Re: [agi] Human memory and number of synapses
On 10/20/07, Matt Mahoney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [most of post snipped and agreed with] Without a number, you could argue that the vast majority of synapses store subconscious (non recallable) memories. But I can still argue otherwise. Humans are not significantly superior to other large animals with smaller brains (such as a bear or a deer) in skills that don't involve language, such as running over rough terrain or discriminating various plants and animals. As I understand it, this is not the case. Tests of throwing accuracy have put chimpanzees' typical error in feet in the same ballpark as humans' typical error in inches. (Some of this is mechanical - the arrangement of bones and muscles in the human arm trades off some strength for accuracy - but some of it is neural.) Humans distinguish a larger number of food and similar non-food plants and animals than any other species. Humans recognize a larger number of individuals in a social context than any other species. I don't have a reference handy, but someone once plotted a graph of brain size versus number of individuals recognized for various social animals - and found humans fall about where you'd expect on the graph given our brain size. Fossil evidence suggests the expansion of brain size in our ancestral line roughly coincides with toolmaking. Spoken language doesn't fossilize, so we're somewhat in the realm of conjecture here, but it has been at least plausibly reckoned that language came later. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56204583-b479f2
[agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
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. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56240391-7b4448
RE: [agi] An AGI Test/Prize
Ben, That is sort of a neat kind of device. Will have to think about that as it is fairly dynamic I may have to look that one up and potentially experiment on it. The kinds of algebraic structures I'm talking about basically are as many as possible. Also things like sets w/o operators, and things not classified as algebraic but related. I can talk generally about this and then maybe specifics. The idea is that - let's say you are a developer and are writing say a web server. How do you go about it? First thing you do is scrounge the internet for snippets and source code, libraries, specs, etc.. The AGI I'm talking about is approached the same way cept' you scrounge mathematics publications generally dealing with abstract algebras. To start off though as there are hundreds of years of code snippets with proofs BTW but we start with simple stuff - groups, rings, fields, algebras, groupoids, etc. including sub-chunks and twists of these things. Sticking with discrete for starters except for some continuous here and there. One might ask why do it this way? The idea is that the framework is elaborate, universal, super powerful construct - basically all abstract math - defined by man cumulative over time, grounded in rigorous proofs and absolutes. The goal is to get everything into it meaning all data input is analyzed for algebraic structure and put into the thing. It's an algebraic superhighway mesh highly dense -yes you have to emulate it on digital computers - go from infinite algebraic mesh to physical real digital subset emulated BUT that's kind of what our brains do. We happen to live in (at least from day to day perspective) a very finite resource world. I'd like to delve deeper into digital physics but will not here J So there is a little background. All we are talking about is math and data and computer. So getting stuff into it? Think about it this way - built in lossy compression. Yes you have sensory memory duration gradations, example: photographic to skeletoid, but to get the algebraic structure is where the AI and stats tools get used. You can imagine how that works - but the goal is algebraic structure especially operators, magma detection, - imagine example a dog running look at all the cyclic groups going on - symmetry, sets, these are signatures, motion operators - subgroups of bodily movement definitions sampled is behavioral display, then put the dog into memory - morphisms storage - all dogs ever seen -think of a telescoping morphism tree index like structure. The AGI internals include morphism and functor networks kind of like analogy tree nets. Subgroups, subfields, etc. are very important as you leverage their structure defined onto their instance representations - Linguistic semantics? Same way. The AI and stats sensory has to break it up into algebraic structure. You need complexity detection. A view of a mountain and a view of a page of text have different complexity signatures. It detects text. The gradation from image to algebraic structure - the exploded text - sets and operators - processed according to its complexity sig, rips it apart put into the algebraic text structure mesh memory of built in telescoping morphism tree (or basically mossy or wormy structures at this point from a dimensional cross section view). The linguistic text structure is hierarchies of intersecting subsets and subgroups with morphic relational trees intersecting with cyclic group and subgroup indexors, etc.. tied into the KB through, once again algebraic structure. Knowledge is very compressed and cyclic group centric (seems like especially physicl world knowledge)- it sort of collapses with a self-organizing effect as more data is added