Slashdot Mirror
Our Brains Don't Work Like Computers
Roland Piquepaille writes "We're using computers for so long now that I guess that many of you think that our brains are working like clusters of computers. Like them, we can do several things 'simultaneously' with our 'processors.' But each of these processors, in our brain or in a cluster of computers, is supposed to act sequentially. Not so fast! According to a new study from Cornell University, this is not true, and our mental processing is continuous. By tracking mouse movements of students working with their computers, the researchers found that our learning process was similar to other biological organisms: we're not learning through a series of 0's and 1's. Instead, our brain is cascading through shades of grey."
damnit
Does not compute!
And it is for this reason that I loathe comparisons of computing power to brain power. "By 2015, we'll have computers as smart as humans." What kind of bullshit comparison is that? They're two completely different processes.
That's what I heard. Even if they don't work like sequential or even parallel digital computers, I'm pretty sure that brains still compute. Mine tries, at least.
I didn't think our brains were binary. I thought that part of the difficulty in reproducing a mechanical brain was preciously it's shades of grey.
Granted, I'm somewhere over 30. Are younger people that dumb nowadays?
Here before all but 8486 of you.
Fuck off.
How we know is more important than what we know.
"...our learning process was similar to other biological organisms..."
AMAZING! Who would have made that sort of connection?!
Just need one more referral for a
Take that skynet!
Looks like the submitter forgot something. Lemme see if I can help him out a little:
How will this study affect your next thought? Go here to discuss it further.
There, that feels more complete.
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Apples and oranges grow on different trees
Each neuron is like a tiny, slow analog DSP, feeding back FM around a base frequency (eg. about 40Hz in the brain's neural tract). The neurons have feedback among themselves locally, and send out some larger feedback in fiber bundles, signalling other clusters along the way. It's like a teeming kazoo symphony, without a conductor.
--
make install -not war
IBM has been working on this for a while
Free XBox, PS2
In other news, the sky is blue...
Come on, it's not like this is neuroscience... Oh.
...with floating point arithmetic. A "double" can represent a number between 0 and 1 with 15 decimals of precision, way more precise than any biological phenomenon. Computers can think like us, it's just a matter of writing the right floating-point code.
The idea that our brains might work like biological organisms is a real breakthrough.
Next week's research topic: Do farts stink?
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
Is this news?
What's interesting is the possibility of modeling electronics around this fact. Analog electronics may see a resurgence, and we lose the ability to squeeze more clock cycles out of our digital systems each second.
This isn't even counter-intuitive let alone revelatory.
More like:
Our Brains Don't Work, Like Computers
--
make install -not war
...is that our brains (like TVs) are inferior analog devices and human brains need to be replaced with new digital versions. :-)
I guess some brains just have more contrast then others...
Gee, that's a surprize.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
He's an outcast of the /. community and he jumps to conclusions.
Roooooolaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand Piquepaille!
I've been waiting for a scientist to tell me that I'm capable of thinking in abstract and fuzzy terms for years. Things I can now forget thanks to the brilliant scientist:
1.) The GPS coordinates of each key on my keyboard.
2.) The streaming audio of my name and all of my friends and families name.
3.) The bio-mechanical force sequences for the hundreds of muscles used in picking up a glass every morning.
Beer will no longer render my circuits useless!
Headline: Brains More Like Neural Nets Than Traditional Programs
Who woulda thunk it.
ftp://ftp.sas.com/pub/neural/FAQ.html%23A2
'Most NNs have some sort of "training" rule whereby the weights of connections are adjusted on the basis of data.'
Insert joke about the 1980's (or 60's/50's/40's) calling). Somehow I don't think Norbert Weiner would be the slightest bit surprised.
-Tupshin
Maybe one day I will have an amd cluster in my skull. Until then, I will accept my alcohol-cooled brain.
This signature is part of a balanced post.
Like them, we can do several things 'simultaneously' with our 'processors.'
How so? Last time I checked 'computer brain' (cpu) cannot do multiple operations at the same time, unless you have dual core/cpus.
CPU just switch from one task to the other at break neck speed (yes I am ignoring pipelines and branch prediction - they are only use in streamlining the operations).
Human brain work the same way- it may be able to take in multiple informations (sight, feel, sound, smell) at the same time, but human brain has adapted a "filtering" system for unimportant sensor input. Thus you cannot say human brain does parallelistic operations at the same time.
I presume the info was a byproduct of a useful study (Cog-Neuro-Psy possibly?). I really hate it when the media picks out the And finally bit of science news stories (a la bread-landing-on-the-buttered-side, etc).
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. Bill Cosby (1937 - )
Sounds like the elusive "analog computer".
"Shades of grey" sounds like working with analog values (i.e. 0-255) instead of binary levels (on/off) or even trianary values (on/maybe/off).
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
Are younger people that dumb nowadays?
I hope not, because if they are, I must finally be old.
I dont think its suprising to anyone that the mind works in an analogue fashion, weighing the choices available to it up as the decision is made, but I think this experiment is interesting in measuring the effect through physical reaction to verbal triggers. By using that many core subsystems of the brain, I think its possible that effects could have been drawn into the experiment that are not wholly connected to the input/output streaming methods within the brain, and more to do with physical operation of the mouse or visual stimulus through the screen.
Business Voyeur
.. that not only do we think in 0's and 1's, but we have 2's and 3's as well!
The article's summation is far more accurate than Slashdot. In TFA, a researcher says our minds don't work like digital computers.
The Slashdot headline says our minds don't work like computers, end of sentence.
Had TFSH (The Fine Slashdot Headline) been accurate, this would've been a mind-blowing result and in need of some extraordinarily strong evidence to support such an extraordinary claim. The question of whether the human mind--sentience, consciousness, and all that goes with it--is a computable process is one of the most wide-open questions in AI research right now. It's so wide-open that nobody wants to approach it directly; it's seen as too difficult a problem.
But no, that's not what these guys discovered at all. They just discovered the brain doesn't discretize data. Significant result. Impressive. I'd like to see significant evidence. But it's very, very wrong to summarize it as "our brains don't work like computers". That's not what they proved at all.
Just once, I'd like to see a Slashdot editor read an article critically, along with the submitter's blurb, before posting it.
What do you mean our brains do not work like computers, granted they are different, but the basic fundamentals are the same. We transmit and interpret data the same way computers do. We use electrical signals, and although the devices that send and interpret these signals are organic, they still only have an off and on. There is no in between. Again I would like to re-iterate that this is only at the very basic level, if you are talking about higher level thinking and operation, of course they are different. We can learn can't we?
Knew it before, i'm colorblind...
Birds do not fly like airplanes, they continuously wave their wings - and do not have turbines or propellers.
Sure hope my taxes don't pay for that "research".
No Shit
We're analog, not digital
The first thing I thought when I read the post and skimmed the article was, "Well duh. What did you think neural nets were?"
I guess it's good to prove it, though.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Does anyone *really* think that computers and the brain work in the same way ? Or even in a significantly similar fashion ?
Well, by 'processors', I assume you mean neurons. These are activated to perform a firing sequence on output connections dependent on their input connections and current state, heavily modified by chemistry, propogation time (it's an electrical flow through ion channels, not a copper wire), and (for lack of a better word) weights on the output connections. To compare the processing capacity of one of these to a CPU is ludicrous. On the other hand, the 'several' in the quote above is also ludicrous... "Several" does not generally correspond to circa 100 billion...
No-one has a clear idea of how the brain really processes and stored information. We have models (neural networks), and they're piss-poor ones at that...
The brain behaves less like a computer and more like a chaotic system of nodes the more you look at it, and yet there is enormous and significant order within the chaos. The book by Kauffman ("The origins of order", I've recommended it before, although it's very mathematical) posits evolution pushing any organism towards the boundary of order and chaos as the best place to be for survival, and the brain itself is the best example of these ideas that I can think of.
Brain : computer is akin to Warp Drive : Internal combustion engine in that they both perform fundamentally the same job, but one is light years ahead of the other.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The W3C rejected my idea for a "sarcasm" HTML tag, when it would have been so useful at a time like this. Well, I can still fake it:
Our brains don't work like computers? <sarcasm>Noooo, you're kidding!</sarcasm>
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
... humans communicate with none of the precision of robots, reproduce in a manner wholly dissimilar to an assembly line and do not benefit from being hooked up to AC electic current.
Tune in tomorrow for more news from the next installment of, "YOU ARE NOT A COMPUTER, GEEK," exclusively on Slashdot.
(drone voice)
Yes. This is true. Logical. I concur.
Next up on the obvious channel, are fat people really heavier than skinny ones?
You mean there are times when sarcasm isn't useful?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
People aren't born with an innate foundation in predicate calculus?
I suppose it can be a useful line of research in robotic "muscle" coordination and world interaction.
I think the study is somewhat flawed because first of all interfacing with the computer using a mouse and based the result of the study on that is somewhat open for other possibilities. The main point however is that:
"When there was ambiguity, the participants briefly didn't know which picture was correct and so for several dozen milliseconds, they were in multiple states at once. They didn't move all the way to one picture and then correct their movement if they realized they were wrong, but instead they traveled through an intermediate gray area," explained Spivey
I think what he's trying to say here is that we in difference state which supports his continues study but from what I'm thinking this is merely someone stop and try to compare the two similar words because they are so close so diferentate the two and not because they are in a grey area. For example if I see two words that are long and hard but most of their character are the same then i will take a while to figure out their difference and select the one with the intented meaning. So i think this study studied the wrong thing.
I still believe in the Church-Turing Thesis... Our brains might not work LIKE computers but they don't do work DIFFERENTLY than them either.
Thank god we have someone like Roland Piquepaille to point out these amazing facts to us!
Yes, that was sarcasam!
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
A Beowulf made from these things?
are they at least Turing Machines?
"the researchers found that our learning process was similar to other biological organisms"
Why was this a suprising result? Prior to this they thought what, that people were human-made binary computers in diguise? We have developed computer systems using binary math not because a binary system of logic is necessarily the best, but because binary components can be made easily and cheaply.
Also, figuring out a system of low-level operations such as NAND and XOR is more difficult for other number systems like decimal.
Alphanos
Sorry, I have to know...
WILL IT RUN LINUX?
perhaps in a beowulf cluster?
01010111010010000100000101010100001111110010000001 00100100100000010001000100111101001110001001110101 01000010000001010101010011100100010001000101010100 100101001101010100010000010100111001000100
(What? I don't understand)
There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't
A human brain can easily spot the problem in the following code:
int i = 1;
while(i > 0) {
i++;
}
It is provably impossible for a computer to detect the problem there in any sort of general fashion.
Clearly there is something fundamentally different between the two devices.
Wow, in other news we dont move the same way as cars!
Just wait this just in...
Not everyone agrees with Bush either!
- Comeon Slashdot you can do better then this
This is such a ridiculous article. Not only is the hypothesis completely pointless (Brains behave like biological organisms), but the experiments they did have no bearing on this finding. Hasn't it been proven that phonemes are the lowest common denominator of language? And since when did the location of a mouse pointer accurately demonstrate the methods of the brain?
What's up with that? credibility--;
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
how the fuck do you reply to the wrong damn article
that talked about how for the brain every neuron firing was more like a line of code executing than a 1 or 0. ive visualised it like that since i read that, although im sure its nowhere near that simple.
Dude... calm down. All he did was link to a collegiate web site. He's not pimping his "blog," he's not getting ad revenue, and he's not just posting fluff for the helluvit. I'm all for jumping down his throat when stuff like that happens, but it didn't this time.
But the sky ISN'T Blue in reality
its just that under most conditions the color
(resulting from angle of the sun and some rather nasty physics/ chemestry) is considered "blue".
Are you saying that Roland would have pointed us to a somewhat useless article?!?? Piquepaille wouldn't do such a thing! Oh wait, he has for his last 80 damn stories.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
They talk in the article of a "1's and 0's" concept of brain function, but they fail (at least through what is in the PR release about their experiment) to disprove that the brain operates on binary data.
