From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!uunet!tdat!swf Wed Oct 14 14:58:01 EDT 1992
Article 7154 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: swf@teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Simulated Brain
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Date: 7 Oct 92 23:58:10 GMT
References: <1992Sep29.151801.8240@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE> <1992Sep29.225005.4267@usl.edu> <1992Sep30.173422.4220@utdallas.edu> <BvoFn3.Ext@nic.umass.edu>
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In article <BvoFn3.Ext@nic.umass.edu> quilty@titan.ucc.umass.edu (Humberto Humbertoldi) writes:
|	Now, of course, if Ms/Mr Flynn is claiming that human brains
|are not central processor cpu's with seperable memory/storage
|subsystems and all those other features of conventional first-fourth
|generation computers which we are familiar with, s/he is quite
|correct.  The architecture of human brains is unquestionably much
|different from any existing humanly-designed electromechanical
|computational devices.  Then again, the question of single processor
|vs. multi-processors is a bit of a misunderstanding of this
|architecture, I take it -- since I assume that some variation of a
|connectionist model of human brain architecture is correct.  ...

At least close enough for the issues being discussed here.

|Clearly, something like parallelism exists across many computational
|levels within the human (or generally "chordate") nervous system.  So
|for example, in pattern recognition lower level feature recognitions
|combine in a multivariate fashion within total object recognition; but
|total objects are themselves similarly conditioned by all the "other"
|sensory objects which contextualize and shape recognition.

Oh, it is even worse than that!  Higher level, total object recognition
can condition, or even determine, lower level feature recogniton.
[Ever try to correct your hearing of the words of a song that you
learned wrong? - your brain keeps insisting on hearing it they way it
has always heard it - I am going to have to listen to "Cam ye o'er frae
France" a few more times with the printed words before I can hear it right].

|Basically,
|the single-processor/multi-processor distinction breaks down and
|becomes meaningless within "Connectionist" systems such as chordate
|nervous systems (I put "connectionist" in scare quotes to indicate
|that I do not claim that chordate brains are fully describable, even 
|at a hardware level, by any finitely and discretely striated
|connectionist model.  Indeed, nature generally tends to be much too
|"indiscrete" for such artificial cognitive models)
|
Ah, now what is the significance of this to AI research?
Is this good or bad news?
-- 
sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com


