From: erlebach@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE (Thomas Erlebach)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Brains
Date: 31 Jul 92 12:04:02 GMT
Organization: Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany
Originator: erlebach@hphalle6e.informatik.tu-muenchen.de


First of all the reason why I think this subject is related to 
talk.origins:
In my opinion the brain/computer-question results in fundamentally
different answers from creationists and evolutionists:

Creationists:
The human abilities to think in abstractions, think about the
meaning of life, love eachother (and many more) were given to us by God.
We cannot give these abilities to a computer, because only God can
give them to anybody (or anything).

Evolutionists:
The human brain developped by the process of evolution. Therefor there
is no 'soul' or anything like that residing in our heads, all thinking
that occurs in our minds is done by the neurons (and the other cells
or whatever (I don't have more than a bit of knowledge about the human
brain up till now, I'll definitely have to change that) having functions
in our brain) exclusively. So the human brain is a kind of biological 
machine. Thus it should be possible to design machines that perform
very similar tasks than the human brain. 

(I use the term 'evolutionist' for somebody who believes that evolution
happened; I'm not sure whether this is correct, maybe 'evolutionist'
stands for somebody who has great knowledge about evolution due to
his education, like professors teaching evolution. Any information
on this would be helpful, send e-mail to my address at the bottom,
please.)

BTW, please send all Replies, Follow-Ups etc. to me in e-mail, too,
because I will be on vacation for the next six weeks and would hate
to miss anything written about this subject.

Now to the main subject of this post:

In article <n0632t@ofa123.fidonet.org>, David.Rice@ofa123.fidonet.org writes:
|> The human brain is nothing like a computer. Or better stated,
|> a computer is not like a brain.

Then tell me one significant difference between a brain and a computer.
I don't mean something like "Computers don't write poetry" and all. In
my opinion brains *are* computers. They are not built of silicon and
don't have the structure current computers have (memory, one or more
cpus, i/o-stuff, a bus system linking these together), but brains are
machines developed by evolution.

|> The human brain can concieve abstractly, creating non-existant
|> beings such as Santa Claus, God, Jesus, Tooth Fairy; and the
|> human brain can assign arbitrary value to concepts such as "good"
|> and "evil," etc., but a computer would have to be specifically
|> told every thing it knows. Abstraction is difficult for a computer,
|> though perhaps one day a computer can "imagine" by using
|> randomizing algorhythyms.

So you claim "a computer would have to be specifically told everything
it knows". I definitely do not approve of that. Although of course it
is true for the conventional computer applications like databases or 
knowledge-based systems. A program for helping people repair their
cars will not 'think' about anything but cars.
But when people began to understand a little better how the human brain
works, different experiments were started: neuronal nets (translation
correct ??). Although there has not been too much success on this 
field until now (and I think that we will not be really successful here
before we know much more about the human brain), there are some interesting
points I'd like to mention:
      - stock market-applications using neuronal net-techniques
        have been surprisingly successful. These applications were
        able to predict changes of stock values in the future better
        then conventional algorithms and even better than people.
        The nets were not told specific rules on how to predict such
        changes. Instead they were shown lots of stock market-
        changes that occurred in the past and 'learnt' to recognize
        patterns in them. These patterns are very complicated and 
        there are probably very few people who are able to recognize
        them. 
      - People are very good at recognizing other people, although they
        are having great difficulty in describing how they really do it.
        Using neuronal nets computers are beginning to be able to perform
        such recognition tasks, too. One need not tell the computer 
        specific rules for recognizing a certain person, instead one
        shows some pictures of the person to the computer and he 'learns'
        to recognize that person by his own rules.
      - Last monday I saw a documentary on a neuronal net-experiment
        (done somewhere in the U.S.A.) on Austrian television. I caught
        only the last ten minutes of it, but it seemed to be very 
        interesting. Anyway, they had a big neuronal net in their computer
        and used the days to give it information. In the nights the net
        'thought' about the information and printed out conclusions and
        whether it found contradictions and all. Interesting examples
        shown in the documentary were: The computer found that
           1. most people are prominent (which amused the scientists and
              was due to the fact that they had input information about
              prominent personalities mostly)
           2. countries having the same religion tend to be in the same
              international organizations (which the scientists 
              considered interesting and wanted to check)

I think these are good examples of computers having ideas that nobody 
specifically told them. 
   
|> When the human brain receives input, a billion biases go to
|> work on it: social, educational, delusional, wishful; the data
|> that comes out may contradict reality (such as Ted Holden's many
|> delusions)--- a computer that does this would be considered broken
|> and sent for repair, while a human that does this is called a mystic,
|> philospher, poet, or theist (depending on content and fortitude
|> behind the delusions), and sometimes, worse yet, a genius.

Can't you imagine a computer letting social, educational and wishful
biases work on its input ? (It's still science fiction, but that was
the landing on the moon, too.)
  
|> I do not "see" computers eventually learning to "think," any
|> more than I can see a slide-rule "thinking." The former is just
|> a much faster version of the latter.

I think it is just a question of time until we have compuers being
called mystics, philosophers, poets or theists. (Although the time
might be many decades or even centuries).
 
|> --- Squish v1.01

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I am the one, Orgasmatron, the outstretched grasping hand
     My image is of agony, my servants rape the land
      Obsequious and arrogant, clandestine and vain
   Two thousand years of misery, of torture in my name
       Hypocrisy made paramount, paranoia the law
    My name is called religion, sadistic sacred whore.

                  --- Motorhead (1986)

erlebach@informatik.tu-muenchen.de
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