On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 2:35 PM, Steve Richfield <[email protected]>wrote:
> 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. > Hence, I see goal direction, reward, etc., as potentially useful only in > some tiny part of our brains. > > Any thoughts? I don't buy the hemisphere disconnect, but I do feel that it makes sense to say that some parts are (like) passive observers and other parts are more concerned with the interactive aspects of reasoning. The idea that reinforcement might operate on the interactive aspects but not the passive observers is really interesting. My only criticism is that there is evidence that human beings will often interpret events according to the projections of their primary concerns onto their observations. Jim Bromer ------------------------------------------- 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
