Tag Archives: cybernetics
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 […]
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 […]
27 Feb Chomsky, Locke and Aristotle on Learning Language
Inherited Abilities In systems design, there is a growing trend to “hard code” less into the system and leave more to be configured by the person or organization that is using the software. The growth of Rules and Workflow Engines that can be managed by non-technical users is prime evidence of this trend. And yet, the complex instruction […]
26 Feb Physiology of Learning to Generalize
I began this blog heavily concentrating on the physiology of the brain, its cells and the way they interconnect. Learning and association are not dealt with much in those posts other than to describe ways in which the brain and its cells provide mechanisms for these activities. Many of the mechanisms of association are fairly clearly understood […]
25 Feb Discrimination, Association and Recognition
Discrimination Although discrimination has negative connotations, we do it every millisecond. We must discriminate between distractions and important information we see and hear. The environment is filled with ambient noise, sometimes so much so as to prevent understanding. Once we have filtered out the noise through discrimination, we must further discriminate between incorrect and correct interpretations of the […]
24 Feb Neural Network Perception
Feedback in Image Processing While the flow of electrical impulses in the brain triggered by visual stimuli travels sequentially through layers I then II then III of the visual cortex, this directional flow does not prevent impulses from other sources, including feedback loops within the visual cortex from contributing to our ability to process images. […]
22 Feb Understanding What we See
Many Japanese kanji characters (originally imported from China) are little pictures of things in the real world. For example 木 (ki) is a tree. You can see the trunk and the branches. By adding a line at the bottom 本 (hon), you get roots or origin. Put three together 森 (mori) and you have a forest. The symbol […]