On Sunday 14 September 2008, Dimitry Volfson wrote:
> Actually, I remember reading something about scientists finding a
> list structure in the brain of a bird singing a song (a moving
> pointer to the next item in a list sort of thing). But whatever.

That does sound interesting, yes, I'd like to find a citation on it. Do 
you know where I might find that? Was it a magazine, journal, etc.?

> It's not a very low level model, but the lower level activation is
> implied.

How could it be used if it's left unspecified and hand-wavy?

> When you imagine a goal-state, the relationship is represented in the
> brain somehow (in the neurons of course). And when evidence of the

Of course. But how?

> actualization of that goal-state comes in through the senses, the
> brains sends an opiate reward, which might make the person want to do
> whatever that was again in the correct context.

How is it that only one class of molecules correlates to goalism? This 
seems suspect considering the complex infrastructure of the brain.

> Motivation circuits - familiar with the concept?

Yes, but only from psychology, not from stuff we can actually build or 
understand.

> If a motivation circuit gets over-energized then a person gets locked
> into doing the same thing over and over again (and not getting the
> goal-state), rather than having enough resources left to think about

Perseveration occurs for many other reasons than 'over-energized' 
though ..

> doing something different and what that different thing should be.
> Does someone need to know exactly how a motivation circuit becomes
> over-energized at the neuronal level in order to model it in an AI? I
> don't think so.

Another illustration of the problem with this line of hypothesis that I 
have is that you're trying to make "intelligence", a vague concept in 
the first place, with a foundation made out of "motivation", another 
somewhat vague psychology concept. I don't care how many times the 
mouse hits the button, etc. Also, I recently cited this:

http://www.ece.utexas.edu/~werner/siren_call.pdf

It's an elaboration of a few of my points here.

> Many things like this are known. And people don't need to understand
> such at the individual-neuron level to model what happens.

No, you miss my point. It's not that I'm saying there's some scale of 
microscopism that we have to climb down (brain, region, tissue slice, 
neuron, axon, subcellular mechanism, ..) to understand things; that's 
not it at all. What I'm talking about is actually considering the 
neurons as the physical components that make up the 'brain' which is 
the physical location of, supposedly, these 'goal-states'. These 
biological systems (brains) are the real things that can be 
experimentally tested or perhaps manipulated, but on the other hand the 
semantic space of "goals", "meaning", "motivation" is hardly 
meaningfully manipulated, even with the WordNet or Cyc relations. 

I can randomly generate new designs for experiments using WordNet or Cyc 
relations or something, where we observe mice subjected to a battery of 
different psychochemical compounds. Then, using WordNet, we can pull 
out random labels for each of the behaviors, maybe it's a "goal" or 
maybe it's a who knows what that the creature supposedly intrinsically 
has, and then what? You'd plot the data sets in some multidimensional 
manner, maybe a State Vector Machine, I'd have to ask some 
mathematicians, and then there's this strong likelihood of statistical 
irrelevance of assigning these labels to the different phenotypes 
observed in experiments. These same "phenotypes" are the things of folk 
psychology as well. The trick is that instead of observing rats, you're 
observing people. 

Given that scenario, what would I care if it's subatomic or neuron-level 
or whole brain level? So, no, our disagreement is about something else.

- Bryan
________________________________________
http://heybryan.org/
Engineers: http://heybryan.org/exp.html
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