where memories can be peeled off. Anyway, kind of understand where it's headed? John From: Benjamin Goertzel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] John Rose, As a long-lapsed mathematician, I'm curious about your system, but what you've said about it so far doesn't really tell me much... Do you have a mathematical description of your system? I did some theoretical work years ago representing complex systems dynamics in terms of abstract algebras. What I showed there was that you could represent a certain kind of multi-component system, with complex inter-component interactions, in such a way that its dynamic evolution over time is equivalent to the iteration of a quadratic function in a high-dimensional space with an eccentric multiplication table on it. The multiplication table basically encodes information of the form (component i) acts_on (component j) to produce (component k) where acts_on is the mult. operator So then complex systems dynamics all comes down to Julia sets and Mandelbrot sets on high-dimensional real algebras ;-) I never ended up making any use of this direction of thinking, but I found it interesting... This stuff made it into my 1997 book From Complexity to Creativity I believe... I am curious what
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
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 -- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?; - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56245822-75b432
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 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56269619-052656
Re: [agi] An AGI Test/Prize
On Monday 22 October 2007 08:05:26 am, Benjamin Goertzel wrote: ... but dynamic long-term memory, in my view, is a wildly self-organizing mess, and would best be modeled algebraically as a quadratic iteration over a high-dimensional real non-division algebra whose multiplication table is evolving dynamically as the iteration proceeds Holy writhing Mandelbrot sets, Batman! Why real and non-division? I particularly don't like real -- my computer can't handle the precision :-) Josh - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56270025-9c1ac7
[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 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56273452-4f8ff3
Re: [agi] An AGI Test/Prize
On 10/22/07, J Storrs Hall, PhD [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Monday 22 October 2007 08:05:26 am, Benjamin Goertzel wrote: ... but dynamic long-term memory, in my view, is a wildly self-organizing mess, and would best be modeled algebraically as a quadratic iteration over a high-dimensional real non-division algebra whose multiplication table is evolving dynamically as the iteration proceeds Holy writhing Mandelbrot sets, Batman! Why real and non-division? I particularly don't like real -- my computer can't handle the precision :-) You need to get the new NVidia AIXI chip ... it's a bargain at $infinity.99 ;-) - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56281147-0ed02b
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
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 bus connects with a
RE: [agi] An AGI Test/Prize
Holy writhing Mandelbrot sets, Batman! Why real and non-division? I particularly don't like real -- my computer can't handle the precision :-) Robin - forget all this digital stuff it's a trap, we need some analog nano-computers to help fight these crispy impostors! John - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56310633-8760ea
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
-- 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 -- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?; - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56325849-3cdbfb
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience [...]
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: agi@v2.listbox.com 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 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?; - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56326072-faf52d
Re: [agi] An AGI Test/Prize
Benjamin Goertzel wrote: On 10/22/07, *J Storrs Hall, PhD* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Monday 22 October 2007 08:05:26 am, Benjamin Goertzel wrote: ... but dynamic long-term memory, in my view, is a wildly self-organizing mess, and would best be modeled algebraically as a quadratic iteration over a high-dimensional real non-division algebra whose multiplication table is evolving dynamically as the iteration proceeds Holy writhing Mandelbrot sets, Batman! Why real and non-division? I particularly don't like real -- my computer can't handle the precision :-) You need to get the new NVidia AIXI chip ... it's a bargain at $infinity.99 ;-) Oh, it's not the price for the NVidia AIXI chip that bothers me, its the delivery: Amazon say that orders will be shipped when Hell reaches Zero Degrees Kelvin. Richard Loosemore - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56326627-3df523
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
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 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56327957-1b80ae
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
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 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56329795-c7f0d9
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
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? - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56335298-578a1a
