Re: Paper by ~MM on distributed self-awareness
- From: "feedbackdroids" <feedbackdroids@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 28 Apr 2006 10:13:45 -0700
Stephen Harris wrote:
http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~mm/self-awareness.pdf
by Melanie Mitchell (Hofstadter was her Phd. supervisor)
"1. Global information is encoded as statistics and dynamics
of patterns over the system's components.
2. Randomness and probabilities are essential.
3. The system carries out a fine-grained, parallel search
of possibilities.
4. The system exhibits a continual interplay of bottomup
and top-down processes."
Looking over the paper shows the above was the follow-on Melanie made
in the 2nd half - as in "what did we learn from the first half of this
paper".
Unfortunately, I think Melanie seriously muddies the water in the first
half of the paper, by trying to call immune systems and ant colonies
"self-aware", and somehow similar to the brain. She admits that this is
a contentious declaration, and that many would say the systems
described are simply "adaptive feedback mechanisms" which induce
self-regulation. She's right on both counts. She muddies the waters,
and the systems she describes are only marginally more complex than
systems with simple feedback loops, and hardly on a par with the sort
of consciousness and self-awareness of humans. D- for trying to make
the connection. She gets what she defines ....
"... In the first paragraph of this paper I defined self-awareness as
information contained in a system about its global state that feeds
back to adaptively control the system's low-level components. Given
this definition, both the immune system and ant colonies have some
degree of self-awareness. It is not clear where, exactly, the "self" is
located in these systems, but neither is it clear for the brain. If
there is something more to self-awareness in the brain, it needs to be
elucidated...."
These 3 things are not at all on a quantitative [or qualititative] par
with each other. OTOH, some of the ideas in the 2nd half of the paper
may be useful, if you leave out the self-awareness bit.
The idea that something can monitor something else is useful, but
doesn't make the somethings together self-aware, on a par with the
brain. The monitoring she talks about is very similar, it seems to me,
to what Minsky called the "B-brain" in Society of Mind. Basically it's
just a pattern recognition unit that monitors the so-called "A-brain",
and checks whether tha A-brain has gotten itself into something like a
limit cycle, or other behavioral conundrum. This isn't hard to do, and
isn't really self-awareness either.
She could re-write her paper, leaving out all the self-awareness stuff,
and rename it something like "Self-Regulation Via Adaptive Feedback
Control in Decentralized Systems".
.
- References:
- Paper by ~MM on distributed self-awareness
- From: Stephen Harris
- Paper by ~MM on distributed self-awareness
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