Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watdragon!violet!cpshelley
From: cpshelley@violet.uwaterloo.ca (cameron shelley)
Subject: Just Minds and Machines this time
Message-ID: <1991Jan25.022026.12999@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Sender: daemon@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Owner of Many System Processes)
Organization: University of Waterloo
References: <11656.9101241836@s4.sys.uea.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 91 02:20:26 GMT
Lines: 51

In article <11656.9101241836@s4.sys.uea.ac.uk> jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk (Richard Kennaway CMP RA) writes:
>

>--
>Richard Kennaway          SYS, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.
>Internet:  jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk		uucp:  ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk
>
>Relevance-to-newsgroup detector now registering approx. 0.0...
                                                         ^^^^

I concur!  Comparisons of pragmatic, existential, positivist, etc...
notions of truth are interesting but becoming both entrenched and
somewhat beside whatever it was that started this.  There are groups
such as sci.logic and talk.philosophy (?) which are better suited and
may arouse a larger volume of relevant comment.  Or maybe e-mail would
be sufficient.

While I'm here (:-), I wouldn't mind drawing some comment on a subject
I've been thinking about recently.  In reviewing some short papers on
some new neural net work, I was struck by the notion of 'error' being
employed.  One of the praises always sung of NN's is that they are
"robust", ie. no matter what input you give them, they won't simply
fail like symbolic programs, but will rather try to compensate and
produce a meaningful output.  In other words (IMHO), all errors are
treated as noise and an attempt is made to ignore them.  There is
essentially no notion of 'ill-formed' input as opposed to 'ill-transmitted'
input.  I argued (in the review) that this is epistemologically
inadequate, at least as a model of human cognition, since humans
show the ability to do recovery from both types of error (in different
fashion).  The cause, I believe, is that while the representation
is dynamically induced (the subject knowledge) the meta-knowledge
(or domain knowledge) is fixed by the structure of the NN so that
it cannot attempt more than one method of solving and therefore has
no redundancy -- a common error-handling technique in both machines
and people.

My intial suggestion was that a system should be created in which
two (or more) NN's with different structures be allowed to compete
for one output.  The question then is: is my analysis correct, and
if so, is the suggestion e-adequate both computationally and 
cognitively?

				Cam

Btw: I finished the review; you are not doing my work for me!

--
      Cameron Shelley        | "Absurdity, n.  A statement of belief
cpshelley@violet.waterloo.edu|  manifestly inconsistent with one's own
    Davis Centre Rm 2136     |  opinion."
 Phone (519) 885-1211 x3390  |				Ambrose Bierce