John G. Rose wrote:
Reading this -
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/health/23blin.html?ref=science
makes me wonder what other circuitry we have that's discouraged from
being accepted.
This blindsight news is not really news. It has been known for decades
that there are two separate visual pathways in the brain, which seem to
process "what" information and "vision for action" information.
So this recent hubbub is just a new, more dramatic demonstration of
something that has been known about for a long time.
This is my take on what is going on here:
The interesting fact is that the "vision for action" pathway can operate
without conscious awareness. It is an autopilot. What this seems to
imply is that at some early point in evolution there was only that
pathway, and there was no general ability to think about higher level
aspects of the world.
Then the higher cognitive mechanisms developed, while the older system
remained in place. The higher cognitive mechanisms grew their own
system for analyzing visual input (the 'what" pathway), but it turned
out that the brain could still use the older pathway in parallel with
the new, so it was left in place.
I am going to add this as a prediction derived from the model of
consciousness in my AGI-09 paper: the prediction is that when we
uncover the exact implementation details of the "analysis" mechanism
that I discussed in the paper, we will find that the AM is entirely
within the higher cognitive system, and that the vision-for-action
pathway just happens to be beyond the scope of what the AM can access.
It is because it is outside that scope that no consciousness is
associated with what that pathway does.
(Unfortunately, of course, this prediction cannot be fully tested until
we can pin down the exact details of how the analysis mechanism gets
implemented in the brain. The same is true of the other predictions).
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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