Connectionists: Stephen Hanson in conversation with Geoff Hinton

[Michael Arbib]

I think this is unhelpful, Gary. The question is not whether our brains can do certain things (not always very well) using neurons that, e.g., co-exist with glia, are cells with nuclei containing complex genetic detail, and have axons whose behavior can be well described by the Hodgkin-Huxley equations – it is whether networks of a specific kind of “something with only very superficial similarity to our neurons” can do certain tasks.

As a complementary theme, the history of computers starts with implementing numerical computations in terms of zeros and ones, and then inventing ever more subtle ways to organize computation in terms of higher-level structures whose relations to 0s and 1s is of limited importance in the sense that we program now in terms of high-level constructs, not in machine language.

Putting the two together, the issue is “what are the high-level languages of brain operation”? If we wish to implement them in silicon their relation to biological neurons may be as secondary as the relation of the implementation to 0s and 1s. That’s why, in my own work, I explore networks of “schemas” as well as networks of “neurons” in seeking to understand the cognitive neuroscience of vision, action, language, etc.

From: Connectionists <connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu> On Behalf Of gary at ucsd.edu
Sent: Friday, February 4, 2022 10:20 AM
To: Danko Nikolic <danko.nikolic at gmail.com>
Cc: AIhub <aihuborg at gmail.com>; connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu
Subject: Re: Connectionists: Stephen Hanson in conversation with Geoff Hinton

This is an argument from lack of imagination, as Pat Churchland used to say. All you have to notice, is that your brain is a neural net work. What are the alternatives?
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