On 21/02/2008, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'm disappointed that you guys, especially Bob M, aren/t responding to
> this. It just might be important to how the brain succeeds in perceiving
> images, while computers are such a failure.
I agree that if you really want to understand what the brain is doing
you do need to take these mappings into consideration. This is
essentially the approach that Steve Grand was taking with his Lucy
robot (now defunct I believe). However, an understanding of the
mappings in the visual system isn't necessarily required for the sort
of engineering based AGI approach taken by Ben and others.
The particular way in which the retinal image is mapped onto
structures in the primary stages of vision is known to be responsible
for the types of patterns which shamans see in trance, and which some
people also see during "near death" experiences or exposure to
hallucinogens. These are usually geometric shapes roughly classified
as tunnels, funnels, spirals or grids. You can find more info on this
here:
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hallucination
So for example during a near death experience when people claim to be
"moving down a tunnel of light", what they're actually experiencing is
the failure of data transfer between the retina and V1, resulting in
spontaneously generated plane waves (that chunk of the cortex is just
free wheeling in isolation). Of course, this isn't a very catchy
explanation, and doesn't play well on daytime TV shows.
One thing which Steve Grand noted was that there are connections from
V1 both to motor areas and also back to the LGN. This doesn't make
sense if you consider vision to be a purely bottom up heirachy, as
according to Marr's theory. However, it does make a lot more sense if
you consider visual perception to be part of a closed loop, where
higher level phenomena are influencing and assisting with the
interpretation of very low level features.
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agi
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