Science Forums 2

[Buffy]

So many words Pyro: I need time to grok it all.

I will say that your basic thesis is kind of like my thinking about "artificial intelligence" and "consciousness": these are a lot simpler than might be imagined, mostly because no one has ever put together a decent model of the building blocks--kinda like your tinker-toy--structures of concepts that solve the "world knowledge problem" through massive parallelism and lots of data. The implementation of these "blocks" themselves is complicated, but I think they do some pretty simple things. Pile several million of them together and you've got great pattern recognition, problem solving and even sentience.

There's a great article in this months' SciAm about mapping the neural code of rats' whisker sense stimuli and how the mechanism for sensing and reaction is not linear as previously thought, but massively parallel: meaning that a seemingly simple mechanism is masked by an almost impenetrably chaotic implementation. To me this is proof of the "accidental" development of the brain (see neural networks!), but its what gets in the way of us figuring out what the heck it does and how it does it.

Great thread Pyro! I'll be back....

Lego,
Buffy