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Originally Posted by Melchior  Well, I'm thinking that because a lot of what is taken in through the senses is essentially disregarded in the process, not really making it to what is generally considered 'conscious thought', or did you mean that the disregarded data is something like white noise, aware of it, but just not important enough to the overall 'melody'? |
Well, keep in mind (not that I remembered to tell you) that Hawkins' work is focused on the neocortex and has less to say about the rest of the brain.
But really. If we're discarding so much as a part of our daily lives, think of how much more interesting the world would be if we could stop doing that. Or, considering the advent of the information age with new ills like information overload and attention fragmentation, maybe that's a bad thing.
I do know that a lot of the issue is that we simply aren't sensitive enough. We don't taste the air the way snakes do; we can't smell anything on the order of magnitude that dogs handle the world.
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Originally Posted by Melchior I remember some of my friends talking about how some of their AI programs work better with some constants than others, even if the overall algorithm is the same. |
Yup. If you start up the
Game of Life program with everything dead, nothing grows. AI is written in order to solve problems, and those problems are generally not "how do I model a human mind?", but instead more like "what is the optimal solution to this multivariate problem?"
This does not lend itself to developing self-awareness; we would develop self-aware AI mostly out of laziness: so that the program could maintain itself for us. And despite the stereotypes, most geeks and hackers aren't interested in that. I mean, if I know enough of the principles to start thinking about how I'd program a self-aware program capable of modifying itself, I have no doubt someone smarter and better than I has figured out details.
I've read two useful books on the subject so far:
AI Application Programming, and
Swarm Intelligence, both textbooks.
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Originally Posted by Melchior But yeah, there's most probably research being done somewhere, I should really browse more journals, in everything, sigh.  |
I feel like that all the time. My trick at learning about lots of different fields at once is to (1) be reading all the time and (2) make a lot of friends and contacts who are deeply interested in other fields, and then let them know I find X, Y, and Z to be really cool subjects. As a result, I've got lots of research minions telling me about interesting things.
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Originally Posted by Melchior That's good, I don't necessarily enjoy reading math all that much, even though I seem to have been doing a lot more of that recently, luckily it's just calculus... >.< lol, we're all zombies.  |
My math professor apparently used to work in neuroscience.
I didn't know it at the time; I just knew he was interested in questions of infinity and consciousness. I was kinda shell-shocked by his disappointment.
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Originally Posted by Melchior  that is quite saddening, old threads getting lost and neglected because they're more worthwhile. As one of my friends commented when he visited these forums, a lot of the stuff he saw was rather mindless, granted, a bit less mindless than other forums, but mindless nonetheless. Ah well, let's hope I don't get too caught up in the Christianity-bashing to lose focus of what I feel is more important. |
I suspect myself of golden age syndrome, but it was better in the old days. Proportions of signal to noise are less meaningful when the actual quantity is low. Eh. At least you can do searches and resurrect very old threads. Which people do regularly.