{"id":269,"date":"2008-06-16T20:51:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-16T20:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2008\/06\/16\/269\/"},"modified":"2014-11-02T20:09:52","modified_gmt":"2014-11-03T01:09:52","slug":"269","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=269","title":{"rendered":"Brain Science: Nature is still smarter that we are …"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m currently reading a book called “Microcognition”<\/a> by British philosopher Andy Clark. It’s basically about human efforts to model human intelligence using computers. Until a few years ago, the popular term for this effort was “artificial intelligence”. But today, that term isn’t very popular. Our scientists have made a lot of progress in understanding just what it is about our brains that makes humankind intelligent (well, at least in certain situations . . . . ). And in doing so, strangely enough, the stuff of our own brains has taught us a new way to compute. Through the 1950s and 60s and into the 1970s, our scientists attacked the problem of intelligence using standard computer programming, the classic realm of do-loops and if-then logic based on combinations of AND – OR gates (in the tradition of mathematical logician John Von Newman<\/a>). They came up with some wonderful inventions, like those powerful chess-playing computers that no human can beat. <\/p>\n

But those super computers couldn’t and still can’t do what people really do in life, i.e. figure out how to survive in confusing and changing circumstances and learn from their experiences and mistakes. The “AI” programmers couldn’t figure out how to make a computer form an “abstraction”, e.g. how to derive the common-ground concept of ‘cold’ from varied examples such as ice, Arctic fronts, and refrigeration. Over time, they finally considered the actual structure of the brain and noticed that it really wasn’t set up like a digital computer. Instead it was like a spider web of intricately connected little things, i.e. neurons, each of which are relatively dumb in themselves. What we slowly learned from the brain was that if such webs of relatively simple information processing objects were set up in the right way (through trial and error, the general process of nature), then abstract ideas and creative re-combinations of them could “emerge”, almost as if by magic. I.e., we found a way to mimic abstraction and creativity.<\/p>\n

Today, “parallel processing” and “neural nets”<\/a> and object-oriented programming are hot items in computer science; they are allowing all kinds of advances such as voice recognition that really works. We haven’t yet been able to do what our brains do in terms of flexible thinking, but our machines are certainly getting better. Once we decided to put aside the “old fashioned artificial intelligence” approach based on man-made rules, and started listening to “mother nature”, computer science progressed by leaps and bounds. <\/p>\n

The brain still hasn’t yielded all of its secrets, and I hope it will be a while yet before humankind figures them out. But it is certainly humbling to see another example of how we ain’t so smart after all; and that whatever smartness we do have is not our own invention, but was a gift from nature. Hopefully we will learn to use that gift wisely enough as not to continue punishing and exploiting the source of that gift, in the quest for wealth and independence. Nature is still smarter that we are, and if we keep pushing her past her limits, she may well find the need — and the means — to shut us down. And all the parallel-distributed silicon chips in the world won’t be able to stop that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m currently reading a book called “Microcognition” by British philosopher Andy Clark. It’s basically about human efforts to model human intelligence using computers. Until a few years ago, the popular term for this effort was “artificial intelligence”. But today, that term isn’t very popular. Our scientists have made a lot of progress in understanding just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=269"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4859,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions\/4859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}