From: Phil Goetz (philgoetz@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Sep 19 2005 - 18:48:04 MDT
--- "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> wrote:
> Jeff Hawkins says, "Maybe the universal cortical algorithm is
> temporal hierarchical sequence prediction and conflict detection."
>
> Now that I have a quantitative grasp on
> how incredibly slow evolution runs, it is far more plausible to me
> that
> most or even all of the cerebral cortex is running one underlying
> algorithm with various degrees of local tweaks - even if it's not at
> all
> obvious that this is the case just from studying functional
> neuroanatomy.
It might be that the cortex operates in much the same
way in different regions, barring certain specialities such as
the cytochrome-oxidase blobs in V1. But the rest of the brain
is modular and task-specific. I don't know which is harder to
deal with - uniform computational principles in a distributed
non-modular design, or diverse modules.
> There's a lot more to the human brain than cerebral cortex, but if
> Redwood Neuroscience can prove Hawkins's notion or find some other
> common algorithm at work across the cerebral cortex, it'll be the
> largest contribution to neuroscience since Marr.
BTW, Marr's contribution is inaccessible to scientists nowadays -
his 1982 book /Vision/ has been out of print for decades,
and used copies sell for about $300. I don't have one.
- Phil
__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:52 MDT