No subject

phenomena or patterns of behavior of physical feedback systems (i.e., looking at
cognition as essentially a bounded feedback system---bounded under normal
conditions, unless the system goes into seizure (explodes mathematically---well, it
is still bounded but it tries to explode!), of course.)  From this point of view
both symbols and fuzziness and every other conceptual representation are neither
"true" nor "real" but simply patterns which tend to be, from an
information-theoretic point of view, compact and useful or efficient
representations.  But they are built on a physical substrate of a feedback system,
not vice-versa.

However, it isn't the symbol, fuzzy or not, which is ultimately general, it is the
feedback system, which is ultimately a physical system of course.  So, while we may
be convinced that your formalism is very good, this does not mean it is more
fundamentally powerful than a simulation approach.  It may be that your formalism is
in fact better for handling symbolic problems, or even problems which require a
mixture of fuzzy and discrete logic, etc., but what about problems which are not
symbolic at all?  What about problems which are both symbolic and non-symbolic (not
just fuzzy, but simply not symbolic in any straightforward way?)

The fact is, intuitively it seems to me that some connectionist approach is bound to
be more general than a more special-purpose approach.  This does not necessarily
mean it will be as good or fast or easy to use as a specialized approach, such as
yours.  But it is not at all convincing to me that just because the input space to a
connectionist network looks like R(n) in some superficial way, this would imply that
somehow a connectionist model would be incapable of doing symbolic processing, or
even using your model per se.

Mitsu



>
>
> >                      Two, it may be that the simplest or most efficient
> > representation of a given set of rules may include both a continous and a
> > discrete component; that is, for example, considering issues such as imprecise
> > application of rules, or breaking of rules, and so forth.  For example,
> > consider poetic speech; the "rules" for interpreting poetry are clearly not
> > easily enumerable, yet human beings can read poetry and get something out of
> > it.  A purely symbolic approach may not be able to easily capture this,
> > whereas it seems to me a connectionist approach has a better chance of dealing
> > with this kind of situation.
> >
> > I can see value in your approach, and things that connectionists can learn
> > from it, but I do not see that it dooms connectionism by any means.
>
> See the previous comment.
>
> Cheers,
>         Lev