X-Message-Number: 8538
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: more comments: computers, intelligence, etc
Date: Thu, 4 Sep 1997 20:45:50 -0700 (PDT)

Hi again!

To Andre Robatino:
Come now! By ignoring what has been done by neurophysiologists and neuro-
scientists who are trying to understand how real physical brains work, your
statement of what is known is awfully weak. So far, you're right that a 
lot more needs to be learned, but we know more than you say. 

Some books to read if you haven't read them already:

	Y. Dudai THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF MEMORY --- already a bit dated, but still
		has lots of good stuff.
	Steven Rose THE MAKING OF MEMORY --- I don't like this guy's politics
      		at all but he has done some very good work piecing out just
		how memory works in chicks. Don't think of chicks as so far 
		from you, either: there's a lot of commonality.
	IB Levitan and LK Kaczmarek THE NEURON -- a good grounding on the 
		the processor responsible for us. There's a newer edition,
      		which I haven't yet read. Mine is dated 1991.

If you get interested I'm happy to suggest more. 

If someone asked you how a new computer worked, and you knew that it wasn't
following a standard design, wouldn't you at least do a little work to try
to find out what the processor(s) were and how it was put together? These
things can't be done a priori, you know. It's hubris to believe we understand
the world well enough to do that, and those who believed they did have so
far run into problems.

I also want to agree strongly with John Pietrzak when he raises the problems
in the definition of "intelligence". It's a much floppier, vaguer concept
than many people will admit, and may include assumptions that simply fail
to be true: it is a metaphysical statement, for instance, to claim that
there is any special ability which helps solve ALL POSSIBLE PROBLEMS of
computing/mental processing as it relates with the world. After all, we've
only been human beings (homo sapiens) for a few tens of thousands of years,
and haven't even visited most of the Galaxy. How can we claim to imagine
all possible such problems? That is just a beginning, too.

Finally, about SPEED: for John de Rivas and others. The major word in what
I said was OPTIMUM. It is not always optimum to be the best on one particular
parameter, because doing so may cost far too much and leave you open to
very simple attack in other ways. For instance, suppose that we would all
work more speedily if nerve conduction went along gold wires (gold is a 
very good conductor ... better than the commonly used ones, certainly). But
that leaves out some other issues: gold is rare and hard to find, and takes
a good deal of energy to refine. An animal which wired together its brain
using gold would have to expend all that energy to get the gold, one way
or another. This means that the speed must be enough to allow it to acquire
that energy, or it will soon be outcompeted by slower but far less expensive
creatures, who just overwhelm it with numbers. For instance, they may eat up
all its food sources, and even though it can chase away a few, they keep
coming back and coming back and coming back, while it hasn't even gotten
enough gold to reproduce itself.

This is only a thought experiment, but I hope it makes the issue clear.

What is optimum at one time and in one environment need not be optimum in
others, either. We can't use this argument to claim that "all is for the
best". But it helps to understand our past condition if we want to 
try for something better.

			Best and long long life to all,

				Thomas Donaldson

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