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<div class="moz-forward-container">Dear Colleagues,<br>
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Is the following material too ahead of time for this connectionist
community? Please feel free to reply to all with your
comments. Some of us like to get your inputs to shape the text.
<br>
<br>
------ Version 5 -----<br>
The Brain Principles Manifesto <br>
(Draft) <br>
<br>
Historically, public acceptance of science was slow. For example,
Charles Darwin waited about 20 years (from the 1830s to 1858) to
publish his theory of evolution for fear of public reaction. It
took about 20 years (by the 1870s) the scientific community and
much of the general public had accepted evolution as a fact. Of
course, the debate on evolution still goes on today. <br>
<br>
Is the public acceptance of science faster in modern days? Not
necessarily so, even though we have now better and faster means to
communicate. The primary reason is still the same but much more
severe --- the remaining open scientific problems are more complex
and the required knowledge to convincingly understand goes beyond
any single person. <br>
<br>
For instance, network-like brain computation --- connectionist
computation --- has been long doubted and ignored by industry.
Kunihiko Fukushima introduced Convolutional deep networks by at
least 1980. Weng, Ahuja and Huang published Max-pooling in deep
fully automatic learning networks by 1992. However, Apple, Baidu,
Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and other major related companies did
not show considerable interest till after 2012. That is a delay
of about 20 years. The two techniques above are not very
difficult to understand. However, these two suddenly hot
techniques have already been proved obsolete by the discoveries of
more fundamental working principles of the brain. <br>
<br>
Industrial and academic interests have been keen on a combination
of two things --- easily understandable but superficial tests and
which companies are involved. However, the newly known brain
principles have told us that the ways to conduct such tests will
give only vanishing gains that do not lead to a realistic zero
error rate, regardless how many more images can be added to the
training sets and how long the Moore’s Law can continue. Do our
industry and public need another 20 years? Or more? <br>
<br>
Oct. 2011 a highly respected multi-disciplinary professor kindly
wrote: “I tell these students that they can work on brains and do
good science, or work on robots and do good engineering. But if
they try to do both at once, the result will be neither good
science nor good engineering.” How long does it take for the
industry and public to accept that that pessimistic view of the
brain was no longer true even then?<br>
<br>
The brain principles that have already been discovered would bring
fundamental changes in the way humans live, human countries and
societies are organized, and the way humans treat one another.
The following questions point to some concrete fundamental changes
that benefit all humans. However, conventionally, scientists in
natural sciences do not address politics. Albert Einstein and
Norm Chomsky are among exceptions.<br>
<br>
The brain of anybody, regardless of his education and experience,
is fundamentally short sighted, in both space and time, determined
by the known brain principles. Prof. Jonathan Haidt documented
well such shortsightedness in his book “<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777">The
Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and
Religion</a>”, although not in terms of brain computation. <br>
<br>
In terms of brain computation, the precise circuits in your brain
self-wire beautifully according to your real-time experience (the
genome only regulates) and their various invariance properties for
abstraction also largely depend on experience. Serotonin (e.g.,
caused by threats), dopamine (e.g., caused praises) and other
neural transmitters quickly change the way these delicate circuits
work but you feel everything inside the brain is normal.
