Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer
Hi meekerdb Complexity need not have anything to do with intelligence. The critical requirement is autonomy of choice. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/12/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-11, 14:20:13 Subject: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer On 1/11/2013 2:12 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 1:33 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 1/10/2013 4:23 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Do you think there can be something that is intelligent but not complex (and use whatever definitions of intelligent and complex you want). A thermostat is much less complex than a human brain but intelligent under my definition. But much less intelligent. That's your conclusion, not mine. According to my definition you can only compare thermostats being good at being thermostats and Brents being good at being Brents. Because you can only compare intelligence against a same set of goals. Otherwise you're just saying that intelligence A is more complex than intelligence B. Human intelligence requires a certain level of complexity, bacteria intelligence another. That's all. So you've removed all meaning from intelligence. Rocks are smart at being rocks, we just have to recognize their goal is be rocks. Maybe we can stop dancing around the question by referring to human-level-intelligence and then rephrasing the question as, Do you think human-like-intelligence requires human-like-complexity? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer
Hi Bruno Marchal Good. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/12/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-12, 07:02:42 Subject: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer On 12 Jan 2013, at 11:53, Roger Clough wrote: Hi meekerdb Complexity need not have anything to do with intelligence. The critical requirement is autonomy of choice. But that autonomy itself requires a minimal amount of complexity. Then the math shows that it is not a lot. universality is cheap. Intelligence requires the same very minimal, but not null, complexity. Bruno [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/12/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-11, 14:20:13 Subject: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer On 1/11/2013 2:12 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 1:33 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 1/10/2013 4:23 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Do you think there can be something that is intelligent but not complex (and use whatever definitions of intelligent and complex you want). A thermostat is much less complex than a human brain but intelligent under my definition. But much less intelligent. That's your conclusion, not mine. According to my definition you can only compare thermostats being good at being thermostats and Brents being good at being Brents. Because you can only compare intelligence against a same set of goals. Otherwise you're just saying that intelligence A is more complex than intelligence B. Human intelligence requires a certain level of complexity, bacteria intelligence another. That's all. So you've removed all meaning from intelligence. Rocks are smart at being rocks, we just have to recognize their goal is be rocks. Maybe we can stop dancing around the question by referring to human- level-intelligence and then rephrasing the question as, Do you think human-like-intelligence requires human-like-complexity? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer
Hi Craig Weinberg Due to their universal perceptions, monads should be extremely complex. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/11/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-11, 08:07:47 Subject: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer On Friday, January 11, 2013 12:27:54 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 1/10/2013 9:20 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, January 10, 2013 7:33:06 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 1/10/2013 4:23 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Do you think there can be something that is intelligent but not complex (and use whatever definitions of intelligent and complex you want). A thermostat is much less complex than a human brain but intelligent under my definition. But much less intelligent. So in effect you think there is a degree of intelligence in everything, just like you believe there's a degree of consciousness in everything. And the degree of intelligence correlates with the degree of complexity ...but you don't think the same about consciousness? Brent I was thinking today that a decent way of defining intelligence is just 'The ability to know what's going on'. This makes it clear that intelligence refers to the degree of sophistication of awareness, not just complexity of function or structure. This is why a computer which has complex function and structure has no authentic intelligence and has no idea 'what's going on'. Intelligence however has everything to do with sensitivity, integration, and mobilization of awareness as an asset, i.e. to be directed for personal gain or shared enjoyment, progress, etc. Knowing what's going on implicitly means caring what goes on, which also supervenes on biological quality investment in experience. Which is why I think an intelligent machine must be one that acts in its environment. Simply 'being aware' or 'knowing' are meaningless without the ability and motives to act on them. Sense and motive are inseparable ontologically, although they can be interleaved by level. A plant for instance has no need to act on the world to the same degree as an organism which can move its location, but the cells that make up the plant act to grow and direct it toward light, extend roots to water and nutrients, etc. Ontologically however, there is no way to really have awareness which matters without some participatory opportunity or potential for that opportunity. The problem with a machine (any machine) is that at the level which is it a machine, it has no way to participate. By definition a machine does whatever it is designed to do. Anything that we use as a machine has to be made of something which we can predict and control reliably, so that its sensory-motive capacities are very limited by definition. Its range of 'what's going on' has to be very narrow. The internet, for instance, passes a tremendous number of events through electronic circuits, but the content of all of it is entirely lost on it. We use the internet to increase our sense and inform our motives, but its sense and motive does not increase at all. Craig Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/pf0w53nZsoMJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer
