Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!husc6!bu-cs!buengc!bph From: bph@buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: The limitations of logic Message-ID: <1667@buengc.BU.EDU> Date: 13 Dec 88 19:24:58 GMT References: <9020@bcsaic.UUCP> <1628@buengc.BU.EDU> <42836@linus.UUCP> Reply-To: bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton) Followup-To: comp.ai Organization: Boston Univ. Col. of Eng. Lines: 31 In article ap1i+@andrew.cmu.edu (Andrew C. Plotkin) writes: >/ In article <1628@buengc.BU.EDU> bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton) >/ wonders what we would expect a topologically and neuromimetically >/ accurate model of a brain to think. > >I assume this simbrain has been taught language in the same way our brains are. >(If it was created with already-existing patterns taken from a human, it's real >easy to figure out what it would think -- just ask the human it's simulating!) This is something we dealt with in my first Neural Science course. Our brains are sufficiently similar as to be indistinguishable for the purposes of survival, yet inescapably dissimilar for the purposes of comparison. Imagine a million identical brains, born all with the same neural mappings and chemical levels, but in a million ordinary humans in ordinary human environments. Even two who are siamese twins will have slight differences in perspective, literally, and will develop some differing ideas. Learning from one's own thoughts is one of the most prevalent human mental activities (being a part of deduction, imagination, intuition, etc.) and no two of the many identical brains can be expected to always have parallel thoughts, because of these differences in their perspective; hence they will all be trained differently. The upshot is that the environment is capable of producing all of the differences between humans, yet can not account for all of the similarities. In response to your statement, therefore, the fact that SimBrain is in a bakelite box will make it very different from the teacher, as will the teacher-student relationship. We can't know what to expect it to think. --Blair "Just ask the human _I'm_ simulating."