Went to JSNC today. As always, interesting stuff. Waydo's results were interesting. He achieved ~92% ROC curves for naive categorization of planes vs. cars vs. motorcycles vs. faces. Faces were categorized the best, as should be expected from such a dataset. He achieved even better ROC curves for 10 transformations of 10 faces each. His (Olshausen's) generative model was also interesting. If I get some downtime, it'd be worth looking at.
Izhikevich presented some fun results. Running a 1 second simulation of 10^11 neurons and 10^15 synapses. It took a 27 computer distributed network 50 days. Impressive, and the higher level image of the 1 second activation patterns is tres cool. You can see activation waves spreading over the neural gray matter. I'd love to see this narrowed down specifically using what we know about vision and visual anatomy. Hopefully, this is coming in the future. He projected a US$1mm computer system in the year 2016 should be able to do this computation in real time (using Moore's Law). Is Moore's Law still true?
A couple posters intrigued me, as well: Gepshtein's treatment of Gabor's uncertainty principle bears further looking into.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Musings on Philosophy of Mind, Determinism & Freewill
One of my pet subjects since I was an undergraduate has been Philosophy of Mind. Unfortunately, I was never a very good student as an undergraduate, so don't have as good a grasp on the subject matter as I would like. Nevertheless, imho, Phil. of Mind is critical to a study of consciousness, and thought experiments and conclusions derived from Phil. of Mind should help drive high level study of cognition.
A good example is phenomenology(which some may argue is not Phil. of Mind, to which I would respectfully disagree). Cognitive Science understanding of perception has advanced to a point at which phenomenological arguments, such as those from Merleau-Ponty are critical to framing the future conversation of where the science is headed. In fact, I believe that we are fairly close to be able to design and test experiments based on different tenets contained within phenomenology. This specific meshing of experimental psychology and philosophy, is dear to my heart, as I did my undergraduate thesis on this.
Thus, I posit, that as an experimental psychologist, it is critical that I improve my knowledge and understanding of Philosophy of Mind. I recently engaged in a discussion regarding Freewill and Determinism. Specifically, we discussed the conundrum (imho) that a complete belief in hard determinism, and therefore a lack of agency, freewill, voluntariness, and origination, if you will[1], should cause the person who holds such a belief a specific, tangible problem with living life. Why do anything? Without the ability to originate your own choices and take actions, without the ability to have voluntary thoughts, actions, choices, why do anything at all? Why act? Why not just sit in a room and be comatose?
Freewill and Determinism, of course, is a loaded subject, with myriad articles having been written on the subject. A quick google search turns up well over 600,ooo websites. The fourth link is The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website, maintained by Ted Honderich, a professor at Univ. College of London. It contains links to many of the critical philosophical writings on the topic, as well as a neat glossary I link to in the footnotes. It seems that my question is addressed to the incompatibilist viewpoint. When I have time, I'll go over some of the incompatabilist writings, and see whether the issue is addressed.
If anyone else holds the incompatabilist viewpoint, I'd love to hear from you.
----
[1] See Honderich's Glossary of freewill terminology for a quick explanation of terms.
======
PS> This was originally posted at back in bj, but that's now private, so I'm reposting it here for public consumption.
A good example is phenomenology(which some may argue is not Phil. of Mind, to which I would respectfully disagree). Cognitive Science understanding of perception has advanced to a point at which phenomenological arguments, such as those from Merleau-Ponty are critical to framing the future conversation of where the science is headed. In fact, I believe that we are fairly close to be able to design and test experiments based on different tenets contained within phenomenology. This specific meshing of experimental psychology and philosophy, is dear to my heart, as I did my undergraduate thesis on this.
Thus, I posit, that as an experimental psychologist, it is critical that I improve my knowledge and understanding of Philosophy of Mind. I recently engaged in a discussion regarding Freewill and Determinism. Specifically, we discussed the conundrum (imho) that a complete belief in hard determinism, and therefore a lack of agency, freewill, voluntariness, and origination, if you will[1], should cause the person who holds such a belief a specific, tangible problem with living life. Why do anything? Without the ability to originate your own choices and take actions, without the ability to have voluntary thoughts, actions, choices, why do anything at all? Why act? Why not just sit in a room and be comatose?
Freewill and Determinism, of course, is a loaded subject, with myriad articles having been written on the subject. A quick google search turns up well over 600,ooo websites. The fourth link is The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website, maintained by Ted Honderich, a professor at Univ. College of London. It contains links to many of the critical philosophical writings on the topic, as well as a neat glossary I link to in the footnotes. It seems that my question is addressed to the incompatibilist viewpoint. When I have time, I'll go over some of the incompatabilist writings, and see whether the issue is addressed.
If anyone else holds the incompatabilist viewpoint, I'd love to hear from you.
----
[1] See Honderich's Glossary of freewill terminology for a quick explanation of terms.
======
PS> This was originally posted at back in bj, but that's now private, so I'm reposting it here for public consumption.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Oh My God.
Early Morning
Dew drops in the crisp biting air.
Chill and purpose mix to form will.
What shall happen what will be.
Survive and Live. Love and Learn.
Chill and purpose mix to form will.
What shall happen what will be.
Survive and Live. Love and Learn.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
An epiphany
Walking across a sky bridge, I encountered a photographer for the Architectural Design department. I saw them shooting my building yesterday, and today, in the fading afternoon light, they were shooting this sky bridge. A 4x5 b/w Polaroid was shot to test composition, and as they imposed a black frame around it, the scene was transformed. No longer the drab, mundane cement and steel bridge that my plodding shoes echoed across daily, it was archetypal, structure, geometry, pattern spanning across the open sky.
I walked on in awe, and realized that I needed to strip away the miasma of life, the buffeting of emotions, the push and pull of obligation and resistance or authoritarianism and rebellion, the oppressive burden of living, breathing, eating, trying that one needs to do. It may sound melodramatic and overly romanticized, but for the next five minutes, my senses and perceptions opened up. I inhaled the verdant shades of green grass and leaves, the vibrant rouge of petals, the tactile density of stucco walls, the humming, nay singing, of life and nature and reality.
Capture the passion in life, ingest it. Let its myriad harmonies, visions, and caresses fill the top of the palate, slither down the tongue. Let the ringlets of its saccharine juice trickle down the corners of the mouth.
And so it starts.
I walked on in awe, and realized that I needed to strip away the miasma of life, the buffeting of emotions, the push and pull of obligation and resistance or authoritarianism and rebellion, the oppressive burden of living, breathing, eating, trying that one needs to do. It may sound melodramatic and overly romanticized, but for the next five minutes, my senses and perceptions opened up. I inhaled the verdant shades of green grass and leaves, the vibrant rouge of petals, the tactile density of stucco walls, the humming, nay singing, of life and nature and reality.
Capture the passion in life, ingest it. Let its myriad harmonies, visions, and caresses fill the top of the palate, slither down the tongue. Let the ringlets of its saccharine juice trickle down the corners of the mouth.
And so it starts.
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