Connectionists: The Brain Principles Manifesto

Sat Feb 21 19:46:13 EST 2015

Sorry, please use the following version.  -John

On 2/21/15 7:31 PM, Juyang Weng wrote:
>
> Dear Colleagues,
>
> 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.
>
> ------ Version 5 -----
> The Brain Principles Manifesto
> (Draft)
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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?
>
> 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?
>
> 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.
>
> 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 “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are 
> Divided by Politics and Religion 
> <http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777>”, 
> although not in terms of brain computation.
>
> 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.
>
> Surprisingly, to understand how the brain works requires sophisticated 
> automata theory in computer science (J. Weng, Brain as an Emergent 
> Finite Automaton: A Theory and Three Theorems 
> <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>, 
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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?
>
> 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?
>
> 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?
>
> 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 the respected 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?
>
> 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?
>
> 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?
>
> 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?
>
> 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?
>
> 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.
>
> --- end ---
>
> -John
> -- 
> --
> 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/
> ----------------------------------------------
>
>
>

-- 
--
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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