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
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 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56337351-4ef3ca
RE: [agi] An AGI Test/Prize
Yeah I'm not really agreeing with you here. I feel that, though I haven't really studied other cognitive software structures, but I feel that they can built simpler and more efficient. But I shouldn't come out saying that unless I attack some of the details right? But that's a gut reaction I have after working on so many large software projects. And it does depend on the view of cognition. Some of cognition is just hype it depends on what you are trying to build. There are a lot of warm-fuzzies, Dr. Feelgood things going on with cognition. I like cognition as a machine, a systematic controlled complexity modeler, edge of chaos surfing, crystallographic, polytopical harmonic, probabilistic sort of morphism and structure pump, with SOM injection - yeah I want a machine that rips through the fabric of reality mesh. John From: Benjamin Goertzel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Well the problem is that branches of algebra like universal algebra and category theory, that don't assume highly particular algebraic rules, don't really have any deep theorems that tell you anything... Whereas the branches of algebra that really give you deep information, all pertain to highly specialized structures that are very unlikely to be relevant to cognition... - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56339571-d001db
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
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. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56347245-bce03f
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
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 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56347479-f61549
Re: [agi] Re: Bogus Neuroscience
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 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56348307-a7af54
Re: Bogus Neuroscience [WAS Re: [agi] Human memory and number of synapses]
As I said above, it leaves many things unsaid and unclear. For example, does it activate all or multiple nodes in a cluster together or not? Does it always activate the most general cluster covering a given pattern, or does it use some measure of how well a cluster fits input to select what, and to what degree, cluster(s) in the generalization hierarchy spreads its(their) activation through the matrix loop? Is it correct to assume that this form of sequential spreading activation can take place between massive number of subconsciously activated nodes simultaneously, or is it limited to a relatively few, or near conscious nodes? How exactly does the model of the basil ganglia described in the earlier part of this paper plug into the operation of the core and matrix loops described in its later part. How does it handle sequential activations that are feed to it in a different order than that originally learned. Etc. My hypothesis is that when the nodes in a cluster are activated, this then leads to the recruitment of other associated nodes not in the cluster, into a contextually-appropriate transient assembly ... and that much of what's interesting in cognitive neurodynamics has to do with these transient assemblies and their interactions... which of course Granger does not touch on... Re consciousness, I tend to agree with Greenfield's hypothesis that wide-ranging transient neural assemblies are associated with conscious awareness. This harmonizes well with the hypothesis I make in the Hidden Pattern, that the more information-theoretically intense patterns in the brain will tend to correspond to the more subjectively intense consciousness experiences... -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56358149-2d450f
FW: Bogus Neuroscience [WAS Re: [agi] Human memory and number of synapses]
Richard, You might be interested to know how much attention one of your articles has gotten in the mailto:agi@v2.listbox.com agi@v2.listbox.com mailing list under the RE: Bogus Neuroscience [WAS Re: [agi] Human memory and number of synapses thread, which has been dedicated to it. Below is a message I sent in defense of your paper. If you have comments to either me or the list I would be interested in hearing them. Edward W. Porter Porter Associates 24 String Bridge S12 Exeter, NH 03833 (617) 494-1722 Fax (617) 494-1822 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -Original Message- From: Edward W. Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, October 22, 2007 1:34 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: RE: Bogus Neuroscience [WAS Re: [agi] Human memory and number of synapses] Dear Readers of the RE: Bogus Neuroscience Thread, Because I am the one responsible for bringing to the attention of this list the Granger article (Engines of the brain: The computational instruction set of human cognition, by Richard Granger) that has caused the recent kerfuffle, this morning I took the time to do a reasonably careful re-read of it. I originally read it when I was interested in trying to learn about the basil ganglia, and didnt read in depth much beyond its initial description of how it can serialize activations from a set of active nodes and learn patterns from such serial activations. And it was this learning from temporally sequential activations that caused me to cite the