Re: The problem of intelligence.

lesterDELzick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Lester Zick) wrote:
> On 22 Jan 2006 08:34:54 GMT, curt@xxxxxxxx (Curt Welch) in
> comp.ai.philosophy wrote:
>
> >"JPL" <park avenue> wrote:
> >> "Curt Welch" <curt@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> >> news:20060108213941.091$gR@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> >> > Risujin <risujin@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> >> Curt Welch wrote:
> >> ...
> >> > The mind and the brain are one and the same. There are not two
> >> > things here, it's only one.
> >>
> >> Agreed, in the sense that mind is brain activity. But why do they
> >> appear as "two" ? Although I agree that language can play a lot of
> >> tricks on us, I believe that the idea that language is the only
> >> "culprit" that bugged us into mind-body dualism is naive. In my view,
> >> the sense of mind-body (mind-matter) dualism is a natural consequence
> >> of how the brain is wired to it's environment via the (myriad) senses.
> >>
> >> I think the core reason that we have a sense of mind-brain duality is
> >> simply organic - and actually quite easy to understand and explain.
> >> Just as, analogously, cross eyed vision makes people see two objects
> >> whereas in fact there is only one. Language only comes in later where
> >> the cross-eyed person can identify two identical objects verbally.
> >
> >Yes, but to post even more on this idea, I think it's language that
> >keeps the lie alive.
>
> What lie?

That mental activity is not just as physical as physical activity, and the
inverse, that physical activity is not just as mental as mental activity.

The lie is that mental are physical are different, when they actually are
the same.

It's better to call it an error in understanding than a lie because we have
no supporting evidence that anyone intentially created the error to mislead
someone. I just used the word lie for dramatic effect.

> You have a relatively straightforward problem here that doesn't
> require smarts or the reams of verbiage you consistently resort to:
>
> A) Brain operations produce perception.
>
> C) Brain operations produce the appearance of cognition different from
> perception, a circumstance you acknowledge by discussing it.
>
> You admit A but say C is a lie. Why?

Why did someone put forth the idea that the word was flat? They did it
because it was the obvious conclusion from the data available to them. But
when you get access to more data, you find that the old model was just
wrong. To someone that belives the world is flat, and has believed that
mankind has known this fact to be true for thousands of years, it would
seem conterintuitive and out right wrong, to hear someone put forth the
idea that the world was a ball. How could it be? people would fall off
the bottom if that was true. People rejected the idea of a round world
without even thinking about it because they are smart enough to know how
balls work and they know that you can't put something on the bottom and not
have it fall off. End of story.

But the people that so quickly and easily dismissed the round earth theory
were dead wrong. And had they not rejected the idea as abusrd so quickly,
they would have seen the evience in front of them to support it. Why do
ships that sail off into the ocean seem to sink into the water when you
watch them with a telescope? If the earth was flat, where does the sun go
to every night? Where does the moon go? What holds up the sun and the
moon? Why do map makers see errors in their long distant measurements that
can only be explained by a round earth?

Once you have the data available to you, we learn things we would never
have predicted before the data was avaiable.

For the millions of years man has been evolving, he never had access to the
data to explain the connection between the external sensory signals (the
physical senses), and the internal sensory signals (the mental senses).
But for the past 100 years +, the evidence has been here, and it only
continues to build in strength.

The question you should be asking, is why it's taking so long for people to
understand that the old beliefs are just wrong since we have had enough
evidence to show the truth for over 100 years now. The answer is two fold.
The common man doesn't have any personal experience with the data. We only
have access to it second hand. I personally have never had a brain probe
of any type connected to my brain that allowed me to monitor my own brain
activity. But I trust what I read about the experiments and procedures
that have been done many times over the past hundred years. And I
udnerstand what the data is telling us.

It's just like someone from the past trying to be be convienced that the
survey and navigation data was conclusive proof that the world was round,
but not having the experience and education to actually understand what the
data was showing.

> It doesn't matter how the lie
> is kept alive, only whether it is or isn't a lie to begin with. How is
> it A is correct but C is never correct if both are products of brain
> operations?

We can preceive cognition as easily as we can preceive a cat. There is no
apparent difference in the power of the brain that allows us to do this.
Both are equal examples of what we are able to preceive. So in fact, your
A, is true for both our perception of phsycial events, and our perception
of mental events.

We also have an inherent power to differentiate. We can tell red from
blue, sound, from light, and cognition, from touch. We can tell cats from
dogs, and sense the difference between thoughts about cats, and visions of
cats.

