Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience

[Richard Loosemore]

Benjamin Goertzel wrote:


But each of these things has a huge raft of assumptions built into it:

  -- hierarchical clustering ... OF WHAT KIND OF SYMBOLS?
  -- hash coding ... OF WHAT KIND OF SYMBOLS?
  -- sequence completion ... OF WHAT KIND OF SYMBOLS?

In each case, Granger's answer is that the symbols are vaguely
behaviorist units playing an incredibly simplistic role in a simplistic
system.

If we take his claims at face value, he has found library functions that
operate on junk that cannot possibly be "symbols" at a cognitive level.

If he had simply said that he had found hiererchical clustering of
neural signals, or hash coding of neural signals, or sequence completion
circuits at the neural signal level, I would say good luck to him and
keep banging the rocks together.

But he did not:  he made claims about the cognitive level, and the only
way those claims could be meaningful and useful would be in a cognitive
level system that is manifestly broken.



Well, I don't fully agree with your final paragraph...

Suppose we take Greenfield's hypothesis that a fundamental role in
cognition, perception and action is played by transient neural assemblies,
that form opportunistically based on circumstance, but that are centered
around "cores" that are tightly-interconnected neural subnets ...

Potentially, Granger's primitive mechanisms could act on sets of neural
signals coding for these "cores", which then indirectly drive the cognitive
activity that occurs mainly on the level of the transient assemblies that
the cores induce...


Fair enough:  but much depends on specifics from Greenfield.


This is *not* what Granger says, but it seems generally plausible to me...

BTW I am curious to hear something about what you think might be
a correct cognitive theory ;-)


There is a sketch of some aspects of it in the Loosemore & Harley paper. 
 I'll take your expression of interest to be sufficient excuse for me 
to send you a copy of it.


I am sure you would like to know more, but I am keeping further details 
behind a proprietary screen for the moment.




Richard Loosemore

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Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience

[Benjamin Goertzel]

On 10/22/07, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>  I think we've beaten this horse to death . . . . :-)
>
> >> However, he has some interesting ideas about the connections between
> cognitive primitives and neurological structures/dynamics.  Connections of
> this nature are IMO "cog sci" rather than just "neurosci."  At least, that
> is consistent with how the term "cog sci" was used when I was a cog sci
> professor, back in the day...
>
> I think that most neurosci practitioners would argue with you.
>


Cognitive science does not equal cognitive psychology.  It's supposed to be
an integrative discipline.  When I co-founded the cog sci degree programme
at the University of Western Australia in the 90's, we included faculty from
biology, psychology, computer science, philosophy, electrical engineering,
linguistics and mathematics.


> So what I'm getting is that you're finding his summary of the neurosci
> papers (the "other, more fine-grained papers") as what is useful.
>


I didn't read all the references, so I don't honestly know where his
summarizing of others' ideas leaves off and his own original ideas
begin  If this were my main area of research I would dig in to that
level of depth, but I've got an AGI to build ;-)

ben

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Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience

[Benjamin Goertzel]

>
>
> But each of these things has a huge raft of assumptions built into it:
>
>   -- hierarchical clustering ... OF WHAT KIND OF SYMBOLS?
>   -- hash coding ... OF WHAT KIND OF SYMBOLS?
>   -- sequence completion ... OF WHAT KIND OF SYMBOLS?
>
> In each case, Granger's answer is that the symbols are vaguely
> behaviorist units playing an incredibly simplistic role in a simplistic
> system.
>
> If we take his claims at face value, he has found library functions that
> operate on junk that cannot possibly be "symbols" at a cognitive level.
>
> If he had simply said that he had found hiererchical clustering of
> neural signals, or hash coding of neural signals, or sequence completion
> circuits at the neural signal level, I would say good luck to him and
> keep banging the rocks together.
>
> But he did not:  he made claims about the cognitive level, and the only
> way those claims could be meaningful and useful would be in a cognitive
> level system that is manifestly broken.



Well, I don't fully agree with your final paragraph...

