Brain, AI in blogosphere…

I. Introduction. Strong AI, Weak AI and Cognitivism.
There are different ways to present a Presidential Address to the APA; the one I have chosen is simply to report on work that I am doing right now, on work in progress. I am going to present some of my further explorations into the computational model of the mind.\**
The basic idea of the computer model of the mind is that the mind is the program and the brain the hardware of a computational system. A slogan one often sees is: “the mind is to the brain as the program is to the hardware.” \**

Let us begin our investigation of this claim by distinquishing three questions:

Is the brain a digital computer?

Is the mind a computer program?

Can the operations of the brain be simulated on a digital computer?
I will be addressing 1 and not 2 or 3. I think 2 can be decisively answered in the negative. Since programs are defined purely formally or syntactically and since minds have an intrinsic mental content, it follows immediately that the program by itself cannot constitute the mind. The formal syntax of the program does not by itself guarantee the presence of mental contents. I showed this a decade ago in the Chinese Room Argument (Searle,1980). A computer, me for example, could run the steps in the program for some mental capacity, such as understanding Chinese, without understanding a word of Chinese. The argument rests on the simple logical truth that syntax is not the same as, nor is it by itself sufficient for, semantics. So the answer to the second question is obviously “No”.
The answer to 3. seems to me equally obviously “Yes”, at least on a natural interpretation. That is, naturally interpreted, the question means: Is there some description of the brain such that under that description you could do a computational simulation of the operations of the brain. But since according to Church’s thesis, anything that can be given a precise enough characterization as a set of steps can be simulated on a digital computer, it follows trivially that the question has an affirmative answer. The operations of the brain can be simulated on a digital computer in the same sense in which weather systems, the behavior of the New York stock market or the pattern of airline flights over Latin America can. So our question is not, “Is the mind a program?” The answer to that is, “No”. Nor is it, “Can the brain be simulated?” The answer to that is, “Yes”. The question is, “Is the brain a digital computer?” And for purposes of this discussion I am taking that question as equivalent to: “Are brain processes computational?”

One might think that this question would lose much of its interest if question 2 receives a negative answer. That is, one might suppose that unless the mind is a program, there is no interest to the question whether the brain is a computer. But that is not really the case. Even for those who agree that programs by themselves are not constitutive of mental phenomena, there is still an important question: Granted that there is more to the mind than the syntactical operations of the digital computer; nonetheless, it might be the case that mental states are at least computational states and mental processes are computational processes operating over the formal structure of these mental states. This, in fact, seems to me the position taken by a fairly large number of people.

I am not saying that the view is fully clear, but the idea is something like this: At some level of description brain processes are syntactical; there are so to speak, “sentences in the head”. These need not be sentences in English or Chinese, but perhaps in the “Language of Thought” (Fodor, 1975). Now, like any sentences, they have a syntactical structure and a semantics or meaning, and the problem of syntax can be separated from the problem of semantics. The problem of semantics is: How do these sentences in the head get their meanings? But that question can be discussed independently of the question: How does the brain work in processing these sentences? A typical answer to that latter question is: The brain works as a digital computer performing computational operations over the syntactical structure of sentences in the head.

Just to keep the terminology straight, I call the view that all there is to having a mind is having a program, Strong AI, the view that brain processes (and mental processes) can be simulated computationally , Weak AI. and the view that the brain is a digital computer, Cognitivism.

This paper is about Cognitivism, and I had better say at the beginning what motivates it. If you read books about the brain (say Shepherd (1983) or Kuffler and Nicholls (1976)) you get a certain picture of what is going on in the brain. If you then turn to books about computation (say Boolos and Jeffrey, 1989) you get a picture of the logical structure of the theory of computation. If you then turn to books about cognitive science, (say Pylyshyn, 1985) they tell you that what the brain books describe is really the same as what the computability books were describing. Philosophically speaking, this does not smell right to me and I have learned, at least at the beginning of an investigation, to follow my sense of smell.

Daniel Brainin

testing blog entries, profiles

testing out various blogs and information pages:

brainin wordpress

brainin – thoughts

brainin – opera tag

dsaniel opera blog

brainin linked in

daniel spaces.live

daniel blog.ca

brainin blogger

brainin tvb

daniel geocities

brainin opera steaks

Eat your Steak..

Europe’s Best is a company that makes and distributes frozen fruit and vegetables. I won their business with a series of ads, the most successful of which was voted TVB’s Best in Category Award for Branded Products A family has dinner in a kitchen. We see the ease with which the frozen vegetables are made before Mom, Dad and Son sit down to eat. Mom and Son watch with some alarm as Dad hoovers his vegetables like a hungry child, after which he pushes his steak around his plate like a petulant child, until Mom says sharply, “Jack. Eat your steak.” The spot ran on CTV

Man in the Chair

I developed a promotion for Maxell Canada that extended Maxell’s iconic ‘Man in the Chair’ branding in a slightly surreal way: a man sitting on a chair on the roof of an urban building throws a CD like a frisbee, which hurtles through the sky to be caught by a woman on a beach – only now it’s a DVD, representing the two products that Maxell wanted to highlight.

Based on this taste of television, Maxell Canada decided to create their own brand sell, and invited agencies to pitch. They chose my spot, which starts off with the ‘Man in the Chair’ getting windblown in a laboratory test of their cassette tapes in the 80’s, followed by a more current ‘Man in the Chair’ getting literally blown off the screen in a laboratory test of their DVD’s. Both spots ran on MuchMusic.

Tuna and T.V.

Television shows and tuna may seem a strange pairing, but that idea won Clover Leaf Tuna’s business. I wrote two 30 second television spots that ran back to back; the first features Clover Leaf’s Flavored Tuna line, the second their staple, plain tuna. The 60 second spot starts off with a parody of America’s Top Model; beautiful girls dressed as different flavors of tuna wait breathlessly to see who will be a member of Clover Leaf’s Flavored Tuna Family, Canada’s Top Tuna. This is followed by the winners joining a Marilyn Monroe-like lady on a talk show, as she is introduced by the jovial host as The Mother of All Tuna’s. Clover Leaf extended the campaign beyond television, and used the tag line ‘There’s tuna, and then there’s Clover Leaf ’ across various media.