Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 12:07:07 -0400
From: Bill Benzon <bbenzon@mindspring.com>
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Inernal meme?
"Mark M. Mills" wrote:
> Are you convinced we know all the details of neural processing?
By no means.
> That
> these experiments tell us nothing new about perception?
This is a very interesting experiment. But I don't see that it tells us much
about how objects are recognized, if only because recognition happens
upstream from the thalamus.
> Where does such confidence come from?
>
> At a minimum, we are getting a better picture of pre-processing details.
We had to have that knowledge in order to do this work. The fact that this
experiment worked could be considered weak validation for some account of
pre-processing.
>
> And, what about the program used to interprete the bit-stream, isn't it's
> design/parameter set telling us something about what the brain must be
> doing to make sense of the bit-stream?
I'd assume that the program was designed with some such theory in mind. But
what's going on in this experiment is a long way from a mechanism that maps
input patterns onto perceptual categories. It may tell us something about
input to such processing, but it doesn't tell us what that's processing is
doing.
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit