Connectionists: how the brain works?

[Brian J Mingus]

The hippocampus and cerebellum might be necessary variance. Data from
strokes and lesion studies suggest that they are not fully necessary,
however. Also, they might be local minima in the design space, and we might
be able to replace them with something simpler before we figure out exactly
how they work, by first identifying what it is that they do and then
inventing something better.

Brian


On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 2:27 PM, Michael Arbib <arbib at usc.edu> wrote:

>  Ignoring the gross differences in circuitry between hippocampus and
> cerebellum, etc., is not erring on the side of simplicity, it is erring,
> period. Have you actually looked at a Cajal/Sxentagothai-style drawing of
> their circuitry?
>
>
> At 01:07 PM 3/19/2014, Brian J Mingus wrote:
>
> Hi Jim,
>
> Focusing too much on the details is risky in and of itself. Optimal
> compression requires a balance, and we can't compute what that balance is
> (all models are wrong). One thing we can say for sure is that we should err
> on the side of simplicity, and adding detail to theories before simpler
> explanations have failed is not Ockham's heuristic. That said it's still in
> the space of a Big Data fuzzy science approach, where we throw as much data
> from as many levels of analysis as we can come up with into a big pot and
> then construct a theory. The thing to keep in mind is that when we start
> pruning this model most of the details are going to disappear, because
> almost all of them are irrelevant. Indeed, the size of the description that
> includes all the details is almost infinite, whereas the length of the
> description that explains almost all the variance is extremely short,
> especially in comparison. This is why Ockham's razor is a good heuristic.
> It helps prevent us from wasting time on unnecessary details by suggesting
> that we only inquire as to the details once our existing simpler theory has
> failed to work.
>
> > On 3/14/14 3:40 PM, Michael Arbib wrote:
>  >> At 11:17 AM 3/14/2014, Juyang Weng wrote:
> >>> The brain uses a single architecture to do all brain functions we are
> aware of!  It uses the same architecture to do vision, audition, motor,
> reasoning, decision making, motivation (including pain avoidance and
> pleasure seeking, novelty seeking, higher emotion, etc.).
> >>
> >> Gosh -- and I thought cerebral cortex, hippocampus and cerebellum were
> very different from each other.
>
>
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