Therefore, you make mistakes but you still feel normal in the
brain. Everybody is like that, including the politicians in the
questions below.<br>
<br>
Surprisingly, to understand how the brain works requires
sophisticated automata theory in computer science (J. Weng, <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.scirp.org%2Fjournal%2FPaperDownload.aspx%3FpaperID%3D53728&ei=21rnVP7fB4KZyAT-noH4Cg&usg=AFQjCNEzHz-YDhivI1esDtgKg84SEx4RuQ&bvm=bv.86475890,d.aWw&cad">Brain
as an Emergent Finite Automaton: A Theory and Three Theorems</a>,
IJIS, 2015). This automata brain model proposes that each brain
is an automaton, but also very different from all traditional
symbolic automata because it programs itself --- emergent. No
traditional automata can program themselves in the sense of Turing
Machine but a brain automaton does. <br>
<br>
The automata brain model predicted that neural circuits precisely
record the statistics of experience, roughly consistent with
neural anatomy (e.g., Felleman & Van Essen, Cerebral Cortex,
1991). In particular, the model predicted that “shifting
attention between `humans’ and `vehicles’ dramatically changes
brain representation of all categories” (J. Gallant et al. Nature
Neuroscience, 2013) and that human attention “can regulate the
activity of their neurons in the medial temporal lobe” (C. Koch et
al. Nature, 2010). The model raised questions to claims that
neurons encode exclusively sensory information like the “place”
cells in the work of 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
instead of a combination of both place and top-down attention
context reported by Koch et al. and Gallant et al. and
theoretically predicted by the automata brain model. <br>
<br>
Unfortunately, the automata brain model implies that all
neuroscientists and neural network researchers are unable to
understand the brain of their studies without a rigorous training
in automata theory. For example, traditional models for nervous
systems and neural networks focus on pattern recognition and do
not have the capabilities of a grounded symbol system (e.g.,
“rulefully combining and recombining,” Stevan Harnad, Physica D,
1990). Automata theory deals with such capabilities. <br>
<br>
Understanding brain’s automata would enables us to see answers to
a wide variety of important questions, some of which are raised
below. We do not provide yes/no answers here, only raise
questions. The automaton brain model predicts that there is no
absolute right or wrong in any brain but its environmental
experiences wire and rewire the brain. <br>
<br>
How can our industry and pubic understand that the door for a
great opportunity that has opened up for them? How can they see
the economical outlooks that this opportunity brings with it?<br>
<br>
How should our educational system change to prepare our many
bright minds for the new brain age? Has our government been
prompt to properly respond to this modern call from the nature?<br>
<br>
How should our young generation act for to this new opportunity
that is unfolding before their eyes? Is a currently narrowly
defined academic degree sufficient for their career?<br>
<br>
Is it consistent with the U.S. people’s interest for the respected
Mr. Barack Obama to have authorized the bombing of ISIS,
sanctioned Russia because of what happened in Ukraine, rejected
conversations with North Korea for what the respected Mr. Kim
Jong-un did, increased extra tax on Americans who create many
jobs, and planed to tax Americans’ overseas ventures which
encourages them to drop U.S. Citizenship? Shortsighted? <br>
<br>
The same ISIS bombing question goes to the respected Mr. François
Hollande. What is the relationship between the armed attacks on
the weekly Charllie Hebdo and the French ISIS bombing that killed
many more innocent civilians as well as racial discrimination
existing in France? <br>
<br>
Is it consistent with the Chinese people’s interest for the
respected Mr. Jinping Xi to conduct anti-graft struggle using the
Communist Party rules without the due process of the Chinese legal
system and to bicker about islands with China’s neighbors like
Japan, Vietnam, and Philippines that negatively affected economy
and tourists’ safety?<br>
<br>
Is it consistent with the Israelis people’s interest for the
respected Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu to take his current approach to
Israel’s Arab neighbors? <br>
<br>
How should all government officials take advantage of the new
knowledge about their own brains? Should people in every country
require them to learn brain theory and correct their feel-normal
mistakes?<br>
<br>
We are from all walks of life and from all regions of the world.
At present, we do not understand the scientific underpinnings of
the material in this Manifesto, just like the public of Darwin’s
time. However, these issues are relevant to the future of our
nations and our lives. We declare to form the Brain Principles
Society, in order to promote human communication and understanding
of brain principles and their implications to human societies so
as to improve the quality of life for all human beings on this
planet. There is a lack of society that regards social sciences
as part of brain science and considers automata theory to be
relevant to brain science and social sciences. However, we are
all governed by the same set of brain principles.<br>
<br>
--- end ---<br>
<br>
-John
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
--
Juyang (John) Weng, Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
MSU Cognitive Science Program and MSU Neuroscience Program
428 S Shaw Ln Rm 3115
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824 USA
Tel: 517-353-4388
Fax: 517-432-1061
Email: <a moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:weng@cse.msu.edu">weng@cse.msu.edu</a>
URL: <a moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.cse.msu.edu/%7Eweng/">http://www.cse.msu.edu/~weng/</a>
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