IUBio

Modelling the human brain by modelling its evolutionary emergence

Frans van der Walle fw.novoware at wxs.nl
Wed Feb 27 15:32:05 EST 2002


Glen M. Sizemore <gmsizemore2 at yahoo.com> schreef in berichtnieuws
3c7b7ed2$1_1 at news.nntpserver.com...
> ' our present day knowledge of the functioning of the human brain and mind
> demonstrates clearly the lack of some unifying theory for the information
> handling processes in the human brain and mind.'
>
> Perhaps this quote illustrates exactly why little progress has been made.
> One thing it does not contain is any hint that the notions of "mind" and
> "information handling processes" may be scientifically worthless.
*******************
I disagree; one only should define what one is talking about. My definitions
are:
*   Mind is the functionality and stored memory items, as implemented in the
physical brain
   structure. It can be called also: ‘The Information System Man'.
*   Brain is the physical object that 'houses' the mind.
*   Information System is defined as the sum of all those characteristics of
that species that
   can be represented by some repository of abstract and conceptual
information items, that
   is reasonably isomorph in its characteristics to the real life system.
*   Information Handling is the set of information transfer-, storage-,
transformation-, input-
   and output operations within such an Information System
Once defined in this (or any other) way, you can use it and work with it
within a modelling
environment. ‘Scientifically' means ‘well defined' & ‘transformed via
logical rules'.
Whether or not these notions are used in daily life in a less well defined
or ‘sloppy' way is
irrelevant to the modeller. Language expressions are very often not very
specific nor well
defined. Misunderstandings occur often; humans can ‘live' with it because
they can use
context information for a further narrowed down interpretation of these
sloppy statements;
models can not, as long as context information is not part of a modelling.
Attaining that last
stage is one of the goals of artificial intelligence and in fact of my
research.

 Many thanks for your remarks
 Frans van der Walle






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