Re: Computer being developed modeled after human brain

casey <jgkjcasey@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Apr 24, 10:37=A0pm, c...@xxxxxxxx (Curt Welch) wrote:
casey <jgkjca...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The dual ideas of what something is, and what
something does, is what Dr. Minsky describes as
a "dumbbell theory" in his society of mind book
(section 11.9). Look it up. And it's appropriate
because every time you make this mistake, I think
you are being a dumbbell.

My reading of Minsky's dumbbell theory is that it
is of things being either one thing or the other but
nothing in between. Nothing I have written suggests
I hold such views on a continuum.

As for Marvin Minsky, he may be brilliant in his
narrow area of expertise, but he would have done
better, I think, if he had read LeDoux's "The
Emotional Brain".

What a thing is, and what a thing does, is exactly
such a false distinction. It's just two different
ends of a single continuum.

So a thing gradually turns into something a thing
does like heat gradually turns into cold?????

No, that's not it at all.

I don't see a thing and its actions as opposites,
binary or a continuum. They are distinct

This is your error. There is no hard and fact distinction between what a
thing is, and what a thing does. It's a continuum of different physical
events. I'll talk more to this down at the end...

and
exist at the same time. Light and dark do not
exist at the same time.

The only reason we try to separate the world into
nouns and verbs is because some of the things that
objects DO are persistent - they always do them,
and other things are more transient.

Think in terms of variables and their values.

To put it into cybernetic terms, what the object IS,
as a system, is made up of a set of measurements, the
things the object, as a system, DOES are the changes
in the values of those measurements.

I am not talking about the physical vs. the
non-physical I am talking about how we describe
the physical by a set of variables, (nouns), and
how their values change over time, (verbs).

Yes I know you are.

But what you still seem to have no ability to grasp, is that the
distinction you believe is there, is not in fact there at all. It's a
continuum with no line you can draw between the two.

It's a problem of the fuzzy boundary. Most of our concepts and meanings of
words we use don't have hard boundaries. There's often a gray area between
the concepts where we can't make any hard determination of which
classification it falls into.

When looking at light reflected from a card, when does white change to
black? Where in that gray area is the boundary between black and white?
There is no specific boundary we can identify. That's because we don't
identify concepts by their boundaries, we identify by a rough location of
their center.

When looking at paint colors, when does red become blue? Or when does it
become "not red" as it shifts towards blue? Again, there is no boundary
defined. We each have a rough idea of where the center of the red
frequency spectrum lies and as we approach the area between to centers, we
can't really tell when it crosses from one to the next. We define what
color a given spectrum of light is by some rough measure of which center
point it seems to be nearest.

Words like black and white, or red and blue are NOT distinct properties of
light. They are classifications crated by the brain when applied to the
continuous spectrum of light. Out in the universe, there is simply a
nearly infinite and continuous rage of different light spectrum, but in the
brain, there is red, and blue, which creates the subjective impression that
red and blue are very distinct things.

As another example, we can build a little light sensor box with two lights
on it. It measures the brightness of the light picked up by some simple
light detector, and it activates on of the two output lights. One is on
for bright light, and the other is on for dim light. The two output lights
are never on at the same time, but one of the two is always on. Now, to
this box, "bright light", and "dim light" are very different, and very
distinct things. But that distinction is something that doesn't exist in
the light. It's defined by the box. If someone else were to study the
light, they6 could not find the point when the light turned from bright to
dim. That's because there is nothing about the light that creates that
distinction. The distinction is defined by how the box works, not by some
inherent property of the light.

The distinction between what a thing is, and what it does, works the same
way. The distinction doesn't exist in the universe. It exists in how our
brain has been trained to "see" the universe. In the universe, the
physical effects we are talking about form a continuum. All physical
effects the brain (and body) has the ability to sense, also tend to have a
temporal duration. How long does the sensation it creates last? What sort
of prediction can we make about the future related to each effect we can
sense about the universe? My PC is black. I can expect to come here
tomorrow, and it will still be black. I expect this propery of the PC to
last for a very long time. As such, that property of the PC is part of
what the PC _is_ to me. Likewise, it's phsyical shape is very consistent.
I don't expect to see my PC turn from it's roughly box like configuration
into a sphere configuration. As such, it's shape is part of what I think
of as what the PC _is_ to me.