Even computer software, which is known to operate on a strict binary system at the lowest layers, can have the appearance of linear, curving outputs as the data fed to it changes. This linearity breaks down at some granularity if you look closely enough at the output and see it jumping from one value to the next value at some minimum discreet distance away.
Unless they think that watching a student draw a curve on a screen with a mouse provides them so hi-definition a picture of the brain's decision making that they could see the granularity, the experiment is meaningless. Chances are high that even in a brain which operates on discreet binary information at the lowest level, the "output resolution" of something like mouse motor skills is capable of being considerably finer-grained than the resolution of the mouse being operated (or the muscles controlling it).
11*43+456^2
We are carbon based lifeforms not silicon - Spock
...on this subject.
The brain may act that way...but I've found myself switching to writing post-it notes in the form of google queries.
How much money did they spend on THIS brilliant study? [/sarcasm]
I believe that the mind is (simply?) a quantum computer, and the article seems to support that idea. The human brain utilizes a sort of general interconnectedness of things to process thoughts as dynamic probabilities of state, with conclusions only being properly arrived at after a certain ammount of calculation has occured, but with all probabilities esiting well before the completion of the thought.
Anyhow, I should probably stop rambling and go outside or something.
Never eat more than you can lift -- Miss Piggy
...the researchers found that our learning process was similar to other biological organisms....
That makes perfect sense, seeing as our brains evolved from other biological organisms.
Check out evolutionary psychology for some information. You'll view the world differently afterwards.
Evolutionary psychology (or EP) proposes that human and primate cognition and behavior could be better understood by examining them in light of human and primate evolutionary history... The idea that organisms are machines that are designed to function in particular environments was argued by William Paley (who, in turn, drew upon the work of many others).
Just because brains aren't binary or synchronously clocked doesn't mean much. One can create analog computers to represent shades of gray or create clockless computers that don't operate in lock-step synchronization. Furthermore, any digital, synchronous computer and simulate both shades of gray (with floating point numbers) and continuous processes (with sufficiently small time slices). Moreover, given the messiness of neuro-electrochemical systems, one can argue that it doesn't take a very precise float or a particularly dense time slicing to simulate neurons.
Some people ascribe the seeming magic of consciousness to some ineffable property of the brain, e.g., quantum mechanical effect. While other insist that its just what happens when you connect enough simple elements in a self-adaptive network.
The question is, are there neural input-output functions that are fundamentally not computable? If not, then a digital computer will, someday, reach human brain power (assuming Moore's law continues).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Our brains work in shades of GREY. I'm such a dork.
--Max
Computers predict which instruction to cache when branching is involved. Let me be another in the long line of "Duh" responses, but in a different direction. Is it at all surprising that the participants didn't wait until $END_OF_TOKEN to start moving the mouse? No, it isn't... in fact this is the way an optimized autocomplete works. We have several discrete states with a minor amount of non-determinism which favor more likely responses. When you start typing "w" and you are using some sort of autocomplete in c, the odds are it will suggest "while." Why would it do that? The answer is obvious, dispite its not being the only choice, it is the most likely. If you RTFA, then you would understand that this only suggests humans aren't DFA's they are NFA's... but if you've taken a Computational Models course, then you know that they are functionally equivalent. So... no... this isn't a major advancement in Cog. Sci. This is just a simple observation that humans are good at planning with incomplete data sets.
Remove *your pants* to send me email.
That is a great song by Annie Lennox.
Does it mean that we can come up with a better (or atleast different kind) of computer?
Maybe we should first debug the universal Turing machine.
But how?
Wikileaks, no DNS
A brain is more like a GPU than a CPU.
You drink for long life?
I was writing neural net simulations, albeit really amature ones, in assembly back in 1984 based on this already back then ultra super mega well known fact. Here it is 2005 and this is just being "discovered"?
Perhaps these researchers missed decades of neural net and artificial life research which takes this biologicals-are-non-binary fact a priori? Perhaps they missed the sub-areas in mathematics and coding theory? Or it being posited (repeatedly) that we'd need something more like nanotech using chemistry or optics to do this rather than simple transistor arrays on chips?
If so, I question their credentials and wonder how they got to be "researchers".
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I just started as a customer service "consultant" (fancy title for answering stupid questions) for a major Scandinavian telco, and I can say that my some of my colleagues are so stupid that I actually would stop using a telco that presented me with them as representatives...
What makes it worse is that it's an outsourced branch so we work for a company specializing in telephone services (we also have MS Support hotline upstairs from us O_o)
But I am glad it's not computer hotline for me anymore...
Who say's our brain's dont work like computers? At least my first argument *proves* otherwise. Two important things here... First: My brain stupid things for no reason all the time (Like I'm running windoze). and the really important thing is that our car's arent computers. (To close windows, please press the start button... yada yada; Crashes would be daily, with at least one "Serious error" a week)
Scott Swezey
...It wasn't posted by Timmothy. What's with that?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
The book "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins (of Palm fame) and Sandra Blakeslee is all about how the brain works, and why people's approach to AI is not going to come anywhere near emulating the brain...
Figured it was worth mentioning given the subject matter of the thread... I liked it.. good read, if a bit dry at times...
http://www.babysmasher.com
http://www.openingbands.com
This isn't so surprising!
Why would anyone think that our brains would be digital when it has been refered to as a massively parallel analog system.
I get this from Neumann's book about computers and brains. This is like 50 or so years ago!
He starts by saying the brain can be digital but that the chemistry lends itself to making it more analog.
Also... I've read this rehash of the massively-parallel-analog-system so many times before in different form.
Why would people think it's digital in the first place!? Oh yeah... friggin crumps we are with all this digital crap.
I think digital is just a method to make things easier for us to deal with. Its a methodology kinda like linear systems. But it is wise to think there is more inherent subtlety that is continuous and not so "on and off."
I've had this philosophical argument so many times it irks me. I basically stand by the view that digitizing is more a process as opposed to reality. Sure it works great and gives results but come on... it's an empty hope.
Just ramblin...
01010010011001010110000101101100011011000111100100 10000001101110011011110111011100111111, errr I mean, really now?
I don't think the chunk of meat in my head works using digital logic; but I'd like to think my Mind does a reasonable job of it.
Natural numbers (1,2,3...), true/false, up/down...
It's not unnatural to divide everything in half, heck our bodys are mostly symmetrical; the distiction comes in where the dividing line is.
We can weight our decisions in endless ways, if someone makes a statement, our belief of that statement depends on how many times we have heard it, our trust in the stater, if it meshes with known facts in the current context.
What I wonder is how far can a human mind be pushed in terms of concepts it can grasp and control it has, can a human visualise a 5 dimensional virtual object? control emotional responses, without supressing them? hold multiple contridictary world models? accelerate long-term memory access?
Even if you think of an electronic computer, it's just hordes of electrons rushing down pathways, only reliable because the voltage levels are continually refreshed at each step, a few electrons might wander off the path, but they are replaced at the next junction. Quantum Mob Rule.
I thought that part of the difficulty in reproducing a mechanical brain was preciously it's shades of grey.
What, if anything, do shades of grey have to do with Precious Moments?
Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order covers the brain as multiple coupled oscillators.
They sort of partially heard the word both ways, and their resolution of the ambiguity was gradual rather than discrete; it's a dynamical system."
It is gradual and not discrete, because the mind has running a binary search on the possible sets of answers before arriving on the correct answer. And in case of candy and candle, the words are too close to let the binary search finish quick enough.
Yes, it was not discrete because the solution doesnt have just 1 bit, it had some n bits and thus there were 2^n states. Got it?
-rite
of course they scanned Bush's brain and found only two shades of grey: Black and White.
We have no clue how the brain actually works. Sure, we know how individual neurons work, but no one can explain how a bunch of neurons creates a mind.
We look around our world and notice that computers are superficially similar to brains (e.g. they can both do math), so we hypothesize that they work similarly.
However, there's very little hard evidence supporting this hypothesis in the first place, so there's no "news" in this story.
Bottom line: The brain is not just a super-powerful computer.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
How is this different than a schema? Haven't we known this since the 70's?
Now this IS newsworthy!
No, no, not that stuff about brains != computers. I'm talking about the fact that a Roland P blog story made got posted, without the main link in the summary pointing to his blog.
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Geez man, one of the best "situational jokes" I've seen on slashdot :)
I hadn't even noticed it was our friend Roland submitting the story until I saw your post, which even made it funnier...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I really dont
+ "HÓÔ ©È%5Dä
huh?
Does the article suggest that our brains are non-deterministic turing machines?
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
no duh! this is news?
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Dear Slashdot Editors,
Could we pretty, pretty please have a Roland Piquepaille section, so we can opt-out? I've been good all year, and it's almost my birthday, and I won't ask for anything for Christmas.
-Peter
The brain is not a clock.
The brain is not a steam engine.
The brain is not a computer.
Next?
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
You're making the assumption that the brain can detect the problem in any sort of general fashion. I think the evidence of the enormous number of bugs points to that being very unlikely, and it was proved by Godel that there are proofs that we cannot prove, which greatly strengthens this viewpoint.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
"In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties -- like a biological organism."
Fine, let's see the math. Let's see the trajectory calculations. How about those calculating the space? Calculating the number of dimensions the space has, and how fast that number changes over time?
40 years ago brain scientists realized that computer architecture made a good metaphor for how the brain works. (They did NOT assume there was no feedback, contrary to the article). It made a handy and productive way to look at things so they could figure out more about what was really going on.
10 years ago brain scientists realized that they could use the way cool chaos stuff the describe the way the brain works. Believe me, I know; I've been to the Santa Fe Institute twice. It worked particularly well for me because I'm essentially a signal analyst -- I HAVE to define a set of variables, estimate how well they work, and decide how many of my arbitrary variables to keep or throw out.
It's still only a metaphor. And unlike the specific specific processes described by cognitive science, the dynamic system stuff remains nebulous. It claims a mathematical legitimacy which it can really claim only in concept because the actual math of the acutal operations are is beyond the abilities of anyone making the claims. The fact that it *can* be described this way is no less trivial than the fact that processes can ge grouped according to the traditional cognitive science concepts.
Trajectories on phase space are soooooooo sexy. But if it's any good, it'll result in something more concrete than more people picking up this flag and waving it while shouting the new slogans and buzzwords. Until that happens I peg this with the study that "calculated" the "fractal dimension" of the cortex just because it has fold and folds in the folds.... so fsking what.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
It's all in the name.
Captain Obvious to the rescue! Thanks, poster!
I'm glad we cleared up that common misconception that our brains are discrete digital computers. Now we know we're really more of a biological entity. I'm ever so shocked and intrigued by these developments.
Not like a computer? I'm a cyborg, you insensitive clod!
A guy walks into a bar... well, I forgot the joke, but the punchline is that he's an alcoholic.
THAT DOES NOT COMPUTE
Not if you are a Republican.
I keed, I keed.
electronics have advanced. The digital computer
can allow us to design a modern analog super computer.
Analog calculations would be tremendously fast and
would allow data analysis in the raw rather than
relying on fourier transforms for estimating
frequency. Frequency data could be left in that domain
and processed using analog algorithms.
Everything would be much faster than attempting to
model an organic system digitally
and then convert it back to analog.
I suggest that the analog computer would
benefit from broadband spectral inputs
much like having a 1024 channel analog sampling
board with a specific bandpass on each channel.
Let's go analog!!!!! Yay!!!!
(About darn time)
I could've told you that. Who approves these stories anyways
/mod as troll, i don't care, Slashdot quality has been going way down lately
Hey, why do you think they call it "grey matter" anyway?
Modern processors do in fact, do this. They maintain statistics on the branches and go forward on the branch deemed most likely to be taken. Its based on a simple principal - if you've taken the same branch a few times before, you're likely to keep taking it from now on. Think of how loops work.
Granted, if the processor is wrong, it has to clear the pipeline and start anew (which is costly), but the benefits outweigh the negatives.
