A kinetic library with holographic books that animate and interact with readers Debra Brooks Images mean a lot. To many (most of us?), "thought" is a series of mental pictures and analogies. Images (including mine) that visualize AI as some kind of "mind" can be misleading. As they say, a picture is worth 1,000 words. So I will keep this short. Debora's image invokes the vast library of information that the super-librarian of AI consults to answer any question. It seems magical but not alive. It seems useful but not scary.

I have lately become impressed with the what's going on in the brain. Learning more about the small details, I wind up asking myself about the "big picture" that these details reveal. I'm a visual kind of guy, so I'm thinking about a picture something like this: Neural network in the brain That picture is showing main connections only - myelinated "high speed" connections. The actual picture would be a packed tangle of axons and dendrites - for example, the massive wad of connections that make up the "white matter" in the brain, connecting (on average) each neuron in the neocortex with 1,000 other neurons. White Matter in the Brain is a Wad of Connections Where else do we see something like that? Roots in the Forest Floor There is a tangle of roots under our feet in the forest floor. We usually see the big ones that manage to break the surface and threaten to trip us up, but the network is much more extensive, especially in a thriving "old...

Daniel Dennett likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt: “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.” As Dennett hints (with typical subtly), there is a lot of "junk philosophy" around the subjects dear to Jaynes' heart. In this post, I'd like to extract one of Jayne's ideas and wipe a bit of "junk" off it to see where it gets me. At the center of Jayne's theory is the "bicameral mind", which is firmly based on the idea that we have a "right brain" and a "left brain" with notably different capabilities, each capable of acting somewhat on their own. The "right brain" is good at seeing the "big picture" and sends its judgments to the left brain, where they are perceived as speech - sometimes the speech of the Gods. As things get historically more complicated, we evolve our present day "inner chatter", no longer attributed to the Gods (if we are sane), b...

Daniel Dennett likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt: “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.” (one might say the same of Dennett, but that is another essay ...) "Origin" is an important book. It inspires more notes than will fit in a single post. A sympathetic portrait of the rather quirky Julian James can be found here . Jaynes was somewhat obsessed loner -- a "one book wonder" -- who spent his life chasing a rather off-beat idea of what it is to be conscious. As his title indicates, Jaynes tackles the issue of consciousness. The "Hard" problem of Consciousness is, Why does it feel the way it does? How can a lump of "stuff", no matter how complex its structure and function feel anything? I agree with the general consensus that Jaynes doesn't solve or even address the hard problem but, like the others, comes closer by helping to understand what consciousness is in the first place. His book is fu...

THE NORMAL WELL-TEMPERED MIND  (2013) Dennett describes the idea that you can break down the mind into "dumber" minds and those into dumber minds and so on. He calls it an "dramatic over simplification". He now likes to think of neurons as a competing society (let's call this "hypothetical reductionism", distinguished by reduction of the need to explain something into the hypothetical ability to solve something simpler) and persues the analogy all the way up to society. Still refers to "cognitive science". As a philosopher, he is wistful about the younger generations that take computers for granted. Still clinging to Turing. Likes recursive organizations, virtual machines implemented on top of virtual machines. Control in computers is very different from control in brains. Computer is a society of slaves. Creeping love of competition and survival. His "hunch" is that competition applies in the brain - an admittedly wild idea. And ba...