Hi Patrick, erin, Rick, Glenn, all
I have been trying to follow this thread but you seem to be going in
circles...
so I thought I'd vent my frustration on you all....
In no particular order....
wouldn't it make more sense if no neuron or network of neurons, was called
grandmother,
the way I see it the brain can only function and process the amount of info
it recieves, by categorising everything much more finely, ie Grandmother
would be, animal, same species, woman, old woman, relative, my parents
parent........ and here is where like the internet, somewhere in your brain
is a DNS, or name server, which tags on the name grandmother, if all the
other criteria are met. If not met then the network steps back a few steps
and spits out...one final check to see if this is all that is needed, and
......old woman!
This also seems to answer one of the problems in this thread, the notion of
filters, in seeing something,
The example of the Natchez not being able to distinguish between blue and
green is missing the point.... it is not important to him to distinguish
between them.. there is no name needed in his brain to separate them.
The same goes for every person in this group, how many of us when we go
outside in the snow, would say anything other than " it's snowing"..whereas
an Eskimo would have over twenty different words for what is happening...
Similarly your eyes can distinguish over 800,000 shades of yellow, yet we
call everything yellow, unless we have a specific name available to us, ie
canary yellow, acid yellow etc, but even these are only narrowing the field,
not describing a single colour, otherwise we would need 800,000 names when
one will do.
My point is that our brain will only recognise something, if it has an
appropriate tag to give it, if no specific tag is available, then whatever
we see will be downgraded to a more general category... that is why some
people will see the D light, because they have a name for it, an explanation
of what it is in their brain.
This leads nicely onto another point I would like to make, Pirsigs big
mistake was to limit his notions to two qualities, Static and Dynamic, when
there are obvious gains to be made by splitting these up into further
categories, you can't discuss something like quality with two words, in the
same way you can't discuss arainbow using the words red and blue.
I don't know if this is a spanner in the works, but ....
Rod
on 3/6/02 6:11 PM, Patrick van den Berg at cirandar@yahoo.com wrote:
> Yes, you're absolutely right. I don't believe in the grandmotherneuron
> theory either (although the Schamujuk-DiCarlo model I mentioned, which
> is a fairly recent model intended to explain findings in the animal
> laboratory research, still uses these kind of representations!). But I
> don't believe in the distributed theory as well, at least not in the way
> currently formulated. My understanding of parallel distributed neural
> networks, is that many neurons represent one thing. If one neuron dies
> because of old age, than the other neurons are still able to represent
> something like a grandmother, although slightly less perfect. But
> mathematically, it's the same kind of representation. After the right
> input, the representation of your grandmother will 'light' or 'fire',
> saying it's 'on'. One advantage of the distributed model, indeed is that
> the representations are not as brittle as in the grandmotherneuron
> theory. Another advantage, is that other old people besides your
> grandmother can be presented by at least a portion of the same neurons
> representing your grandmother. That is, a network can be trained to
> respond in the same way to 'old people' as opposed to responding in
> another way to 'young people'.
> That's my current understanding of distributed networks. But I hope
> there's someone out there reading this who has a better understanding of
> these things, and can better explain these matters...
>
> With friendly greetings, Patrick.
>
>
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