The fact that we can sense that cognition is different from vision and
sound and touch and smell is not a problem or an inconsistency in the
operation of our brain. It's exactly what it does for all our senses. It
allows us to clasify, and differentiate, sensory signals.

So why is it that for the 5 major senses, we call it "perception" and for
the 6th type of sense, the sense that allows us to preceive mental
activity, we just use words like cognition, and not "sensation". How could
our ability to preceive cogntion not be a sense?

The "lie" is that our ability to sense our cogntion activity, is a
fundamentialy different type of "sense" than our 5 physical senses. And we
know this to be a lie, because you can stimulate differnt parts of the
brain in the same way (with an electical probe), and some stimulations will
be preceived as a physical sensation, and other stimulations will be
preceived as a mental sensation (perhapes triggering a memory). The only
difference is which part of the brain you choose to stimulate. So
internally, both types of sensations are represented with the same type of
signals - both are just the activity of neurons firing.

So, the commonly held belief that cogntion is fundimentially different than
percpetion, is a lie. One which we now have huge bodies of evidence to
suggest this to be the truth. But it's not a surprise, because we can
understand why people belive this as easily as we understand why people
used to think the world was flat. It's beacuse people didn't have access
to the data that needed to see the full truth. But in both cases, we now
have the data. No matter how conter intuitive the data seems to be, you
have to open your eyes and look at what the data is telling us and stop
trusting your intuition.

> I don't know of any animals which ponder the nature of
> C in language. So I suspect they experience A but don't experience C.

I suspect that's basically true. I suspect our power to create these
internal events which are independent of both our external senses, and
external behaviors, is what gives us the stong language and planing powers
we have.

But, that does not need to imply that we have some fundimential form of
consciousness which animals don't have. In fact, I think that belief is a
gross misunderstanding of the systems at work in the brain and a
fundamential error which has misled much work in AI.

I belive it can be explained by hardware structued like this:

_________________
Sensory input ------>| |--------+---> motor outputs
| | |
+-->| learning matrix |--->+ |
| | | | |
+---|-->|_________________| | |
| | | |
| +<-cognative feedback loop-+ |
| |
+<------ motor feedback loop ------+

The senory inputs, are thousands of independent signals coming from various
external sensory systems. The motor outputs are the signals going back to
control our arms and legs. These motor outputs are feed back, to allow the
learning matrix, to learn output functions, which are a function of not
only our sensory inputs, but also of our motor outputs. In other words, we
can sense our own actions, before they feedback through the external
environment and come back in the sensory inputs. The motor feedback loop
allows the system to produced fixed output sequences (like walking, or
speaking a word, or reaching out the arm) which is indepentend of the
current sensory inputs. The learning matrix however has the power to cross
mix any of these signals, so it can regulate and trigger, different output
sequences at the correct times.

The cognitive loop works just like the motor feedback loop, except the
outputs aren't connected to any external muscle.

What we can sense, is the existence of all the signals inside the learning
matrix. We aren't just sensing what is sent to the input of this black
box, we _are_ the black box. We sense everything which is happening in the
black box. There's nothing happening in this learning matrix, what we
aren't consciously aware of. The signals flowing through this matrix is
our conscious awareness. What we are not aware of, is what causes these
signals to exist. That's our subcounscious.

When we receive vision inputs, the input signals only tell us about light
and dark pixels. It does not tell us about cats and grandmothers. We
learn that by the the way the hardware inside the box learns to processes
signals. It learns how to combine different signals together in a way to
create a "cat" signal. We are "aware" that we see a cat, the "cat" signal
is created from the vision inputs.

We are aware that we are reaching for an object by both the fact that the
"reach" hardware is activated, and by the fact that the outputs are feed
back to the input of this elarning matrix, which learns to reconize and
clasify known patterns of behavior just like the cat hardware learned to
recognize and clasify sensory data created by cats into a "cat" signal.

The cognative feedback loop is what allows humans to create sensations that
are indepentend of both sensory, and motor, actions. We can sense the
cognative outputs, and their effects on the signals inside the learning
matrix, just as easily as we can sense the effects which happen in the
sensory inputs.

But, when we create real motor outputs, our arms and legs move. And when
we do that, it causes all sorts of touch sensors on our arms and legs, to
create corresponding sensory inputs. And we see are arms and legs move
with our eyes, so there is more direct feedback. And we hear the sounds
are arms make as they move or when they cause objects to hit each other.
And when we stick our fingers in your mouth or near are nose, we can taste
and smell the results of our motor actions. All this allows the learning
matrix to spot correlations between the sensory input signals, and between
the motor output signals.

