[Bmi] BMI debate: Can we start to look at the brain-mind from the entire system point of view?

Tue Oct 25 17:41:44 EDT 2011

Ali and John,

I agree with Ali that we ignore evolution at our peril. It is critically important that we come to understand how evolution shapes the adaptability of organisms and how it interacts with learning and development. All three of these processes concern problems of adaptation, and they share interesting algorithmic ideas and can even compensate for each other. They are not in natural opposition as so many psychologists assume.

I also agree with John, and much of biology, that development serves as a bridge between genotype and phenotype.

Even if one's primary interest is in building human-inspired robots, one should figure out what to build in, what to give over to development, and what to leave to learning. Learning methods themselves are products of evolution. We need to understand all three adaptive processes, which occur on different and nested time scales, and how they interact.

Natural evolution can indeed take a long time, but we can also study its principles in computational models, much like we do with cognition, development, and learning.

Cheers,
Tom

From: bmi-bounces at lists.cse.msu.edu [mailto:bmi-bounces at lists.cse.msu.edu] On Behalf Of Juyang Weng
Sent: Sunday, October 23, 2011 8:14 PM
To: bmi at lists.cse.msu.edu
Subject: Re: [Bmi] BMI debate: Can we start to look at the brain-mind from the entire system point of view?

Ali,

Yes, from a scientific point of view, both development and evolution are important to study.   From an engineering point of view, however, the cost of evolution to reach a human-level performance is extremely high.  Primates have a history of at least 65 millions of years.

This perspective does not rule out any possible benefits of evolution in engineering studies.  Partial evolution based on development is still worth studying.

The major problem in many evolutionary models is the absence of development --- genome is mistakenly taken to be task specific, corresponding to intelligence directly.   As I understand, the main purpose of the genome is to regulate development, not
to directly generate behaviors or intelligence.

-John

On 10/20/11 3:02 PM, Ali Minai wrote:
John

I think that a developmental perspective is crucial if we're ever going to understand how the mind emerges from the brain, or how the brain-body system works. In fact, I would say that we have to include not only development but also evolution - not only how the zygote develops into a functional animal, but also how simple animals evolve into animals with more complex functionality by using the same modules in myriad ways. I have argued (and am writing a book chapter on this) that the "evo-devo" approach needs to be extended into the third dimension of mental function - asking "what systematic evolutionary and developmental processes allow the emergence of a system capable of mental function. Just as we have the idea of "evolvability", so there must be an equivalent idea of "mentability" (or some such word) that distinguishes systems capable of mental function from those incapable of this. This should then be connected to development and evolution.

All this said, I think that these types of global theoretical approaches complement rather than replace the focused study of specific subsystems like the hippocampus. Of course, I say this as someone who has worked on such systems (including the hippocampus, where Dave's work has been a major influence for me). Both global and parcellated investigations contribute to our understanding. To insist on one or the other would just be an ideological choice.

Best

Ali

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 2:07 PM, Juyang Weng <weng at cse.msu.edu<mailto:weng at cse.msu.edu>> wrote:
Dear all:

After talking to some of my colleagues, we here kick of a BMI debate via this email on bmi at lists.cse.msu.edu<mailto:bmi at lists.cse.msu.edu>.
Many of you on this anonymous list told me that they are interested and want to be posted.  However, we will use this
anonymous list sparely.   If you want to keep posted about this debate and other BMI activities, sign on bmi mailing list
at http://lists.cse.msu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/bmi or simply Google it with key words like "BMI mailing list MSU".
Once you receive email from the mailing list, you can post simply via reply.   BMI mailing list is a moderated list to avoid
unrelated emails.  If there are sufficient interest, BMI might host a live web debate in a few weeks.  Post your views!

The following email I sent to Dave Touretzky is the kick-off for the BMI debates.  I will provide some interesting examples soon.