Suppose we take Greenfield's hypothesis that a fundamental role in
cognition, perception and action is played by transient neural assemblies,
that form opportunistically based on circumstance, but that are centered
around "cores" that are tightly-interconnected neural subnets ...

Potentially, Granger's primitive mechanisms could act on sets of neural
signals coding for these "cores", which then indirectly drive the cognitive
activity that occurs mainly on the level of the transient assemblies that
the cores induce...

This is *not* what Granger says, but it seems generally plausible to me...

BTW I am curious to hear something about what you think might be
a correct cognitive theory ;-)

-- Ben G

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Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience

[Mark Waser]

I think we've beaten this horse to death . . . . :-)

>> However, he has some interesting ideas about the connections between 
>> cognitive primitives and neurological structures/dynamics.  Connections of 
>> this nature are IMO "cog sci" rather than just "neurosci."  At least, that 
>> is consistent with how the term "cog sci" was used when I was a cog sci 
>> professor, back in the day... 

I think that most neurosci practitioners would argue with you.

>> (To a significant extent, Granger's articles just summarize ideas from 
>> other, more fine-grained papers.  This does not make them worthless, 
>> however.  In bio-related fields I find summary-type articles quite valuable, 
>> since the original research articles are often highly focused on 
>> experimental procedures.  It's good to understand what the experimental 
>> procedures are but I don't always want to read about them in depth, 
>> sometimes I just want to understand the results and their likely 
>> interpretations...) 

So what I'm getting is that you're finding his summary of the neurosci papers 
(the "other, more fine-grained papers") as what is useful.

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Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience

[Richard Loosemore]

Benjamin Goertzel wrote:



On 10/22/07, *Mark Waser* <[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
> wrote:


> > -- I think Granger's cog-sci speculations, while oversimplified
and surely wrong in parts, contain important hints at the truth (and
in my prior email I tried to indicate how)
> > -- Richard OTOH, seems to consider Granger's cog-sci speculations
total "garbage"
> > This is a significant difference of opinion, no?
 
As you've just stated it, yes.  However, rereading your previous

e-mail, I still don't really see where you agree with his cog sci
(as opposed to what I would still call neurobiology which I did see
you agreeing with).



It's of course quite non-obvious where to draw the line between 
neuroscience and cognitive science, in a context like this.


However, what I like in Granger paper, that seems cog-sci-ish to me, is 
the idea that functionalities like


-- hierarchical clustering
-- hash coding
-- sequence completion

are provided as part of the "neurological instruction set"


But each of these things has a huge raft of assumptions built into it:

 -- hierarchical clustering ... OF WHAT KIND OF SYMBOLS?
 -- hash coding ... OF WHAT KIND OF SYMBOLS?
 -- sequence completion ... OF WHAT KIND OF SYMBOLS?

In each case, Granger's answer is that the symbols are vaguely 
behaviorist units playing an incredibly simplistic role in a simplistic 
system.


If we take his claims at face value, he has found library functions that 
operate on junk that cannot possibly be "symbols" at a cognitive level.


If he had simply said that he had found hiererchical clustering of 
neural signals, or hash coding of neural signals, or sequence completion 
circuits at the neural signal level, I would say good luck to him and 
keep banging the rocks together.


But he did not:  he made claims about the cognitive level, and the only 
way those claims could be meaningful and useful would be in a cognitive 
level system that is manifestly broken.





Richard Loosemore

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Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience

[Benjamin Goertzel]

>
>
> Granger has nothing new in cog sci except some of the particular details
> in b) -- which you find "uncompelling and oversimplified" -- so what is the
> cog sci that you find of value?
> --
>


Apparently we are using "cog sci" in slightly different ways...

I agree that he has nothing new and useful to say (in that paper) in "cog
psych"

However, he has some interesting ideas about the connections between
cognitive primitives and neurological structures/dynamics.  Connections of
this nature are IMO "cog sci" rather than just "neurosci."  At least, that
is consistent with how the term "cog sci" was used when I was a cog sci
professor, back in the day...

