Richard: science does too know a good deal about brain
architecture!I *know* cognitive science. Cognitive science is a friend of
mine.
Mike, you are no cognitive scientist.... :-).
Thanks, Richard, for keeping it friendly - but - are you saying cog sci
knows the:
*'engram' - how info is encoded
*any precise cognitive form or level of the hierarchical processing vaguely
defined by Hawkins et al
*how ideas are compared at any level -
*how analogies are produced
*whether templates or similar are/are not used in visual object processing
etc. etc ???
Obviously, if science can't answer the engram question, it can hardly answer
anything else.
You are indeed a cognitive scientist but you don't seem to have a very good
overall scientific/philosophical perspective on what that entails - and the
status of cog. sci. is a fascinating one, philosophically. You see, I
utterly believe in the cog. sci. approach of applying computational models
to the brain and human thinking. But what that has produced is *not* hard
knowledge. It has made us aware of the complexities of what is probably
involved, got us to the point where we are, so to speak, v. "warm" / close
to the truth. But no, as, I think Ben asserted, what we actually *know* for
sure about the brain's information processing is v. v. little. (Just look
at our previous dispute, where clearly there is no definite knowledge at all
about how much parallel computation is involved in the brain's processing of
any idea [like a sentence]). Those cog. sci, models are more like analogies
than true theoretical models. And anyway most of the time though by no means
all, cognitive scientists are like you & Minsky - much more interested in
the AI applications of their models than in their literal scientific truth.
If you disagree, point to the hard knowledge re items like those listed
above, which surely must be the basis of any AI system that can
legitimately claim to be based on the brain's architecture.
Another example of where you are not so hot on the *philosophy* of cog. sci.
is our v. first dispute. I claimed and claim that it is fundamental to cog
sci to treat the brain/mind as rational. And I'm right - and produced and
can continue endlessly producing evidence. (It is fundamental to all the
social sciences to treat humans as rational decisionmaking agents). Oh no it
doesn't, you said, in effect - sci psychology is obsessed with the
irrationalities of the human mind. And that is true, too. If you hadn't gone
off in high dudgeon, we could have resolved the apparent contradiction. Sci
psych does indeed love to study and point out all kinds of illusions and
mistakes of the human mind. But to cog. sci. these are all so many *bugs* in
an otherwise rational system. The system as a whole is still rational, as
far as cog sci is concerned, but some of its parts - its heuristics,
attitudes etc - are not. They, however, can be fixed.
So what I have been personally asserting elsewhere - namely that the brain
is fundamentally irrational or "crazy" - that the human mind can't follow a
logical, "joined up" train of reflective thought for more than a relatively
few seconds on end - and is positively designed to be like that, and can't
and isn't meant to be fixed - does indeed represent a fundamental challenge
to cog. sci's current rational paradigm of mind. (The flip side of that
craziness is that it is a fundamentally *creative* mind - & this is utterly
central to AGI)
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