Re: <eyebeam><blast> a relational plane

[Alex Bennion <abennion@Bowdoin.EDU>]

Nathan Doughty nathan@xnihilo.com wrote: 

>        _a physical representation is people standing in
>        crowds/mobs all over the world and every person is
>        touching other people and being touched on all sides and
>        the entire mob is moving in towards some center all the
>        time and shifting like a gelatin being squeezed between
>        fingers and parting and coming back together. 

>        _and imagine that there are others alongside you receding
>        backwards and taking it in and popping back and forth to
>        sell what they know. 

        Likewise, imagine a physical representation in which people are
replaced by neurons.  Limbs are replaced by synapses.  Influence is
replaced by excitatory or inhibitory signals.  And community is replaced
by patterns of activation.

        I am intrigued by the correlation between the aformentioned
metaphor and artificial neural networks, as they have been described by
cognitive scientists.  In many ways, we are all trying to understand the
same problem.  How can a group of disparate, local, and relatively
unkowledgeable entities interact in such a way as to produce emergent
semantic results that exhibit intelligent behavior?  What syntactic
structures, architectures, or networks, will produce desired patterns of
behavior beyond mere compromise?  How interesting it would be if the
study of artificial intelligence arbitrarily succeeded in yielding a
better understanding of human interaction.  For example, in the
development of neural networks, "we do not assume that the goal of
learning is the formulation of explicit rules.  Rather, we assume it is
the acquisition of connection strengths which allow a network of simple
units to act as though it knew the rules" (McClelland, Rumelhart,
Hinton).  In other words, it may be possible to produce reasonable
outcomes without truth.  Isn't this the whole point?  Could this vein of
knowledge contribute to our undersanding of dialogue between people,
cultures, and institutions in a practical way?     

        I am new to this discussion.  If anyone would like to recommend
books or authors to me,  please e-mail abennion@bowdoin.edu.




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