Also, as my knowledge of the cog-sci and neurosci literature is not
comprehensive, I can't always tell when an idea of Granger's is novel
whereas when he's just clearly articulating something that was implicit in
the literature beforehand but perhaps not so clearly expressed.  Analogously
I know Jeff Hawkins has gotten a lot of mileage out of clearly-expressed
articulations of ideas that are pretty much common lore among
neurobiologists (though Hawkins does have some original suggestions as
well...)

(To a significant extent, Granger's articles just summarize ideas from
other, more fine-grained papers.  This does not make them worthless,
however.  In bio-related fields I find summary-type articles quite valuable,
since the original research articles are often highly focused on
experimental procedures.  It's good to understand what the experimental
procedures are but I don't always want to read about them in depth,
sometimes I just want to understand the results and their likely
interpretations...)

-- Ben

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Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience

[Mark Waser]

>> So, one way to summarize my view of the paper is
>> -- The neuroscience part of Granger's paper tells how these 
>> library-functions may be implemented in the brain
>> -- The cog-sci part consists partly of
>> - a) the hypothesis that these library-functions are available to 
>> cognitive programs 
>> - b) some specifics about how these library-functions may be used within 
>> cognitive programs
>> I find Granger's idea a) quite appealing, but his ideas in category b) 
>> fairly uncompelling and oversimplified. 
>> Whereas according to my understanding, Richard seems not to share my belief 
>> in the strong potential meaningfulness of a)

*Everyone* is looking for how library functions may be implemented precisely 
because they would then *assume* that the library functions would then be 
available to thought -- thus a) is not at all unique to Granger and I would 
even go so far as to not call it a hypothesis.

And I'm also pretty sure that *everyone* believes in the strong potential 
meaningfulness of having library functions.

Granger has nothing new in cog sci except some of the particular details in b) 
-- which you find "uncompelling and oversimplified" -- so what is the cog sci 
that you find of value?

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Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience

[Benjamin Goertzel]

On 10/22/07, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>  >> -- I think Granger's cog-sci speculations, while oversimplified and
> surely wrong in parts, contain important hints at the truth (and in my prior
> email I tried to indicate how)
> >> -- Richard OTOH, seems to consider Granger's cog-sci speculations total
> "garbage"
> >> This is a significant difference of opinion, no?
>
> As you've just stated it, yes.  However, rereading your previous e-mail, I
> still don't really see where you agree with his cog sci (as opposed to what
> I would still call neurobiology which I did see you agreeing with).
>


It's of course quite non-obvious where to draw the line between neuroscience
and cognitive science, in a context like this.

However, what I like in Granger paper, that seems cog-sci-ish to me, is the
idea that functionalities like

-- hierarchical clustering
-- hash coding
-- sequence completion

are provided as part of the "neurological instruction set"

The attractive cog-sci hypothesis here, as I might reformulate it, is that
higher-level cognitive procedures could palpably take these functionalities
as "primitives", sort of as if they were library functions provided by the
brain

So, one way to summarize my view of the paper is
-- The neuroscience part of Granger's paper tells how these
library-functions may be implemented in the brain
-- The cog-sci part consists partly of
- a) the hypothesis that these library-functions are available to
cognitive programs
- b) some specifics about how these library-functions may be used within
cognitive programs

I find Granger's idea a) quite appealing, but his ideas in category b)
fairly uncompelling and oversimplified.

Whereas according to my understanding, Richard seems not to share my belief
in the strong potential meaningfulness of a)

All this is indirectly and conceptually relevant to Novamente because we
have to make decisions regarding which functionalities to supply as
primitives to Novamente, and which functionalities to require it to learn...

However, the cognitive theory underlying NM is totally different than, and
much more complex than, Granger's overall cognitive theory...

