Hi John, Gary, Ravi;
comments interspersed below,
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
John F. Sowa wrote:
Rich, Gary, and Ravi,
<snip/>
That is *not* cracking the code. They discovered
evidence that
the associations in the brain link the same kinds of
things that
AI programs have been linking for the past half
century.
<snipplet/>
The new guys on the block have
much more precise instruments, and the fMRI scans let
them look
at how Broca's area and Wernicke's area light up when
people
are talking or listening. That's interesting, but it
still
doesn't tell us how neurons encode information. In
fact,
the phrase "neural encoding" is no more
enlightening than
Aristotle's "affections (pathêmata) in the
psyche".
John Sowa
RGC> Knowing that these three concepts,
widely understood (manipulation, eating, shelter), are consistently providing
an invariant scattering of evoked signal responses to the same local brain area
is a building block for further refinement.
For example, what ontological properties
of tools, food, compartments are associated with other scattering axes in fMRI
experiments? What aPartOf,
IsA, SameAs, ContainsA, and other
common AI concepts can also be found to map onto brain manifolds, perhaps in
concert with the above three axes?
Finding other manifold scatterings of
conceptual pairs, triples, etc can further inform our collective discovery of how
the brain sorts concepts spatially in the various compartments.
The conceptual invariants we have now are
clearly inadequate. Pop neurologists act like they suffer from rampant
anthropopathy when they "explain" how the brain regions work. Every
action seems to them to have a "purpose" or to confirm a suspicion,
or reward "good" stuff, but there have been no obvious experimental data
re physiological correlates to conceptual information, at least not to my
amateur knowledge. Contraindications requested.
The structure of the brain into some known
compartments, and assignment of emotional meaning to the various compartments,
manifolds and linkages is well described in the book "The Emotional
Brain", if any reader is interested in pursuing emotional
conceptualization.