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From: brucec@orca.UUCP (Bruce Cohen)
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Parallelism and Physiology
Message-ID: <179@orca.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 6-Oct-83 13:06:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: orca.179
Posted: Thu Oct  6 13:06:54 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 8-Oct-83 04:49:39 EDT
Organization: Tektronix, Wilsonville OR
Lines: 37

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Re the article posted by Rik Verstraete <rik@UCLA-CS>:

In general, I agree with your statements, and I like the direction of
your thinking.  If we conclude that each level of organization in a
system (e.g. a conscious mind) is based in some way on the next lower
level, it seems reasonable to suppose that there is in some sense a
measure of detail, a density of organization if you will, which has a
lower limit for a given level before it can support the next level.
Thus there would be, in the same sense, a median density for the
levels of the system (mind), and a standard deviation, which I
conjecture would be bounded in any successful system (only the top
level is likely to be wildly different in density, and that lower than
the median).

	Maybe the distinction between the words learning and
	self-organization is only a matter of granularity too. (??)

I agree.  I think that learning is simply a sophisticated form of
optimization of a self-organizing system in a *very* large state
space.  Maybe I shouldn't have said "simply."  Learning at the level of
human beings is hardly trivial.

	Certainly, there are not physically two types of memories, LTM
	and STM.  The concept of LTM/STM is only a paradigm (no doubt a
	very useful one), but when it comes to implementing the concept,
	there is a large discrepancy between brains and machines.

Don't rush to decide that there aren't two mechanisms.  The concepts of
LTM and STM were developed as a result of observation, not from theory.
There are fundamental functional differences between the two.  They
*may* be manifestations of the same physical mechanism, but I don't
believe there is strong evidence to support that claim.  I must admit
that my connection to neurophysiology is some years in the past
so I may be unaware of recent research.  Does anyone out there have
references that would help in this discussion?