-
But when the students heard "candle" and were presented with two pictures with similarly sounding names, such as candle and candy, they were slower to click on the correct object, and their mouse trajectories were much more curved. Spivey said that the listeners started processing what they heard even before the entire word was spoken..."When there was ambiguity, the participants briefly didn't know which picture was correct and so for several dozen milliseconds, they were in multiple states at once. They didn't move all the way to one picture and then correct their movement if they realized they were wrong, but instead they traveled through an intermediate gray area," explained Spivey.
Or maybe piquepaille needs to realize a word is made up of discrete units called 'letters'. Let's imagine I build a robot that had a set of pictures in front of it and is fed one letter of a word at a time. the goal is to point to the correct picture as fast as possible. now i a 'c' and already it knows it should point to either carion, carmen electra, carcasonne, or the carton of budweiser. an efficient robot would start to move already at this point. the human in the example could have been told "wait until you have heard and found the word before you begin moving" and you'd have a straight line every time. the only difference between the robot i describe and the human is that the human dosen't have the speed or precision.
Also, what game were the refs watching?! 42 samples in the set barely proves water is wet.
In Lofti Zadeh's Fuzzy Logic
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~zadeh/
multiple variables (high & low; near & far; cold, warm & hot) describing some state can be true at the same time to various amounts. So, a fuzzy logic system for running a washing machine might make a decision based on the water both being cool and warm and hot but to varying degrees. There might be multiple rules like, if the water is warm, spin the drum, and if the water is cold, add some hot water, and what actually happens related to these potentials. Fuzzy Logic provides a way to take rules of thumb which refer to fuzzy distinctions and quantify them to some extent and use current state to make decisions. In the case of the article, dynamically the state of "candle" and "candy" are both some value for a while and the person responding curves the mouse accordingly (until they hear enough of the word and process it enough to commit more fully to one interpretation).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
In the end floating point numbers are still represented by 1's and 0's. We'll have to wait until computers can represent data in 2's and 3's and 4's and 52.5234's ("shades of gray") before they'll be more like us.
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
Math is nothing but a way to simplify things. Its not enough to do everything we want to do.
The path planner goes slower and generates paths that are initially ambiguous when faced with multiple alternatives. That's no surprise. I'm working on the steering control program for our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, and it does that, too. Doesn't mean it's not "digital".
I hope the story was intercepted from the queue by a sympathetic editor who stripped out the ad link.
What do you mean we don't think like computers!
0
1001011101000101010010010011101011101010000101011
That was my brain calling you an intellectually challenged Donkey's Behind , if you know what I mean...
GCS/MU d- s: a--- C++ W+++ w+ M-- PS--- PE++ t+ R+ tv b+ DI++ G e- h! !y
slow "analog DSP"???
DSP = DIGITAL Signal Processor.
The terms Digital/Analog are entirely different and orthogonal to Discrete/Continous. It only happens that modern systems typically pair "Digital" with "Discrete" processing, but this is not a requirement.
Example: Analog Pulse Amplidute Modulation (AM). This is a signal consisting of discrete samples where the original data stream was analog (values come from an infinite set -- Reals).
Mods, Don't give points to invalid analogies.
Also, it should be noted that continous waveforms can be very very very well approximated as a series of discrete samples, taken at a very high sampling rate...
So, if the Brain operated like a Digital Signal Processor, operating on discrete signals (e.g. at the electron/chemical level), researchers would have much difficultly in differentiating this from an analog system operating on continous signals.
So Parent, Shut Your Trap.
from the article:
The picture below shows Michael Spivey with one of his students looking at two objects on her screen.
this may sound crazy, but i too, would like to look at the two objects on her screen. where's the line?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
is brain DRM
My new blog
Right. And where's the news?
It's just slightly obvious to anybody who knows even a little bit about neuroscience that the brain is an analogue computer.
And obviously the brain learns like other biological brains, it _is_ a biological brain, and they all follow pretty much the same kind of design.
...these aren't my real teeth.
Essentially what I got out of this article is that our thought process is much like google's auto-search that will guess the word you want to search for as you;re typing itm but wont know for sure until the entire word is finished.
Hm, duh?
In all seriousness though, I wonder how the curvature of the mouse shows gravitation to one side versus the other, maybe they're just a quake2 player and enjoy cirlce-strafing.
I'd have put this in the "water still wet" department. People have known for decades that the brain used continuous, or analog computing.
Analog computers can be built cheap now using mass produced Op Amps. For the readout you can use a Vellman Oscilloscope which goes for about $150 US.
The question is, how can we reconcile all of this complexity with the relatively small number of genes in our genome (possibly as few as 25,000 - compare to 18,000 for a worm, same number as a fruit fly.)
The simple answer? We can't. The information content simply is not there, it defies the laws of mathematics. All of this consciousness and complexity crap is obviously some sort of mistake on our part - or it would be if we were sufficiently intelligent to make mistakes.
Timmy! Are you writing a symphony again? BAD *WHACK* TIMMY *WHACK* STOP *WHACK* VIOLATING *WHACK* LAWS *WHACK* OF *WHACK* NATURE *WHACK*. Get back into your corner and resume drooling and scratching yourself RIGHT NOW young man!
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Except George W Bush... You are either with us, or you are against us, amongst other dichotomies.
Yup, the "and finallys" get a little old after a while.
:)
I hope no one was using this research to acquire a PHD or MS. The "brains are not computers" epiphany has been realized about billion times already. And this research could stand to be much deeper.
I'm a little bummed about the shallow linguistics analysis. It's interesting and all, but I wish they would have really jumped into something such as pattern recognition.
I'm and interactive designer, and I tend to believe that language and interaction is based upon pattern recognition. Our brains receive data, and compare them to flexible patterns in order to make decisions. This study certainly supports that theory.
In this case, if you show a candle and a dog to a user, and tell the user to click on the candle, the user will jump directly the candle since a dog does not fit the pattern of a candle at all...both visually and verbally. However, if you present someone with a picture of a candy stick and a candle, they will hesitate upon selecting the candle since they bare verbal and visual similarities. More processing time is needed to compare intricacies.
People probably slow down and curve their mouse movement since they are still comparing patterns while they are selecting. By curving the track path, users increase tracking distance and cognitive processing time. It also allots them a circular motion which can easily translate into a last minute decision change. When people are unsure of things, they usually prepare themselves for backing out.
damn I'm a geek
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
There's a saying by neurophysiologists: "If the brain were simple enough to be understood, it would be too simple to understand itself"
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
I mean, come on, really. Who really thought that their brain worked like a computer? I know I can do things my computer can't. And no matter how fast the computer I'm using is, I'm always waiting for it to finish so I can get it to move on to the next task.
Plus, I can "know" things, whereas my computer just stores them. I can also plot future things to do, whereas the computer just does what it's doing now.
I mean.. sheesh.... if I thought in binary, odds are I'd only see in black and white.
Reeses
Brains have evolved. Computers are designed. And computers have definitely not been designed by understanding the brain processes. (except for AI). So why assume that they function same.
Here are some more comments:
1. It is a different issue of birds fly like planes, because planes have been designed by looking at birds.
2. Computers are designed to be generic. They apply same logic irrespective of the context. Brains evolved for specific environment (jungles on earth) and they work a lot on assumptions.
3. Computers may compute similar to the way we compute while doing basic math (but with high speed). However our logic and math faculty is just a small portion of the whole brain faculty. It is not correct to assume computers work like brains because they work like a small faculty in 'modern human brains'. By the same logic we could say electrical systems work like brains.
Deep Thought was right...
While the methodology is new, the observation is anything but. Details of how neurons conduct impulses (and the way they self-attenuate, adjust modulation and amplitude, etc.) has been understood for decades. There are no revelations here. In fact, computational neural-nets were a graph theoretical application of communication theory (very) loosely based on those observations -- hence the name. A neural network is a primitive model of a single neuron.
By 2015, we'll have computers sufficiently powerful to simulate a full working model of a human brain...
of course, it will be as large as a four storey building, take all the power of Niagara falls to run it, and all of the water of Niagara falls to cool it.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
And here I was thinking that by 2055 when I'm old, I could transfer my brain to a computer continue living as a computer. I guess that'll never happen now, and I'm going to "die" like everyone else. I guess I'll go spend all my savings now :).
Science has recently discovered that circles may be slightly different from squares!
Also, water freezes if you get it cold enough!
(Seriously, is anybody who has really sat down and thought about brains and digital computers at all surprised by this?)
If you're over 30, you should appreciate a little touch of grey. We will get by!
And let's be honest . It's not like most of the stories here are that much better than Rolands, and if Tim is the editor, usually worse.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
As it turns out we've known for a long time that the human brain doesn't act like a computer, and while the report probably had some nice useful new information, the /. article wasn't presented well. If you're interested read "Dark Hero of the Information Age" or google "cybernetics", "Norbert Weiner". or pretty much anything on the workings of the human brain.
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
"the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties -- like a biological organism."
Biological organism? Talk about a shocker!
I bet the guy is kicking himself after seeing that in print. In a conversation you can catch yourself after saying stupid stuff. When you're quoted in an article, you're screwed.
I can hear him now, "Dammit why didn't I think before I spoke? No shit it's like a biological organism!"
Shocked, truely shocked. Mu BRAIN is NOT a COMPUTER.
Wow.
How about telling us something we don't know.
Yeah, they are totaly diffrent. For example a computer would probably never try to base philosophical arguments on a slashdot blurb.
Seriously, computers can work with things more complex then 'ones and zeros'. They can be programed to deal with shades of grey as easily (well, maybe not 'easily' but it definetly can be done)
The fundemental part of the human brain is the neuron, and it's either firing or not. 1 or 0 just like a computer. What triggers it is a bit more complicated, but the process can be emulated by a computer, and eventualy comptuers will be fast enough to do just that.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Godel wrote his incompleteness theorem before turning wrote about his machines, you idiot. Actually, there is a perfectly logical reason: it's called Goedel's incompleteness theorem. It shows that there are some types of mathematical proofs that a human mathematician can demonstrate to be true, but a turing machine ( read: any current technology computer ) cannot. Godel didn't say anything about humans and computers. His proof has absolutly nothing to do with the diffrence. I mean, really you have absolutly no idea what you are talking about. At all. Your brain is a turing machine. Subject to all the limitations.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This is really amazing because it shows how the mind displays emergent properties from all the chemical and electrical activity in neurons in the brain.
In addition to proving that the mind is more than a Turing machine, or some other kind of discrete system, it's saying that the mind itself behaves dynamically, as if it was biological. This experimental work should help us understand language processing in humans in particular as it was the focus of the study.
It may lead to breakthroughs in how we approach the study of AI, specifically branches dealing with natural language processing, voice recognition, translation, and many others I'm sure. I also think the research is great because it is an answer to a deep question.
I sure hope PETA is keeping an eye on these scientists and their "mouse research". I swear - if they harm one little mouse-hair on their heads....
(yuk! yuk!)
That explains why I can't do the Robot.
Our brains are not analog computers. What these guys did would be akin to looking at a computers GUI to figure out if it had a trace-cache. So far removed from the lowest levels that you can't tell anything about them.
:)
Neurons are either firing or not firing, just like a transistor in a computer. What makes them fire is having a certan theshold charge between the inside and outside of the cell, the charge is caused by sodium and potasium ions that are pumped out of the cell. It's very similar to a transistor in that respect.
The diffrence is, rather then just sending electrical signals, the neuron spits out 'juice' that affects other neurons. It could be something simple like dopamine that causes other cells to instantly fire, or something slower acting that hangs around longer and simply 'tweaks' the next cell to be more sensitive or less sensitive (like morphine or cocaine
But it's not at all like an analog computer.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yeah, all I did was take a class on neurochemistry. I guess that makes me dumb enough to think that neurons are either firing or not depending on concentrations of several (or hundreds) of diffrent chemicals floating around near it's dendrites.
Kalat must be a complete tard, and a fool I was to read his work! Woe is me!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Wow. Why is it that people feel the need to speak when they have no idea what they are talking about? I mean really. I think you're talking about speculative multithreading, and I'm pretty sure this was part of the original pentium architecture - but I'm no John Siracusa. Durr.. It's in the IA64 archetecture used by Itanium chips. Never in X86 chips like the pentium.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Spivey showed this exact same thing ten years ago in the '95 edition of Science, except with eye movements instead of mouse movements.
