Re: How much intelligence?

Glen M. Sizemore wrote:
"Curt Welch" <curt@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:20060428005535.234$2A@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"chadmaester" <chad.d.johnson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
...it's been a while, but oh well - I don't have a lot of time on my
hands cause it's finals.

I think you will find that behaviorists do not believe
the brain stores anything. It simply "changes" in
a way to make it behave differently next time. Or
something like that.
To me, that is simply incorrect. The brain has to be storing things
because it can recall things without being anywhere close to whatever
it is thinking about. For instance, if I'm on the other side of the
world I can easily recall what my house looks like back home - anytime,
any place.

A computer program that recognizes handwritten characters stores
information about the characters. Indeed, it changes the more and more
it trains and learns the characteristics of the characters, but it DOES
have internal representations of the characters - the connections and
strengths of connections between the neurons (artificial neurons, that
is). I think our brains do the same thing, but they have a mechanism
which allows us to put these characteristics together and form mental
pictures (maybe STM; and maybe that's what cognition is). We can create
connections between neurons, and the strengths and placements of these
connections are what give us understanding. I'm not sure what forms a
solid memory - probably the more connections that exist, the more or an
understanding/grasp we have of a concept or concepts (if you know
anything about associative memory models, a single network can store
multiple memories).

Sorry I went off on a tangent there, but do you agree/disagree?
There's no doubt, even by behaviorists, that these sorts of things are
"stored" in the machine, and in the brain. They just don't think the word
"stored" or the concepts connected with the word, are a valid or useful way
to explain what is happening.

A better way to say it is simply that the animal is changed by exposure to certain environments and that, as a consequence, the animal behaves differently. The term "change" is not a synonym for "store". There is no advantage to speaking carelessly.



For example, many people would believe that saying "God caused the flood",
is not considered a valid or useful way to talk about floods, but the
people that reject the God talk, are not rejecting the ideas of floods.

Behaviorists reject the use of storage talk, to explain the cause of human
behavior that can be better explained using other concepts.

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

Talk of "storage" of information tends to come from people with a computer background. They don't like talk of "changing the animal", because that reminds them too much of "self-modifying programs", which they have been taught is a Bad. They tend to think of an intelligent program as one that accesses, adds to, and modifies a database rather than one that modifies its own operation, ie, one that accesses, adds,to, and modifies its own code. So of course they tend to see the brain as accessing, adding to, and modifying "stored" data.

IOW, 'learning' means changing the stored data, but not how the program works.*** Hence talk about the brain's being "hardwired" by the genes, the brain controlling the behaviour, etc. The mistake in this sort of talk is to assume that control is a meaningful concept - which it happens to be when discussing a stored-program computer, but not when discussing animal brains. There are other examples of vague and inconsistent concepts, but these will do to show that the most common computationist models of AI cannot work.

Note that a learning program of this type must not only augment the database, it must also be able to add to and modify the rules of inferences/interpretation/etc of the stored data. That is, it must be self-modifying. So the stored-data model of knowledge/intelligence/etc is inconsistent. Or so it seems to me. Also, "feedback loops" imply self-modification of the program.

I am not at all bothered by the notion of "a learning program == a self-modifying program." A multiple-threaded program, running on a large number of processors, should be able to modify itself quite safely, since the threads can be written to monitor each other, and so prevent certain types of self-modification, or prevent their execution, or correct them, or etc. Not that I believe that a computationist model of AI is the best approach, but then I don't know enough to decide what may be the best approach.

Imagine an OS that not only knows how to identify a virus, but knows how to fix the code that the virus exploited.... A computer running such an OS would be about as smart as -- a cell.

Just a few rambling thoughts, triggered perhaps by the ingestion of a large chunk of dark semisweet chocolate. :-)

HTH
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: How much intelligence?
    ... The brain has to be storing things ... A computer program that recognizes handwritten characters stores ... strengths of connections between the neurons (artificial neurons, ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: How much intelligence?
    ... The brain has to be storing things ... A computer program that recognizes handwritten characters stores ... strengths of connections between the neurons (artificial neurons, ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: How much intelligence?
    ... The brain has to be storing things ... A computer program that recognizes handwritten characters stores ... strengths of connections between the neurons (artificial neurons, ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: How much intelligence?
    ... The brain has to be storing things ... A computer program that recognizes handwritten characters stores ... strengths of connections between the neurons (artificial neurons, ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: How much intelligence?
    ... The brain has to be storing things ... A computer program that recognizes handwritten characters stores ... strengths of connections between the neurons (artificial neurons, ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)