paper to Vladmir. I had totally forgotten the articles initial, arguably grossly overreaching claims of its own importance, because that wasnt what I remembered as being important it. Upon my complete re-reading this morning, I think, overall, this paper represent valuable work. I think its actual brain science is interesting and important. Its description of the basil ganglia certainly advanced my knowledge substantially. Its basic message about the cortico-thalamic loops is important that, in general, each cortical columns in the cortex has two types of loops through the thalamus: a core loop that feeds directly back to itself; and a matrix loop that feeds forward to widely distributed portions of the cortex. A significant portion of the paper is based on computer simulations. This makes the resulting observations somewhat questionable, since the accuracy of neural models can vary tremendously. But I welcome the general effect the increasing use of computational neural modeling has had on brain science. It lets us create models much more complex than we ever could in our own human minds, and then give them a spin. I think his notion that the combination of the two loops through the cortex allows spreading activation, particularly that between different localized topological maps, to use a sequential coding to, in effect, bind information is extremely interesting, and potentially valuable. It takes a fair amount of thought to understand the significance of this. Once, when we were both young and single and living in Manhattan I met a woman at a party who worked as an Asian art specialist for one of the worlds biggest art auction houses. I told her I had seen an excellent exhibition of 19th century Japanese art and artifacts and had blown me away with its abstraction and minimalism. She responded that in Japanese literature and art it is often a sign of respect for the intelligence of your readers and viewers to relay your message in as few words or as little detail as possible. In a similar vein, when Granger says his paper describes the basic mental operations from which all complex behavioral and cognitive abilities are constructed I think he assumes his intended readers will be quite intelligent enough, well versed in brain and cognitive science, and willing to take the time to understand the potential implications of what he is saying. I think he assumes that such reader, and to a certain degree further research and though, will fill in much of what is left unsaid. If you think about the sequential grammar he describes and include the ability for time dilation and compression he incorporates from other papers I have not read, it would possibly, in conjunction with prior knowledge, provide a mechanism for the learning, perception ,and recall of compositional structures having all the invariance of Hawkinss hierarchical memory. It not only provides for dealing with compositional patterns that are static, but also ones that are temporal. It also allows patterns to be learned that have elements spanning multiple topological regions of the brain. This is interesting and quite valuable. As I said above, it leaves many things unsaid and unclear. For example, does it activate all or multiple nodes in a cluster together or not? Does it always activate the most general cluster covering a given pattern, or does it use some measure of how well a cluster fits input to select what, and to what degree, cluster(s) in the
Re: Bogus Neuroscience [WAS Re: [agi] Human memory and number of synapses]
Edward W. Porter wrote: Dear Readers of the RE: Bogus Neuroscience Thread, Because I am the one responsible for bringing to the attention of this list the Granger article (“Engines of the brain: The computational instruction set of human cognition”, by Richard Granger) that has caused the recent kerfuffle, this morning I took the time to do a reasonably careful re-read of it. [snip] In his Sun 10/21/2007 2:12 PM post Richard Loosemore cited failure to answer the following questions as indications of the paper’s worthlessness. “RICHARD “How does it cope with the instance/generic distinction?” I assume after the most general cluster, or the cluster having the most activation from the current feature set, spreads its activation through the matrix loop, then the cluster most activated by the remaining features spreads activation through the matrix loop. This sequence can continue to presumably any desired level of detail supported by the current set of observed, remembered, or imagined features to be communicated in the brain. The added detail from such a sequence of descriptions would distinguish an instance from a generic description reprsented by just one such description.. A misunnderstanding: the question is how it can represent multiple copies of a concept that occur in a situation without getting confused about which is which. If the appearance of one chair in a scene causes the [chair] neuron (or neurons, if they are a cluster) to fire, then what happens when you walk into a chair factory? What happens when you try to understand a sentence in which there are several nouns: does the [noun] node fire more than before, and if it does, how does this help you parse the sentence? This is a DEEP issue: you cannot just say that this will be handled by other neural machinery on top of the basic (neural-cluster = representation of generic thing) idea, because that other machinery is nontrivial, and potentially it will require the original (neural-cluster = representation