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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jun 21, 2017 - 08:26am PT
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Bottom line? I think the real deal we're talking about here is that some, if not most, people just can't stand or deal with the notion we are just animals and our behaviors are just that - advanced animal behavior.
I find the degree of resistance, arrogance, narcissism, and denial wrapped up in that truly remarkable.
"...Oh my god!! We can't just be animals -- I mean we're just too damn precious and special!!!"
Crikey.
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 21, 2017 - 08:49am PT
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A human being is not an animal.
An animal has no ability to transcend its material consciousness.
Only at the stage of human being is this option available.
Most do NOT take to it due to bodily consciousness believing "I am the Body". The living entity/being is never the hardware.
There is a huge difference.
Even on the material platform.
A human being does not get charged for murder if he kills an animal nor does an animal get charged for murder for killing a human being.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jun 21, 2017 - 08:52am PT
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Nor does a human being get charged with murder if he murders enough other humans beings all at once - we usually call them conquerors, heroes, generals, demi-gods, or saviors.
A human being is not an animal.
But it's always a comfort to know I can count on Werner to make my point at exactly the right time...
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G_Gnome
Trad climber
Cali
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Jun 21, 2017 - 09:10am PT
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So why hasn't Werner ascended yet if he knows everything about it?!
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 21, 2017 - 11:06am PT
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if he murders enough other humans beings all at once - we usually call them conquers, heroes, generals, demi-gods, or saviors.
You're insane ....
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Jun 21, 2017 - 01:41pm PT
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The IP metaphor still hard at work as an organizing construct
Just because they use the word "computer" in the title doesn't mean you should conclude they are using the"IP metaphor". The geometric structures they are trying to describe aren't anything like any computer you ever bought. Actually, I thought the article was kind of cool, albeit highly speculative. These guys are just looking for a mathematical language to describe the patterns they see in the brain, they're not trying to fit the brain into the preexisting Turing machine paradigm.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jun 21, 2017 - 01:46pm PT
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No, it's very cool, but their verbatim verbiage is '... information processing ...' - hard to get closer to the IP metaphor than that.
Again, there's still a lot of currency in the metaphor and the idea we'd drop a metaphor like a hot potato for a new one is a bit ridiculous. When a new metaphor comes along and starts to take hold there'll be a long overlap as one fades and the other grows.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 21, 2017 - 03:48pm PT
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Interesting how dimension takes on different meanings in various contexts. To the uninitiated five dimensions is surreal, unimaginable.
At each point of this region a functional integral having as variable of integration certain contours in the complex plane is evaluated. [-10,10]
Just my playing with a concept (no connection to dimension comment).
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Jun 21, 2017 - 06:20pm PT
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hard to get closer to the IP metaphor than that
helayje, I don't think we disagree at all that this is a very cool piece of work. Maybe we mean something different by IP metaphor. When I think of "IP metaphor" I see those AI guys back in the 50s and 60s armed with their recently defined Turing machine ready to use their computers to "explain" the mind. There's something totally different going on in this work you posted up. It's a marvel at the way nature works, not a replacement of nature with a man-made machine.
Even if you want to say that the "IP metaphor" is something weaker: for example a theory about what thought is or a theory about what brain functioning is, that doesn't seem to have much bearing on this result. The scientists (mathematicians?) are trying to describe how the brain organizes when it's active. It's a sort of geometric result. That's what cool. The work is impressive independent of any theory about whether or not the mind or the brain can be understood as an information processor. I realize that the people who did the work frame everything in that language, but I think that's more a reflection of the culture they come from than the essence of the result.
Their description of how the brain seems to be organizing looks light years beyond any digital computer design I've ever seen.
Cheers
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 21, 2017 - 08:05pm PT
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Very glad to see that reference.
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.4576.html
I will probably pay the $32.
Anyone at an educational institution may be able to see it without directly paying.
The findings come from simulations and it is a big step from the potential implications of the work as I glimpse it to how this kind of organization may help the brain to interact with the world around it.
On the good side, the marvelous geometry proposed grows naturally out of simple connections among neurons.
One wonders why people and cats are so different in behavior, but maybe we are more alike than we think.
edit:
The simulations were based on juvenile rat somatosensory cortex. Rats are amazing, and I am not being facetious.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 21, 2017 - 10:14pm PT
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A Turing machine is an abstraction, not an actual machine (although you could build one), and the abstraction is used to explore computation. Nobody in AI would use an actual Turing machine to model the nervous system, they might attempt to show an equivalence between mental computation and a Turing machine abstraction to explore the limits of those types of machines.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Jun 22, 2017 - 03:39am PT
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Presently, I do not feel I have a closure on the mathematics of neural networks. Yes, they can be described by a system of discrete equations but more ... Certainly a Largo Mechanism that does not meet his idea of mind but not a Turing Machine.
for the elementary math on these:
http://www.heatonresearch.com/book/introduction-neural-network-math.html
and for some $200+ you can get Mathematics of Neural Networks
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-1-4615-6099-9
Browsing through the chapter titles of this book may give one a better feel for the modeling and procedures of neural networks.
