanical arm with position sensors besides the inference. But
> it will NOT need a program. It will have to learn step by step, from its
> sensors. Knowledge is still necessary, but it comes as input, not as
> program.

Naturally.

But this is an excessively general answer which completely ducks the
meat of the question. The problem was specified to emphasize the
necessity of processing spatial relationships. Because you're a
crackpot, you are unwilling/unable to see the deficiencies of your
theory. Your theory does not process spatial relationships and it leaves
no room for that flaw to be patched therefore I have to discard it or
make radical, unauthorized modifications to it. I'm a visual thinker and
I know for certain that spatial information is critically important.

> In the case of the retina, the situation is a little different. You may have
> seen my recent post about the blind climber who can see enough to climb a
> mountain with a camera and electrodes attached to his togue. There is no
> retina, no optical nerve, not even a vision-specific area of the brain
> involved there. This confirms what I already knew from my experience with
> causal sets. The anatomical details about the retina or the optical nerves,
> or left-right and upside down, are not needed at all. Not even as input. 

=\

You've been repeating this ad-nausium.

My counter claim is that the post-central gyrus, where most of the
nerves from the tongue end up, has a number of features in common with
with the occipital lobe. My claim is that while you are trumpeting the
plasticity of the brain as proof that nothing matters, my counter-claim
is that the same evidence is a demonstration of my point that:

A. the cortex is general.

B. Spatial maps are what is important, not a specific neural pathway.

C. Your system does not seem to have a way to encode spatial information
therefore it sucks.

Get some 3D goggles, set it up with a camera and a permutator which
randomizes the input stream (maps one pixel to some random pixel), then
try to see with it. If you do manage to adapt to such a thing, it only
means that your brain re-organized your optic nerve to restore the
spatial mapping of the outside world, and that adapting back to normal
will be almost as difficult. This is neural science 101. I'm sure it
would be easier for the nerves to drop in wherever, but that's not what
we see, we see an exquisitely ordered and highly regular pattern of
neural connections at all levels, and for pretty much all senses, except
the olfactory sense.

> We would be living in a fantasy world if we believed that anyone can
> understand or explain or prove or guarantee all that. I sure can't. Because
> of that, I have proposed a practical approach. First, before even starting
> anything, we need a computer with the inference installed on it. Second, a
> simple model of a retina, just a camera with a few hundred pixels, followed
> with the inference. Show it an image, see what it does. Does it compress the
> image as the retina does? By how much? Compare with the real retina. If a
> match is found, bingo! I am sure it will. 

The retina is extremely lossy. It is also well understood. It is not
very interesting either except in showing how little input the brain
actually receives.

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