Connectionists: Please stop having conversations on this mailing list

[Danny Silver]

Dear Stephen, Pau and Others .. The Connectionists list was created for the very exchange of ideas that we now see happening.
It is wonderful that working professionals and those in the middle of academic research and applied work are using the list, but the vetting of new scientific ideas and subsequent discourse is what this forum has been about over 30 years.

The current debate, and in some cases re-debate, of the symbolist versus connectionist positions harkens back to discussions in the 1980s and 90s.  Of course, we now understand a lot more about the biological mechanisms of learning and have new theory concerning computational learning.  Many of the emails reflect on this.  The exchange is wonderful for the silverbacks to review and most certainly for the new researchers to share, discuss and add their own fresh ideas.

This debate has rekindled some of my own thoughts from the past plus a few more recent perspectives. The representation of semantics and their composition into thought can be modeled by:
(1) the symbolist perspective: symbolic representation and syntactic compositionality; and
(2) the connectionist perspective: vectorial representation and composition through superposition.
It can be argued that both can explain the systematicity of human thought and thinking,  however … symbols and syntactic compositionality is much simpler for human communication.  And this has likely been to our detriment in terms of understanding the function of our nervous systems.  It makes sense to me that early AI started with this choice of representation and compositionality, because it is how we exchange information between each other.  But it is unlikely this is how our nervous systems function.
Many simple reptiles and mammals can perform complex tasks without having to manipulate symbols.  Although more complex to understand, it is likely that vectorial representation and composition is the basis of how our brains work, and that symbolic representation and syntactic compositionality developed as a method of sharing concepts and meaning between each other.
The evolutionary step that allowed us to explain to a young person (using symbols) how to identify a dangerous insect or animal (using our senses and neural vectors) provided a huge advantage to humans and so it was inherited and expanded upon over many generations.  Eventually, it also provided something else … the ability to organize and “think” about the things we sensed in the world, at least at a coarse level, using symbols and syntactic relations.

My suspicions are that the duality of learning to sense and respond to the world affectively (using vectors) while also learning to explain those senses and actions (using symbols) creates a multiple task learning problem that takes longer to develop but results in significant benefits - the basis for an agent that can reason and plan over the things it senses and can affect.  So currently I am in the camp that believes that our bodies manipulate sense and action vectors and not symbols.  However, we have developed the ability to map “manifolds” of sensory and action vectorial space onto symbols (also represented as vectors within our nervous system) that can be used for communications to others, or conscious reasoning about aspects of the world.

Please see the following recent article by Jeff Mitchell and Mirella Lapata that dives much deep into aspects of this at  https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01106.x
Interestingly, they sight Dedre Gentner’s article of 1989 which originally stimulated my thinking on this in the 1990s
Gentner, D. (1989). The mechanisms of analogical learning. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical reasoning (pp. 199–241). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.


==========================
Daniel L. Silver
Professor, Jodrey School of Computer Science
Director, Acadia Institute for Data Analytics
Acadia University,
Office 314, Carnegie Hall,
Wolfville, Nova Scotia Canada B4P 2R6

t. (902) 585-1413
f. (902) 585-1067

acadiau.ca<http://www2.acadiau.ca/index.php>
Facebook<https://www.facebook.com/acadiauniversity>  Twitter<https://twitter.com/acadiau>  YouTube<https://www.youtube.com/user/AcadiaWebmaster>  LinkedIn<https://www.linkedin.com/company/acadia-university?trk=biz-companies-cym>  Flickr<https://www.flickr.com/photos/acadiauniversity/albums>
[id:image001.png at 01D366AF.7F868A70]



From: Connectionists <connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu> on behalf of Stephen José Hanson <jose at rubic.rutgers.edu>
Date: Monday, February 7, 2022 at 10:14 AM
To: pau <pau at ini.uzh.ch>, connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu <connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: Connectionists: Please stop having conversations on this mailing list
CAUTION: This email comes from outside Acadia. Verify the sender and use caution with any requests, links or attachments.

Pau,

actually this was exactly what Connectionists was created for:  civil, thoughtful discussion about Neural Computation.

It is very lightly moderated and provides a forum for discussion, promotion and potential collaborations.

This discussion has been a bit redundant here and there, but for the most part reconstructing much of the arguments from the 1980s in the background of the DL revolution.

Explainable AI, Neuro-Symbolic models and causal structure have been constant concerns of thoughtful folks using, building Neural network systems for 40 years.

The threads have gone in predictable ways, but have interesting voices and real issues behind them.   Some of this is dialetical (my friend Gary Marcus who is a master at this) and some of it hyperbolic.   But all have made excellent and interesting points.

Best Regards,

Steve
On 2/5/22 11:29 AM, pau wrote:

Dear connectionists,



To the best of my understanding, the aim of this mailing list is to meet

the needs of working professionals. I understand by this sharing

information about events, publications, developments, etc. that can be

useful for someone who works in this field.

If someone wants to argue, discuss, praise or assign blame, agree or

disagree, please do so in private correspondence or in non-work-specific

social media channels.



Best,

P.
--
[cid:part1.AC909AA8.0241CDFF at rubic.rutgers.edu]
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/pipermail/connectionists/attachments/20220207/3cf5d5cc/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.png
Type: image/png
Size: 20163 bytes
Desc: signature.png
URL: <http://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/pipermail/connectionists/attachments/20220207/3cf5d5cc/attachment.png>