On 10/20/11 12:59 PM, Juyang Weng wrote:
Hi Dave,

I read some of your papers about hippocampus, which are very interesting.  Let me inject some basic but probably very controversial ideas you probably will reject.  If you do not mind, I will post this discussion to the BMI mailing list.   The main purpose is to attract more talented researchers to this important brain-mind subject.

How about looking at the brain from a top system point of view?  I believe that top (but detailed) theory is powerful, since the brain basically does signal processing (not in the traditional sense).   Maybe with this view, our future design of experiments could be  more productive?  Let me start from one example:

One of your papers is "Synaptic Learning Models of Map Separation in the Hippocampus", Neurocomputing, 32:379-384, 2000.   The co-authors wrote: "If the perforant path projection to CA3 functions as a pattern completion mechanism, and the DG projection via the mossy fibers performs pattern separation (O'Reilly and McClelland, 1994), then ..."

My new perspectives about the brain benefited from such local views, but I think that such local views can also benefit from the entire brain-mind point of view, in the sense of a giant Finite Automaton (FA).   This brain FA is not handcrafted, but rather developed, since all phenotypes emerge from a single cell (zygote).   So, I model such a developmental FA as the Developmental Network (DN).  Then, the Hippocampus is simply a very small part of a giant DN.  According to how the DN works, I predict the following:  If we focus on a small part (e.g., Hippocampus) of this DN, we definitely will get hopelessly lost, like a hiker in a forest without a global map.   He can see some local phenomena from where he stands, but he did not see the entire forest.

Focused, per-phenomenon discoveries have been prevailing in the brain science literature in the modern science, with few exceptions (Charles Darwin is one).  This is probably because only such papers can be accepted and funded in the modern time.  Although those phenomena are useful, they are piece meals.  Now, there seem to have enough pieces to put the grand puzzle together.  I have established what a DN can do in real time, by modeling the brain-mind from the entire FA (DN) point of view.  Since all pieces of DN seem to fit what we know about the brain science, the brain should not be less efficient than a DN.

You can say that this is just fantasy, but I have a series of rigorous proofs.

Daniel M. Wolpert said at SfN 2009 that the over 1400-page long volume of "Principles of Neural Science" by Kandel et al. could be much condensed if we could model the entire brain in computational theory.   I hope that the DN theory can help that condensing process.

A major infrastructure problem is that what I talked about above spans at least 6 disciplines.   Meaningful conversations are extremely difficult.  If you feel angry or insulted by my above text, I feel that it is partially because of this huge divide.

I am giving a CC to Jay, as his work was cited.

Best regards,

-John

-John

--

--

Juyang (John) Weng, Professor

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

MSU Cognitive Science Program and MSU Neuroscience Program

3115 Engineering Building

Michigan State University

East Lansing, MI 48824 USA

Tel: 517-353-4388<tel:517-353-4388>

Fax: 517-432-1061<tel:517-432-1061>

Email: weng at cse.msu.edu<mailto:weng at cse.msu.edu>

URL: http://www.cse.msu.edu/~weng/<http://www.cse.msu.edu/%7Eweng/>

----------------------------------------------

--
Ali A. Minai, Ph.D.
Professor
Complex Adaptive Systems Lab
School of Electronic & Computing Systems
University of Cincinnati
Cincinnati, OH 45221-0030

Phone: (513) 556-4783
Fax: (513) 556-7326
Email: Ali.Minai at uc.edu<mailto:Ali.Minai at uc.edu>
          minaiaa at gmail.com<mailto:minaiaa at gmail.com>

WWW: http://www.ece.uc.edu/~aminai/<http://www.ece.uc.edu/%7Eaminai/>

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--

--

Juyang (John) Weng, Professor

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

MSU Cognitive Science Program and MSU Neuroscience Program

3115 Engineering Building

Michigan State University

East Lansing, MI 48824 USA

Tel: 517-353-4388

Fax: 517-432-1061

Email: weng at cse.msu.edu<mailto:weng at cse.msu.edu>

URL: http://www.cse.msu.edu/~weng/

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