Referencing your own work is obviously not what I was asking for. Still, something more substantial than "neuron is not a concept", as an example of "cognitive theory"?
On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 4:35 AM, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Vladimir Nesov wrote: >> >> Could you give some references to be specific in what you mean? >> Examples of what you consider outdated cognitive theory and better >> cognitive theory. >> > > Well, you could start with the question of what the neurons are supposed to > represent, if the spikes are coding (e.g.) bayesian contingencies. Are the > neurons the same as concepts/symbols? Are groups of neurons redundantly > coding for concepts/symbols? > > One or other of these possibilties is usually assumed by default, but this > leads to glaring inconsistencies in the interpretation of neuroscience data, > as well as begging all of the old questions about how "grandmother cells" > are supposed to do their job. As I said above, cognitive scientists already > came to the conclusion, 30 or 40 years ago, that it made no sense to stick > to a simple identification of one neuron per concept. And yet many > neuroscientists are *implictly* resurrecting this broken idea, without > addressing the faults that were previously found in it. (In case you are > not familiar with the faults, they include the vulnerability of neurons, the > lack of connectivity between arbitrary neurons, the problem of assigning > neurons to concepts, the encoding of variables, relationships and negative > facts ...... ). > > For example, in Loosemore & Harley (in press) you can find an analysis of a > paper by Quiroga, Reddy, Kreiman, Koch, and Fried (2005) in which the latter > try to claim they have evidence in favor of grandmother neurons (or sparse > collections of grandmother neurons) and against the idea of distributed > representations. > > We showed their conclusion to be incoherent. It was deeply implausible, > given the empirical data they reported. > > Furthermore, we used my molecular framework (the same one that was outlined > in the consciousness paper) to see how that would explain the same data. It > turns out that this much more sophisticated model was very consistent with > the data (indeed, it is the only one I know of that can explain the results > they got). > > You can find our paper at www.susaro.com/publications. > > > > Richard Loosemore > > > Loosemore, R.P.W. & Harley, T.A. (in press). Brains and Minds: On the > Usefulness of Localisation Data to Cognitive Psychology. In M. Bunzl & S.J. > Hanson (Eds.), Foundations of Functional Neuroimaging. Cambridge, MA: MIT > Press. > > Quiroga, R. Q., Reddy, L., Kreiman, G., Koch, C. & Fried, I. (2005). > Invariant visual representation by single-neurons in the human brain. > Nature, 435, 1102-1107. > -- Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/ ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
