12 Mar Building a Concept Hierarchy
Existential knowledge, our knowledge of things that exist, is hierarchical. In other words, we categorize things into classes. Objects in these classes form the content of our thoughts. We have heard about the phylogenetic tree, the “tree of life” or the system of biological classification. This is a beautiful example of a regular taxonomy (irregular might have […]
11 Mar Joe’s Theory of Everything
While my teachers explained that language is about nouns and verbs, I think language is about symbolically representing everything and communicating about anything to anyone. There are many ways to look at the milieu in which we live from the tiniest sub-atomic particle on up. One way is to look at the larger context of […]
10 Mar The Context of Knowledge
What Is Knowledge? Just like the beautifully structured organization of all things in the physical universe, there is a hierarchy or taxonomy of knowledge. The levels and organization of the hierarchy, as I see them, are shown in the illustration below. Being fascinated by the concept of context, I have decided that, in this model, “context” includes […]
07 Mar Your Personal Bubble
There is time-space context within which we constantly move and place ourselves in the universe. Our constantly moving and evolving personal bubble is the starting point of understanding. Where are you at this very moment? Are you where you want to be? Where am I? Why am I here? Why isn’t the tide washing the […]
06 Mar Inference in the Face of Uncertainty
Do you know what I’m about to say? If your mind were not able to race ahead of the words and build a set of expectations about what comes next, you may not be able to understand me speaking or writing. But you can predict a lot more than your conscious awareness tells you. A […]
04 Mar Gnosticism, Mysticism and Hard Knowledge
Neural Network science describes oft rejected explicit knowledge in neurons as “gnostic cells” or “gramma cells” suggesting one neuron knows about gramma. Not all scientists agree with associationist theories that explain learning in the context of things that pre-exist in memory. In fact, an entire school of thought flatly rejects explicit representations that form the core […]
03 Mar Images in Thinking
More or Less Remembering Memory is a subjective thing. Will we ever be able to teach a computer what is memorable in art, music, literature or cinema? A great illustration of memory’s subjectivity is the song from Gigi entitled, “Ah, yes, I remember it well.” In the song’s lyrics, a woman and a man recount […]
01 Mar Hold Onto the Memories
When you see Grandmother, is there a cell or cluster of cells in your brain that light up and say: “I recognize that face – It’s Grandmother!” The Grandmother cell theory suggests that there is such a cell or group of cells where that knowledge is explicitly stored. Earlier posts included a discussion of feature selectivity […]
28 Feb Sense-Perception and Memory
I Recall… Since we have been discussing learning in the past few posts, it seems appropriate to talk about memory here as well. Of course, we are talking about human memory, but computers can remember quite well, too. In fact memory is one of the few areas where it is universally agreed that computers are […]