psychoceramics: >H FY;) Ontogenesis of Mechanoia (fwd)

[Mitchell Porter <mitch @ thehub.com.au>]

More Mentifex...

----- Forwarded message from Eugene Leitl -----

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 1996 12:29:35 GMT
From: Arthur T. Murray <uj797 @ freenet.Victoria.BC.CA>
To: "bionet.neuroscience mail newsgroup" <bionet-n--@d--.ac.uk>
Subject: Ontogenesis of Mechanoia


Ever since Wozniak the genius and Jobs the unstoppable Primum Mo-
vens invented the future in a garage,  there are no more rules of
engagement for the commencement and cessation of a Kuhnian krieg.

Lo! the august Scientific American (quod vide inferius) published
an article once suggesting that scientific revolutions which fall
outside the canon of science will languish and skirmish until the
canon has matured enough to accommodate and assimilate tectonics.

Now hear this, Scientific American:  The binary Steves -- cherry-
picker and Apple-picker -- have changed all that no-can-do canon.
All scientific bets are off, and you do not know which locomotive
is leaving the station because you can't see the stations anymore
between the Home Brew Computer Clubs and the Northwest AI Forums.

Drop your enshrined pre-digerati process of forming a hypothesis,
performing experiments and excreting a theory.  Nowadays,  by the
license vested in us by the garage Prometheans,  we incrementally
design the Homo Sapiens II and Mindcore CNS via introspeculation.

We make broad, basic assumptions about the cerebral cortex and we
test them against the books of Eccles, Pribram and Arbib.  In our
reverse engineering of the CNS black box we include more and more
noetic features by tinkering with primitive neural networks wired
Cog-like and Cyc-style across electromechanical relays,  training
ourselves in the process to think as molders of information-flow.
By and by we interpret Pribram as damage and we route around him.
Our edifice of extracanonical mind-making grows so VAB large that
it swallows up the linguine of Chomsky as it sees eye-to-eye with
the Nobelage of Hubel and Wiesel -- chiasmic canonical cool cats.
The last rampart to fall is a question:  What seems to be a verb?

Any freelance writer may submit text and public-domain cover art:

  /^^^^^^^^^^^\ Trojan Horse of Non-canonicalism  /^^^^^^^^^^^\
 /visual memory\           ________   semantic   /  auditory   \
|      /--------|-------\ / syntax \  memory    |episodic memory|
|      |  recog-|nition | \________/<-----------|------------\  |
|   ___|___     |       |    |flush-vector      |    ______  |  |
|  /image  \    |    ___V____V___  word-fetch   |   /      \ |  |
| / percept \<--|-->/ conceptual \--------------|->/ stored \|  |
| \ engrams /   |   \ mini-grids / for thinking |  \ words  /   |
|  \_______/    |    \__________/  in language  |   \______/    |

http://www.newciv.org/Mentifex/ original public-domain archive or
http://www.complex.com.pl/~venom/science.html Web site in Poland.



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----- End of forwarded message from Eugene Leitl -----