But what if I lived in a different universe, and the box would change
colors as quickly as my monitor screen can change colors? This color of
the box would no longer be what the box _is_ to me. It would be something
the box _does_.

However, the shape, and the color, are not persistent. They don in fact
change over time. They are in fact constantly changing. Atoms and
elections are being removed from the shape of the box, and being added to
the shape of the box, on a continues basis. It's just happening at a level
below what our sensors can detect. So in fact, the shape of the box is not
constant, it's shape, and it's constantly changing shape, is just something
the box "does".

And more important, over the next 1000 years, the box is highly likely to
change into a very different shape. It's likely to be thrown out, and
crushed in a land fill, or recycled into different parts. So now, we see
the box shape, and color, is just something the atoms were "doing" for a
few years, and not what they actually were. And give it a few billion
years, and all the atomic particles in those atoms are likely to be turned
into something else as the sun expands to a red giant and burns/melts
everything on the surface of the Earth. So again, "steel", and "plastic"
is not what the PC is, but just what the atomic particles were doing for a
period of time.

Give the universe enough time, and all it's current atomic structure might
vanish as it collapses into one big black hole indicating that all this was
just something the universe was "doing" and not what it "is".

But in the actions of all objects, we find constrains. We can wave our
arms, and this is something a human does. But the range of motions we can
create with our arms is limited. We can only move them so fast, and so
far. The limitations in the behavior, in what a think can do, has more
persistence than the thing being done. So the "arm waving" is something a
human can do, but the constrains of how we can wave our arms, is talked
about as what a human "is".

The point in all these examples, is that there is no HARD distinction
between what a thing is, and what a thing can do, just like there is no
HARD distinction between white and black, or short and tall, or slow and
fast. These are just words we use to label relative parts of a continuous
effect from the universe. The more persistent the effect is in the
temporal domain, the more likely we are to use the effect as part of the
what defines a "thing" in the first place - it's a property of what a thing
is. The shorter the temporal persistence of the sensory effect, the more
likely we are to label the sensory event as "what a thing does". But there
is no hard distinction between when a sensory event turns from a thing,
into a behavior. It's just a sensory event.

To look at all this from the perspective of what the brain does, we see
that the brain is receiving a constant flow of sensory events - neurons
firing. Somehow, mixed in those events, exists the "things" of the
universe, and the "behaviors" of the universe. When is a neuron firing a
"thing" and when is it a "behavior"? SO of the events represents a "dog",
and some of the events represent a "bark". How does the brain separate the
events that represent "dog" from the events that represent "bark"? Why is
one set of neural firing patterns a "thing" where as another sent of neuron
firing patterns "what something is doing"?

The answer is in the brain's ability to predict which events will happen in
the future. If the brain is able to make correct predictions about the
neural patterns, that prediction, and that neural pattern, becomes the
"thing". What it can't predict, becomes the "what it does". If I move my
eyes to look at my PC, my brain is able to predict that it will see "a
black PC" even before I move my eyes. This ability to predict what sort of
neural firing patterns are expected to show up in response to that eye
movement, is what makes the PC a "thing" to our brain, instead of "what it
does" to our brain.

Our perception of the world being divided up into things, and what they do,
is created, and defined by, our brain's ability to correctly predict
sensory signals. But this prediction ability is not hard and fast. It's a
large continuum. There are not some signals we can predict, and some we
can't. It's a large continuum of partial predictions with varying amounts
of accuracy with not clear boundry between what a thing is and what it
does.

