Ben Goertzel wrote:
Richard,
I'm curious what you think of William Calvin's neuroscience hypotheses
as presented in e.g. "The Cerebral Code"
That book is a bit out of date now, but still, he took complexity and
nonlinear dynamics quite seriously, so it seems to me there may be some
resonance between his ideas and your own
I find his speculative ideas more agreeable than Tononi's, myself...
thx
ben g
Yes, I did read his book (or part of it) back in 98/99, but ....
From what I remember, I found resonance, as you say, but he is one of
those people who is struggling to find a way to turn an intuition into
something concrete. It is just that he wrote a book about it before he
got to Concrete Operations.
It would be interesting to take a look at it again, 10 years later, and
see whether my opinion has changed.
To put this in context, I felt like I was looking at a copy of myself
back in 1982, when I struggled to write down my intuitions as a
physicist coming to terms with psychology for the first time. I am now
acutely embarrassed by the naivete of that first attempt, but in spite
of the embarrassment I know that I have since turned those intuitions
into something meaningful, and I know that in spite of my original
hubris, I was on a path to something that actually did make sense. To
cognitive scientists at the time it looked awful, unmotivated and
disconnected from reality (by itself, it was!), but in the end it was
not trash because it had real substance buried inside it.
With people like Calvin (and others) I see writings that look somewhat
speculative and ungrounded, just like my early attempts, so I am mixed
between a desire to be lenient (because I was that like that once) and a
feeling that they really need to be aware that their thoughts are still
ungelled.
Anyhow, that's my quick thoughts on him. I'll see if I can dig out his
book at some point.
Richard Loosemore
On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 9:53 AM, Richard Loosemore <r...@lightlink.com
<mailto:r...@lightlink.com>> wrote:
Ed Porter wrote:
Richard,
Please describe some of the counterexamples, that you can easily
come up
with, that make a mockery of Tononi's conclusion.
Ed Porter
Alas, I will have to disappoint. I put a lot of effort into
understanding his paper first time around, but the sheer agony of
reading (/listening to) his confused, shambling train of thought,
the non-sequiteurs, and the pages of irrelevant math .... that I do
not need to experience a second time. All of my original effort
only resulted in the discovery that I had wasted my time, so I have
no interest in wasting more of my time.
With other papers that contain more coherent substance, but perhaps
what looks like an error, I would make the effort. But not this one.
It will have to be left as an exercise for the reader, I'm afraid.
Richard Loosemore
P.S. A hint. All I remember was that he started talking about
multiple regions (columns?) of the brain exchanging information with
one another in a particular way, and then he asserted a conclusion
which, on quick reflection, I knew would not be true of a system
resembling the distributed one that I described in my consciousness
paper (the molecular model). Knowing that his conclusion was
flat-out untrue for that one case, and for a whole class of similar
systems, his argument was toast.
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:r...@lightlink.com
<mailto:r...@lightlink.com>] Sent: Monday, December 22, 2008 8:54 AM
To: agi@v2.listbox.com <mailto:agi@v2.listbox.com>
Subject: Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ----
Building a
machine that can learn from experience
Ed Porter wrote:
I don't think this AGI list should be so quick to dismiss a
$4.9 million dollar grant to create an AGI. It will not
necessarily be "vaporware." I think we should view it as a
good sign.
Even if it is for a project that runs the risk, like many
DARPA projects (like most scientific funding in general) of
not necessarily placing its money where it might do the most
good --- it is likely to at least produce some interesting
results --- and it just might make some very important
advances in our field.
The article from http://www.physorg.com/news148754667.html said:
".a $4.9 million grant.for the first phase of DARPA's
Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable
Electronics (SyNAPSE) project.
Tononi and scientists from Columbia University and IBM will
work on the "software" for the thinking computer, while
nanotechnology and supercomputing experts from Cornell,
Stanford and the University of California-Merced will create
the "hardware." Dharmendra Modha of IBM is the principal
investigator.
The idea is to create a computer capable of sorting through
multiple streams of changing data, to look for patterns and
make logical decisions.
There's another requirement: The finished cognitive computer
should be as small as a the brain of a small mammal and use
as little power as a 100-watt light bulb. It's a major
challenge. But it's what our brains do every day.
I have just spent several hours reading a Tononi paper, "An
information integration theory of consciousness" and skimmed
several parts of his book "A Universe of Consciousness" he
wrote with Edleman, whom Ben has referred to often in his
writings. (I have attached my mark up of the article, which
if you read just the yellow highlighted text, or (for more
detail) the red, you can get a quick understanding of. You
can also view it in MSWord outline mode if you like.)
This paper largely agrees with my notion, stated multiple
times on this list, that consciousness is an incredibly
complex computation that interacts with itself in a very
rich manner that makes it aware of itself.
For the record, this looks like the paper that I listened to
Tononi talk about a couple of years ago -- the one I mentioned
in my last message.
It is, for want of a better word, nonsense. And since people
take me to task for being so dismissive, let me add that it is
the central thesis of the paper that is "nonsense": if you ask
yourself very carefully what it is he is claiming, you can
easily come up with counterexammples that make a mockery of his
conclusion.
Richard Loosemore
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--
Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
Director of Research, SIAI
b...@goertzel.org <mailto:b...@goertzel.org>
"I intend to live forever, or die trying."
-- Groucho Marx
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