-- Ben G

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Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience

[Benjamin Goertzel]

>
>
> About the Granger paper, I thought last night of a concise summary of
> how bad it really is.  Imagine that we had not invented computers, but
> we were suddenly given a batch of computers by some aliens, and we tried
> to put together a science to understand how these machines worked.
>
> Suppose, also, that these machines ran Microsoft Word and nothing else.
>


Amusingly, I used a very similar metaphor in a newspaper article I wrote
about the
Human Genome Project, back in 2001 (it appeared in the German paper
Frankfurter
Allgemaine Zeitung)

http://www.goertzel.org/benzine/dna.htm

"
Consider a large computer program such as Microsoft Windows.  This program
is produced via a long series of steps.  First, a team of programmers
produces some program code, in a programming language (in the case of
Microsoft Windows, the programming language is C++, with a small amount of
assembly language added in).  Then, a compiler acts on this program code,
producing an executable file – the actual program that we run, and think of
as Microsoft Windows.  Just as with human beings, we have some code, and we
have a complex entity created by the code, and the two are very different
things.   Mediating between the code and the product is a complex process –
in the case of Windows, the C++ compiler; in the case of human beings, the
whole embryological and epigenetic biochemical process, by which DNA grows
into a human infant.

Now, imagine a "Windows Genome Project," aimed at identifying every last bit
and byte in the C++ source code of Microsoft Windows.   Suppose the
researchers involved in the Windows Genome Project managed to identify the
entire source code, within 99% accuracy.   What would this mean for the
science of Microsoft Windows?

 Well, it could mean two different things.

 Option 1: If they knew how the C++ compiler worked, then they'd be home
free!  They'd know how to build Microsoft Windows!

 Option 2: On the other hand, what if they not only had no idea how to build
a C++ compiler, but also had no idea what the utterances in the C++
programming language meant?  In other words, they had mapped out the bits
and bytes in the Windows Genome,  the C++ source code of Windows, but it was
all a bunch of gobbledygook to them.   All they have a is a large number of
files of C++ source code, each of which is a nonsense series of characters.
Perhaps they recognized some patterns: older versions of Windows tend to be
different in lines 1000-1500 of this particular file.  When file X is
different between one Windows version and another, this other file tends to
also be different between the two versions.   This line of code seems to
have some effect on how the system outputs information to the screen.  Et
cetera.

 Our situation with the Human Genome Project is much more like Option 2 than
it is like Option 1.
"

--  Ben

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Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience [...]

[Mark Waser]

Arthur,

   There was no censorship.  We all saw that message go by.  We all just 
ignored it.  Take a hint.


- Original Message - 
From: "A. T. Murray" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2007 10:35 AM
Subject: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience [...]



On Oct 21, 2007, at 6:47 PM, J. Andrew Rogers wote:


On Oct 21, 2007, at 6:37 PM, Richard Loosemore wrote:

It took me at least five years of struggle to get to the point
where I could start to have the confidence to call a spade a spade



It still looks like a shovel to me.


In what looks not like a spade or a shovel but like
CENSORSHIP -- my message below was in response to

http://www.mail-archive.com/agi@v2.listbox.com/msg07943.html

Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 06:18:27 -0700 (PDT)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (A. T. Murray)
Subject: Re: [agi] More public awarenesss that AGI is coming fast
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Reply-To: agi@v2.listbox.com


J. Andrew Rogers wrote:

[...]
There is enough VC money for everyone with
a decent business model. Honestly, most AGI
is not a decent business model.


Neither is philosophy, but philosophy prevails.


Otherwise Mentifex would be smothered in cash.
It might even keep him quiet.


I don't need cash beyond the exigencies of daily living.
Right now I'm going to respond off the top of my head
with the rather promising latest news from Mentifex AI.

ATM/Mentifex here fleshed out the initial Wikipedia stub of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_of_Mind
several years ago. M*ntifex-bashers came in and
rewrote it, but traces of my text linger still.
(And I have personally met Jerry Fodor years ago.)

Then for several years I kept the Modularity link
on dozens of mind-module webpages as a point of
departure into Wikipedia. Hordes of Wikpedia
editors worked over and over again on the
Modularity-of-mind article.