All the effects with short term persistence fall into that gray area where
it's hard to know whether it's more correct to say it's a thing, or an
action. IS a wave a thing, or the action of the water? Waves come and go,
and tend to last for such a short period of time, it's hard to know whether
it's more correct to call it what the thing is, or what the thing does. Is
a wave a noun or a verb? Looking it up on dictionary.com, I see it's
listed as both (in the same definition, instead of as separate
definitions). They can't even tell whether it's none or a verb well enough
to decide which way to label it in the dictionary!

This is all because the universe is not divided into nouns and verbs, just
like light is not divided into bright and dim. The distinction is a
man-made distinction which exists in our brain hardware, and not out in the
universe. Out in the universe, there is simply a continuous stream of
events, some of which, we can build hardware to predict, because they have
some measure of predictable temporal persistence, and others, with less
predictable persistence. We know that the "things" lies on one end of this
continuum, and the "actions" lie on the other, but where we choose to draw
the line, is purely, a 100% arbitrary human invention.

Above you wrote:

I don't see a thing and its actions as opposites,
binary or a continuum. They are distinct [snip]...

If I look at the montior in front of me, it's made up of a lot of distinct
sensory events. There are the events created by it's shape, and by the
black edge around the monitor. And there are the events created by the
flashing lights on the screen. Which of those sensory events make up what
the montior "is", and which make up what the monitor can "do"?

Well, that's fairly easy to answer. The sensory that's highly persistence,
and which allow me to make accurate predictions about the future, are the
sensory events we associate with what it "is". That includes the light
given of by the edge of the monitor - it's always in the pattern of "black
textured plastic", pattern. But the light given off by the center of the
monitor, changes. So the light on the edge, we call "what the thing is",
and the light from the center we call "what the thing does".

There is a very clear distinction in our ability to predict what sensory
events will be created by the edge, from our ability to predict the sensory
events created by the center (aka screen) of the monitor. One has a
persistence that we expect to last for years, the other has a persistence
we expect to last for seconds.

But I can look at the stuff this monitor does, and I can see a window
created by Firefox. Now, is that window a thing? or is it what the monitor
does? When we talk about our computers, we talk about windows being
things. We use them as nouns in our language. We we do that, we have lost
our consistence. Is the light from the screen what it dose or what it is?
It can be both, or either.

And the cursor that moves around the screen. Is that what the screen does,
or is that a thing? We most definitely talk about it being a thing. But
yet, as I move it, it's just a pattern of light and dark spots created by
some of the leds that make up my screen. When the cursor is in the lower
right corner, the cursor pattern is what those collection of led lights are
current "doing". When I move the cursor to another location on the screen,
the first led lights turn all white (something those LEDs are doing), and
another set of LEDs light up in the pattern we call the cursor. So is the
cursor a thing, or something the LEDs are doing? Again, it's just social
language conventions that makes the distinction between whether the cursor
is a noun or a verb. At times, we label those physical events as a noun,
and at times we label it as a verb.

It seems straight forward to talk about my monitor as a "thing". But if we
could zoom into it, and see the individual elections, would the montior
still look as much like "a thing" or would it stop looking like a thing,
and look a lot more like the behavior of atoms? It would stop looking so
much like a "thing" to us.

If a lot of people bunch together in the middle of a large field, and form
a crowd, (like how the atoms bunch together to form a PC monitor), is that
crowd a thing, or is it something the people are doing? It's arbitrary
because in the universe, there really is no such distinction.

