Vladimir Nesov wrote:
On Sat, Jun 7, 2008 at 8:30 PM, Richard Loosemore
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
But .... I have no problem with this at all! :-). This is exactly
what I believe, but I was arguing against a different claim! Rogers
did actually say that "neurons are simple" and then went on to
claim that they were simple because (essentially) you could
black-box them with something like a bayesian function.
You stepped in and said things that implied you were defending his
position, that is all.
I certainly am not arguing that neuron functionality will probably
be modelled much more simply, in the long run. But that is
different.
I think you misinterpreted his position also then. I certainly
interpreted it to mean something along the lines of what I've just
summarized, or even more generally that a design that is even not a
neural net can be even more efficient and simple. He is too smart to
believe in silliness you argued against.
Huh? But his original comment was
Neurons *are* simple, analogous to a transistor. [Compare with:] a
modern CPU ..... [which is] made out of simple transistors.
He then followed up with:
Neurons are structurally complex but computationally simple within
the usual constraints of computational information theory.
And then, when Mark Waser asked the following question:
On Jun 1, 2008, at 12:39 PM, Mark Waser wrote:
What do you mean by computationally simple?
Rogers' answer was:
Meaning there is a trivial set of functions and/or computational
model that captures the utility.
The problem is that he began by comparing neurons to transistors.
What you and I agree on is the idea that the overall functionality of
neural nets will probably one day be implementable with something else
that does not require neurons, and that the overall functionality of
these future systems will not require the complexity of biological neurons.
But that is a world away from the idea that neurons, as they are, are as
simple as transistors. I do not believe this was a simple
misunderstanding on my part: the claim that neurons are as simple as
transistors is an unsupportable one.
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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