At the start of September 2007 I decided to
flesh out the Wikipedia connection for each
Mentifex AI mind-module webpage by expanding
from that single link to a "cluster" of all
discernible Wikipedia articles closely related
to the topic of my roughly forty mind-modules.

http://www.advogato.org/article/946.html
is where on 11 September 2007 I posted
"Wikipedia-based Open-Source Artificial Intelligence"
-- because I realized that I could "piggyback"
my independent-scholar AI project on Wikipedia
as a growing source of explanatory AI material.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/aima-talk/message/784
is where I suggested (and I quote a few lines):

It would be nice if future editions of the AIMA textbook
were to include some treatment of the various independent
AI projects that are out there (on the fringe?) nowadays.


Thereupon another discussant provided a link to
http://textbookrevolution.org -- a site which
immediately accepted my submission of
http://mind.sourceforge.net/aisteps.html as
"Artificial Intelligence Wikipedia-based Free Textbook."

So fortuitously, serendipitously the whole direction
of Mentifex AI changed direction in mere weeks.

http://AIMind-I.com is an example not only of
a separate AI spawned from Mentifex AI, but also
of why I do not need massive inputs of VC cash,
when other AI devotees just as dedicated as I am
will launch their own mentifex-class AI Mind
project using their own personal resources.

Now hear this. The Site Meter logs show that
interested parties from all over the world
are looking at the Mentifex offer of a free
AI textbook based on AI4U + updates + Wikipedia.

Mentifex AI is in it for the long haul now.
Not only here in America, but especially
overseas and in "third world" countries
there are AI-hungry programmers with
unlimited AGI ambition but scant cash.
They are the beneficiaries of Mentifex AI.

Arthur
--
http://mentifex.virtualentity.com

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Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience

[Mark Waser]

>> -- I think Granger's cog-sci speculations, while oversimplified and surely 
>> wrong in parts, contain important hints at the truth (and in my prior email 
>> I tried to indicate how) 
>> -- Richard OTOH, seems to consider Granger's cog-sci speculations total 
>> "garbage"
>> This is a significant difference of opinion, no?

As you've just stated it, yes.  However, rereading your previous e-mail, I 
still don't really see where you agree with his cog sci (as opposed to what I 
would still call neurobiology which I did see you agreeing with).


  - Original Message - 
  From: Benjamin Goertzel 
  To: agi@v2.listbox.com 
  Sent: Monday, October 22, 2007 10:26 AM
  Subject: Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience


  And I really am not seeing any difference between what I understand as 
your opinion and what I understand as his. 


  Sorry if I seemed to be "hammering" on anyone, it wasn't my intention. 
(Yesterday was a sort of bad day for me for non-science-related reasons, so my 
tone of e-voice was likely off a bit ...) 

  I think the difference between my and Richard's views on Granger would likely 
be best summarized by saying that

  -- I think Granger's cog-sci speculations, while oversimplified and surely 
wrong in parts, contain important hints at the truth (and in my prior email I 
tried to indicate how) 

  -- Richard OTOH, seems to consider Granger's cog-sci speculations total 
"garbage"

  This is a significant difference of opinion, no?

  -- Ben

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Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience

[Richard Loosemore]

Mark Waser wrote:

 >> True enough, but Granger's work is NOT total BS... just partial BS ;-)
In which case, clearly praise the good stuff but just as clearly (or 
even more so) oppose the BS.
 
You and Richard seem to be in vehement agreement.  Granger knows his 
neurology and probably his neuroscience (depending upon where you draw 
the line) but his link of neuroscience to cognitive science is not only 
wildly speculative but clearly amateurish and lacking the necessary 
solid grounding in the latter field.
 
I'm not quite sure why you always hammer Richard for pointing this out.  
He does have his agenda to stamp out bad science (which I endorse 
fully) but he does tend to praise the good science (even if more 
faintly) as well.  Your hammering of Richard often appears as a strawman 
to me since I know that you know that Richard doesn't dismiss these 
people's good neurology -- just their bad cog sci.  And I really am not 
seeing any difference between what I understand as your opinion and what 
I understand as his. 


