IUBio

Neuro, AI, Robotics seminar Mon.27.jul.1998

Stephen Wood swood at papyrus.mhri.edu.au
Wed Jul 29 23:08:43 EST 1998



Mentifex wrote:

>   The "ganged fibres" are simply redundant parallel nerve fibers
>   holding a concept--which is in turn a collection of associative
>   tags--which are neuronal fibers leading from the abstract con-
>   ceptual fibers to the concrete engrams in the sensory channels.
>

OK, lets get serious. Published journal articles please (rather than
non-reviewed web sites) to show the neural basis (and I mean in terms of
neurons, synapses and neurotransmitters) of 'redundant parallel nerve fibres
holding a concept'. I mean, what is your proof of any of this? Are abstract
conceptual fibres pyramidal cells? Granule cells? Interneurons? Basket cells?
Purkinje cells? What? And by the way, I'm uncertain of your use of redundant,
since you seem to be suggesting that actually they aren't redundant but very
useful!

>   Concepts above are "deep" in the Chomskyan sense that they under-
>   lie, at the profoundest level, the linguistic generation of ideas.
>   When a thought forms as the dynamic interaction of the "deep" con-
>   cepts, activity bubbles upwards through the "shallow" lexical
>   concepts, where rigid structures of Chomskyan syntax fetch words
>   and morphemes stored in auditory memory to create a new sentence.
>   The auditory system then consciously hears itself think that idea.
>

Again, prove it. There's a number of suggestions that people don't think in
language (see Pinker for a start), but in a kind of mentalese. This would
seems to suggest that the auditory system does not hear itself think an idea
(for a start the _auditory_ system responds to external sounds, not to
subvocal speech - have a look through some functional imaging studies.).

>   Dr. LeFever, sometimes History taps a man on the shoulder and he
>   must choose to take advantage of that tide in the affairs of men
>   which leads on to fortune.  Please consider such options as wear-
>   ing to your meetings a nametag or button:  "Ask me about Mentifex."
>   Be either the great debunker of Mentifex or the great Dr. LeFever.

  Or be both! Or alternatively, give up on Mentifex and get on with some
serious research




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