Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!usc!venera.isi.edu!smoliar From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Plaiting a Plexus of Processes (Was: Re: Chess, Reduct...) Summary: Who is talking about what. Message-ID: <12887@venera.isi.edu> Date: 13 Apr 90 15:24:45 GMT References: <369@ntpdvp1.UUCP> <43pQ024H9chW01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> Sender: news@venera.isi.edu Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute Lines: 89 Keywords: In article <43pQ024H9chW01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> kp@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Ken Presting) writes: >In article <369@ntpdvp1.UUCP> sandyz@ntpdvp1.UUCP (Sandy Zinn) writes: >> >> Insofar as Mind is representa- >>tion, it is a metaphor for whatever is being represented. > >This account of how representations can exist in the mind is IMO the >only possible coherent view. (It needs to made a little more coherent >itself, of course). > >If Quine and Davidson are to be taken seriously on the issue of >indeterminacy of translation, inscrutability of reference, and the holism >of meaning, then we cannot build a machine which learns a human language >in the way humans do unless REFERENCE IS EXCLUDED FROM REPRESENTATION. > >This means: no concept training, no semantic nets, and NO FRAMES! > Just don't throw out the body! So, Ken, you're having trouble with Edelman? Let us see if we can start off with a relatively straightforward remark in THE REMEMBERED PRESENT: "It is not sufficient . . . to start with an idea of mental representations in the absence of physical mechanisms." Ultimately, this is what the man is all about. He wants to throw Cartesian dualism out the window and say that the study of RES COGITANS cannot proceed in isolation from RES EXTENSA. So go ahead and throw out your semantic nets and frames, but you had better also turn a critical eye towards any logical calculus you happen to be carrying around! In all fairness, I should say that, having survived two Edelman books, I am not prepared to say he has made his case. However, I am still inclined to look where he is pointing. From my own point of view, this means trying to figure out whether he is pointing somewhere in the direction of Minsky's society of mind. >(Minsky has the gall to describe _The Society of Mind_ as "neo-Freudian". >But perhaps that should be excused as an easily explainable parapraxis: >Freudian :: Froodian :: Fodorian!) > Now that you've had your turn to be cute, let us try to clear the air here. If you have trouble with Gerry Edelman, I have trouble with Jerry Fodor. Fodor certainly knows how to entertain; but after the show is over, I always seem to come away wondering if he said anything. Edelman may not be so entertaining (although I like the jokes he tells at his lectures); but he never fails to leave me with serious thoughts of termites gnawing away at foundations my teachers told me were firm. I like that in a writer. One thing seems certain, at least from my vantage point: there is no "language of thought" in either Edelman's biological theory of consciousness or Minsky's society. Indeed, the whole point of a Minsky society is that it does not NEED a language of thought. That is because it does not have any well-formed "thought objects" (or semantic nets or frames or whatever you want to call them) which need a language for their manipulation (whatever that manipulation may be)! All it has are lots of agents which do lots of things; and when they all work together, we can say of some object that embodies all those agents that it looks like that object is thinking. (You have no idea how hard I am trying to suppress use of the word "emergent!") Edelman is in a similar camp. However, he wants to go a step further than Minsky. Minsky is content to deal with agents which are imaginary machines. He just wants to impose the constraint that each agent be very simple, without pinning that constraint down to any specific criteria. He figures that we should start by figuring out how to build societies of these agents before we worry too much about building the agents, themselves. That seems to be his agenda. Edelman, on the other hand, wants to make sure that everything is grounded in the reality of biology and physics. Thus, he requires that his agents be models of things we find in the body. This is why he is concerned about issues such as the fact that no two bodies have exactly the same "neural wiring." Hopefully, this will help you, or anyone else, who has been trying to make sense out of either Edelman or Minsky. If I'm lucky, I shall be able to refine these remarks and make use of them in the review I'm trying to write of THE REMEMBERED PRESENT (when I'm not trying to clear the air on this bulletin board)! Meanwhile, you can go back to your Heidegger. Some researchers feel compelled to burrow as deep as they can into the primitive physical mechanisms which make us tick. Others would rather be high-diggers. (Sorry, I couldn't resist. What do you want on Friday the thirteenth?) ========================================================================= USPS: Stephen Smoliar USC Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Suite 1001 Marina del Rey, California 90292-6695 Internet: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu "Only a schoolteacher innocent of how literature is made could have written such a line."--Gore Vidal