mat <mats_trash at hotmail.com> wrote in berichtnieuws
43525ce3.0202260711.1fc916f9 at posting.google.com...
>$2 Frans, your replies are irritatingly repetetive and you are simply
not
> answering the questions put to you. I don't care about why you think
> your project is worthwhile, or your interpretation of the evolutionary
> history of man (even though these are debatable) what I want to know
> is what you are actually going to do. Is all very fine saying you've
> written a 600-page tome pretentiously titled 'Biography of Man', but
$3 I've read some of it and all you do is talk about the possible
> evolution of higher-level cognitive function. If you are planning to
> model these then fine, but then you confuse the issue by talking about
> modeling neural networks. You are confusing levels all over the
> place. You have no hope of accurately modeling how the development of
> neural circuits leads to cognitive function becuase you (and everyone
$4 else) has no where near enough data on how neurons work (its not even
> certain that it is electrical activity of neurones that correlates
> with cogniton - it could just as likely be protein interactions etc.)
>> Please answer, directly, some basic questions:
$5 Are the evolutionary analyses you talk about yours or someone elses
> work which has been published? Is it actually experimental analysis
> of animal tissue, or just supposed evolution based on what you think
> 'must' have happened?
> Secondly, your criteria for 'correctness':
>> >'Are the characteristics of the model reasonably isomorph with the
> >functionality of the
> > 'real thing', i.e. Homo?'
>
$6 this is just totally false. Apart from the fact that you have no way
> of accurately testing more complex aspects of cognitive function the
> test you propose is simply a Turing test. However, Turing tests are
> in no way a measure of the correctness of the 'inner workings' of a
> machine compared to the way the brain works. Output may be the same
> for any given input, but the processor could be entirely different.
> Given that what you want to do is understand the brain, this test is
> hopeless. Address this point.
>
$7 How are you going to model? Are you writing a computer-program
> environment or what? What input are you giving to the model? What
> will its envrionment be? It seems to me you talk/write a lot but say
> very little.
************************
See $i's above:
$2 I am really sorry that I irritate you and that I appear to repeat myself.
I do my best to
answer your questions and I enjoy the discussion; I don't have the feeling
that I repeat; we are
coming gradually closer to deeper modelling issues.
But I am indeed a stubborn man, who is convinced that he has done something
worthwhile,
that needs however critical comments from third parties.
$3 You have read nothing of the real' thing; my website offers only
descriptive information
on goals, methods, results, etc. The real thing is Biography of Man', which
I considered a
nice title as a biography describes the history of a living entity from its
inception unto its
present status, which may be death. Biography of Man describes that history
of a living (and
changing) entity from its inception as an initial multi-cell life form (some
700 million years
ago) up to its present status.
$4 That is right; therefore some speculative assumptions are necessary. Your
remark would
mean that you, if you were living in 1850, would have to reject the laws of
Newton as that
man has postulated that two masses at a distance attract each other with
opposite but equal
forces without giving any details how that is possible and what processes
are involved in it.
Newton just said: It is isomorph with reality and he showed that all
measured data on
planetary movement were correctly represented in his model'. Louis XIV, or
some later
general like Napoleon, said: It enables me to compute correctly the
trajectories of my cannon
balls; to hell with details; for me it suffices!
Later, Einstein translated the attraction phenomenon into space curvature
due to the masses,
again not specifying details, which the searchers for a unifying field
theory are now trying to
fill in.
If you require that all aspects from small to large have to be
included/solved at the same time,
you block all progress. We (Man) are simply not clever enough to see it all
correctly at once;
just like evolution, it is a trial & error procedure. One of my professors
once said:
If we would only do what we have completely understood, then we still
would not ride a
bicycle!'
I am therefore not confusing levels'; the advantage of a theory is further
that it enables an
experimenter to know where to look'. In my case it means e.g. that it is
worthwhile to
investigate wat difference there is in the brain activation between an
englishman writing the
word table' and a german writing the word Tafel'. If my modelling is
correct, then there is
no difference in the cortex activation but there must be a difference in
either the cranial nerve
nuclei or in the brain stem / spinal cord pattern generators'. There are
many more of these
experimental checks thinkable; I don't know sufficiently what can be
measured with present
measuring techniques.
$5 My work is published by my own company Novoware; my website was intended
primarily as promotion vehicle for subscriptions to these publications. I
have one paying
customer, the library of the University of Goettingen in Germany and several
free copies have
been sent to scientific friends. I have some difficulty in getting portions
published in journals.
That is not an unusual situation for any innovative approach to a scientific
subject.
Chomsky's preface in his famous book (published only 20 years after the
event) Rules and
Representations' is an amusing illustration of this difficult fight with the
established
publishing organizations.
In my analyses I make use of all experimental results that are published,
preferentially via
overviews. See my literature list, which is attached. My own experimental
facilities are
limited to my brain, pencil and PC. The experimental results that I refer to
vary from human
oriented (Wilder Penfield e.g.) to animal tissue (cats in the case of Cools
e.g.), but also to
observations of behavioral characteristics of Man and its culture (Desmond
Morris, Toynbee,
van Peursen, etc) as of animals.
It refers to both presently living species as to precursors (Winson's
research on the
evolutionary emergence of the brain's Theta Rhythm and its relationship with
REM sleep, the
associated dreaming procedure and the link to memory storage developments in
early
mammals, etc).
What I have contributed primarily is: Weaving a unifying thread through all
this information,
based on the statement:
Man' may be a complex phenomenon but its emergence in evolution is
controlled by a
single and simple criterion:
Only those life forms that produce sufficient fertile offspring will
remain!'
I have shown (I think) further that this one simple criterion is translated,
by evolution, in the
brain into operations on only one information entity: The Virtual Image',
created in the brain
from all recent and past sensory observations. In evolution this virtual
image became
gradually more refined.
$6 The only test of any model/theory is:
Does it describe reality correctly to a sufficient extent, i.e. is it
reasonably isomorph?'
You may indeed call it a Turing test. No theory gives a complete description
of all details of
reality. Man is just not equipped for anything better. The theories of
Newton, Einstein, Planck
etc., are all just models that describe, to some extent, reality.
There will remain therefore always a terra incognita', regarding the inner
workings', as you
expressed it. But it helps with our existence in reality if the model is
reasonably isomorph.
See also my notes under $4.
$7 My modelling is now a 1000 page handbook Biography of Man' with some 6
underlying
research documents, parts I through IV, VIII and IX. We are planning now a
three year
refinement and extension research program in cooperation with the
psycho-neuro-
pharmacological dept of professor Alexander Cools of Nijmegen University
(KUN). It will
(hopefully) lead to a number of scientific publications, aimed at very
specific aspects of the
modelling procedure. The planned research subjects are more or less
identified by the list of
questions I cited in my summary of my request for comment in my newsgroup
communication of 23-02-2002. This three year follow-up research project will
lead to a
software implementation of the modelling environment (in fact a computerized
psychology
implementation). We plan to use it for two applications:
One for supporting managers in strategic decision making in a competitive
environment.
One for creating an advanced Internet Browser that adds Man's
intelligence, as far as it is
modelled, to the browsing procedure within the internet network.
Regards, look forward to your comments
Frans van der Walle
.