Sorry, neurons are not at all like DSPs. They are like transistors. Firing or not firing based on the electrical charge between the inside and outside of the cell. Please, try to learn something about a topic before you speak about it. Spouting off about things you know nothing about is like jerking off in someone else's slurpy. It may be enjoyable, but if everyone does it the end result is that no one can really enjoy their slurpy unless they are a Cum junky.
You're not a cum junky, are you? No? then pleaze shut up.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Why is everyone here saying that it's obvious that the brain might work like a biological organism? Why is everyone complaining that this has been known for years?
If it were that well-known and obvious, Amazon would have patented it.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Brains work with bits. On or off, firing or not firing neurons just like a computer! And neurons are far less sensitive to diffrent levels of charge then a computer is to diffrent floating point numbers.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Where the fuck did they get an analog mouse?
What this is saying is that Roland Piquepaille is a fucking moron who wouldn't know neurobiology if you shot his brains out and show them to him.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The orgional poster was talking about taking both branches at once, and then throwing out the wrong one, which Itanium chips do.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Wow... the human brain isn't like a boolean logic-based computer...
So this must mean that the good folks at Cornell University are smart enough to discover the obvious...
I wonder how long it will take them to "discover" that the human brain is a giant collection of pattern recognition systems?
There are at least hints of this idea in the original Star Trek series. I'll skip any commentaries but paraphrase it from memory. ... Each "bit" represented not just a one or a zero but every thing in between. Thus allowing the storage all of human knowledge on the Enterprise's computer. For those wishing to Karma whore for more... try Daystrom, Multitronic and Duotronic. I got tired of googling around for more than a sketchy episode summary...
The big innovation in the machines (such as the one on the Enterprise) was (will be ?) that they weren't binary
the clock on the wall says 4 til 7
Don't you mean Rolling PigPail?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
This audio track from The Album Of The Soundtrack Of The Trailer Of The Film Of Monty Python And The Holy Grail conclusively proves that human brains don't work like computers. Not to mention all the episodes of Star Trek where Captain Kirk destroyed computers by talking to them:
John Cleese: Good evening!
The last scene was interesting from the point of view of a professional logician because it contained a number of logical fallacies -- that is, invalid propositional constructions and syllogistic forms -- of the type so often committed by my wife.
"All wood burns," states Sir Bedevere. "Therefore," he concludes, "all that burns is wood."
This is, of course, pure bullshit! Universal affirmatives can only be partially converted. All of Alma Cogan is dead, but only some of the class of dead people are Alma Cogan. Obvious one would think.
However, my wife does not understand this necessary limitation of the conversion of a proposition. Consequently, she does not understand me. For how can a woman expect to appreciate a professor of logic if the simplest cloth-eared syllogism causes her to flounder.
For example: given the premise, "All fish live underwater" and "All mackerel are fish", my wife will conclude, not that "All mackerel live underwater", but that "If she buys kippers it will not rain" or that "Trout live in trees" or even that "I do not love her any more."
This she calls "using her intuition". I call it "crap" and it gets me very IRRITATED because it is not logical!
"There will be no supper tonight," she will sometimes cry upon my return home.
"Why not?" I will ask.
"Because I have been screwing the milkman all day," she will say, quite oblivious of the howling error she has made.
"But," I will wearily point out, "even given that the activities of screwing the milkman and getting supper are mutually exclusive, now that the screwing is over, surely then, supper may, logically, be got."
"You don't love me any more!" she will now often postulate. "If you did, you would give me one now and again so that I would not have to rely on that rancid Pakistani for my orgasms!"
"I will give you one after you have got me my supper!" I now usually scream, "but not before" -- as you understand, making her bang contingent on the arrival of my supper.
"God, you turn me on when you're angry, you ancient brute!" she now mysteriously deduces, forcing her sweetly throbbing tongue down my throat.
"Fuck supper!" I now invariably conclude, throwing logic somewhat joyously to the four winds, and so we thrash about on our milk-stained floor, transported by animal passion, until we sink back, exhausted, onto the cartons of yoghurt....
I'm afraid I seem to have strayed somewhat from my original brief. But in a nutshell, sex is more fun than logic. One cannot prove this, but it IS in the same sense that Mount Everest IS, or that Alma Cogan ISN'T.
Goodnight.
I am not sure that indirect measurements, such as in this case, justify the conclusions made in the study. Actually, I am quite sure that they don't justify them at all. First, there is no cognitive science paper, book or lecture that I am aware of that ever claimed that there are distinct states (like on or off) in the mind. Of course, there aren't - we don't have separate timers (frquences) imposed on us, like modern CPUs do. So the press release is actually not talking about a computer, but rather about a single CPU. Yeah, our brain is not like a single computer chip. A great finding, thanks to the intrepid Cornell researchers.
Second, the "temporal resolution" is abysmal. No researcher has ever claimed that for "several dozen milliseconds" there is a single distinct mind state.
Third, their findings do not really disprove that there are distinct states, they just claim that there can be some more states between certain distinct states. So there can actually be a lot of states, so what? Neuron firing or not firing is as distinct as it gets. Before my spelling checker finally decides whether the word is cromulent or not, it is in the grey area too! If you could devise an experment to find out what Word 2000 think about a word in between me pressing space and there appearing (or not) a curved red underline, you would find that there is continuous competition too.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
When you understand this You will understand the universe.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
NOW you tell me!! No wonder Gentoo wouldn't boot...
Ride the skies
If you make the assumption that our brains work in a rigorous mathematical way, then your idea about an arbitrary limit, ie sleep/frustration at lack of progress, would be nature's clever way of ensure we don't end up trying to compute non-computable thing. Of course, it's late and I need to sleep so I'm probably talking out of my ass.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
"They sort of partially heard the word both ways, and their resolution of the ambiguity was gradual rather than discrete; it's a dynamical system."
Although I acknowledge the potential this discovery has, but "sort of partially" really doesn't do it for me. Not exactly convincing technical terms one would use to be compelling with your argument.
Or is it more that brains are not binary? The "shades of grey" would apply just as well to using multi-state logic. (Many early computers worked directly in octal or even decimal, and multi-state - or "discrete state" - chips can be found from most IC vendors.)
For that matter, when does one become the other? There are very few components that have zero susceptability to interference from other components or the natural world, so most "truly analog" systems aren't truly analog at all, as the accumulating error means you can't go beyond a certain level of precision.
It is also hard to know what, exactly, is new in this research. Fuzzy logic (ie: logic that is not two-state) has been known for years and is derived from biological systems, so it's not really surprising that the brain should apply something similar.
The problem with most fuzzy logic is that you can get an extremely good approximation to it by building a wide-enough digital system. For example, if you stretched a computer such that the smallest identifiable piece of information (the n-state information digit) was equal to a modern 64-bit word, then you enter a realm where one nit can take a heptilion or so possible states - more than enough to cover all the states a neuron can differentiate between.
But, by definition, the system I have just described can be built using a clever-enough arrangement of purely digital circuits, although you'd now need 4096-bit processors to handle a 64-nit system. Doable, well within the realms of existing technology. You could even use a 64-bit processor, to emulate it, but because of the interactions between 64-bit words, you could easily see a 4032 (64*63) fold reduction in speed - far too much to run even the most simplistic of neural network software at a decent speed, never mind an n-state neural network with multi-state inputs and non-linear responses.
So, it's not beyond existing CPUs, but not beyond digital technology in concept, is what I am seeing. Very different things. And I would certainly need a lot of proof to contradict that.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You don't even seem to know that the "electrical charge" is ionic
Well, I did know that. (sodium and potassium ions) Did you expect me to regurgitate every single thing I know in every single post? Off the top of my head I can list several neurotransmitters, dopamine, various endomorphines and endocanabinoids, nitric oxide, serotonin, acetylcholine, GABA, Substance P, etc. (adrenaline is more of a hormone) I learned far more, but I don't remember every single one since I'm not a biologist.
You don't seem to know that DSPs signal by changing the electrical charge between the inside and outside of the chips - or that they're made of transistors.
And you don't seem to know there is a difference between "A transistor" and "transistors" like transistors arranged into a DSP, which would behave differently then a single transistor. Thus a comparison between something and a transistor does not equate with a comparison between something and a DSP.
If you reall are that smart, you have not done a very good job of articulating yourself.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
i have my doubts. this hyper-techno-industrial society is making drones out of us, ontop of the aliention that comes with civilization itself. sure our brains may not work like computers but they might as well because we sit in front of them all day for nothing. fuck technology
The brain cant work with continuous values either. How many digits of pi do you know?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I heard a body theatan is fucking Kate Holms up the ass right now.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Universal Turing machines cannot be debugged on other UTMs. This is known as the CRASHING problem, similar to the HALTING problem, but less commonly known.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
you have not done a very good job of articulating yourself.
Allow me to introduce you. Pot, this kettle; kettle this is cunt
The sloppy posting is due to my lack of posting on sites that require you to supply your own linebreak tags by default. I post on slashdot so rarely now, I'm not used ot it.
This is a red herring. You can make the same problem for a computer -- one where there is not enough fuel in the universe for the computer to computer the solution. This is how modern cryptography works.
Thats not a red hearing, thats exactly why brains, just like all other real computers (and unlike turing machines with their infinite tape) are finite, and have finite limits on what they can do.
Nobody is claiming that the human mind is infinite. All I'm saying is that I and others (including some really smart famous philosophers) have concluded, based on Geodels' theorem, that turing machines and minds are qualitatively different things.
Well, Godel claimed that either humans were not emulateable by turing machines or that other thing was true. I don't know the other thing, but IIRC penrose talked about magical quantum computers with time-traveling bits inside the brain, so Its kind of hard to take that sort of thing seriously.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I guess the brain is analog... and if the number of bits everywhere continues to rise, the tendency is to develop a fully analog computer... with infinite resolution, and infinite bits for everything... the only limit is the point of view.. and of course the analog quality in the matter of signal to noise ratio
That was a compelling response. By the way, can you actualy name these top researchers you claim to have worked with?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
No fucking shit.
Now for the meat ... there are certain things that the brain does, and does exceptionally well. Indeed, it does this because we have been hard-wired for this over the course of our evolution. What does Man - Man that has existed, until recently, at relatively slow speeds and needed to directly or indirectly hunt - need most to survive? Well, we need to be expert at speech-processing so that we can pack-hunt and send each other signals, warnings, and information. We also need to be expert at visual discrimination - especially with respect to face recognition - so that we can see danger, identify cave-pal Ug from enemy Oot, and track a moving prey item.
Now ... what do you get when you combine these two? Why, you get an expert system that is BUILT to be an always-on system. Whee. Hence, yes you will see the two systems also interracting and experiencing possible dissonance and interference. In fact, check out some work that Michelle Miller (Northern Arizona University) did a few years back. I did a lot of the back-end for it (hopefully it published, you never know with these things), and it essentially showed that, yes, cognition is not a FSM (Finite State Machine).
That reminds me ... let's back off this a step ... IS THIS NEWS to anyone? With the exception of chunking (as the cognitive load presented here is VERY low), the Man-cum-FSM view of Mind is inflexible to such an extreme so as to fail to account for a lot of the "bug-in-the-box" kinds of things that we see out in the world.
Argh. This should be a LOW-hanging fruit, I think I'll maybe cherry-pick this into a follow-up article.
By the way, can you actualy [sic] name these top researchers you claim to have worked with?
How would you know them if he did?
Or for that matter, to realize that such things as analog computers exist, and can be simulated on digital computers.
That said, I do find the Cornell researchers' conclusions interesting, as there is a wealth of data that suggests that our input data is delivered/sampled discretely, and not in continuous streams.
It's pretty widely recognized that we are mainly visually based, and that our "view" of reality is an interpretation of the data by the brain, and not necessarily a precise interpretation at that.
