We're just very good pattern-matching engines!

by AlmostAtheist 18 Replies latest jw friends

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  bebu

  Your daughter is certainly busy making connections thru learning/patterns.

  Crack open a brain and you just get grey goo. There's gotta be something simple happening there.

  Well, it is gooey, and it is grey... But the human brain is truly fascinating to me.

  Here's a list of interesting facts about children's brains (for the new dad):

  http://www.fcs.uga.edu/pubs/current/FACS01-2.html From this page:

  A 3-year-old?s brain is twice as active as an adult?s. Why? The adult brain is more efficient. It has gotten rid of connections that it doesn?t need. By about age 3, the brain?s cells have made most of their connections to other cells. Over the next several years, connections are refined based on experience. The connections that are used most will become stronger. Those that are used least will eventually wither.

  bebu
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  Carmel

  Recognizing patterns is the essence of scientific process. Once a pattern is seen, (it may be a false premis) one can concieve of an hypothesis. This can be tested! Voila! A model is formed and application is theorized and civilization inches forward..

  What macro-patterns can we see in history.. woops,,, slid into somthin else...

  carmel
• 

  seattleniceguy

  Related to pattern-matching is pattern-abstraction. I was talking on the phone to onacruise the other day and realized something that it seems like I knew before but for some reason had forgotten it until just then. All nouns, except proper nouns, are abstract concepts. For example, take the word cup. What is represented by the word? It represents no single specific item, but rather an abstract type into which many instances can fall.

  By observing patterns, a creature can establish an abstract type. The benifit from this comes when the creature finds another instance of the type, since it now has instant knowledge about things this new instance might do or be. Even animals do this. For instance, when I meet my friend's dog for the first time, it recognizes me as a human, even though it has never seen my exact form before. This recognition allows it to act differently with me than with, say, a piece of furniture. So the dog has abstracted the patterns unique to the type "human" into a conceptual class it its head. When it saw me, it recognized that I met those patterns and thus fell into the type. I was likely to exhibit behaviors similar to other members of the type. The dog had instant, though tentative, data on me.

  As simple as it sounds, abstraction of this sort really blows my mind. It makes sense biologically, because it represents a profound survival advantage. But from a technical point of view, I wonder how it is accomplished.

  SNG
• 

  mtbatoon

  Crack open a brain and you just get grey goo. There's gotta be something simple happening there.

  There is. Epilepsy sufferers who had to undergo brain surgery where it was needed for them to stay conscious were asked by the surgeons if they could have a little poke around at the same time. They were shown pictures of items in on a screen and asked to identify them. When the surgeon applied an electric pulse to certain areas of the brain the patient would forget groups of items. Not just a list of items but they would forget them in groups, so they would forget all foods or all clothes or all animals. From this it was concluded that not only do we store information we also give it a directory structure.

  I saw it on the telly and it was also back up by the bloke down the pub. Remember you don't have to look up the information, you have mtbatoon to do it for you.
• 

  AlmostAtheist

  I saw it on the telly and it was also back up by the bloke down the pub.

  Whoa! I thought this was just something you readon the internet. This was on TELEVISION!?

  I should be paying for this kinda research!

  I have heard that 'stored in groups' thing before as well. I can believe it, but I have to believe the "groups" are actually slices through sets. For instance an "apple" is a fruit, a food, a decoration, a snack, and a hundred other things. One category might become in accessible, but I wonder if the item is still accessible from another category?

  Dave
• 

  Satans little helper

  Almost, I did some AI research during my IT degree and there was alot of information about neural networks within AI that attempted to match the way we remember and assimilate information. Aparently we take on new information and place it in context by creating new pathways through the neurons in our brains which link each chunk of information - I guess like greating a stub for the abstract class 'cup' and then creating some linkage to the sub classes 'mug', 'schooner' and 'hiball'. Sort of in the same way as indexing a database and grouping by a foreign key.

  I think of it in the same way as you would code an object oriented program - you recognise the concept of 'cup' and then types of cup inherit the attributes of the parent class.

  The thing with your daughter is interesting, sort of like a Pavlov's dog reaction (was it pavlov?).
• 

  AlmostAtheist

  SNG and SLH:

  The abstraction/class/object thing is another fascinating level. In your dog example, the dog had apparently established a "human" class. It was probably derived from the "living class", which was derived from... all the way down to the lowest levels. It's those lowest levels -- char, int, float -- that I'd really like to find.

  (Cat brains of course have only the "cat" and "not a cat" classes)

  I'll go watch television. Maybe there'll be a Law & Order episode on it...

  Thanks, All!

  Dave
• 

  RunningMan

  Just wait till your baby gets to the "pee" and "poop" stage. Don't know what that is? You will.

  Anyway, back to pattern matching. I have had very similar thoughts regarding the creation/evolution debate. Many people claim that design requires a designer. So, one day, I set out to determine what constitutes "design". Is it complexity? Complexity exists in nature. Is it suitability (match) for its purpose? A puddle of water is perfectly matched to the hole it is in, but there was no designer.

  Well, after much thought, I began to notice that there are many things that seem incredibly complex, but when you break them down, are nothing more than a simple law, repeated many times, and interconnected with other laws. Things like the ecology of a forest, the formation of a complex crystal, or the flight pattern of geese.

  Our minds see the end result of very simple interrelationships, and assume that it was built to a design, when really, it was built blindly from the ground up.

  I think you are on the right track.
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  Carmel

  Dear runningman,, to dogmatically decree that there is no designer is a religious statement as difficult to defend as claiming the opposite. We are both dealing with what we "want" to be true.

  cheers,

  carmel