Hi Telmo Menezes The electronics presumably requires a digital signal. But the brain presumably uses analog signals. And there is the raster line and sync signal problem. There is the digital pixel problem, which uses only 3 colors: blue,green,red. How can all of this work ? [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/8/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Telmo Menezes Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-07, 19:24:24 Subject: Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer Hi Craig, On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 12:41 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Monday, January 7, 2013 6:19:33 AM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 8:55 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg ? Sorry, everybody, I was snookered into believing that they had really accomplished the impossible. So you think this paper is fiction and the video is fabricated? Do people here know something I don't about the authors? The paper doesn't claim that images from the brain have been decoded, Yes it does, right in the abstract: To demonstrate the power of our approach, we also constructed a Bayesian decoder [8] by combining estimated encoding models with a sampled natural movie prior. The decoder provides remarkable reconstructions of the viewed movies. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2811%2900937-7 ? but the sensational headlines imply that is what they did. Starting with UC Berkeley itself: http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/ ? The video isn't supposed to be anything but fabricated. ALL videos are fabricated in that sense. ? It's a muddle of YouTube videos superimposed upon each other according to a Bayesian probability reduction. Yes, and the images you see on your computer screen are just a matrix of molecules artificially made to align in a certain way so that the light being emitted behind them arrives at your eyes in a way that resembles the light emitted by some real world scene that it is meant to be represented. ? Did you think that the video was coming from a brain feed like a TV broadcast? It is certainly not that at all. Nice straw man + ad hominem you did there! ? ? The hypothesis is that the brain has some encoding for images. Where are the encoded images decoded into what we actually see? In the computer that runs the Bayesian algorithm. ? ? These images can come from the optic nerve, they could be stored in memory or they could be constructed by sophisticated cognitive processes related to creativity, pattern matching and so on. But if you believe that the brain's neural network is a computer responsible for our cognitive processes, the information must be stores there, physically, somehow. That is the assumption, but it is not necessarily a good one. The problem is that information is only understandable in the context of some form of awareness - an experience of being informed. A machine with no user can only produce different kinds of noise as there is nothing ultimately to discern the difference between a signal and a non-signal. Sure. That's why the algorithm has to be trained with known videos. So it can learn which brain activity correlates with what 3p accessible images we can all agree upon. ? It's horribly hard to decode what's going on in the brain. Yet every newborn baby learns to do it all by themselves, without any sign of any decoding theater. Yes. The newborn baby comes with the genetic material that generates the optimal decoder. ? ? These researchers thought of a clever shortcut. They expose people to a lot of images and record come measures of brain activity in the visual cortex. Then they use machine learning to match brain states to images. Of course it's probabilistic and noisy. But then they got a video that actually approximates the real images. You might get the same result out of precisely mapping the movements of the eyes instead. Maybe. That's not where they took the information from though. They took it from the visual cortex. ? What they did may have absolutely nothing to do with how the brain encodes or experiences images, no more than your Google history can approximate the shape of your face. Google history can only approximate the shape of my face if there is a correlation between the two. In which case my Google history is, in fact, also a description of the shape of my face. ? ? So there must be some way to decode brain activity into images. The killer argument against that is that the brain has no sync signals to generate the raster lines. Neither does reality, but we somehow manage to show a representation of it on tv, right? What human beings see on TV simulates one optical environment with another optical environment. You need to be a human being
Re: Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer
Hi Telmo Menezes Well then, we have at least one vote supporting the results. I remain sceptical because of the line sync issue. The brain doesn't provide a raster line sync signal. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Telmo Menezes Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-07, 06:19:33 Subject: Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 8:55 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg ? Sorry, everybody, I was snookered into believing that they had really accomplished the impossible. So you think this paper is fiction and the video is fabricated? Do people here know something I don't about the authors? The hypothesis is that the brain has some encoding for images. These images can come from the optic nerve, they could be stored in memory or they could be constructed by sophisticated cognitive processes related to creativity, pattern matching and so on. But if you believe that the brain's neural network is a computer responsible for our cognitive processes, the information must be stores there, physically, somehow. It's horribly hard to decode what's going on in the brain. These researchers thought of a clever shortcut. They expose people to a lot of images and record come measures of brain activity in the visual cortex. Then they use machine learning to match brain states to images. Of course it's probabilistic and noisy. But then they got a video that actually approximates the real images. So there must be some way to decode brain activity into images. The killer argument against that is that the brain has no sync signals to generate the raster lines. Neither does reality, but we somehow manage to show a representation of it on tv, right? ? ? ? [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/6/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-05, 11:37:17 Subject: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer On Saturday, January 5, 2013 10:43:32 AM UTC-5, rclough wrote: Subjective states can somehow be extracted from brains via a computer. No, they can't. ? The ingenius folks who were miraculously able to extract an image from the brain that we saw recently ? http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity somehow did it entirely