Tmosley,

I challenge you to name one thing a computer has learned. Computers can store information, and they can process it using weighted decision-making. But they have never, ever "learned" anything. Researchers are anthropomorphizing when they say a program "learns". Computers never learned to play chess; they were programmed to do that. Programming is not teaching, and a computer running a program has not been "taught". Some programs can alter themselves in specific, pre-programmed ways, but that is not learning.

Google acquired DeepMind Technologies last year and announced that they have devised a "Neural Turing Machine" that learns. But the NTM contains no neurons, so the name is highly misleading. According to Google, they chose this name because they were "inspired" by neurons. Not surprisingly, Google had to admit that they took similar license with the use of the verb "learn." What they really meant is that the NTM's programming mimicked the results of prior neural network simulations (which also do not learn), only faster.

If this level of misdirection were used in any other branch of science, it would be called academic fraud.

Youngatheart, You just said "...and understands us..." That is the crux of the matter. We don't even know how _we_ accomplish understanding, let alone how to create software that does.

Gweihir,

Well said. Your description of yourself as a dualist, with regard to intelligence, is congruent with Maxwell's theory of the dual forces of electro-magnetism. Maxwell predicted radio waves, but it wasn't until Marconi created a new apparatus that detected them that science accepted the theory as proven. In just this way a modern cognitive researcher could predict an external source of order and information essential to intelligence but not detectable with today's technology. Some future scientist might well invent the apparatus to detect this information source. That it has many of the same properties philosophers attribute to the soul would not be surprising. Nor would it be unscientific.

It might even turn out that this suspected source for intelligence is the same information source for biological morphology. That would be in keeping with the essential attribute of science to seek the minimum set of processes to explain observed phenomenon. A Unified Life Theory, as it were.

A true scientist would not rule out an external force that could be termed a soul if it could be tested and measured. It would not be supernatural in that case, but part of nature. The term supernatural is a man-made descriptor for any phenomenon outside our current knowledge. Until Marconi discovered radio waves, the idea of transmitting information at a distance was considered supernatural. In reality, that misconception was just ignorance.

Genomics, like cognition, is another discipline that may have to admit to an information repository other than the one we found in DNA. Because the encoding for a vast amount of biological information -- such as the structure of organs, systems, and process sequences -- does not appear to exist in the genome. Call it epigenetics. Call it a bio field. It's still the antithesis of the self-contained genome. Neurophysiology should at least be as open to external information sources as genomics is.

Anonycow,

On the contrary, cargo cults are a well documented phenomenon, in particular the cargo cults of World War II:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

Fyngyrz,

You're taking the expression "no idea" too literally, and that's not really an argument. If I say "I have no idea how to drive a car," I obviously don't mean that I literally don't have a single idea, it means that I cannot functionally perform that task.

Regarding your other point, in this discussion, human brains are exactly what is at issue. The WSJ said the paper they cited illustrates how Google scientists are "teaching computers to mimic some of the ways a human brain works."

Similar outcomes prove nothing. Neural nets do not "learn" a maze the way a rat does, and in fact there is no evidence that learning, in the sense of brain cognition, occurs in neural nets at all. What they do is record a maze using a matrix of differential equations modeling how we think neurons work. Science has not demonstrated that those models are correct, and getting the same results as rats doesn't prove they are correct. We can also record a maze with a digital shift register and some input gates, but that doesn't mean that's how rats learn a maze. Moreover, if you put a cat in the maze, rats can adapt. Neural nets do not, because the goal for a neural net be must be encoded in advance.

With our understanding of even these simple cognitive tasks essentially at ground zero, we have no right to claim AI has made any progress at all toward true cognition. Everything done to date could be a dead end.

Improv, You are the one asserting that we know how the brain works. Knowing "what some parts do" is not the same as knowing how the brain works, i.e. how it performs cognitive tasks.

As the asserter, you need to provide the proof, not I. Name calling is the refuge of the debater who has no actual argument. I'm still open to an example of one cognitive function science can explain. Absent that, at a minimum we have no idea at all how far along we are toward AI. Without describing how cognition is done, we can't program an AI to do it.

Alas, no. See what you did there? The same thing the WSJ did. You inflated a tiny bit of research about a portion of the locust's visual system into "reverse engineered". In a nutshell, the paper you cite only posited a theory, based on some observations, for a possible neuronal substrate influencing excitation and inhibition in the visual field. The researchers then incorporated a mathematica model of that substrate into the control structure of a small mobile robot, which subsequently avoided collisions with objects. That's not cognition. Or a reverse-engineered visual system.

That's a motion sensor.

I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. :)

My original post complained about the WSJ hyping Google's research (read the title). I read both Journal pieces and Google's published paper. I suspect Google is as much to blame for not correcting the Journal's misconceptions. But my overriding concern is that this AI inflation seems to be happening with more frequency, and the hype is getting exponentially more hyperbolic.

I use the term "cargo cult" because it's accurate. I'm reasonably well read in neurobiology and biochemistry, and participated in a fair amount of early neural network implementation. But the burden isn't on me to "know what I'm talking about". The burden is on anyone, including as you, claiming science knows anything about how the brain works. You're making the assertion, so you must provide the proof. I'm happy to consider any examples you have of how the cognitive function of your choice operates.

Fyngyrz, by "some ideas" you mean "some theory". And in your case it's a theory with no research and no testable hypothesis. When I say "no idea" I mean literally we have no demonstrable understanding of any one single cognitive function of the brain. Any brain. We don't know how a gnat processes tactile information from its antennae, how a fly integrates spacial information while flying, or even how a planaria stores its memory of a maze. Human brains? We've got nothing.

Improv,

Kola and Wishaw's text discusses the brain from two organizational perspectives, anatomical and behavioral. The authors never undertake to explain how the brain functions to produce the behaviors they describe. We thus know some of what the brain does, but nothing about how it does it. And the authors admit as much. Nobody knows how memories are stored, how vision is processed, how decisions are made. Science doesn't even know for sure that these functions occur inside the brain at all. There is, after all, the soul to contend with. That concept is no more outside the realm of science than were radio waves before Marconi discovered them.

Improv,

We are in the "cargo cult" phase of neurological research. Our level of cognitive understanding is like that of the South Pacific islanders who made bamboo replicas of WWII airplanes and radios after the GIs left. The islanders said to themselves "We must be very close to reproducing these wonders, because our airplanes and radios looks so much those of the GIs. Now we just sit back and wait for the magic goods to come out of the airplanes and wise voices to come out of the radios."

If you really don't know how little we understand about the brain, NY Times science writer James Gorman can explain it to you:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11...