You know, you're right:  I do spend a lot less time praising good stuff, 
and I sometimes feel bad about that (Accentuate The Positive, and all that).


But the reason I do so much critiquing is that the AI/Cog 
Sci/Neuroscience area is so badly clogged with nonsense and what we need 
right now is for someone to start cutting down the dead wood.  We need 
to stop new people coming into the field and wasting years (or their 
entire career) reinventing wheels or trying to fix wheels that were 
already known to be broken beyond repair 30 years before they were born.


About the Granger paper, I thought last night of a concise summary of 
how bad it really is.  Imagine that we had not invented computers, but 
we were suddenly given a batch of computers by some aliens, and we tried 
to put together a science to understand how these machines worked.


Suppose, also, that these machines ran Microsoft Word and nothing else.

As scientists, we then divide into at least two camps.  The 
"neuroscientists" take these computers and just analyze wiring and other 
physical characteristics. After a while these folks can tell you all 
about the different bits they have named and how they are connected: 
DDR3 memory, SLI, frontside bus, water cooling, clock speeds, cache, etc 
etc etc.  Then there is another camp, the "cognitive scientists" who try 
to understand the Microsoft Word application running on these computers, 
without paying much attention to the hardware.


The cog sci people have struggled to make sense of Word (and still don't 
have a good theory, even today), and over the years they have embraced, 
and then rejected, several really bad theories of how Word works.  One 
of these, which was invented about 70 years ago, and discarded about 50 
years ago, was called "behaviorism" and it had some pretty nutty ideas 
about what was going on.  To the behaviorists, MS Word consisted of a 
huge pile of things that represented words ("word-units"), and the way 
the program worked was that the word-units just had an activation level 
that went up if there were more instances of that word in a document, or 
if the word was in a bigger font, or in bold or italic.  And there were 
links between the word-units called "associations".  The behaviorists 
seriously believed that they could explain all of MS Word this way, but 
today we consider this theory to have been stupidly simplistic, and we 
have far for subtle, complex ideas about what is going on.


What was so bad about the behaviorist theory?  Many, many things, but 
take a look at one of them: it just cannot handle the "instance-generic" 
distinction (aka the "type-token" distinction).  It cannot represent 
individual instances of words in the document.  If the word "the" 
appears a hundred times, that just makes the word-unit for "the" so much 
stronger, that's all.  It really doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell 
you that that is a big, fat problem.


The one "virtue" of behaviorism is that amateurs can pick up the talk 
pretty quickly, and if they don't know all the ridiculous limitations 
and faults of behaviorism, they can even convince themselves that this 
is the beginnings of a workable theory of intelligence.


So now, along comes a neuroscientist (Granger, although he is only one 
of many) and he writes a paper that is filled with 95% talk about wires 
and busses and caches and connections  and then here and there he 
inserts statements out of the blue that purport to be a description of 
things going on at the Microsoft Word level (and indeed the whole paper 
is supposed to be about finding the fundamental circuit components that 
explain Microsoft Word).  Only problem is that whenever he suddenly 
inserts a few sentences of Microsoft Word talk, it is just a vague 
reference to how the circuitry can explain the things going on in what 
sounds like a *behaviorist* theory!  His statements look wildly out of 
place:  its all "SLI b

[agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience [...]

[A. T. Murray]

On Oct 21, 2007, at 6:47 PM, J. Andrew Rogers wote:
>
>On Oct 21, 2007, at 6:37 PM, Richard Loosemore wrote:
>> It took me at least five years of struggle to get to the point  
>> where I could start to have the confidence to call a spade a spade
>
>
>It still looks like a shovel to me.
>
In what looks not like a spade or a shovel but like
CENSORSHIP -- my message below was in response to

http://www.mail-archive.com/agi@v2.listbox.com/msg07943.html

Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 06:18:27 -0700 (PDT)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (A. T. Murray)
Subject: Re: [agi] More public awarenesss that AGI is coming fast
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Reply-To: agi@v2.listbox.com
 
 
J. Andrew Rogers wrote:
> [...]
> There is enough VC money for everyone with
> a decent business model. Honestly, most AGI
> is not a decent business model.
 