You, and Alpha have many times told me that matter isn't really a "thing".
You have both told me to read the book the "matter myth". The basic
argument is, the more closely you look at matter, the less it seems to be
"thing" and the more it seems to be "a behavior". Duh. And if you
understood the point I'm making here, and have written a lot of words in
many past posts to try to get you to grasp, you would understand why I say
"Duh". At a distance, it's valid to say the crowd is a "thing" ut when you
get to close to, and can see the actions of the individuals, we tend to
want stop calling it a thing, and start calling it the behavior of the
individuals. Did it change from being a "thing" to being an "action"
because of something that happened to it? Of course not. It changed
because _we_ changed our point of reference. The distinction between what
a thing is, and what a thing does has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE UNIVERSE.
It's a classification created by the human brain based on the brain's
ability to predict events in the universe. When we get close to the crowd,
we are see all the indivisual motions of the people, we see their hands and
arms move, we see them tilt their head, we see them blink their eyes. We
lots of changing sensory events which we can't predict, and as such, the
bulk of of the sensory data flowing into us get's classified as "actions"
instead of "things". But if you fly over the crowd in an airplane, we can
no long see the arm motions, and the head tilts, and the eye blinks. We
see a big dark spot on the light colored ground, and it doesn't seem to
have any motion to it at all. Now, because this "black spot on the ground"
is not changing, we classify it as "thing" instead of an "action". But
did our classification change because the crowd changed? Not in the least.
The re-classification of the crowd from a verb to a noun had NOTHING TO DO
WITH WHAT WAS HAPPENING IN THE CROWD. It instead, had everything to what
sensory data from the crowd our brain had access to. When we look at the
crowd, some aspects of the light are more consistent than other aspects of
the light. Close up, our eyes are able to pick up a lot more of the
aspects which are constantly changing and very hard to predict. From far
away, we pick up far more of the aspects which are very slow changing.
It's not that the light up at the airplane is different. It's that our
eyes can't see it. If we use a telescope in the airplane, the crowd would
turn back into a verb.

The distinction between whether some event in the universe is part of what
what a thing is, or is instead, part of what a thing does, is totally
arbitrary.

The underlying truth of the universe, is that there exists a continuous
temporal range of predictability of physical events. The longer, and more
accurate, the human brain is able to predict future events, the more likely
we are to label those events as nouns (or as being what defines the meaning
of some noun). The less we can predict or the faster our ability to
predict fades with time, the more likely we are to label the event as a
verb. The temporal boundary between the two, exists somewhere in the range
of a few seconds to a few minutes. If it can persist and be predicted for
more than a few seconds into the future, we are free to start talking about
it as a "thing", and if the physical event is predictable for less than a
second, we are forced by human convention to start talking about it as an
action.

The closer you look at matter, the all the "stuff" seems to vanish, which
is what leads people to say stupid ass stuff like "matter isn't real". (or
"matter is a myth").

It's not a myth. That entire concept is stupid. The universe is a large
continuum of physical events. Those physical events are very very real.
It's what "real" really is. It's the fact that these events exists. Our
brain, and our language, has picked this 1 to 10 second point on the
temporal scale as the dividing line between "thing" and "action" purely
because that point on the scale is a useful dividing point based on the
perception powers of the human brain. Brain hardware that could think much
faster, might pick a dividing line at the 1 to 10 ms point. Anything that
lasted for longer than 10 ms might be though of by that hardware as a
"thing". Hardware that ran much slower, might use a 1 to 10 year dividing
point. Anything that changed faster than once every year, would look like
an action, instead of a thing.

We can re-map our view of reality by using things like time laps
photography to transform our temporal sensory range. A mountain look like
a thing to us. But if we watched in time laps photography that lasted for
a million years, it start to look like the action of the planet instead of
a "thing". If we change the scale of the time laps movie to billions of
years per second, the creating and destruction of solar systems would look
like the action of the universe, instead of like things.

So does the fact that all the "things" vanish as we look closer prove that
"things" don't exist? Of course not. We instead, see the truth that
"Things" are not part of the universe, they are part of our perception of
the universe.

And when we go in the reverse direction, and try to understand the behavior
of subatomic particles, but continue to use our 10 second frame of
reference to separate the behaviors which we call "things" and the
behaviors we call "actions", and notice that everything seems to turn into
actions, and all the things vanish, does this mean that my monitor doesn't
really exist as a thing? Of course not. It just means we understand that
"things" exist not in the universe, but in our perception of the universe -
and more precisely, in our ability to predict the future of the universe -
to predict future actions of the universe.

Of course, this gets us to the interesting problem of what it means for a
thing to make a prediction, if there are no things, but only actions of
which we choose to call some of them things. But this post is far to long
already so I won't drift into that discussion.

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

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