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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8538