Connectionists: How the brain works

[Uthscsa]

Sorry all. Apparently the Dropbox link broke. Happens some times. Will fix and repost for those interested. 

Thanks for the interest. 

Just for the record I believe and have for many years that sucess requires the sharing and acceptance of community models. This has been the basis for the GENESIS project since the mid 1980s. I also understand that complex realistic models are more difficult to understand and share. Of course I also know well the sucess if physics for hundreds of years in building a common basis for advancing understanding by sharing common models.  All that said just because their is light under that particular lamp
Post does not mean that that is where the keys are.  If one knows otherwise that also doesn't mean that is necessarily where you should look first. 

I will repost the link. But for those of you willing to read the paper. I believe you will find the kinds of fundamental questions about brain function that will be critical I believe to
Figure out what kind of machine this is. And I am certain that we still fundamentally have little idea about that. 

Jim. (Still tilting after all these years)   :-)

> On May 23, 2014, at 9:51 AM, james bower <bower at uthscsa.edu> wrote:
> 
> perhaps instead of speculating, you might be interested in an article actually describing how a REAL brain model:  read: a model made of the actual brain itself, rather than some abstracted imagined idea about how brains work, has propagated between labs.
> 
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/erw705h4yyh3l9k/272602_1_En_5%20copy.pdf
> 
> I am more than aware that most people on this mailing list have no interest in these kinds of models - and, as most are aware, I personally believe that most of the models that people are interested in on this mailing list are fundamentally Ptolemaic in intent and effect.
> 
> However, I have no interest in continuing that argument.
> 
> I am also, of course, very aware that building model that transcend individual laboratories is hard and that boiling everything down to as few equations as possible would make that process much easier (as it did in physics) - sadly, biological systems are explicitly more complex by nature - and their success depends on the details.  That is absolutely clear.  I should also say that in the GENESIS project, we have been working for a long time on how you build and propagate community models - which requires a new form of publication.  But that is a much longer and more complex conversation than would probably be tolerated here. 
> 
> Accordingly, I post this link to the paper, just in case, someone new on the list is interested in actually understanding how actual physical models of the nervous system are very slowly being developed - more slowly than they should be, given the interest and hope of the majority that somehow a system that evolved over many hundreds of millions of years to do something VERY HARD, might somehow be captured in some mathematical structure simpler than itself.
> 
> Jim Bower  
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On May 22, 2014, at 6:00 PM, Janet Wiles <janetw at itee.uq.edu.au> wrote:
>> 
>> When does a model escape from a research lab? Or in other words, when do researchers beyond the in-group investigate, test, or extend a model?
>> 
>> I have asked many colleagues this question over the years. Well-written papers help, open source code helps, tutorials help. But the most critical feature seems to be that it can be communicated in a single equation. Think about backprop, reinforcement learning, Bayes theorem.
>> 
>> Janet Wiles
>> Professor of  Complex and Intelligent Systems,
>> School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering
>> The University of Queensland
>> 
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Connectionists [mailto:connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu] On Behalf Of Yu Shan
>> Sent: Friday, 23 May 2014 7:37 AM
>> To: Juyang Weng
>> Cc: connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu
>> Subject: Re: Connectionists: How the brain works
>> 
>>> Suppose that one gave all in this connectionists list a largely 
>>> correct model about how the brain works, few on this list would be 
>>> able to understand it let alone agree with it!
>>>