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How Brain Architecture Leads To Abstract Thought (umass.edu)
catchblue22 writes: UMass Amherst scientists have analyzed fMRI data to link brain architecture with consciousness and abstract thought. "We momentarily thought our research failed when we saw that each cognitive behavior showed activity through many network depths. Then we realized that cognition is far richer, it wasn't the simple hierarchy that everyone was looking for. So, we developed our geometrical 'slope' algorithm," said neuroscientist Hava Siegelmann (abstract). "With a slope identifier, behaviors could now be ordered by their relative depth activity with no human intervention or bias," she adds. They ranked slopes for all cognitive behaviors from the fMRI databases from negative to positive and found that they ordered from more tangible to highly abstract.
"'Deep learning is a computational system employing a multi-layered neural net...the brain's processing dynamic is far richer and less constrained because it has recurrent interconnection, sometimes called feedback loops.' Her lab is now creating a 'massively recurrent deep learning network,' she says, for a more brain-like and superior learning AI."
"'Deep learning is a computational system employing a multi-layered neural net...the brain's processing dynamic is far richer and less constrained because it has recurrent interconnection, sometimes called feedback loops.' Her lab is now creating a 'massively recurrent deep learning network,' she says, for a more brain-like and superior learning AI."
FTA:
"'Deep learning is a computational system employing a multi-layered neural net...the brain's processing dynamic is far richer and less constrained because it has recurrent interconnection, sometimes called feedback loops.' Her lab is now creating a 'massively recurrent deep learning network,' she says, for a more brain-like and superior learning AI.""
But this is not new. This is connectionism and all its descendants. Anyways...the larger point is, that there is no reason to believe that consciousness or experience falls out of machines, no matter how wet or complex they are. Consider that anything which can be modeled with a computer can be modeled with something much more primitive, albeit in a cumbersome way, for example, a Turing tape or a even a very fancy abacus made of wood, wires, beads. Yes you definitely want to keep that fact in mind before you pin that Strong AI Booster pin on your lapel.
If we want to get down to brass tacks and go really hardcore the one thing we have absolute irrefutable evidence for is just experience itself. Everything else is possibly a chimera based on a re-construction of experience-as-thought; material substance is real the same way a false belief or an illusion is real.
If anything, consciousness gives rise to matter (as an illusion or particular way of thinking) and also all the laws of physics and everything that flows therefrom. Given the absolute non-reputability of the existence of experience it's more likely that consciousness is the "fundamental" stuff of the universe than matter or that consciousness arises from sufficiently complex arrangements of non-conscience matter.
Anyway, it is overwhelmingly likely that at this stage of our knowledge and scientific inquiry we just radically and fundamentally misunderstand the nature of matter and consciousness. People still think about densely packed protons and neutrons but in fact there are only quarks (at least so far) and a quark is a "thing" oh, about the size of a virus, which is contained in a sphere of emptiness- just nothing- the diameter of Neptune's yearly orbit around the sun. So there's your "material stuff". Last seen receding ever further into purely mathematical constructs....
We specialize because we have to with the result that we just don't think big enough or more accurately closely and precisely enough about what the Big Picture is telling us. Science slowly grinds down, or more charitably "hones", your imagination in a particular way so as to make you a successful researcher or current theorist.
Whatever framework we are using to try to understand consciousness - call it reductionism to material- is most likely as wrong as voodoo for reasons which will later be shown to have been hidden to us now. If that doesn't just immediately strike you as most likely correct, then consider the argument has inductive support: that's been the historical tale of the tape when we are in the same state of ignorance with respect to a subject matter as we are with respect to the brain.
AI researchers who start quacking on making big, definitive statements about consciousness and the brain are just marking themselves as lesser lights and can always count on a round of ridicule, at least from me, on /.
Let's not forget that same fMRI technology successfully identified brain function in a DEAD SALMON.
http://blogs.scientificamerica...
-Styopa