From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!wupost!uunet!trwacs!erwin Wed Aug 12 16:52:39 EDT 1992
Article 6584 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: erwin@trwacs.fp.trw.com (Harry Erwin)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.cognitive,comp.ai.neural-nets
Subject: Speculations
Keywords: cognition consciousness flows
Message-ID: <690@trwacs.fp.trw.com>
Date: 9 Aug 92 22:22:42 GMT
Followup-To: sci.cognitive
Organization: TRW Systems Division, Fairfax VA
Lines: 40

This is a speculative posting, and should be treated as such. I will make
three predictions about the future evolution of neuroscience.

1. We will understand (at least in outline) cognition and consciousness by
the end of 1994. This may sound like I'm taking a risk, but it looks like
our evolving understanding of how the brain functions may reach that point
in the next two years. I think three key advances will contribute to this
situation:
a. Someone will work out a way of defining cognition as an ergodic
process. This will be done by a mathematically sophisticated neural
scientist.
b. Someone else will work out a way of measuring the lyapunov exponent
associated with various specific brain processes, (This may be key and
hard. When I was doing my work on chaotic quasiperiodicity in
multiprocessing systems, I was never able to break this one, and had
to use statistical arguments. Even in the continuous limit, the effect
of a race condition is to cause a discontinuous change in the partials
describing the evolution of the system) and
c. A third person will demonstrate that cognition is in some deep sense a
chaotic process. (I think many people might be able to nail this one.
Bernardo Huberman has some interesting ideas about cooperative search
processes that are suggestive.)

2. By the end of 1995, we will have demonstrated that human social groups
support distributed cognition. This isn't much of a speculation--there's
work underway already investigating this. I suspect the cognitive model
will differ significantly from that associated with speculation #2.

3. (This is the over-the-top speculation.) By the end of 2015, advances
coming out of predictions 1 and 2 will have worked out some way of setting
off an exponential growth in human cognitive abilities/intelligence.
Possibly by 2025, we may reach Vernor Vinge's singularity. This
speculation is motivated by the probable consequences of having two
effective models of cognition.

Cheers--I'm open to comments...
-- 
Harry Erwin
Internet: erwin@trwacs.fp.trw.com



