<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Re: John's Brain</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF"> Hello everyone, A little bio graphical information.  I am now working a production job counting money.  For instance nineteen million dollars passed through my section room the other day.  I put amounts of money into plastic bags, for instance mutilated twenties, which I then seal.   $240,000 of twenties weighs I think more than twenty pounds, but I can't tell how much, anyway I lug this stuff around with video cameras watching, locked doors triple doors, guards, and rules, oh my rules.     For 9 and 10 hours at a stretch, with the supervisors screaming you are going too slow.  I'm forty nine years old in another entry level job for a high school drop out.     This leaves me irritable when I get home.  It fine tunes my incipient depression.  And most of all slows down my word making abilities to LBO.     SnitgrrRl  About logic, there is a great history book describing the rise of computers after WWII, called "Closed World".  It really covers the issues that I think are important.  It gets away from the hairy assed philosophical issues that get me into trouble.  It describes why computers became so important in the U.S.  And what they displaced.  What they displaced is ...     In the positivists and reductionist circles mainly at MIT and other research technical schools, they absorbed this "Closed World" thinking after WWII, and have tried mightily to make the progress toward understanding the brain by using mathematical logic their model.  A culmination of this was a book by a young thinker, David Marr, called "Vision".  Subsequently Marr died young of some kind of cancer.  Marr tried to describe vision using algorithmic logic.  He went a long ways into the various sorts of vision modules, like 3d, and color, and focus, and so forth.  Afterwards, they realized vision wasn't logical.  And that was the historical moment of transition.  David Marr died in 1980.  In 1976, I first understood the modular description of the brain.  Funny co-incidence that a contemporary of mine was doing these things.  Then died without seeing so much happen since. SnitgirrRl to Charles Brown Wednesday Nov 25,98 <TT>But anyway, I read marxist social science and I realized a couple of years ago that much of it lacked an adequate theory of social change because it inadequately conceives of the relationship between the individual and society. On a vulgar social constructionist view, this relation is conceived of as merely dialectical:  society creates people who in turn create society.  And so on. Society, social sturcture, social institutions (like property, rights) aren't seen as capable of standing on their own apart from the human actions and beliefs that create them.  What would happen, say, if we all started running about taking people's property any ole time we felt like it, ey?  Well it wouldn't happen quite so easily now would it. Doyle I agree with this.  That is why I think understanding consciousness is important now.  And we are starting to get the tools to investigate consciousness through neuro-networks that gives us the means to stop using abstract concepts like a "worker", because we can know in a materialist sense what is what.  Well said from my point of view SnitgrrRl. SnitgrrRl Doyle needs to address this issue though, how can conversation and argument take place w/o logic.  And, similarly, I have asked him this before though in a different way. I asked him to speculate how things might be different if we were to better understand how the brain works. Doyle Language is an "exchange" of "conversation", and it is the properties of the conversation which are important.  The grammatical structure of language, the noun phrases, and verb phrases aren't necessarily composed of properties of writing systems, and words, but could be thought of as sense like.  So we might exchange a sense-like system of language.  Please see your reprint of the essay on John's Brain.  The essay is ho-hum as far as I'm concerned.  It is a bit skeptical sounding, but not really focused upon what neural networks mean.  So there is not flavor in the essay of the struggle between the Chomskyan focus upon logical systems being what the brain is and neural networks.  That logic based viewpoint is an all pervasive social idea that generally shapes everyone's thoughts in the U.S. and perhaps everywhere science has sway.  Perhaps there is good reason for Frances to react with so much vehemence to Doyle rooting around in the dustbin of scientific thinking I can find in some bookstore.  I picture myself a Marxist, Frances, not a Popperian Positivist, but then I don't even know what Popper wrote.  Hell I don't know philosophy, I learned my way up from studying art, then vision, and because I was a worker, socialist thought.  I don't know so much, and most of my life, I have to work like a fiend, while thinking at the same time what will I say to SnitgrrRl, or to my brother, or Jan, my wife.  Then at the end of the day, SnitgrrRl has written ten essays to my one, and I can't even properly put together one foggy reply to last weeks important questions. Doyle The Popperian positivists poops at places like Microsoft have a battle plan.  They will start making computers that talk to us we carry around with us all the time, and are wireless.  Who needs to learn to write anymore when we can talk back and forth to our computer.  In fact why can't we exchange pictures back and forth with a recording of the sounds?  I would guess that the Positivist Popperian poops at Intel will have to come up against the mere fact that logically made computer chips don't work like those nasty old blood filled wet brains we use. Doyle To Carrol, you're right I was feeling depressed when I said ashes the other day, and I was feeling irritable with SnitgrrRl just when she was admitting she liked me.  Ain't it something when we strive to connect, and then foolishly throw away something.  I think my relationship with SnitgrrRl is going to be like Rick's with the Gendarme, at the end of Casablanca, an interesting collaboration indeed. Doyle Anyhow, Carrol your beautifully worded short summaries of things like logic, and idiots are wonders for me, when I have to write ten pages of turgid prose to say the same thing.   Doyle SnitgrrRl a neural network can perceive logic in something, the challenge is not that logic ought to be banished from human existence, but to find the interconnectedness that a neural network tells us is there and make that the foundation for human society.  What if we dropped the idea of a two line struggle.  Look at ShenFan.  Look at the cultural Revolution.  Those people were twisted by the "logic" of revolutionary reason. Doyle I tried an experiment awhile back that Frances thought was odd.  I said to a group of friends, why not get rid of the rules of a political organization.  Just come and tolk your ideas, say anything.  So we got started and it was working fine as a place to just go and bring up what caught someone's interest (not unlike LBO) until I suggested we do something for real together, and then intense feelings rose up like a hydra headed monster, and people left furious, and scared like a devil gripped them.  The lack of rules, or logically constructed common program didn't stop them from doing the experiment, but their strong feelings about what did this stuff mean once it might lead to something suddenly exploded the group.  We have so much to learn about how people really connect to one another.  So much crap to push aside and see underneath what we could really do if ... Doyle Today is Thanksgiving.  I will see friends.  Hope All on LBO fares well.  And to SnitgrrRl especially, I do appreciate you finally.  Have a nice day with your family. regards, Doyle</TT> </BODY> </HTML>