But, when the brain creates outputs for this cognitive feedback loop, there
never is any corelation with the sensory inputs. The motor outputs aren't
connected to the external world with the help of muscles or anything else.
The only corelations the brain can identify, is the correlations between
the cognitive outputs and the cognitive inputs.

So, that type of feedback loop, creates the power for the brain to talk to
itself.

The learning matrix creates a holographic effect as it meshes together and
separates out signals to drive the outputs. When the cognative feedback
signals are mixed into that, they do not remain totaly separate. Instead,
they are condtioned by the constant flow of sensory->motor data which is
happening and mix with them. This is what gives the cognitive signals the
power to recreate brain states that happaned under past exposure to
sensory/motor data. We call that effect "memories".

The difference between humans and the lower animals, can all be explained,
by the size and toplogy, of this cognative feedback loop. Without the
cognative loop, we still have the same large powers to create behavior, and
to trigger and regulate different beahviors in response to the sensory
inputs. But we have no power to have private thoughts, which are
indepdendent of sensory and motor actions.

I suspect that we are not alone with this cognative loop in our brain which
gives us the ability to create these private thoughts. I believe that
humans simply have a better developed set of cognative feedback loops -
especically in an area needed to have private language behaviors. So where
we have cognative feedback loops that allow us to create a large amount of
private brain activity, the typical animal has very little ability to do
that, and instead, has most of their brain dedicated to the strict
sensory/motor problem. Basically, they have little power to day dream, and
are forced to exist mostly "in the moment" by dealing with that is in front
of them.

However, the side effect of having this cognative loop, is that it allows
us to create all this private brain behavior, which is not assocated with
external actions. And it's our awarness of these private behaviors in the
brain, that are not assocated with external actions, that has so confused
us for thousands of years. We sensed they existed, but had no way to
understand where they were coming from in connection to all the other
things we understood about the normal sensory/motor signals we are aware of
in the brain.

So, the bottom line of my view of the structure of the brain, is that the
hardware which creates our cognitive ablities really isn't any different
than the basic learning-matrix hardware which creates all our physical
perception and behavior skills. Percpetion, and behavior in fact is one
and the same hardware function. It's a reinforcement trained learning
matrix which maps sensory input signals to motor output signals. We don't
have one type of hardware for doing preception, and another type of
hardware for creating motor outputs. It's all just one generic RL trained
signal mapping network.

The sensory cortex is not a different technology from the motor cortex.
The sensory cortex is just the top half of my learning-matrix in the
diagram above and the motor cortex is just the bottom half of my learning
matrix in the diagram above.

And likewise, our cogntive ablities are not created by a different type of
hardware. It's all the same learning matrix. Our cognative abilities are
created by a simple addition of extra independent feedback paths.

It's the independence of these private internal behaviors created by the
cognative feedback paths that give us our strong langauge, and reasoning,
and planing skills which is missing from lower animals. We can relive past
events and explore the potential ramifications of future events before we
try them out for real.

So, the idea that humans are somehow uniquely special, that we are
conscious and lower animals are not, just seems to be a silly misguided
view to me. We both have basically identical hardware with the same
powers, but we simply have some extra (probaly just more) feedback paths in
our brain. So where as we can use more of our brain mass for "dreaming",
the lower animals are forced to use most of their brain mass for simply
dealing with the reality of the moment.

This is why I believe it's so important to develop this "learning matrix"
technlogy. I see it as the key to not only explain all the lower level
animal behaviors, but all our higher cognative abilities as well.

All this talk about mental vs physical, is just mis-guided flat-earth BS to
me. We are nothing but what you see in that diagram above. We are are
just a signal processing learning matrix and that's all we are. Everything
we are aware of, both what we call the mental, and the physical, exist as
signals in that learning matrix. If there's not a signal created somewhere
in that learning matrix, we are not aware of it. Our entire universe is
represented, by the signals in our learning matrix. When I see my
computer, it's beacuse there are signals flowing somewhere in that matrix
which represent my understanding of "seeing the computer". The stuff we
think of as "mental/cognative" thoughts, are nothing more than the
activation of higher level abstract signals that happen without the
activation of lower level sensory signals. They happen because of the
cognative feedback loops we have that allow us to activate parts of the
learning matrix independent of our normal sensory and motor behaviors.

It may seem that we have some magic form of consciousness which is missing
from lower animals, but to think of it that way is to fail to see the fact
that 99% of the learning-matrix hardware is identical in lower animals and
humans. To think that way is to fail to understand what it is we have to
build to create AI.

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

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