Neither is philosophy, but philosophy prevails.
 
> Otherwise Mentifex would be smothered in cash.
> It might even keep him quiet.
 
I don't need cash beyond the exigencies of daily living.
Right now I'm going to respond off the top of my head
with the rather promising latest news from Mentifex AI.
 
ATM/Mentifex here fleshed out the initial Wikipedia stub of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_of_Mind
several years ago. M*ntifex-bashers came in and
rewrote it, but traces of my text linger still.
(And I have personally met Jerry Fodor years ago.)
 
Then for several years I kept the Modularity link
on dozens of mind-module webpages as a point of
departure into Wikipedia. Hordes of Wikpedia
editors worked over and over again on the
Modularity-of-mind article.
 
At the start of September 2007 I decided to
flesh out the Wikipedia connection for each
Mentifex AI mind-module webpage by expanding
from that single link to a "cluster" of all
discernible Wikipedia articles closely related
to the topic of my roughly forty mind-modules.
 
http://www.advogato.org/article/946.html
is where on 11 September 2007 I posted
"Wikipedia-based Open-Source Artificial Intelligence"
-- because I realized that I could "piggyback"
my independent-scholar AI project on Wikipedia
as a growing source of explanatory AI material.
 
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/aima-talk/message/784
is where I suggested (and I quote a few lines):
> It would be nice if future editions of the AIMA textbook
> were to include some treatment of the various independent
> AI projects that are out there (on the fringe?) nowadays.
 
Thereupon another discussant provided a link to
http://textbookrevolution.org -- a site which
immediately accepted my submission of
http://mind.sourceforge.net/aisteps.html as
"Artificial Intelligence Wikipedia-based Free Textbook."
 
So fortuitously, serendipitously the whole direction
of Mentifex AI changed direction in mere weeks.
 
http://AIMind-I.com is an example not only of
a separate AI spawned from Mentifex AI, but also
of why I do not need massive inputs of VC cash,
when other AI devotees just as dedicated as I am
will launch their own mentifex-class AI Mind
project using their own personal resources.
 
Now hear this. The Site Meter logs show that
interested parties from all over the world
are looking at the Mentifex offer of a free
AI textbook based on AI4U + updates + Wikipedia.
 
Mentifex AI is in it for the long haul now.
Not only here in America, but especially
overseas and in "third world" countries
there are AI-hungry programmers with
unlimited AGI ambition but scant cash.
They are the beneficiaries of Mentifex AI.
 
Arthur
--
http://mentifex.virtualentity.com 

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Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience

[Benjamin Goertzel]

>
>   And I really am not seeing any difference between what I understand as
> your opinion and what I understand as his.
>

Sorry if I seemed to be "hammering" on anyone, it wasn't my intention.
(Yesterday was a sort of bad day for me for non-science-related reasons, so
my tone of e-voice was likely off a bit ...)

I think the difference between my and Richard's views on Granger would
likely be best summarized by saying that

-- I think Granger's cog-sci speculations, while oversimplified and surely
wrong in parts, contain important hints at the truth (and in my prior email
I tried to indicate how)

-- Richard OTOH, seems to consider Granger's cog-sci speculations total
"garbage"

This is a significant difference of opinion, no?

-- Ben

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Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience

[Mark Waser]

>> True enough, but Granger's work is NOT total BS... just partial BS ;-)

In which case, clearly praise the good stuff but just as clearly (or even more 
so) oppose the BS.

You and Richard seem to be in vehement agreement.  Granger knows his neurology 
and probably his neuroscience (depending upon where you draw the line) but his 
link of neuroscience to cognitive science is not only wildly speculative but 
clearly amateurish and lacking the necessary solid grounding in the latter 
field.

I'm not quite sure why you always hammer Richard for pointing this out.  He 
does have his agenda to stamp out bad science (which I endorse fully) but he 
does tend to praise the good science (even if more faintly) as well.  Your 
hammering of Richard often appears as a strawman to me since I know that you 
know that Richard doesn't dismiss these people's good neurology -- just their 
bad cog sci.  And I really am not seeing any difference between what I 
understand as your opinion and what I understand as his. 