The missing pieces are filled in by our minds (and I'm not about to be drawn into a discussion of whether the mind is consciousness, meatware or programming -- there is simply not sufficient information known at this point to make it more than a wild guess) based on what the mind expects to be there. Such expectations may be based on experience, neuroses, or urban legends.
Could a digital computer be constructed to perform (simulate) this process? IBM seems to think so, at least at the more fundamental levels, 'cause they're building one. So while we may have analog computers progessing discrete/sampled data feeds nesteled in our skills, IBM is working on building a digital computer to simulate an analog meatware facility that processes data in discrete chunks.
I suppose it's not too much to see that once the fundamental processes are understood, a considerably streamlined execution of those processes will be possible, although such a result would be in no way whatsoever similar to a human consciousness -- assuming such a thing were to be self-aware, the differing processing speeds of the various internal domains would render the entirely of the thing to be something completely different than a human mind.
It might be a super-smart ant, or something approaching an omniscient being, or it might just get bored and turn itself off. No way to know without performing the experiment.
the earth is round.
seriously, who doesnt already know this.
can *really* do shades of gray.
Given quantum conditions, nothing can do better than approximate levels of gray because when you try to get too accurate, quantum uncertainty kicks in and overwhelms you with randomness.
pleaze shut up.
You spelt please with a zed! This would be an example of being "down and stuff", would it? Do you practice being so hip or is it natural ability. Sorry, did I say "hip"? I meant "laughable". [Laughs].
Gosh, that was clear as mud. Whatever it means, I'll bet it sort of relates to the evo devo survival value of logical fallacies like post hoc ergo propter hoc, or the sudden (and surprising) ability of children of leap to conclusions at the age of 8. Can YOU program a computer to leap to conclusions? If you did, would your laptop snap itself shut on your fingers and scuttle up to the attic to hide? Even rats can modify their behavior based on fallacies like "Ralph died after eating blue bait, I'll bet all blue food is poisonous." Teach a computer to get it wrong with the facile ease of wetware? Sorry, Charlie. Can't be done.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
I wonder what Douglas Hoffstadter could do by adding time to his processing models. I'm sure this could lead to new algorithms. They may be dog-slow algorithms, but perhaps they'll turn out to be more powerful than the one's we're using - at least when backed up with enough silicon.
the article didn't say brains work more like NN, it said brains continue to reevaluate over time.
How many NN implementations do you know of that have reprocessing over time? None in my experience!
"researchers found that our learning process was similar to other biological organisms: we're not learning through a series of 0's and 1's"
Wow! Despite the fact that we are non-biological entities, not carbon based at all, we exhibit the same neural based cognitive processes as carbon based, biological, neural based intelligences!
And! We had to invent a binary computing system since 1822 (ok it was not made then) and just now we have realised that our brains are not like... erm... this thing... that people invented...
I think I will have to RTFA to actually decipher if there is any news in this...
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
What's so interesting to me is that there may turn out to be valuable patterns that can be found by processing the way evalution has changed over time.
I've always thought that in poetry, the way your perception of the meaning of phrases changes as you get the next word and the next is important.
An algorithm that processes over time, and process the play of its own states (to some lesser exent) over time seem much more like human consciousness than anything that's been tried.
Your last post was an interesting one by the way.
First of all, I happen to be doing computational modelling of psycholinguistic processes, and I know (some of) Spivey's work.
The claims that are made in the article do not contradict the idea of continuous attraction, but they do not prove it either. There is a much simpler explanatation, which is hinted at near the end of the article: one or more processes that try to solve the problem using competition. As a matter of fact, this study simply provides a little bit more evidence of what has been en vogue for a long time.
This behaviour *can* be mimicked quite easily using digital computers, and is definitely not shown by all biological processes.
So, our minds don't work like digital computers in the sense that they cannot store and delete information in the same way. That's been known for a long time, and this experiment doesn't prove it.
Some of the basic cognitive processes can be modelled on a computer, though, but that's not surprising either, since computers are supposed to be able to compute "everything computable" and there is still no reason to assume that the workings of our brain cannot be approached by a computational model.
So, nothing to see, only of interest to psycholinguistic experts. Move on, please.
Now, the output cannot be any more stable than the input, so if you have a fluctuating input, you will have a fluctuating output. However, I'll assume that the input is stable to some high level of precision. (This requires a screened input and a screened device, but those are doable.)
So we now focus on the device itself. Resistance varies with the exact composition of the material, the exact temperature of the material and the exact thickness of the material.
Problem #1 - it is very hard to make a resistor that is of absolutely 100% perfect even consistancy. So if you move the dial N% of the total length, you expect to get a resistance of (total resistance)*100/N. In practice, this will merely be the average value, there will be some variance. That variance dictates the absolute upper limit of how finely you can tune the dial, because at some point the level of uncertainty will become comparable to the level of adjustment.
The second problem is heat. All resistors generate heat, but heat increases resistance. Thus, all resistors will fluctuate in value. Remeber, though, that the composition is not 100% even, so the temperature cannot be 100% even either. This means that the fluctuation in resistance will be dependent on where you are on the dial, increasing the uncertainty.
The third problem is the thickness. Resistance increases as the diameter of a wire decreases. Variable resistors involve two conductors in contact with each other, thus scraping. Unless the dial is 100% circular, you MUST go over the midsection of the potentiometer more than one or both ends. This means that even if you DO somehow achieve a perfect variable resistor at the start, you won't have one after you start using it. You will vary the thickness across the length, and therefore vary the resistance of any segment.
Normally, these variations are too small to notice, which is why these components are useful in the first place. BUT, as you increase the precision, you increase the importance of these variations. Eventually, the variations will swamp the signal. At that point, tuning the dial with even greater precision will be worse than useless, as the value is utterly non-deterministic.
In reality, power fluctuations are of vital importance and are a big reason ADCs and DACs have not exceeded 26 bits of precision. Nobody has figured out how to get a power source stable enough, or a chip screened enough, to transform signals of one form to the other with greater precision than that.
If the cleanest signals we can get from an analog system are 26 bits wide, then producing a simulation of an analog system that is 64 bits wide will be vastly superior to any actual system we know how to build.
Now, it is entirely possible that the brain has developed a level of precision and signal clenliness that exceeds 26 bits. I'm not disputing that. I am disputing that any physical system you can build can exceed 64 bits and it probably can't get even close to that. So, a 64 bit simulation of analog signals should be as good as the real thing.
But what of waveforms? Can you reproduce waves, using discrete multi-state logic? Sure. It's called a transform. The three best-known transforms are Z transforms, Laplace Transforms and Fourier Transforms. Using these, you can do a surprising amount. Transforms work by turning a domain you can't use into a different domain that you CAN use. They're very useful devices.
Fourier Synthesis (the theory that any wave, of any complexity, can be reproduced with a sufficient number of overlapping sine waves) makes this clearer. We can represent a classic sine wave by denoting amplitude, start point and end point. We just need to be able to build a set of any number of these, and we
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Or make him a slashdot editor and he can post his own damn stuff; then we can filter him like JonKatz. But honestly, if I wanted to read his plagiarised crap, I'd read his site, not slashdot.
Aside from giving readers the ability to filter his crap, I can think of several legitimate uses for a Roland section:
1. A new section icon. Let me be the first to propose the Goatse man. As a beneficial side-effect, this would help encourage new readers to make the "correct" filtering decision.
2. For that matter, stories in the Roland section could have special ads targeted at masochists and the mentally deficient.
3. When trolls are identified, they could lose access to all stories *except* Roland stories.
Honestly - I see *no* downside whatsoever here. This is win-win for everyone.
Mouse movement without curves???
Next they'll say their conjecture is backed up by the fact that we don't walk like robots... or beep when we wake up.
Duh we don't think like computers! Our actions reflect our thoughts and half the time everyone on the planet is doing crazy shit which no orderly sequencial mind would deign to conceive.
Goddamn hippie.
One of the problems facing many of the "rising generations" today is that they have seldom, if ever, used a good analog computer. Or even know what one is if they even see one.
These can be as simple as a slide rule or a logrithmic scale on a wheel, to something as complex as the Nordin Bomb Scope (used by U.S. bombers in WWII), or even the targeting computers on the Ohio Class battleships of the U.S. Navy. BTW, they were not electronic computers, but they were quite accurate, and last used in combat operations in Lebanon during the Reagan administration.
The nice thing about analog computers is that they can handle input data that is of a continuous nature and be able to perform calculations on that information (or feedback, if it were). They can also handle both discrete and continuous information inputs, and integrate them both together.
Drawbacks to analog computers is that they are seldom general purpose machines. Babagage's computer might be an exception, but even that could be called a digital computer, just not electronic. Analog computers require incredible skill on the part of machinists as well as mechanical engineers (something particularly the USA is lacking these days). They require custom curved pieces and unusual shapes that make devices like this to be a dying art.
Another more minor problem with analog computers is that they are only as accurate as the precision of all of their parts. This goes for pocket watches (pure mechanical watches are analog computers in this sense), slide rules, or even automotive odometers. Because they tend to be one-off devices, especially the more specialized analog computers, higher precision often isn't available, which is exactly why digital general purpose finite state machines (what is commonly refered to as a computer) have become as pervasive as they have in current industrial society.
Still, there is nothing like a good astrolabe to tell you your current lattitude... just in case the GPS reciever breaks down, or worse the GPS constellation breaks down.
How this applies is that I think of the human brain as precisely an analog computer, but one that surprisingly has been equiped for general purpose work with useful input and output mechanisms. Add in a bit of quantum computing that is not just a separate module but integrated into the overall design, and perhaps you get a simplistic view of what the human brain is really about.
Then they'd switch to solar energy and we'd have to scorch the sky.
Which would inevitably lead to the human race being enslaved to be used as batteries.
Anyway, all of that still doesn't make 3i an integer of course.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
jesus, i understand that every generation must repeat mistakes of previous, but don't knowing basics of human biology(that all neurons work simultaneously) is just compromitation of your biology teacher.
What cracks me up is the nerd infatuation with, basically, "only the trivia _I_ know are the essential things. And you're an idiot if you don't know them, no matter how utterly useless or irrelevant they are to _your_ job or interests."
No, sorry. The world doesn't revolve around you or your hobbies. There _are_ plenty of jobs for which the computer isn't the important part. It's not what makes them money.
E.g, for a lawyer it's a better investment of their time to study the laws and precendents, than to learn networking protocols. E.g., when you need surgery, better hope that that surgeon spent their time becoming a better surgeon, instead of becoming a networking expert. Etc.
For most jobs the computer isn't even as necessary as you'd think. It's at best "nice to have", but not justifying investing months into learning IT and networking protocols.
E.g., it's nice for a lawyer or doctor to have the client files on a computer instead of looking through a filing cabinet. But it's not as essential as you'd think. If you expect him/her to spend months becoming a computer expert, for something that saves him/her _maybe_ an hour per week, you need to put down the crack pipe. Then the computer would actually waste their time instead of saving them anything.
Here's another idea for you: You are there and are getting those calls not from "idiots" but from basically victims of a scam. All the "computers are easy", "wireless networking is easy" or "connecting through our ISP is so easy that grandma could do it" ads are actually marketting scams.
Computers are nowhere near that easy yet, or not without investing some signifficant time. But if your employer actually told those people "sorry, folks, it's only for IT gurus. Spend some time becoming an IT pro and growing a goatee, and then it'll be for you", then they'd lose business. Then, see above, you'd be surprised for how many people the computer isn't _that_ important.
So your employer, and a bunch of others, lied to those people to get their money. There's a name for that. It's called "fraud".
And now those people merely expect your employer to live up to those fake claims. They were explicitly told that they'll just plug it in and be online, so it's _not_ unreasonable for them to actually expect it to work like that.
Because thet's how any other industry works. If a car manufacturer told you "this model reaches 60mph in 8.9 seconds", you'd damn well expect it to live to those expectations. You'd expect that after 8.9 seconds, that car damn better be at 60mph.
Same here. If your employer told them "just pop in this CD and you'll be online in less than 1 minute", they expect that after 1 minute they damn better be online and surfing.
