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From: ins_atge@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Thomas G Edwards)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: What AI is exactly.
Message-ID: <6482@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU>
Date: 22 Sep 90 01:30:43 GMT
References: <35282@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <3851@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> <146@tdatirv.UUCP> <3893@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Reply-To: ins_atge@jhunix.UUCP (Thomas G Edwards)
Organization: The Johns Hopkins University - HCF
Lines: 83

In article <3893@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> jim@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Jim Ruehlin, Cognitologist domesticus) writes:
>That's seems to me to be a fair definition for what biologists are trying
>to study.  I certainly don't know enough to discuss it in that realm
>anyway.  But to apply that definition to cognitive science leaves out
>the capability to just sit back and think, to have thoughts or engage
>in cognitive activity with NO change in behaviour.  

Well, of course you do have a behavior, namely changes in your
neural state (action potentials, neurotransmitters going across
synapses, etc).  Single-unit and multiple-unit recording should be a valid
tool for Congitive Science/Physiological Psychology.  Of course, there
are limits to what it can tell us.

>Yes, but we have some different neurons (e.g., cerebral cortex vs.
>hypocamus (sp?), and more of them.  The "hardware" is important, but
>what we can do on top of it is what makes learning, or intelligence,
>what it is.

I wouldn't say we have different neurons.  We definately have
extra brain areas, and some of our areas have different shape/sizes
than animals.

>You may be right.  But in some of the examples you cite (such as modeling)
>we currently don't have a way to see if cats model internally.  The only
>way we can with humans so far (as far as I know, anyway) is to query
>them as to what cognitive process is occuring.  So while cats might be
>doing just that, we don't know if they really are, and won't until we
>have a more accurate and language-free method of determining if this is
>true.

Introspection (that is, asking people to explain what they are thinking
about) is not a dependable method.  The data is corrupted, because 
people may be thinking in one way when they don't have to explain it,
but have to come up with another method when they actually explain what
they are doing.  I personally doubt if most people's thoughts about
how they think are anything like what they are actually doing.  Otherwise,
we'd have all this cognitive science stuff solved.  Neuronal recording
and examining behavior from lesioned and non-lesioned people/animals
are the best tools of cognitive science.  And this can be done for
cats as well as people.  Granted, it is difficult to get a cat to do
anything he or she doesn't really want to.

>I agree.  The reason I go on about learning and intelligence in other
>animals is because we arn't very rigorous about what these things are
>and how to study them.  We often rely solely on behaviour without
>regard to the internal activity going on.  I don't think we should
>be suprised if we find out that while some behaviours look the same
>between humans and animals, the motivations or internal mechanisms that
>cause them are very different.  In other words, we're naturally prone
>to anthropomorphism.

That is exactly why congitive science depends on lesion analysis to
legitimize theories which predict behavior.  In other words, one
may theorize a certain box diagram of a cognitive action with
sensory input comming in, motor activity going out, and lots of
parallel and/or serial paths of cognition in the middle.  If a part
of a persons brain is injured, we examine the behavior of that patient
and compare it with "normal" people.  If we can reasonably explain the
loss of cognitive ability with one box (or more) being incapacitated,
then there is some reason to believe that there is some truth to your
theory.  Of course, it is diffcult to find lesions which affect every
box you want to check, and it is possible for one lesion to wipe
out more than one box, or only halfway wipe it out.  But suprisingly,
there are all kinds of people who have wierd behavior after brain
damage.  For instance, there are people who cannot pronounce
non-words they read, but can pronounce real words.  And there are people
who can pronounce non-words, but have difficulty understanding real
words they read.  Congitive Scientists consider these results to
indicate two parallel paths to spoken word pronounciation, one
which is based on a grapheme to phoneme conversion which allows non-words
(such as "sokutad") to be pronounced, and another which is a 
grapheme to semantics converter which picks up the meaning of words,
and in serial with that unit, a semantic to phoneme converter.
One or the other path can be damaged by lesions to different
areas of the brain.
  Anyway, for those of you who are interested, there is a book which
I believe is called "Congitive Science" from MIT Press (I used it last
year in a course, so I am a little sketchy on the details of who wrote
it and such).  Cognitive  Science accepts a computational model of the
brain, and asks the question "How can we truly prove that a theory
of computation in brain is what is really happening?"

-Thomas Edwards