  - Original Message - 
  From: Benjamin Goertzel 
  To: agi@v2.listbox.com 
  Sent: Monday, October 22, 2007 8:00 AM
  Subject: Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience





  On 10/22/07, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> If I see garbage being peddled as if it were science, I will call it
> garbage.

Amen.  The "political correctness" of forgiving people for espousing total
BS is the primary cause of many egregious things going on for far, *far* 
too 
long.

  True enough, but Granger's work is NOT total BS... just partial BS ;-)

  I felt his discussion of the details by which the basal ganglia may serve as a
  reward mechanism added something to prior papers I'd read on the topic.  
Admittedly 
  our knowledge of this neural reward mechanism is still way too crude to yield 
any
  insights regarding AGI, but, it's still interesting.

  On the other hand, his "simplified thalamocortical core and matrix 
algorithms" are 
  way too simplified for me.  They seem to sidestep the whole issue of complex
  nonlinear dynamics and the formation of strange attractors or transients.  
I.e., even
  if the basic idea he has is right, in which thalamocortical loops mediate the 
formation 
  of semantically meaningful activation-patterns in the cortex, his 
characterization of
  these patterns in terms of categories and subcategories and so forth can at 
best
  only be applicable to a small subset of examples of cortical function  
The difference 
  between the simplified thalamocortical algorithms he presents and the real 
ones seems 
  to me to be the nonlinear dynamics that give rise to intelligence ;-) .. 

  And this is what
  leads me to be extremely skeptical of his speculative treatment of linguistic 
grammar 
  learning within his framework.  I think he's looking for grammatical 
structure to be
  represented at the "wrong level" in his network... at the level of individual 
activation-patterns
  rather than at the level of the emergent structure of activation-patterns 
 Because his 
  simplified version of the thalamocortical loop is too simplified to give rise 
to nonlinear
  dynamics that display subtly patterned emergent structures...

  -- Ben G

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Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience

[Benjamin Goertzel]

On 10/22/07, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > If I see garbage being peddled as if it were science, I will call it
> > garbage.
>
> Amen.  The "political correctness" of forgiving people for espousing total
> BS is the primary cause of many egregious things going on for far, *far*
> too
> long.


True enough, but Granger's work is NOT total BS... just partial BS ;-)

I felt his discussion of the details by which the basal ganglia may serve as
a
reward mechanism added something to prior papers I'd read on the topic.
Admittedly
our knowledge of this neural reward mechanism is still way too crude to
yield any
insights regarding AGI, but, it's still interesting.

On the other hand, his "simplified thalamocortical core and matrix
algorithms" are
way too simplified for me.  They seem to sidestep the whole issue of complex
nonlinear dynamics and the formation of strange attractors or transients.
I.e., even
if the basic idea he has is right, in which thalamocortical loops mediate
the formation
of semantically meaningful activation-patterns in the cortex, his
characterization of
these patterns in terms of categories and subcategories and so forth can at
best
only be applicable to a small subset of examples of cortical function
The difference
between the simplified thalamocortical algorithms he presents and the real
ones seems
to me to be the nonlinear dynamics that give rise to intelligence ;-) ..

And this is what
leads me to be extremely skeptical of his speculative treatment of
linguistic grammar
learning within his framework.  I think he's looking for grammatical
structure to be
represented at the "wrong level" in his network... at the level of
individual activation-patterns
rather than at the level of the emergent structure of
activation-patterns  Because his
simplified version of the thalamocortical loop is too simplified to give
rise to nonlinear
dynamics that display subtly patterned emergent structures...

-- Ben G

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[agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience

[Mark Waser]

If I see garbage being peddled as if it were science, I will call it 
garbage.


Amen.  The "political correctness" of forgiving people for espousing total 
BS is the primary cause of many egregious things going on for far, *far* too 
long.



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