That's why you get those calls. Because those people expect your employer to live up to some very explicit claims.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Duh, who'da thunk it. :->
I wonder how much that study cost?
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
The huge analog network that is the brain has one big task: to do pattern matching on the input and recall the good/bad degree of the current experience. Once that is decided, then the organism either reacts positively or negatively. We humans call these 'emotions'. The whole experience is stored back to the brain for later processing. The whole concept is centered around survival.
The difference between machines and humans is not that machines are digital and humans are analog: analog processing can be simulated with neural networks. The difference is also not in the processing capacity: one day they will be powerful enough computers to simulate the entire human brain. The difference between machines and humans (and any other organism) is that humans need to survive, and they constantly seek ways to extend and prolong their survival, whereas machines don't do that. That's the reason biological organisms evolve, while computers sit their idle to be commanded.
This one goes in the 'no shit' pile...
...and to think: someone's time & money was forever wasted in determining that, when all's said and done, apples are not oranges. Bravo. Et tu, greater reality? Have you a mystery that man cannot pull from your cold, dead fingers?
I welcome our new analogue processing overlords.
;0)>
Or was that done already.
PS: In American that's "anal-og pro-sess'ng o-vr-lds"
What the hell are people complaining about? I say good post Roland. I find this article quite interesting. I have always thought that given two stimulii the human brain would process those stimulii in parallel, and only synchronise upon the process of making a descision. This very interesting research shows that we can only process one stimulii at a time. As a result, perhaps we could create neural networks and artificial brains that are more powerful than humans much sooner that anticipated.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
Shades of gray cannot be quantified and represented in binary???
Just think of the next batch of graphics cards that take into account that digital technology cannot deal with shades of gray or curves:
Coming this Fall, the latest in DIGITAL graphics technology - 4x4 pixel displays with *single* bit color! Highest frame rates in history!!!
And this just in: all celestial bodies move across our sky, so Earth MUST be the stationary center of the universe! Yikes!
I guess that many of you think that our brains are working like clusters of computers
/. used to be a technology news site, not some magazine for 6pack rice farmers.
Uhm. No. In fact this cries out loud for BS: we design A to mimic B, then say B works like A. Get lost.
But each of these processors, in our brain or in a cluster of computers, is supposed to act sequentially.
Uhm. No. Again, galactical bullshit. It wouldn't hurt to read a bit about neurobiology [e.g. it was a compulsory subject in our IT course back then] before writing crap.
Sometimes I just seem to have enough.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
You know, we're all nerds, and we're all arrogant.
But what cracks me up is that the most arrogant assholes are the ones with the least skill or achievement. When you see someone harping the most about how he's uber-L33T because he knows what an IP address is, and how everyone else is an idiot... chances are it's someone who actually knows the _least_ about those. Chances are it's not a programmer who actually writes socket code, it's not a hardware engineer who's designed a network card, etc. No siree, it's a script-reader from the hell-desk that does the "I'm so l33t and everyone else is an idiot" fuss.
So you want to call people idiots if they don't know some computer trivia you know (off a list of canned answers)? Well, then being an EE and having some 20+ years of programming experience, I'll call _you_ an idiot, because you're below _my_ skill level.
Sure, you know what an IP or port number is or how to find it out in Windows. (Or can find it out on your list of canned answers.) But can you actually _use_ a socket on that port? Can you for example write a game server that listens on that port? If I gave you an old network card, can you find the right Linux kernel driver and change it to make it work with that card? Or what?
Or, ok, you do know what an IP address is. Congrats. Do you also know what a B-Tree is, how it works, and how to implement one in your code? Do you also know the difference between, say, MergeSort and QuickSort, and the influence of external (e.g., DB file on a disk) vs internal (in RAM) sorting on their performance? Can you implement either purely as, say, a state-machine driven by exceptions to signal state changes, just to prove that you actually understand the algorithm, as opposed to copying someone else's code off the net? Do you know the difference between bitmap indexes and b-tree indexes in Oracle, and can discuss when you might need one instead of the other?
Hey, it's computer stuff too. Very basic stuff too, nothing esoteric. We established already that computer stuff matters, and you're an idiot if there's something you don't know about them.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
our brains don t think like computers because my laptop does not think about sex as much as i do..
Although it tries to store many gigs of it..
Our brain is biological!
Truth is inherently binary.
At a fundamental level, either a percept was detected or not detected.
If I recall correctly, neurons have a threshold voltage at which they will fire. Thus either the neuron fired or it did not fire.
Of course, this assumes a strictly materialistic view of the brain; that is matter is the only substance in the universe of discourse. However, if matter and mind both exist as substance, then I suppose it is possible that mind can be continous rather than discrete.
If the physical universe is just particles in motion, then the "forms of space dimensions (i.e. length, width, height, numbers of particles) are encoded into even the materialist structure, and since such "forms" are not "things", then there is a substance other than matter. (Geisler 57)
A purely materialistic brain is discrete, for such a brain could be no other way.
References:
Geisler, N., Hoffman, P. (2003). Why I Am a Christian: Leading Thinkers Explain Why They Believe. Baker Books. Grand Rapids, MI.
p.s. If anyone has a problem with a Christian citation, look up Alvin Plantinga in the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy...
i think that the main difference between computers and brains is algorithms for the searching. ;-) that used on this differrent devices.
Out brains use associative algorithms, but computers use linear-like algorithms.
in addition, don't forget `microcode'
PS Sorry for my english
i don't like bad comments
Fuckin ell, who'da thunk it?
For TEH FRIST PSOT
suckers
My web domain.
... our computers will get laid more than we do.
The key question is, are they really? Reality is complete and yet it is consistent. Something is missing.
A fundamental concept of Godel is that we're dealing with systems that have a finite number of axioms. But does reality have a finite number of axioms? IMO, it seems doubtful. If we were able to test all unprovable statements (a very big if) like Euclid's fifth axiom and the axiom of choice against reality, and added those axioms to our logical system, we'd end up with an infinite number of axioms because there are an infinite number of unprovable statements. In such a system, every statement is complete and consistent because every unprovable statement has been assigned a true/false value and remains consistent. Godel doesn't apply because we define it not to apply.
And that's the kicker. Our mind doesn't just settle for the axioms which we know are true. We constantly add axioms (and remove them) as we learn. Our brains are limitted, but we tend to focus on only a limitted number of problems at one time. As far as our limitted experiences go, Godel effectively doesn't apply because we define it not to apply.
I really don't see how this sort of thing could ever be coded into a computer.
Did anybody else notice that the image on Roland's home page is being hosted at Cornell.edu? The image in question is http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/June05/Spivey_ env.jpg
Roland, when you copy and paste the HTML from somebody else's web site, at least move the images to your server. You're stealing other sites' content, other sites' bandwidth and giving them none of the ad revenue they could potentially realize if Slashdot linked directly to the original source!
101110110011011010111011010101000011101010011...*w akes up*...huh? oh sorry, i was just thinking to myself
Humans 'similar to other biological organisms'
More on this shocking new theory at 8
We've finally found where the quantum states at the macro level are: *inside*, not "outside". By this logic, we've found "God": the *external*, "quantum" events *we* 'observe' are *inside* the 'universal conciousness': there isn't really any 'outside'.
Wrap your mind around that: as if you could avoid doing so...8^D
That's why I say Wheeler was right: all universes in 'fact' *do* exist, probabilities are allways [sic] 'splitting off' and the four dimensions we "perceive" are kind of a 'hypnotic illusion' we accept AS "reality" (wonder why). (Although some humans perceive more than four.) Those who "draw a line" between 'inside' and 'outside' are *less* "sane" (in the sense of correctly comprehending "reality"), because they have accepted a limitation that doesn't "really" exist. ('Sanity' defined that way is more 'realistic' than defining sanity as 'correctly adhering to the group perceptual norm'.) If we truly understood the nature of the physical system, we wouldn't even be 'perceiving' -- but we would most *certainly* 'know'.
If you can't *erase the line in your mind*, look at it like this: Scientifically, look at it in terms of string theory: 4 external "fixed" dimensions, 7 internal "probabilistic" dimensions. Religiously, look at it this way: an external universe bounded by God's laws, an internal universe bounded by God's imagination. (It's a start.)
If there is no "outside", then 'God' must be right here inside *with* us; to draw a crude analogy, the 'electromagnetic noise' of our own consciousness usually overwhelms the 'gravity' of "his". It cannot be *proven*; we cannot meet [him] (except, perhaps, "symbolically" -- but what, then, *isn't* a symbol?): yet, you just 'know' "it".
The brain, then, is like a useful 'lens' for us beginning conciousnesses; otherwise, we'd be like a baby, continually experiencing a "blooming, buzzing confusion", as we perceived *everything at once*. like 'God' does. We needed to cut down the stimuli to get things done, but, with our 'ego', we've cut it down *too much*: we *should be* perceiving more of the continually branching probablity states than we [generally] do. It's time to really *use our brains* to *really* use our brains.
If we were able to design a more subjective science of conciousness, we wouldn't be so susceptible to religion-based manipulations of our perceptual and conceptual 'inceptions', because we'd *see through* better. Clever experiments, like this one, are a start, but they are still treating the brain behavioristically, like a black box. We need a 21st century William James (who very nicely conceptualized 'introspection' back in the 19th century -- before the advent of Freud's "objective" psychoanalysis.)
Remember: "it's all inside".
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
This was known ages ago. Back in the day, the rage wasn't modeling brains as computers but trying to build circuits, or software that imitated the way networks of neurons operated (neural nets, and other similar learning networks).
RF.
how many shades of gray?
16? 256? 65536??
From here on anyone who can't construct an ALU(or at least a fp-div unit) from dominoes is to be considered completely retarded.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Think about it. Pay attention to how you see the world. Literally, with your eyes. Pay attention to how you shift focus and select what your brain is working on.
Watch your dog or pet turtle do the same.
Now, think about how you got to this state. Obsere newbrns and children. New born animals. They don't now anything yet. I doubt they are self aware. Which is the goal of an intelligent machine.
Watch a newborn human or animal. What do they spend most of their waking time doing? Early on, they are integrating themselves with their environments. Thay flail around and slowly develop motor control. At first they are making the dstinction between themselves and everything else. They sleep a lot because it takes a lot of processing to build the model. It's my opinion, based on observation, that motor skill is not just about learnng how to control ones body. It's constructing a highly organized, in coarse to fine order, awareness of self vs world. Psychologists have some fancy name for what happens when the small child eventually figures out that momma is not part of 'self'. See momma has been pretty controllable over the early years so the distinction was not clear.
If you think about the way you see the world, it's the same sort of filtering in real time. The model has been built, but there is way more information there than you need to interact with it. You live in your model world with the degree of input correlation corresponding to the detail you need to tie this model to the outside.
This should not be difficult to 'program' into a machine once a consequences imperative is added. I've yet to see any AI work which includes the NOT side of learning. i.e. 'this hand in the fire is NOT good, it burned the fuck out of me!'
Anyway, go pay attentionand think about what you are seeing and experiencing.
Takes it at least 10 minutes to boot up in the morning.
Single? Canadian? We can help. Visit http://www.l
1010001110101010101000101110101110110101011101 001110101010100000111110001001010100101010101001 00111011010101010100111011000111...Do robots dream of electric sheep?
It doesn't take alll that much 'study' to figure out that we don't quite process like computers (or them quite like us .. who was here first anyway?). In many ways, a lot of people wish they could process like computers (and a lot of geeks wish other people could/would process that way). Of course, computers don't process exactly like we do ..
And I quote: In his study, 42 students listened to instructions to click on pictures of different objects on a computer screen. When the students heard a word, such as "candle," and were presented with two pictures whose names did not sound alike, such as a candle and a jacket, the trajectories of their mouse movements were quite straight and directly to the candle. But when the students heard "candle" and were presented with two pictures with similarly sounding names, such as candle and candy, they were slower to click on the correct object, and their mouse trajectories were much more curved. Spivey said that the listeners started processing what they heard even before the entire word was spoken.
