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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
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
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 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 class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:weng@cse.msu.edu">weng@cse.msu.edu</a>
URL: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.cse.msu.edu/~weng/">http://www.cse.msu.edu/~weng/</a>
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