On 4/26/07, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
1) Clarification: I do not ever say that we can do the job "...without reference to the hardware". It is very important indeed that you don't get the wrong idea on this point: *some* amount of reference to the hardware is fine, but I am making a distinction between those who take modest inspiration from hardware issues, and those who primarily try to emulate the entire hardware structure of the brain.
Sure, but I think if you're drawing a _lot_ of inspiration from human cognitive architecture (as you advocate), you also need to draw a _lot_ of inspiration from the hardware. I think the two need to go hand in hand if you're trying for the sort of detail involved in successful reverse engineering. 2) Neuroscientists, today, are making incredibly, unbelievably naive
statements about the functional level (the cognitive systems level).
Well I'm sure they'd say you're making incredibly naive statements in the other direction too :) But now we've discarded the argument from authority/consensus and are looking at conflicting opinions. To
put it in perspective, imagine a group of people who claimed to be trying to understand computers, who were doing this: dissecting computer hardware and publishing papers in which they measured patterns of heat output from the circuit boards, and saying in their papers things like "We have found the Spellcheck Area!" and "We now understand the place where is sensitive to spam!" and "Linux and Windows explained in terms of hardware differences".
Well, the analogy of a civilization that knows nothing about computers and has a batch of modern PCs fall through a dimensional warp and is trying to reverse engineer them doesn't hold up terribly well but to the extent it does, it supports my argument: they'd be wasting their time just studying the operating system and spelling checker. Studying the chips and circuit boards is precisely what they'd need to do. Overall, I think that perhaps you are using 'neuroscientist' to mean
something broader than you may have intended: did you mean to distinguish those people from the cognitive scientists, or were you not aware of the huge divide between them?
"Cognitive science" is a catchall term that's used to refer to everything from Freud to Turing to Hofstadter to, indeed, neuroscience. What's going on is that you've got a particular group of people who fall under the general heading, who believe you can reverse engineer the human mind without equally detailed study of the brain; and you've got other groups of people under the general heading, myself included, who say that won't work - if you're serious about reverse engineering human cognitive architecture, you'll have to be equally serious about understanding the hardware it runs on. ----- 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=231415&user_secret=fabd7936
