One often hears this basic argument (especially in the internet
newsgroups): Some great ideas were initially rejected. This idea is
rejected. Therefore this is a great idea.
Life being short, we do have to make some choices , without full
knowledge of the facts, as to what ideas are likely to be worth
pursuing. Sometimes one guesses wrong, but my impression is that some
people ALWAYS guess wrong and they seem to have a special attraction to
"rejected ideas". (as Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute)
Given that this fellow seems to have no idea at all of how the brain is
actually organized, i.e. doesn't just disagree with the data others
have developed but seems not to KNOW of more developed concepts of
brain organization and/or lacks the capacity to see any contradiction
between them and his own armchair "analysis" of brain organization, I
think the probability of his somehow coming up with a novel but useful
idea is vanishingly small. Conceivably, a group of monkeys banging on
typewriters will eventually (re)produce the complete works of
Shakespeare, but this charming hypothesis has so far not been been
tested in actual practice. Meanwhile, some of us will place our bets
on other schemes for authorship.
F. LeFever
In <7lt64l$btu$1 at newsin-1.starnet.net> "Bill Zimmerly"
<billz at inlink.com> writes:
>>F. Frank LeFever <flefever at ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
>news:7lr2jg$cdo at dfw-ixnews8.ix.netcom.com...>> [Snip]
>> Seems to me I saw somebody's comment to the effect that AI systems
do
>> not HAVE to mimic natural systems and can stand on their own; but
>> unless more novel/elegant/interesting as pure creations than these
>> simplistic diagrams seem to imply, I see no point in pursuing such
>> schemes even as a hobby or game...
>>>> F. Frank LeFever, Ph.D.
>> New York Neuropsychology Group
>>Dr. LeFever,
>>With all due respect, it is prudent to be careful about statements to
the
>effect that YOU see no point in pursuing such schemes. (Implicit in
such
>observations being that there is no value in doing so.)
>>History has shown that one person's blind spot may be another's golden
>opportunity.
>>Consider Xerox. They could have "owned" the microcomputer and
networking
>industry of today. The geniuses of Xerox Parc created so many of the
>technologies that we consider today to be the core of the data
processing
>world, yet...
>>...the upper management of the company couldn't see beyond "copy
machines"
>at the time, and refused to put this research into production.
>>The GUI, the mouse, Metcalf's "Ethernet", etc. all were a decade ahead
of
>their time, and the upper management of Xerox at the time couldn't see
the
>point in pursuing production versions of these technologies. These
aren't my
>criticisms, but were the criticisms of some of the engineers who
worked at
>Parc, including Bob Metcalf, the inventor of Ethernet.
>>Sincerely,
>- Bill Zimmerly
>http://www.zimmerly.com mailto:bill at zimmerly.com>"All great truths begin as blasphemies." - George Bernard Shaw
>>>
