Language, Consciousness and Intelligence?
Edge: A TALK WITH REUBEN HERSH [page 5]: "A good math teacher starts with examples. He first asks the question and then gives the answer, instead of giving the answer without mentioning what the question was. He is alert to the body language and eye movements of the class. If they start rolling their eyes or leaning back, he will stop his proof or his calculation and force them somehow to respond, even to say 'I don't get it.' No math class is totally bad if the students are speaking up. And no math lecture is really good, no matter how beautiful, if it lets the audience become simply passive. Some of this applies to any kind of teaching, but math unfortunately is conducive to bad teaching. "
"Order out of confusion; simplicity out of complexity; understanding out of misunderstanding; that's mathematical beauty. "
Edge: PINKER VS. ROSE-A DEBATE (PART I) [page 4]: "the issues that we have to discuss this evening run far deeper than modern science, they go right the way back through centuries of debate, beyond Darwin, back through, certainly, a good chunk of the Judeo-Christian tradition; they are, as Susan said at the beginning, about determinism and free will, and how one understands the living world that there is around us"
The Reality Club: The Evolution of Culture: "Are memes a rhetorical technique, a metaphor, a theory, or some other device? Depending on who you talk to, they can be so wispy as to be almost nothing. As applied by Dennett in his lecture, they make no predictions and cannot be falsified. They are no more than a perspective. "
Applications of Machine Learning methods (ie. ML success stories): "Symbolic machine learning methods were used to learn to control a (simulated) airplane. The conditions of the airplane, the information on the control panel and the actions were recorded of pilots who were flying an airplane in single flight plan. These were divided into situation-action pairs."
i.e. machine learning is human mimickry
Feral Children (McCrone): "Whichever nature Victor might turn out to have, one thing the philosophers were not expecting was that he might be mute. It had always been assumed that speech came to man as naturally as breathing. Even a person growing up in isolation like Victor was expected to have the power of speech. "
Fascinating stuff:
Language depends on a 'linguistic' community AND language depends on a 'linguistic' biology.
Whence a 'linguistic' community?
A community with a 'linguistic' biology is insufficient, and even the evolution of such a thing is problematic (as the biological 'linguisticism' confers no selective advantage to the species until it becomes communal 'linguisticism').
New Scientist 1997 (J. McCrone): "A replacement for the brain-as-computer model certainly seems overdue. The textbook view has been that brain cells are simple logic gates, adding and subtracting input spikes until some threshold level of charge is breached, at which point they convulse to produce a spike of their own. The all-or-nothing nature of a cell's firing promised to lift neurons clear of the usual soupy sloppiness of cellular processes, allowing the brain to carry out digitally crisp, noise-free calculations. The task for researchers was simply to discover how the output of each cell encoded a message. In a chase likened to the hunt to crack the genetic code, neuroscientists became obsessed with finding the 'neural code'. They tried to discover whether the message was contained in the strength of a spike, the average number of spikes produced each second, or in the timing of the firing, with information carried only on those spikes which were synchronised with spikes from other cells (see 'Dot dot dot, dash dash dash', New Scientist, 18 May 1996, p 40).
But the neurons have proved slippery customers. 'For 30 years we've been going along quite nicely, with lots of expensive equipment, lots of expensive people and lots of papers being produced, but finally the answers aren't there. We can't even say what it is about the spike train of an individual neuron that counts,' says Rodney Douglas of the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich. Much worse for the idea of a simple, crackable neural code are the smattering of recent findings which show that the output of any individual neuron also depends on what the brain happens to be thinking at the time. It's as if rather than the spikes combining to produce conscious awareness, consciousness is able to decide how the cells should spike. "
What is the physical cost of creativity? (Michael Webb): "Computers sometimes give the illusion of being creative, but innovation is ultimately based on choices. Programmers and users make all the choices that determine how software executes. Therefore, computer creativity originates strictly in the human mind, and is actually a form of human creativity.
Everything that happens in software can be reduced to well-defined algorithms. Software is really nothing but a set of definite rules. Computer systems hold no fundamental surprises, unlike living systems."
