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Article 6503 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Defining Intelligence
Message-ID: <BILL.92Jul23203434@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu>
Date: 24 Jul 92 03:34:34 GMT
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In-Reply-To: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu's message of 23 Jul 92 22: 38:09 GMT

rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:

   >  I still disagree.  We have some kind of memory.  But that memory
   >does not have a store operation, and does not have a retrieve
   >operation.

This is an open question, actually.  There might be neural mechanisms
that "gate" the modifiability of synapses, so that when one of these
mechanisms is active, the current activity pattern is stored.
Psychologists have called such a thing a "Print Now" mechanism.  There
is some reason to think that norepinephrine does something of this
sort.

There might also be mechanisms that control retrieval.  1) It has been
suggested that the hippocampus works by rythmically blanking out the
existing activity pattern, feeding in a cue, and allowing the cue to
evoke a memorized pattern.  2) In the neocortex, if, as has been
suggested, it works as an attractor neural network, mechanisms that
control the amount of noise in the network will determine whether the
activity pattern can fall into an attractor (which is equivalent to
recalling a memory).

All this is pretty speculative, of course, but in any case I don't
think it's reasonable to be dogmatic about these things.

	-- Bill


