RUBIN@COLUMBIA-20.ARPA (12/23/83)
From: Michael Rubin <RUBIN@COLUMBIA-20.ARPA>
I wonder if we've been incorrectly thinking of the brain's loop detection
mechanism as a sort of monitor process sitting above a train of thought,
and deciding when the latter is stuck in a loop and how to get out of it.
This approach leads to the problem of who monitors the monitor, ad
infinitum. Perhaps the brain detects loops in *hardware*, by classical
habituation. If each neuron is responsible for one production (more or
less), then a neuron involved in a loop will receive the same inputs so
often that it will get tired of seeing those inputs and fire less
frequently (return a lower certainty value), breaking the loop. The
detection of higher level loops such as "Why am I trying to get this PhD?"
implies that there is a hierarchy of little production systems (or
whatever), one for each chunk of knowledge. [Next question - how are
chunks formed? Maybe there's a low-level explanation for that too, having
to do with classical conditioning....]
BTW, I thought of this when I read some word or other so often that it
started looking funny; that phenomenon has gotta be a misfeature of loop
detection. Some neuron in the dictionary decides it's been seeing that damn
word too often, so it makes its usual definition less certain; the parse
routine that called it gets an uncertain definition back and calls for
help.
--Mike Rubin <Rubin@Columbia-20>rh@mit-eddie.UUCP (Randy Haskins) (01/04/84)
One of the truly amazing things about the human brain is that its pattern recognition capabilities seem limitless (in extreme cases). We don't even have a satisfactory way to describe pattern recognition as it occurs in our brains. (Well, maybe we have something acceptable at a minimum level. I'm always impressed by how well dollar-bill changers seem to work.) As a friend of mine put it, "the brain immediately rejects an infinite number of wrong answers," when working on a problem. -- Randwulf (Randy Haskins); Path= genrad!mit-eddie!rh