of generic thing) idea to be abandoned completely. “RICHARD “How does it allow top-down processes to operate in the recognition process?” I don’t think there was anything said about this, but the need for, and presence in the brain of, both top-down and bottom-up processes is so well know as to have properly been assumed. Granted, but in a system in which the final state is determined by expectations as well as by incoming input, the dynamics of the system are potentially completely different, and all of Granger's assertions about the roles played by various neural structures may have to be completely abandoned in order to make allowance for that new dynamic. “RICHARD “How are relationships between instances encoded?” ” I assume the readers will understand how it handles temporal relationships (if you add the time dilation and compression mentioned above). Spatial relationships would come from the topology of V1 (but sensed spatial relationships can also be build via a kohonen net SOM with temporal difference of activiation time as the SOM’s similarity metric). Similarly, other higher order relationships can be built from patterns in the space of hierarchical gen/comp pats networks derived from inputs in these two basic dimensions of space and time plus in the dimensions defined by other sensory, emotional, and motor inputs. [I consider motor outputs as a type of input]. Again, no: relationships are extremely dynamic: any two concepts can be linked by a relationship at any moment, so the specific question is, if things are represented as clusters of neurons, how does the system set up a temporary connection between those clusters, given that there is not, in general, a direct link between any two neurons in the brain? You cannot simply strengthen the link between your artichoke neuron and your basilisk neuron in order to form the relationship caused by my mention of both of them in the same sentence, because, in general, there may not be any axons going from one to the other. “RICHARD “How are relationships abstracted?” By shared features. He addresses how clusters tend to form automatically. These clusters are abstractions. These are only clusters of things. He has to address this issue separately for relationships which are connections or links between things. The question is about types of links, and about how there are potentially an infinite number of different types of such links: how are those different types represented and built and used? Again, a simple neural connection is not good enough, because
RE: Bogus Neuroscience [WAS Re: [agi] Human memory and number of synapses]
Richard, I will only respond to the below copied one of the questions in your last message because of lack of time. I pick this example because it was so DEEP (to be heard in your mind with max reverb). I hoped that if I could give a halfway reasonable answer to it and if, just maybe, you could open your mind (and that is one of the main issue in this thread), you might actually also try to think how your other questions could be answered. In response to this DEEP question, I ask How do you, Richard Loosemore, normally distinguish different instances of a given type. By distinguishing characteristics? (This would include things like little dings on your car or the junk in its back seat that distinquish it from a similar make and model of the same years and color. ) If so, that is handled by Grangers system in the manner described in my response to the question copied below. Now when you are dealing with objects that have an identical appearance, such as Diet Coke cans (the example I normally use when I think of this problem), often the only thing you can distinguish them by is again their distinguishing characteristics. But in this case the distinguishing characteristics would be things like their location, orientation, or perhaps relationship to other objects. It would also include implications that can properly be drawn from or about such characteristics for the type of thing involved. For example, if you leave a Diet Coke can (can_1) downstairs in your kitchen and go up to you bedroom and see an identical looking coke can next to your bed, you would normally assume the can next to your bed was not can_1, unless you had some explanation for how can_1 was moved next to your bed. (For purposes of dealing with the hardest part of the problem we will assume all coke cans have been opened and have the same amount of coke with roughly the same level of carbonation.) If you go back down stairs and see a Diet Coke can exactly where you left can_1, you will assume it is can_1, itself, barring some reason to believe the can might have been replaced with another, such as if you know someone was in your kitchen during your absence. All these types of inferences are based on generalities, often important broad generalities like the persistence of objects, that take the learning of even more basic or more primiative generalities (such as those needed for object recognition, understanding the concept of physical objects, the ability to see similarities and dissimilarities between objects, and spatial and temporal models), all of which take millions of trillions of machine opps and weeks or months of experience to learn. So I hope you will forgive me and Granger if we dont explain them in detail. (Goertzel in Hidden Pattern, I think it is, actually gives an example of how an AGI could learn object persistence.) However, the whole notion of AGI is built on the premise that such things can be learned by a machine architecture having certain generalized capabilities and having something like the physical world to interact in and with. Those of us who are bullish on AGI think we already have a pretty good ideas how to make system that can have the required capabilities to learn such broad generalities, or at least get us much closer to such a system, so we can get a much better understanding of what more is needed, and then try to add it. With such ideas of how to make an AGI, it become much easier to map the various aspects of it into known, or hypothesized, operations in the brain. The features described in Grangers paper, when combined with other previous ideas on how the brain could function as an AGI, would seem to describe a system having roughly the general capability to learn and properly inference from all of the basic generalizations of the type I described above, such as the persistence of objects, and what types of objects move on their own, and with what probabilities under what circumstances. For example, Granger's article explains how to learn patterns, generalizations of pattersn, patterns of generalizations of patterns, and with something like a hippocampus it could learn episodes, and then patterns from episodes, and generalizations from patterns from episodes, and patterns of generalazations from episodes, etc. Yes, the Granger article, itself, does not describe all of the features necessary for the brain to act as a general AGI, but when interpreted in the context of enlightened AGI models, such as Novamente, and the current knowledge and leading hypotheses in brain science, it is easy to imagine how what he describes could play a very important role in solving even mental problems as DEEP (again with reverb) as that of determining whether the Diet Coke can on the table is the one you have been drinking from, or someone elses. Has there been a little hand waving in the above explanation? Yes, but if you have a good understanding of AGI and its brain equivalent, you
Re: Bogus Neuroscience [WAS Re: [agi] Human memory and number of synapses]
On 10/23/07, J Storrs Hall, PhD [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Still don't buy it. What the article amounts to is that speed-reading is fake. No kind of recognition beyond skimming (e.g. just ignoring a substantial proportion of the text) is called for to explain the observed performance. And I'm saying nevermind articles, try it for yourself. I tried the experiment, before I wrote that earlier post, it's easy to do. You'll find you do in fact recognize (I'm making no claims about rate of comprehension or retention, I'm only addressing the question of recognition) many words simultaneously, in parallel, without needing to saccade serially to each one. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56505374-0f2862
Re: Bogus Neuroscience [WAS Re: [agi] Human memory and number of synapses]
On Monday 22 October 2007 08:01:55 pm, Richard Loosemore wrote: Did you ever try to parse a sentence with more than one noun in it? Well, all right: but please be assured that the rest of us do in fact do that. Why make insulting personal remarkss instead of explaining your reasoning? (RL, Sat Oct 6 02:48:54 2007) - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56508702-7de092
Re: Bogus Neuroscience [WAS Re: [agi] Human memory and number of synapses]
On Monday 22 October 2007 08:48:20 pm, Russell Wallace wrote: On 10/23/07, J Storrs Hall, PhD [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Still don't buy it. What the article amounts to is that speed-reading is fake. No kind of recognition beyond skimming (e.g. just ignoring a substantial proportion of the text) is called for to explain the observed performance. And I'm saying nevermind articles, try it for yourself. I tried the experiment, before I wrote that earlier post, it's easy to do. You'll find you do in fact recognize (I'm making no claims about rate of comprehension or retention, I'm only addressing the question of recognition) many words simultaneously, in parallel, without needing to saccade serially to each one. Still don't buy it. Saccades are normally well below the conscious level, and a vast majority of what goes on cognitively is not available to introspection. Any good reader gets to the point where the sentence meanings, not the words at all, are the only thing that breaks into the conscious level. (you can read with essentially complete semantic comprehension and still be quite unable to repeat any of the text verbatim.) BTW, I'm not trying to say that no concurrent recognition happens in the brain -- I'm sure that it does. I merely maintain that I haven't seen any evidence to convince me that it occurs in that particular part of vision. Josh - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56509948-3b75bb
Re: Bogus Neuroscience [WAS Re: [agi] Human memory and number of synapses]
On Monday 22 October 2007 09:33:24 pm, Edward W. Porter wrote: Richard, ... Are you capable of understanding how that might be considered insulting? I think in all seriousness that he literally cannot understand. Richard's emotional interaction is very similar to that of some autistic people I have known. The recent spat over Turing completeness started when I made a remark I thought to be humorous -- *quoting exactly the words Richard had used to make the same joke* to someone else -- and he took the same words he had said as a disparaging insult when said to him. Josh - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56513821-de495c
Re: Bogus Neuroscience [WAS Re: [agi] Human memory and number of synapses]
On 10/23/07, J Storrs Hall, PhD [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Still don't buy it. Saccades are normally well below the conscious level, and a vast majority of what goes on cognitively is not available to introspection. Any good reader gets to the point where the sentence meanings, not the words at all, are the only thing that breaks into the conscious level. (you can read with essentially complete semantic comprehension and still be quite unable to repeat any of the text verbatim.) Sure, but saccades and word recognition are like breathing - normally they operate subconsciously, but you can become aware and take control of them if you so choose. Again this isn't abstruse theory - try it and see, the experiment can be done in seconds. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56514215-602795
Re: Bogus Neuroscience [WAS Re: [agi] Human memory and number of synapses]
You can DO them consciously but that doesn't necessarily mean that you can intentionally become conscious of the ones you are doing unconsciously. Try cutting a hole in a piece of paper and moving it smoothly across another page that has text on it. When your eye tracks the smoothly moving page, what appears through the hole is a blur. Josh On Monday 22 October 2007 10:23:12 pm, Russell Wallace wrote: On 10/23/07, J Storrs Hall, PhD [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Still don't buy it. Saccades are normally well below the conscious level, and a vast majority of what goes on cognitively is not available to introspection. Any good reader gets to the point where the sentence meanings, not the words at all, are the only thing that breaks into the conscious level. (you can read with essentially complete semantic comprehension and still be quite unable to repeat any of the text verbatim.) Sure, but saccades and word recognition are like breathing - normally they operate subconsciously, but you can become aware and take control of them if you so choose. Again this isn't abstruse theory - try it and see, the experiment can be done in seconds. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?; - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56519427-089861
Re: Bogus Neuroscience [WAS Re: [agi] Human memory and number of synapses]
On 10/23/07, J Storrs Hall, PhD [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You can DO them consciously but that doesn't necessarily mean that you can intentionally become conscious of the ones you are doing unconsciously. One every few seconds happens involuntarily, when I try to not let any through at all; but it's not unnoticeable, when concentrating, in the same way that breathing isn't. I don't believe it's that much of a freakish talent :) Try cutting a hole in a piece of paper and moving it smoothly across another page that has text on it. When your eye tracks the smoothly moving page, what appears through the hole is a blur. Absolutely - as can be readily verified right now just by focusing on one finger while moving it across your monitor; it's easy to be conscious of the fact that the contents of the screen are a blur. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56545873-bf81cb
RE: [agi] An AGI Test/Prize
Vladimir, I'm using system as kind of a general word for a set and operator(s). You are understanding it correctly except templates is not right. The templates are actually a vast internal complex of structure which includes morphisms which are like templates. But you are right it does seem like a categorization approach. When you say categorization approach can you point out an example of that that I can look into? John From: Vladimir Nesov [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] John, What do you mean by system? You imply that these objects have a structure, or equivalently are abstract models of original input. So, you take original input in whatever form it's coming in and based on it you create instances of abstract structures according to templates that are known to system. Is it essentially correct? If so, it's very similar to categorization approach: you observe experience indirectly, through categorization structure that current perception system produces for it. If you need to model a boolean based space for some sort of sampled data world it sees and correlates to that, the thing would generate a boolean algebra modeled and represented onto that informational structure for that particular space instance being studied. For example electronics theory - it would need to model that world as an instance based on electronics descriptor items and operators in that particular world or space set. Electronics theory world could be spat out as something very minor that it understands. So, it would assembled a description 'in place' from local rules, based on information provided by specific experience. Is it a correct restatement? Not sure if my terminology is very standard but do you understand the thinking? It may very well be morphic to other AGI structures or theories I don't know but I kind of like the way it works represented as such because it seems simple and not messy but very comprehensive and has other good qualities. It's very vague, but can with a stretch of imagination be mapped to many other views. It's unclear with this level of detail. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=56546239-4cc4b3
