Its funny how what we think about can totally fool our own faculties of logical and aesthetic discrimination. Beautiful ideas can creep up on you, pop out with the least effort, and be lauded and praised while you're still wondering why anyone would read it...or you can slave away on a body of work that ties in years of reading and careful concept building, and nobody gets it.
Maybe that's why some people believe in the Platonic reality.
What I've described above is quite exaggerated with respect to myself, but I'm sure of the truth of it, even then. Something in the way cognition and conceptualisation work rings true to this phenomenon. How much can we truly say our minds are arbitrary, chaotic creations of fuzzily specified hardware systems? Isn't there some thread of structure of thought that is inherent to us all?
Many have claimed there is.
It was thought to be language-based, maybe recursion, but that is by no means established. Some rather famous (in anthropology circles) Amazon tribe seems to exist entirely without recursive speech, and all it takes is one black sock.
It may hide somewhere in the little-understood processes of memory formation and recall.
The signalling system of the biological neural network is hardly measurable, and very much not understood. Allow me here a hackneyed and misplaced analogy with computers, to spell things out...If our neural nets are the physical data transfer layer, then the signalling between them is the logic gate design*. If we do not have a full grasp of even this level of algorithmic operation, how can we divine the instructions being passed, or the language that they underwrite, or the semantics being expressed?
How can we hope to reason about why thinking works in such peculiar ways? I'm afraid that for now, the engineering of cognition is a way up the slope**, and we are stuck with thinking about thinking.
The beauty of it is, thinking about thinking can be far more fun than knowing the answer :)
*We could also say 'the Turing Machine specification', but this gives the false impression that classical Turing machines are not totally superseded by von Neumann logic gates (Tesla's logic gates are kind of besides the point, occuring too soon). Also, this analogy only holds in the static case, but the dynamic is too much to go into - see Holland's Emergence.
**The slope of the acceleration of human knowledge. I'm not going to say anything about how that relates to linear time here. That woud be presumptuous.
4 comments:
Your starting lines remind me of the The Pareto principle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
Quite frankly I don't know if I buy into it. Maybe that productive 20% is not because it is better, but because the other 80% underlie it already. Or maybe it is that 20% that is rewarded... or that brings forth fruit in other ways. Of the 80% majority may be a consequence of our own efforts, but no less on the shoulders of giants ;)
What always gets me when thinking about thinking is the connectionist view of top-down and bottom-up at once (perhaps your beloved Holland's primer would give me a richer understanding of complex systems... ). Just as a memory is recalled the substance of it shifts. Curious, why do you chose logical gates to represent neural processes - indeed you lost me somewhere in the distinction between different types of logic gates. Care to educate? :)
(ah, my mind is skipping words now I see.. lexical blind spots. Let me know if all legibility is lost)
I don't think the Pareto principle really applies in the larger case. In reference to my opening lines, where sometimes 80% of the quality thought comes after 20% of the effort, the principle fits loosely but it doesn't generalise over the greater theme.
Really, it is the dichotomy between the processes behind different 'products' of thought that I'm talking about. Mozart and Salieri. The leap of intuitition and the slow slog of induction.
Top down and bottom up might be a good way to think of it - presumably both are needed for higher level cognition, but one or the other might be usually prevalent. Perhaps in perfect harmonious concert, they logarithmically drive up the scale of cognition to allow magnificent insights.
Logic gates just seemed like the natural place to put the neurons in a computer/brain analogy.
I'm afraid you'll have to go to the source for logic gates 101 - look up Turing Machines, then 'von Neumann logic gates', then 'Tesla logic gates'. Should cover it :D
When I said "behind different 'products' of thought", I meant - different products from different people, but of similar scope and nature.
The dichotomy being some people might solve for x at a glance while others need paper and pencil (alas, I hold up my hand!).
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