Hi All, Looks like you've got a good thing going here. I wasn't really looking for a place to call home, but when came across a comment on WriterofMinds website about your forum, I thought I'd have a look. I spent a few hours yesterday reading posts on topics of interest which impressed me (lots of serious interested members). For anyone interested, particulars about my background, it can be found in my profile, so I won't bore you with that. I suspect, you'd prefer to know more about what I may offer the group in terms of AI and my particular views on AI.
I've been interested in neural net approaches to artificial intelligence since the 1980s after buying my first computer. I ran across a series of articles in AI Magazine describing the perceptron, MLPs, SOMs, ART, and so on. Since then, I watched it go through the AI winter and its resurgence to what it has become today. During the interim, between then and now, I'd periodically check the literature to see what progress had been made. Working and survival made major demands on my time. Somewhere around 2007, I was more or less forced into retirement Suddenly, I had lots and lots of time to do whatever I wanted to do (constrained by the limitations of age - I'm 76 now). I spent the first 5 years catching up on what I will refer to as Brain Science, for no particular discipline suffices for such a pursuit and they all seem to have something to say on the subjects related to brain emulation and artificial intelligence. It wasn't long before I realized that brain science and artificial intelligence were still frontiers and wide open to anyone - heck, you even have economists trying to establish principles.
In the beginning, I just thought it would be nice to have an intelligent personal assistant embedded in a computer that could interact with me and do things like search for information on topics of interest. I've always been one who enjoyed pursuing interests by tiptoeing my way through bibliographies. following my nose, to find gems of insight. It wasn't long until I realized that those who preached the mind/body relationship were probably right and that no real general intelligence could be produced without subjective feedback. To me, that meant that intelligence and sentience were interdependent. So, that brought in robotics. Needless to say, the simplistic and naive approach snowballed into a quest that's going to last longer than I am. Still, it fills life with purpose and meaning, and the occasional epiphany is better than any recreational pharmaceutical I've seen - not that I have ever engaged in such pursuits.
I won't say that the 5 year focused study was a waste of time, but I wasn't making any sort of progress in my pursuit. That, and a found myself shaking my head far too often in disagreement with what others were claiming. I have what I refer to as an exceptionally refined "exception detector," and it triggers when I perceive alternate interpretations for claims made in theories. You won't find me to be harshly critical, but you will find me offering alternate views on things. As an approach to AI, I see very little future for anything that doesn't conform to what's biological plausible and likely to be found in the brain. I'm not one who subscribes to reproducing biologically constrained architectures based on specific locals (like Brodmann Maps). I stick with fundamentals and ask questions like - "what in the world are all those synaptic connects for?" And then try to find reasons for them, like subnet influences. Or questions like, "why are there so many different kinds of neurotransmitters? Of course, the questions are endless and propagate more questions.
Once upon a time, I was a draftsman and worked in the electronics industry. I tend to think at the hardware level and create designs in schematic formats based on bit flipping and the black-box approach to figuring out how all the inputs/processes/outputs work in the brain. I try to lay it out in accordance with what I would expect in accordance with valid neurological principles and try to think holistically about the over all operation. Last but not least, I've been trying to write it all up in an eBook to leave behind as my legacy. All in all, it's been a thought experiment I've been pursuing for 14 years now. I would need another life time to complete it, but I believe I have made some progress, though some of it deviates from what's popular and fashionable in professional circles.
