Hi John, Gary, Ravi; comments interspersed below,

-Rich

 

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper

EnglishLogicKernel.com

Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

John F. Sowa wrote:

Rich, Gary, and Ravi,

<snip/>

That is *not* cracking the code.  They discovered evidence that

the associations in the brain link the same kinds of things that

AI programs have been linking for the past half century. 

<snipplet/>

The new guys on the block have

much more precise instruments, and the fMRI scans let them look

at how Broca's area and Wernicke's area light up when people

are talking or listening.  That's interesting, but it still

doesn't tell us how neurons encode information.  In fact,

the phrase "neural encoding" is no more enlightening than

Aristotle's "affections (pathêmata) in the psyche".

John Sowa

RGC> Knowing that these three concepts, widely understood (manipulation, eating, shelter), are consistently providing an invariant scattering of evoked signal responses to the same local brain area is a building block for further refinement.  

For example, what ontological properties of tools, food, compartments are associated with other scattering axes in fMRI experiments?  What aPartOf, IsA, SameAs, ContainsA, and other common AI concepts can also be found to map onto brain manifolds, perhaps in concert with the above three axes?

Finding other manifold scatterings of conceptual pairs, triples, etc can further inform our collective discovery of how the brain sorts concepts spatially in the various compartments.  

The conceptual invariants we have now are clearly inadequate.  Pop neurologists act like they suffer from rampant anthropopathy when they "explain" how the brain regions work.  Every action seems to them to have a "purpose" or to confirm a suspicion, or reward "good" stuff, but there have been no obvious experimental data re physiological correlates to conceptual information, at least not to my amateur knowledge.  Contraindications requested. 

The structure of the brain into some known compartments, and assignment of emotional meaning to the various compartments, manifolds and linkages is well described in the book "The Emotional Brain", if any reader is interested in pursuing emotional conceptualization.