How the Brain Works and More

[Marty Stoneman]

Paul Bush (paul at phy.ucsf.edu) wrote:
: Here is an essay that
: describes how I have come to understand reality. First I shall
: explain the brain, to show that the theory is grounded in reality. I
: will then go on to show how this explanation leads us to an objective
: framework for knowledge representation. This theory has interesting
: philosophical implications.

: OK, lets begin. How does the brain work?

	[ESSAY SNIPPED]

: Paul
: Copyright Paul Bush 1996 all rights reserved etc etc.

Thanks for posting your essay of your brain model; I'm looking forward to
your view of the "consequences".  Your posting gave me an opportunity to
compare our Anthrobotics "intelligent-entity" models and software to your
"wetware" model; and there are many areas where they are very, very 
similar.  

Since we have worked with primarily non-distributed processing, our ideas 
and models are necessarily more explicit than yours -- and I am wondering 
how explicit your "objective framework for knowledge representation" is.

Some areas in which we may differ somewhat might be discussed in email if
you wish, for example:

1.  We had the best results very explicitly differentiating "relevancy" 
computations from "perception/prediction" computations; among other 
things, this means that our entity can learn new "perception/prediction" 
things that are not "relevant", including about somewhat-wildly-new input.
2.  We required servicing separately "cognitive" learning -- about 
perception-prediction -- and "relevancy" learning -- about plans and 
goals; and the way of servicing learning was quite different in each case.
3.  We required forms of "knowledge representation" which appear to 
explicitly shadow the forms of natural language and explicitly require the 
kinds of similarities which humans talk about and learn from.

One of our most fascinating results was that we found that the kinds of 
computation required to do our "hardest" parts broke down to an identical 
primitive computation  -- which can be done in a massively parallel 
arrangement -- and it might be interesting to acquaint "wetware" (and 
neural net people?) with that to see if it helps them understand what their 
"nets" are doing most of the time.

[We are still looking for a conference or place to publish -- but we 
should have a home page up shortly with more details]

So thanks in advance for your next installment -- not many throw their 
overall thinking/models into cyberspace for review.  I'll be happy to 
have some email discussions in your areas if you do not object.

Cheers,

Marty Stoneman
marty at indirect.com