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From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,comp.ai
Subject: Re: Edelman
Summary: relationship to John Holland
Message-ID: <12084@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 28 Feb 90 16:24:29 GMT
References: <12015@venera.isi.edu> <6595@cps3xx.UUCP> <12038@venera.isi.edu> <5028@itivax.iti.org>
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Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar)
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In article <5028@itivax.iti.org> dhw@itivax.UUCP (David H. West) writes:
>In article <12038@venera.isi.edu> smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar)
writes:
>|  One of the major punch lines of Gerald Edelman's NEURAL
>|DARWINISM is that algorithms based on selection from a population may
>|allow us to deal with the first half of this question--category formation.
>
>I suspect that this constitutes a "punch line" only for those
>unaware of the work of John Holland.
>
My personal feeling is that Holland's major advance has been in the area of
ASSIGNMENT to categories, rather than the FORMATION of those categories.  Thus,
the selective capabilities of his genetic algorithms are good for determining
how an input stimulus should be classified;  but the categories themselves are
essentially "hard-wired" into the architecture of the systems "genes."
However, if I am mistake in this impression, I would be very interested
in having someone set the record straight.

By the way, Edelman and Holland are quite aware of each other, as Holland sat
on the IJCAI panel which discussed Edelman's work.  Much of the discussion
involved the question of how an agent can manage in an unlabeled world, this
being Edelman's point of departure for his category formation work.  Holland's
position statement argued that retinal patterns are just as much "labels" as
are nouns in a natural language.  It sounds to me as if this argument is trying
to say that category formation is not an issue, and I'm not sure I'm ready to
buy into that yet.  I always liked Tony Hoare's observation that "the most
powerful tool available to the human intellect is abstraction."  I view nouns
as an abstraction of retinal patterns (among other things);  and I am not sure
there is much to be gained from calling things labels which really do not
impose ANY abstraction on the input stimuli.  Edelman seems to be saying
that, not only do such abstractions exist (i.e. abstractions on "raw data"
like retinal stimuli), but also they have a biological foundation.

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