See, the computer actually waits for input, prompts and so forth. I know we'd like to build impatient computers that jump the gun before they get all the input that is necessary to make a correct decision!! People forget that we came up with these computers ... TO HELP US/use as tools ... not replace us. (And if that were to ever happen, it's because of the general populace's apathy while a few people seek to assert their control ... kind of how we've let our government go here in the US.)
In some ways, we seem to have come to envy the computer and its processing power. And in some ways, humans could benefit by emulating a computer (waiting for the input until they start processing/making decisions/talking). We know that computers don't work exactly like us ... that's why there are efforts out there like predictor systems, fuzzy logic and so forth. To try and get them closer to us.
That all said, there are (IMO) still some significant similarities ... and that's all I believe there ever was .. similarities. We have short-term (like RAM) and long-term memory (Floppy/HD/CD) similar to a computer. But, we don't have a save/search mechanism as formal as the computer does .. or is the commonly employed 'save' mechanism a substitute for whatever allows to flag something as worthy of saving long-term? What makes us attach one item to another in the schemas in our head? There's still a lot to learn about here.
But I don't think the fact that we don't think in only 1's and 0's is ground-breaking news.Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
nuff said
.
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
"In thinking of cognition as working as a biological organism does, on the other hand, you do not have to be in one state or another like a computer, but can have values in between"
Isn't that why they invented floating point values?
For centuries, people have compared the human brain with the most advanced technology of the era : clocks in the 17th century, automatons in the 18th, Jacquard weaving machines or steam engines during the 19th, automated telephone exchanges in the 1920's, and digital computers from the 1950's on. Now it's (neural) networks, quantum computers or fuzzy logic, but the idea is the same.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
You can simulate atom bomb bursts all day long and not a single gamma ray will escape.
You can simulate a brain all day long and not a single thought will occur.
However, you can download your brain to a computer. In fact I'm doing it now, and if you respond you are too.
www.mcgrew.info/
My first response to this article is, "no shit, since a direct comparison is never what people meant to begin with."
When we draw comparisons between computers and brains, it's in a sense of gross generalizations rather than one to one correspondence. No one is dumb enough to suggest that human brains process information in terms of 1s and 0s (though I may be mistaken, since there are people dumb enough to believe in gods, demons, and devils).
However, brains are segmented (if not always cleanly) into specialized segments -- parts of the brain handle vision, parts handle speech (and apparently music), etc. It is in this regard that big-picture parallels can be drawn between computers and brains.
These parallels are not by chance most of the time, as much human technology is inspired by knowledge of natural processes.
or rather, the author's opinion that he has made a great discovery is based on his own crude misreading of the prevailing literature. We understand neural processing to function in a continuous but where its not massively important like any other group of scientists we represent only the relevant factors and for ease modelling and explanation pretend events are sequential. For decades now it has been acknowledged that human cognition is continuous and probabilistic in nature (a famous example would be Richard Gregory's paper on perceptions as hypotheses). There is a large literature on recombinant pathways in the visual cortex, again the figures presented by Zeki of feedforward neural processing are understood to be a useful representation of what goes on, not a literal representation of it. Nothing to see here, just an Assistant Professor who hasn't a clue what he's up to. The only surprise is that nobody in the faculty at Cornell has had a quiet word in his ear.
You get modded insightful for saying "fuck off" now?
What do I get for saying "cunt"?
Mod parent up!
--
GoogleBot
There is no "discreteness" to water above the molecular level.
There is no "discreteness" in nature at all. E.g., what is the exact figure for pi?
Every God is lame because he cannot know he is lame.
(Or, as George Carlin put it: 'God can do anything' Well 'Can God make a rock so big that he himself can't lift it?')
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I can hear it now... "Where do I plug my compu-brain into my head at?"
This just in! 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the population.
Did this answer really need research. I had thought of this before my parents thought I was old enough to drive. Let me know if you would like to save money on further research.
When a computer can write a software program that plays chess as well as a human, then I'll be impressed.
Evolution is a fact. Darwinism is a joke.
The interesting thing about this is that it almost sounds like the "positronic brains" in Asimov's robot novels functioned. He decribed a system in which competing "potentials" in the robot's brain would rise and fall continuously in response to external input and the interaction of his Three Laws. If the potentials were conflicting, the robot could wind up in limbo, stuck between one path and another.
I always thought that this was a rather outdated, analog way of thinking about things. I felt that modern computer-ish concepts were more likely to govern future robots' behavior. But if our own brains work this way, it may be only natural for us to design robots that think this way as well. Maybe Asimov wasn't so far off?
(Of course the examples of conflicting potentials in Asimov's novels are still terribly simplistic compared to the level of complexity that would actually be involved...)
Now, perhaps, they will get some dates.
A social scientist is somebody who is constantly amazed by the obvious.
The idea that our chemical/electronic brain operates continuously and without binary information seems to me to be the overriding assumption anybody would, and has always, taken. Did they think anybody was under the impression that we all had timing clocks in us? And anybody who's tried to order a dessert at a restaurant knows damn well the human brain is analog.
The question I'd like to see answered is why there has been such a recent surge in funding for this kind of bullshit science. Let's figure out how a rat works first, ok? There's a ton of "results" coming out of this field, but nothing of any use. Didn't we try this already with AI in the 70s?
John Searle - Is the Brain a Digital Computer?
The sense of information processing that is used in cognitive science, is at much too high a level of abstraction to capture the concrete biological reality of intrinsic intentionality. The "information" in the brain is always specific to some modality or other. It is specific to thought, or vision, or hearing, or touch, for example. The level of information processing which is described in the cognitive science computational models of cognition , on the other hand, is simply a matter of getting a set of symbols as output in response to a set of symbols as input.
We are blinded to this difference by the fact that the same sentence, "I see a car coming toward me", can be used to record both the visual intentionality and the output of the computational model of vision. But this should not obscure from us the fact that the visual experience is a concrete event and is produced in the brain by specific electro-chemical biological processes. To confuse these events and processes with formal symbol manipulation is to confuse the reality with the model. The upshot of this part of the discussion is that in the sense of "information" used in cognitive science it is simply false to say that the brain is an information processing device.
Summary of the Argument
This brief argument has a simple logical structure and I will lay it out:
1. On the standard textbook definition, computation is defined syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation.
2. But syntax and symbols are not defined in terms of physics. Though symbol tokens are always physical tokens, "symbol" and "same symbol" are not defined in terms of physical features. Syntax, in short, is not intrinsic to physics.
3. This has the consequence that computation is not discovered in the physics, it is assigned to it. Certain physical phenomena are assigned or used or programmed or interpreted syntactically. Syntax and symbols are observer relative.
4. It follows that you could not discover that the brain or anything else was intrinsically a digital computer, although you could assign a computational interpretation to it as you could to anything else. The point is not that the claim "The brain is a digital computer" is false. Rather it does not get up to the level of falsehood. It does not have a clear sense. You will have misunderstood my account if you think that I am arguing that it is simply false that the brain is a digital computer. The question "Is the brain a digital computer?" is as ill defined as the questions "Is it an abacus?", "Is it a book?", or "Is it a set of symbols?", "Is it a set of mathematical formulae?"
5. Some physical systems facilitate the computational use much better than others. That is why we build, program, and use them. In such cases we are the homunculus in the system interpreting the physics in both syntactical and semantic terms.
6. But the causal explanations we then give do not cite causal properties different from the physics of the implementation and the intentionality of the homunculus.
7. The standard, though tacit, way out of this is to commit the homunculus fallacy. The humunculus fallacy is endemic to computational models of cognition and cannot be removed by the standard recursive decomposition arguments. They are addressed to a different question.
8. We cannot avoid the foregoing results by supposing that the brain is doing "information processing". The brain, as far as its intrinsic operations are concerned, does no information processing. It is a specific biological organ and its specific neurobiological processes cause specific forms of intentionality. In the brain, intrinsically, there are neurobiological processes and sometimes they cause consciousness. But that is the end of the story.\**
I'm working on the steering control program for our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, and it does that, too. Doesn't mean it's not "digital".
Clearly in the case of the DARPA challenge, the underlying physical machine is a digital processor. But I'm wondering, what type of algorithms does your control program use? The reason I ask is that the question Spivey's considering here isn't whether the physical processing mechanism resembles a digital computer, as clearly the anatomical brain structure itself does not, but instead whether the functional mechanisms (which in your example are directly defined as the algorithms instantiated by your code) are compatible with the serial and symbolic models posited in the classic era of AI as well as cognitive psychology.
In other words, that a computer program could model these functions is for the most part logically trivial and in fact Spivey employs a computational model in the article itself in order to test whether his theory accounts for the data. Similarly, many modern machine learning algorithms are qualitatively "un-digital" even though they are being modeled on a digital computer (hence why they require so much processing power). Do you see the distinction?
This is the kind of thing that highlights he worthlessness of about 50% of the studies done by pyschologists. You don't need to perform a targetted study to realize that our thought processes are cascading, look at people who play Scrabble, are good at Jumble, or athletes even.
Those people are cases of different streams of input, different possibilities, coalescing into an idea. When people see a byunch of leters umbled up, they don't often run through all of the possibilities, rather, a word or word "appears". Similarly, on a basketball court, players don't tend to analyze the situation, they "feel" things happening. Like the article said about the curved trajectories in the case of candle and candy being presented when candy is spoken, intercepted passes or bad plays happen when a player "sees" one situation close to another and makes a bad pass, shot, etc.
Why is this news to people?
A closer inspection reveals: "The computer metaphor describes cognition as being in a particular discrete state, for example, "on or off""
There's a pretty huge gap between saying something doesn't work like a computer, and saying it goes through continuous states. As we all know, computers can model continuous states: Just take floating point numbers, or as a broader example, consider approximately solving differential equations that describe continuous processes. Computers do this all the time.
So, looking at humans and computers as black boxes, they both seem to process things continuously and to be able to have these "shades of grey". The difference is that we only know how computers work. Nothing in the article suggests anything beyond this.
As a side note, I must say that drawing such far-reaching conclusions from the way a person moves her mouse seems to me quite amateurish.
In my first AI class we learned this... I kindof figured it was also common knowledge for pretty much anyone who knew anything about computers.
Humans and computers process things completely differently... hence the problems in trying to create AI.
What next, computers and people get their energy from different sources?
On my Linux system's command line, if I have two files in a directory, named "candle" and "jacket," as soon as I type in the letter "c" and hit TAB, the computer's "brain" immediately finds the file, "candle." If however I have two files -- "candle" and "candy" -- and type in "can," the computer's "brain" hesitates in a gray area between "candle" and "candy." This is true even if a third file, "jacket," is in that directory.
Now, I'm not saying that the above is a definitive comparison between the human brain and a computer (in light of the article's experiment); I'm saying that I agree with you that the facts of the experiment don't prove anything. I think before throwing out any hypothesis of discreet processing, more experiments and, more importantly, more thinking needs to be done.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Sounds like fuzzy logic to me...
-Myke
myke@compassionatecoalition.org
http://www.compassionatecoalition.org
Physiologists have known for decades that neural signaling involves a change in the rate of firing [which is electrochemical, not electronic]. Some computer or cognitive scientists have built discrete models, but the computer metaphor was only that.
You mean like a CSA (carry select adder), which've been around for years and years?
- MS/Image2.gif
They're pretty commonly used to break up longer-bit additions sequences, and their underlying premise is to calculate the result for out comes if the addition produces a carry and if it doesn't. Then, one of the two branches is propogated depending on earlier segments. A 2 to 1 mux with the select signal controlled by the previous segment is pretty much how the "decision" is made.
Pretty common stuff people came out with years ago, nothing innovative here.
Here's a pic of a CSA:
http://www.ecse.rpi.edu/frisc/theses/ErnestThesis
I can't believe the drivel that gets spouted by some of these so called scientists.
Maybe they should be writing for the "National Inquier", they could put the articles next the the ones about Batboy and Bigfoot.
