To all, There may be a fundamental misdirection here on this thread, for your consideration...
There have been some very rare cases where people have lost the use of one hemisphere of their brains, and then subsequently recovered, usually with the help of recently-developed clot-removal surgery. What they report seems to be completely at odds with the present discussion. I will summarize and probably overgeneralize, because there aren't many such survivors. One was a brain researcher who subsequently wrote a book, about which I heard a review on the radio, but I don't remember the details like title or name. Hopefully, one of you has found and read this book. It appears that one hemisphere is a *completely* passive observer, that does *not* even bother to distinguish you and not-you, other than noting a probable boundary. The other hemisphere concerns itself with manipulating the world, regardless of whether particular pieces of it are you or not-you. It seems unlikely that reward could have any effect at all on the passive observer hemisphere. In the case of the author of the book, apparently the manipulating hemisphere was knocked out of commission for a while, and then slowly recovered. This allowed her to see the passively observed world, without the overlay of the manipulating hemisphere. Obviously, this involved severe physical impairment until she recovered. Note that AFAIK all of the AGI efforts are egocentric, while half of our brains are concerned with passively filtering/understanding the world enough to apply egocentric "logic". Note further that since the two hemispheres are built from the same types of neurons, that the computations needed to do these two very different tasks are performed by the same wet-stuff. There is apparently some sort of advanced "Turing machine" sort of concept going on in wetware. This sounds to me like a must-read for any AGIer, and I certainly would have read it, had I been one. Hence, I see goal direction, reward, etc., as potentially useful only in some tiny part of our brains. Any thoughts? Steve ------------------------------------------- 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=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
