AI, NN, CNS (central nervous system)

[Steve Hanson]

aha--jim, we finally get to your anti-reductionist roots! 
(deep below your brown locks)

Well you're right of course, Fooling around
in computational space doesn't guarantee any connection whatsoever
to the brain.    And probably most of the readers and NIPS
goers are concerned about making nets faster, better, brighter,
cleaner, bigger, etcer... and not interested in making brains.
However, lets be careful about creating a junkpile term
and throwing people into it.  Cognitive Neuroscience as a field, for example,
has interest in both brains and function.  As Jordan P. wanted
to document a few notes ago this might even mean
we are interested in a level of computational abstraction we
could, if so inclined, refer to as the-- mind.  Cognitive
Neuroscience is about characterizing function at the level
of the mind, in fact, but in terms of neural tissue.  Consequently,
Cognitive neuroscience is not about the engineering, "neuro-tech"
that you seem to be glumping the entire neural net community into.
I think there are distinctions to be drawn other than "BRAIN"
and "NON-BRAIN".  I still maintain connectionism is about
"system-level" theory and explanation --this is a vast
computational arena that requires careful, informed, and
systematic exploration (and not just from neuroscientists).  
I don't see neuroscientists jumping up with "theories of the brain" or 
even small parts of the brain everyday.  And of course good 
experimentalists are usually suspicious of good theorists--this seems to 
be endemic to such interaction.  You will undoubtly, complain that worrying
about language, problem solving, category learning, and even
much of high-level perception at this point is premature since
understanding the brain means THE BRAIN!  Not some cartoon
version of it --not a simplified, random looking computational
bric-a-brac...yes, yes, I know... but physicists (and you're surrounded
by a number of them out there) seem to appreciate abstracting abit..even 
before we have all the details straight --

"The art of model-building is the exclusion of real but irrelevant parts of the
problem, and entails hazards for the builder and the reader.  The builder
may leave out something genuinely relevant; the reader, armed with too
sophisticated an experimental probe or too accurate a computation, may
take literally a schematized model whose main aim is to be a demonstration of
possibility."

	-P. W. Anderson (from Nobel acceptance speech, 1977)

	

	merry xmas.   Steve