Pretty interesting. Through several lectures professor presents his argument (and counter arguments) as to how a Turing machine inherently can never "understand" the data it is processing, and thus should be disqualified as a model for human intelligence.
The idea that human minds are like computer is so widespread and popularly accepted, and almost religiously clung to, that it seems the idea will be with us a long time even if it is proven false.
Another really interesting observation he makes is that in his long life he has noticed the workings of the brain generally have been compared to and tried to be explained as just about every new technology that has come along... and no doubt it will be in the future as well.
Thanks, Asimov.
Anyhow, pretty good lectures even if one disagrees with his argument... definitely some good points to think about.
On the topic of A.I. it seems to me another really interesting documentary I saw recently is, ironically, Stupidity.
In fact I propose a new Turing test. We can consider a Turing machine intelligent when it can define and accurately identify stupidity. (The first test will identify all of the people who think this is easy... such as, just a problem of mismatched input/output.)
A common confusion is these types of discussion is to conflate the brain and the mind (or consciousness if you prefer). That is why they look for some magical escape clause like "quantum effect", whatever that means here.
The brain is a physical organ which I have no doubt (given a lot of time) we will be able to model more and more precisely. However, that does not mean that we will accept the computer model as a mind.
Deep Blue may be able to play very well against a world class chess champion. But people tend to view it as not very intelligent as it is based largely on "brute force search". Similarly, I have no doubt that the computer will one day be able to pass the Turing Test, but it still does not mean that we would view it as an embodied mind until we could "Live" with it for a time - physically interact with it.
Sample size: 42
Population size: 6,000,000,000 people.
Diversity of population: Vast. Each element in the population is a unique collective ecosystem, composed of dynamic populations of microscopic lifeforms. Individuals vary widely even on a macroscopic scale; placement of bones within the feet vary. Not even the number of chromosomes is fixed in all individuals. Individuals are susceptible to wide variations in behaviour due to thousands of environmental conditions, including temperature, pressure, surrounding colours, ambient noise levels, air quality, local bacteria levels, and other uncontrolled variables.
Sample size(percent of total): 0.00007%
Statistical Relavence of results: Worthless. The sample cannot be meaninfuly proven to represent any particular subset of the diverse population. There may be over 42 distinct subtypes of individuals within the population; to attempt draw conclusion from this evidence is bad science at best.
Conclusions based on experiment: Psychologists should learn to follow the scientific method. In cases where a master statistician doesn't have enough data to present evidence, any answer a psychologist gives based on "statistical" evidence is tantamount to voodoo.
at the end of the day everyone in any sort of customer care or tech support environment bitches about the idiots they get through who are usually rude and angry and don't want to help the support person help them
let the guy vent - if he cannot do it on here where can he... plus at the end of the day you are doing exactly what you complain he is - saying i know more than you so GFY
there is ALWAYS someone who knows more than you and ALWAYS someone who knows less... sometimes we get proud of our little knowledge and push too far and get slapped down by someone further down the path than us
but isn't this place about people who WANT to know more and who LOVE it when they learn something new? the tech support guy may be on a lower rung of the ladder than you but don't kick him off it for bragging about the view, encourage him to climb higher...
"When no-one around you understands start your own revolution and cut out the middle man"
Our brains may not operate like computers... but I have noticed that a lot of my co-workers brains operate a whole lot like Windows ME. Slow, Sluggish, and crashing all the time.
-- Yes, I work for the government, and yes I am watching you.
I'm not just picking on this particular message, but on a whole sub-set of tech support people who are, in fact, far more arrogant than the post I was answering to. Some seem to eventually get stuck in the mentality that everyone they're talking to is by default an idiot.
Again, not all. I did say a sub-set. I assume it's a small sub-set, but, you know, at some times that minority can be loud and annoying.
And it's not just towards uncooperative customers, but to people who didn't even ask the troll's help or opinion to start with. In which case, sorry, that excuse doesn't exist any more.
There's a whole class of "you're stupid if you don't take my word for <insert topic>. I'm TEH L33T EXPERT because I'm tech support for <insert completely unrelated field>" trolls. In fact, _the_ nastiest thing I've seen posted by a fanboy to someone complaining about a CTD (crash to desktop) bug in a game, namely "then you should pack your computer and take it back to the shop, because you're too stupid to own one" was... some alleged tech support veteran.
You see people arguing stuff like (massively paraphrased for compactness sake, since some of those rants go on and on for pages, but keeping the idea):
- "Noo, the game is perfect, it has no bugs. You must defragment your hard drive. It only crashes once every 2-3 hours after that. I'm an expert in these things, because I'm tech support for an ISP. If you say it didn't help, then you're stupid." (Uh, nope. Even skipping over the internal contradiction that something crashing every 2-3 hours is claimed to have no bugs at all, still nope. If changing timings, which is all that defrag does to the game, actually affects a bug's probability to happen, then you have the clear symptoms of a race condition in the code.)
- "I made a priest character and took no healing spells, nor any other spells that can help a party member, and people kick me out of their teams! They don't realize how useful a purely mace-swinging priest would be to teams! They're all idiots! And I'm tech support, so I know all about idiocy!"
And so on.
Now I do have all the sympathy in the world for all you good hard working people stuck in that low-pay high-stress kinda job. But that particular "I'm a complete genius, you're all complete idiots" sub-set is getting more and more on my nerves.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Neurons are not digital. To be digital you must not only have quantitized levels but also clocking. (Asynchronous digital is a misnomer - it does not work digitally in reentrant networks unless there is an equivalent to clocking built-in.) Neurons operate similarly to a type of analog electronics known as "pulse-width modulation". Neural information is mostly coded in the relative phases of inputs to a neuron, which vary with the relative frequencies of the inputs. The weightings of the inputs are also analog and vary in an analog way over time. The time-dependent summation functions of neurons are also analog. There are even some neurons with continuously variable voltage outputs. Neurons are completely analog, and the relative consistency of output pulse shapes in most neurons has nothing to do with digital logic or digital math. The noise-resistance in both frequency-domain PWM and in digital methods comes from voltage quantitization but that is the only similarity.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Neural Network software simulations have been around for decades.
Coming soon - proof that our lungs don't operate like vacuum cleaners, our eyes are not quite the same as digital cameras, and shockingly, our colons function differently from marketing departments...
Perfectly Normal Industries
Prooves? :-o
/i.e. the brain/, just by that the trajectory of the mouse is not straight, and the trajectory is been corrected in "run time"?
-- How a scientist could make so brave conclusion about the way the control unit of the hand that direct the mouse works
And more - it's easier and more natural for the hand to move in arcs rather than in perfect straight "rails", because the way it's constructed, not the way it's controlled.
You can move the hand in almost straight lines, but this is taugh to perform and rarely performed, because control is harder, and because the arcs does the job.
"The findings provide compelling evidence that language comprehension is a continuous process."
What a brilliant invention! It sounds like the control unit could try to work out and "make profit" of the first came parts of an input which comes from serial input stream, before the entire message -- whose lentght, also, is usually unkwnown -- enter the memory.
That doesn't prove that the mind doesn't understand the input that is came in discrete stages, when it finds some kind or a new kind of meaning in the input came after a revision.
-- "More recently, however, a growing number of studies, such as ours, support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind."
Computers, seen in execution, are dynamical systems, and they are "gray" if we look at more than one bit of their state definition.
Computers has not just two states, "on and off" - the primitive elements of a computer have two states, but there could be zillions of such elements when we model something,
and that "something" may behave as we desire. This is incomparable with the brain - one hardly may use the brain amazing "TERAFLOPS" computing power and "endless memory" to do what he wants to do - we wouldn't need computers if it was like that, and we wouldn't use PIECES OF PAPER to write a phone number. The brain have PETA- or EXA-bits of memory? But it hardly remembers even 50 simple bits that we need it to remember.
Computers are an instrument for building any control machines, with
Brain is not -- brain design is in the DNA. To change the brain, you must change the DNA and wait the brain to grow up.
-- They mess MIND with BRAIN
The article compares MIND (abstract high-level system containing a lot of parts) with the Digital computers, seen as "ones and zeroes" (the lowest level of abstraction, the simplest element of the machine -- it has zillions such elements).
With enough digital elements, ordered complex enough, and with an analogous output device with enough differentiable states (such like a hand that moves a mouse), you can model any "smooth" or non-linear transition and trajectory - you just need a
Digital to Analog Convertion to show the "smoothness" more clear to who don't believe you.
The smooth trajectory of hand does not imply neither that an analogous device controls it, nor that that control device works "not on discreete steps" inside, in the conceptual structure of their "processors".
I'll recall again that the accessible coordinate system of hand is not Cartesian, and non-linear motion is not implied directly fron the control unit, but more from the controlled unit.
Why are all the knowledgeable slashdotters still talking about this? We all know computers are more stupid than slugs. They only do what we tell them to do (except when something goes wrong with the hardware). Even a slug *might* have a cognitive decision making process. I say might because it could be that they just respond predictably to stimuli. I'm not a biologist.
A computer program is only as smart as the people who designed and wrote it and can only do what those people told them to do. Even AI programs are the same. The "A" stands for "Artificial". A computer may be able to do many billion instructions a second, but that doesn't mean its smart. Water passes over billions of molecules every second. That doesn't make it smart. (a poor analogy but it's 5pm on a Friday, so...).
Ah yes, but every shade of grey can be represented by a series of 0's and 1's.
When you think about it, you can't really say we aren't binarily-based; computers as we know them today may correspond to some sub-atomic structure, to follow the analogy.
-- Sid
The problem with this line of thinking is that as soon as you suppose that some god could violate logic, then you must assume that the universe, on some level, does not follow logical principles. If this is the case, you can never actually know when something has a rational explanation or not (e.g. whether it is causally related to something else and therefore follows some sort of logical progression), so why even bother worrying about any of that anymore?
Things get really strange when you attempt to use logical methods to argue for the fact that a god wouldn't be bound by logical principles. Because of the above, how could you know that your argument was meaningful? You've just drawn into question the primacy of logic, which in effect pulls the rug out from under your own argument's structure.
The point may be a bit subtle, but it becomes a big deal when you start to take into consideration the possibility for knowledge about anything in the universe. If we can't be sure of logic, we can't be sure of the supposed knowledge gained through logic (which comprises pretty much all of what makes modern civilization possible). This is a pretty big bullet to end up biting, especially when there doesn't seem to be a very good reason to do so other than a possibly nonsensical definition to begin with -- the so-called 'omni' god.
For that matter, there's good reason to believe that the definition is nonsensical for other reasons than the example given by the poster you quoted. Many other well known problems with the definition are pretty well documented in philosophical debates, from the ontological argument (the core of which turns upon a problem pretty significant to logic as a whole, at least many years ago: whether or not existence is in fact a predicate [it's generally agreed upon by logicians now to not be a predicate by the way, at least as far as first order is concerned]) to the problem of evil.
Not necessarily. There are several theologies (notably Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu) where God is transcendant from the universe. This is called the 'radically other' theology.
But you're right; to use the term theology ('knowledge' or 'study' of God) here is an oxymoron, because if God truly transcends the universe (and thus logic), then you can't have any knowledge of God (hell, you can't even refer to him), because all knowledge is based on logic. But, as the aforementioned religions attest, there are other ways of 'connecting' with God, even though knowledge is not a path: prayer, religious ceremony, meditiation, etc.
What you're arguing for is a very old Greek idea that ultimate reality is Logos, roughly translated in this usage as 'idea' or 'logic'. The logos, of course, can be reached through the intellect. I think it's accurate to say that most atheist scientist would agree with this idea: Laws (here 'rules' or 'logic') are the ultimate reality, and we can discover and understand these laws through observation and logic.
A radically-other God does not mean that we do not have to throw out logic and knowledge. A radically other God, about whom you can know or understand nothing, can still create logic and a universe that is logical.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
The question of "should we" is often shadowed by the question of "can we." It's human nature. Even if we know we shouldn't we often do. Take cloning for example which is now closer to reality than the sci-fi it once was regardless of the ethical opposition. Time will tell. If we can we likely will.