Connectionists: how the brain works?

[Juyang Weng]

Mike,

the main idea for Autonomous Mental Development (AMD) is to 
automatically generate (develop) brain regions and detailed circuits 
recursively (scaffolding) using three things:
(1) The developmental program (simulating the functions of the genome)
(2) The circuits already generated so far from the birth time
(3) The experience of autonomous interactions with the environments.
Why?  The brain circuits are too complex to hand craft.  Every brain 
circuit is very different.  For this reason, I think that the NIH 
Connectome project is not very useful for understanding how the brain 
works even one gets the perfect connection map without any error.

We have shown that different areas of the DN so developed indeed have 
very different circuits.

However, we have not yet identified which part of a DN is hippocampus 
and which part is cerebellum, etc., because we still mainly use
one or two sensory modalities (e.g., vision and audition, or vision and 
touch) and a very small set of effectors.   A hippocampus uses all five 
sensory modalities of a human body and all human body effectors to 
develop.  A cerebellum uses very rich sets of receptors in the 
somatosensory system and almost all body effectors.    To truly generate 
(develop) hippocampus and cerebellum correctly, one needs to have at 
least all major receptors and effectors that they use.  Therefore, I do 
not think that anybody should statically model a hippocampus or a 
cerebellum because without the developmental causality, any such static 
circuits are grossly wrong and computationally inefficient.

In summary, the brain is nearly optimally developed to perform the 
sensorimotor experience that a child/human has experience up to the 
current time.

This is probably not a view supported by most people on this list, but I 
respectfully ask everybody to at least consider patiently.

-John

On 3/19/14 4:27 PM, Michael Arbib 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. 
>>

-- 
--
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: weng at cse.msu.edu
URL: http://www.cse.msu.edu/~weng/
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