Oh, and for the record, "Fucxk Largo and his polemic stance on this."
have you ever got the feeling Largo and the Smoking Duck are both perched rather tightly on a similar fence? Mind you a duck on a fence?
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Jun 22, 2017 - 03:41am PT
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Ed, go back and read some of the claims of the AI group back in the 50s and 60s and you'll see what I mean. I could look for the references, but I already got too bored.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Jun 22, 2017 - 05:13am PT
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"Fucxk Largo and his polemic stance on this."
Hey! There's a lot of cool stuff going on in this thread. Maybe we should thank Largo for opening up the debate.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 22, 2017 - 08:21am PT
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At Chicago in the 70s there was a professor looking at neural nets from the vantage of a mathematician.
Digital computer simulations of nervous nets (B.G. Farley, 1965; D. R. Smith, and C. H. Davidson, 1962) together with some analysis of their combinatorics (Smith and Davidson op. cit., J. Sl Griffith, 1963) have provided some indication of the the type of activity to be found in nets of randomly interconnected formal neurons.
J.D. Cowan
1968
Proceedings of the -School on Neural Networks - June 1967 in Ravello
editor E. R. Caianello
Back then, progress was being made on sensory and motor neurophysiology, the brain’s inputs and outputs. What was going on in between the input and output was still terra incognito.
Then “place neurons” were found.
O'Keefe and Dostrovsky (1971)
In rats. Finally there were examples of central neurons doing a useful job: telling the rat where it was.
Place cells were doing a job that we could understand the value of, but their activity showed surprising dynamics.
One of the most significant observations in the study of place cells during the past two decades is the discovery that place cells participate in multiple independent spatial representations. Under certain experimental conditions, place cells were found to totally alter their firing patterns in response to apparently minor changes in the sensory or motivational inputs to the hippocampus.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19021254
Rodolfo Llinás
Neurons like one another very much. They respond to one another's messages, so they basically chat all day, like people do in society. "Where can I park?" "How much is it going to cost?" "Am I going to get a ticket?" One set of neurons talks to another set of neurons, and they talk back, so we have a dialogue between different components in the brain. And the dialogue is not between one cell and another cell, but rather between many cells and many other cells. It's like having a huge number of people holding hands, dancing together, making ever-changing circles and organized together in such a way that every cell belongs, at some time, to some circle. It's like a huge square dance. Each dancer belongs to a particular movement at a particular time.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/electric-brain.html
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 22, 2017 - 08:26am PT
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I could look for the references, but I already got too bored.
sounds like an academic troll... make an unreferenced statement and demure to provide sources, all the while asserting the point being made is supported by those unnamed sources.
I don't have time right now to look them up... perhaps later.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Jun 22, 2017 - 11:33am PT
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Ed, I can't believe you pissed me off enough to wade through Dreyfus's 1965 Rand report and pick out some of these, but you did. There are dozens more in the report (which is free on line) for you to look for and think about:
Newell and Simon: (about their programming techniques back in the day): "Work has tended to demonstrate that heuristics form the integral core of human problem solving behavior. As we begin to understand the heuristics that people use in thinking, the mystery begins to dissolve from such vaguely understood processes as intuition and judgment."
Feigenbaum and Feldman describing their work with computers: "The forecast for progress in the research of human cognition is most encouraging."
Feigenbaum "Digital computers, being general information-processing devices can be programmed to carry out any and all information processes"
Newell, Shaw and Simon "This approach makes no assumption ... except the assumption that (the hardware of computers and the human brain) are general purpose symbol manipulating devices and the computer can be programmed to carry out information process functionally like those executed in the brain."
Newell, Shaw and Simon: "We postulate that the subject's behavior is governed by a program organized from a set of elementary information processes."
Simon's prediction that within 10 years most theories in psychology would take the form of computer programs or of qualitative statements about computer programs.
This was long before neural networks.
The Wikipedia page about Dreyfus's work and the evolution of the AI project:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus%27s_views_on_artificial_intelligence
Another article (written by a philosopher but quite clear) about Dreyfus's criticisms and the subsequent evolution of the AI project:
https://www.utwente.nl/en/bms/wijsb/staff/brey/Publicaties_Brey/Brey_2001_Dreyfus.pdf
You might also try the book Ai: The Tumultuous History Of The Search For Artificial Intelligence by D. Crevier
Enjoy ....
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jun 22, 2017 - 11:41am PT
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Almost left DEC's R&D labs for a job here:
Dodged that bullet...
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 22, 2017 - 02:22pm PT
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Dreyfus did not anticipate that AI researchers would realize their mistake
Dreyfus doesn't sound too bright.
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