through computation. How was that possible? By passing off a weak Bayesian regression analysis as a terrific consciousness breakthrough. Look again at the image comparisons. There is nothing being reconstructed, there is only the visual noise of many superimposed shapes which least dis-resembles the test image. It's not even stage magic, it's just a search engine. ? There are at least two imaginable theories, neither of which I can explain step by step: What they did was take lots of images and correlate patterns in the V1 region of the brain with those that corresponded V1 patterns in others who had viewed the known images. It's statistical guesswork and it is complete crap. The computer analyzed 18 million seconds of random YouTube video, building a database of potential brain activity for each clip. From all these videos, the software picked the one hundred clips that caused a brain activity more similar to the ones the subject watched, combining them into one final movie Crick and Koch found in their 1995 study that The conscious visual representation is likely to be distributed over more than one area of the cerebral cortex and possibly over certain subcortical structures as well. We have argued (Crick and Koch, 1995a) that in primates, contrary to most received opinion, it is not located in cortical area V1 (also called the striate cortex or area 17). Some of the experimental evidence in support of this hypothesis is outlined below. This is not to say that what goes on in V1 is not important, and indeed may be crucial, for most forms of vivid visual awareness. What we suggest is that the neural activity there is not directly correlated with what is seen. http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/crick-koch-cc-97.html What was found in their study, through experiments which isolated the effects in the brain which are related to looking (i.e. directing your eyeballs to move around) from those related to seeing (the appearance of images, colors, etc) is that the activity in the V1 is exactly the same whether the person sees anything or not. What the visual reconstruction is based on is the activity in the occipitotemporal visual cortex. (downstream of V1 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079612305490196) Here we present a new motion-energy [10, 11] encoding
Re: Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer
Hi Roger, On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 1:28 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Telmo Menezes Well then, we have at least one vote supporting the results. Scientific results are not supported or refuted by votes. I remain sceptical because of the line sync issue. The brain doesn't provide a raster line sync signal. The synch signal is a requirement of a very specific technology to display video. Analog film does not have a synch signal. It still does sampling. Sampling is always necessary if you use a finite machine to record some visual representation of the world. If one believes the brain stores our memories (I know you don't) you have to believe that it samples perceptual information somehow. It will probably not be as neat and simple as a sync signal. A trivial but important point: every movie is a representation of reality, not reality itself. It's just a set of symbols that represent the world as seen from a specific point of view in the form of a matrix of discrete light intensity levels. So the mapping from symbols to visual representations is always present, no matter what technology you use. Again, the sync signal is just a detail of the implementation of one such technologies. The way the brain encodes images is surely very complex and convoluted. Why not? There wasn't ever any adaptive pressure for the encoding to be easily translated from the outputs of an MRI machine. If we require all contact between males and females to be done through MRI machines and wait a couple million years maybe that will change. We might even get a sync signal, who knows? Either you believe that the brain encodes images somehow, or you believe that the brain is an absurd mechanism. Why are the optic nerves connected to the brain? Why does the visual cortex fire in specific ways when shown specific images? Why can we tell from brain activity if someone is nervous, asleep, solving a math problem of painting? [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Telmo Menezes Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-07, 06:19:33 Subject: Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 8:55 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg ? Sorry, everybody, I was snookered into believing that they had really accomplished the impossible. So you think this paper is fiction and the video is fabricated? Do people here know something I don't about the authors? The hypothesis is that the brain has some encoding for images. These images can come from the optic nerve, they could be stored in memory or they could be constructed by sophisticated cognitive processes related to creativity, pattern matching and so on. But if you believe that the brain's neural network is a computer responsible for our cognitive processes, the information must be stores there, physically, somehow. It's horribly hard to decode what's going on in the brain. These researchers thought of a clever shortcut. They expose people to a lot of images and record come measures of brain activity in the visual cortex. Then they use machine learning to match brain states to images. Of course it's probabilistic and noisy. But then they got a video that actually approximates the real images. So there must be some way to decode brain activity into images. The killer argument against that is that the brain has no sync signals to generate the raster lines. Neither does reality, but we somehow manage to show a representation of it on tv, right? ? ? ? [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/6/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-05, 11:37:17 Subject: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer On Saturday, January 5, 2013 10:43:32 AM UTC-5, rclough wrote: Subjective states can somehow be extracted from brains via a computer. No, they can't. ? The ingenius folks who were miraculously able to extract an image from the brain that we saw recently ? http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity somehow did it entirely through computation. How was that possible? By passing off a weak Bayesian regression analysis as a terrific consciousness breakthrough. Look again at the image comparisons. There is nothing being reconstructed, there is only the visual noise of many superimposed shapes which least dis-resembles the test image. It's not even stage magic, it's just a search engine. ? There are at least two imaginable theories, neither of which I can explain step by step: What they did was take lots of images and correlate patterns in the V1 region of the brain with those that corresponded V1 patterns
