Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l
Date:         Mon, 14 Dec 1992 21:31:04 CST
From:         John Gabriel <gabriel@EID.ANL.GOV>
Subject: Re: Neurological research

[Gabriel 921214 20:55 CST]
(Powers same date)

>Remember, mainframe software was not
>made to serve people; people were made to serve mainframe
>software.

Agreed. Missing feedback 3 terminal controller some place. Gang of
3 busy in search of same. Finding an awful lot of lesions in
corporate consciousness. Seriously Bill, you and I agree too often for
it to be possible for us to disagree on fundamentals. Small
unweighted Hamming Distance. But weights are perhaps large for
Aristotelian attributes where we disagree. Seems to me this should
be called strong but isolated disagreement. Delta functions at
a few isolated bits integrate up to significant heat at times,
but not large distance all the same.

>Your point about using information about the brain is a good one.
>I did a good deal of that in writing BCP. In fact when I went to
>work at the VA Research Hospital in Chicago, I was full of
>ambitions, with the Northwestern University Medical School (and
>library) right across the street. I thought good, I can just go
>through all the neurological literature and look up what the
>various parts of the brain do, and build the model around that. I
>was soon disillusioned.

Perhaps it really is true that the real world is just very complicated
and the great simplifying principles only go so far in the face of
a channel where we still have less than perhaps 1 millionth or one
billionth of the complete system specification. But that in no way
diminishes the significance of the simplifying principles. Without
them, we would even more badly drowned in data we don't understand.

>As you say, brain researchers have found a good deal of
>interesting material without using PCT, more in recent years with
>improvements of technology. The problem is not with the
>technology, however. It's with the concepts of behavior against
>which neurological findings are compared.

Fundamental truth. Without a good abstraction, you just have a
pile of unorganised data. Without a taxonomy you can't even
begin to communicate about the attempt to abstract. Linnaeus
done good!! Hugh Dingle, who taught my wife her courses in
ecology and animal behaviour used to talk about the field
naturalist phase of scientific theories.

>When you stop to think about it, neurological findings are ALWAYS
>based on SOME theory of behavior. Without any theory of behavior,
>all you have is a record of lesions in various parts of the brain
>and some recordings of spikes and potentials from electrodes in
>anatomically, but not functionally, known areas. You see the
>theory of behavior not in the findings about the brain, but in
>the descriptions of external correlates of brain activity.

This is what I might call the "Symmetry Theory" that we don't
have yet. The meta-Gestalt of neuroanatomy.

>  "Naturally, the lesion method can only be as good as the finest
>level of cognitive characterization and anatomical resolution it
>uses. In other words, the method's yield is limited by:
>   1. The sophistication of the neurophysiological testing or
>experimentation with which anatomical lesions are correlated.
>   2. The sophistication of the theoretical constructs and
>hypotheses being tested by the lesion probes.
>   3. The degree of sophistication with which the nervous tissue
>is conceptualized ...   4. The anatomical resolution of the methods used." (p.
> 9)

At risk of igniting burned out flames, some place in the first few
pages of one or another of H. Weyl's books on Group Theory he says
"All the real work is down in the mud and the blood."

>From a modeler's point of view, the sophistication of
>neurophysiological testing and experimentation is not very high.
>In fact, evaluations of what is wrong with the behavior of a
>person with a brain lesion tends to rely on subjective and rather
>crude classification of symptoms rather than models of brain
>function.

A rather good description of the work of a field natural historian.
The fact that clinical medicine a) can sometimes fix what hurts,
and b) probably has the world's biggest collection of incompletely
correlated facts within its' collective perspective, does not
make it a mature science. I suppose I'm both fortunate and unfortunate
in being inclined towards mathematics and physics. The physics at
least is perhaps closer to being a worked out vein of gold. The
mathematicians can take comfort however in being always incomplete.
>

................................
>And so on and so on. What's going on is nothing more than an
>informal assessment of superficial aspects of behavior to see if
>the patient can do all the things that normal people do, and in
>the familiar way. An atmosphere of formality is generated by
>using Latin terms -- alexia for inability to read, prosopagnosia
>say that the person "has" alexia, "has" prosopagnosia, etc.
>..........................

But professional jargon has a useful place besides telling those
who don't have union cards to stay out of the discussion - an
instruction eliciting hostility from all of us factual omnivores.
It conjures up to those "in the know" a very large card index of
shared experience. And when a really neat theory like PCT
satisfactorily abstracts part, but not all of that card index,
the owners of the card index find their livelihoods threatened.
If you can abstract all of the index then you win the pot, and
the previous owners of the intellectual territory are eventually
unemployed. But, as the historians of science point out, only
after the generation holding both the card index and the levers
of power have all died or retired. The ecological purpose of
intellectual warfare. Some time appropriate around April 1st,
I'll publish on the net a taxonomy of academia invented by an old
friend whom I have not seen for almost 40 years - Margaret di Menna,
who originated the classification the day after the party to celebrate
her Ph. D. If there are any readers out there in Kiwiland who know
her, please say the taxonomy is still in use.

>..........................
>Such reports of what's wrong are analogous to the report a
>technologically naive person makes to an auto mechanic: "it makes
>a funny noise sometimes; it pulls to the left; the acceleration
>is sluggish above 30 miles per hour; the steering wheel shakes."
>When the mechanic sets out to fix the problem, he doesn't look
>for a funny noise or a pull to the left or a center of
>sluggishness or a steering-wheel shake.  Those are just the
>symptoms, outcomes, consequences. The mechanic understands how
>the car works, so he looks for a hole in the exhaust pipe, a
>tight wheel bearing, a malfunctioning carburetor, or anunbalanced tire. He
> doesn't say, "Oh, you car has odd-noisia, or
>dextromobilia, or accelerotardia, or manipulo-oscillia" and go
>look up the recommended treatment in a big thick book. He reasons
>out what might underlie the symptoms on the basis of the theory
>of operation of an automobile, and that theory tells him what is
>REALLY wrong with the car. That's what a good theory of behavior
>does for you, when it's tied to the actual functions of the
>device. It lets you reason your way to the layers of organization
>that underly superficial symptoms.

Bill, I think it's sometimes hard to distinguish between a malfunctioning
carburettor, and accelerotardia if you don't know what a carburettor
is. And the problem is very difficult when the mechanic is still
trying to articulate what a carburettor is, but in trade school jargon,
not neurophysiological jargon.

Your previous paragraph is going to come back to haunt you the next time
you complain about triangulation in Kanerva spaces.

Bill, I think I've pulled your leg hard enough so I should stop before
exceeding the elastic limit so far that a perceptual feedback circuit
causes you to seize a 2x4 and beat me around the head.

But all in fun, and I hope in a good cause. Perhaps I should publish
the taxonomy on Jan 1st. CSGNET is the most wonderful colony of
boffins I've ever had the privelege of associating with, and between
us perhaps one day we'll predate on the buzzards who review papers
submitted to the trade union journals.

Tom Baines has an interesting theory of the origins of revolutions
- like the 1917 Soviet one, rather than the scientific variety. But I
am inclined to think it holds for the scientific ones too. I don't
remember whether my comment about the bloodless wars in academia was
made on-line or off-line. But just like the chicken run, it's hell
being at the bottom of the pecking order. Scientific territory is just
as subject to ambition and militarism as any other kind.  Only the
dictators have no guns and no police force, just the threat of no
tenure.

        Sincerely, and with affection for all my fellow boffins.
        Sic Itur ad Astra, and nil Bastardio Carborundum.

                John Gabriel
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