Book Excerpts: Feedback - Robotics - ...

"Milieu, An External Environment:

Last but certainly not least: the population of similar cells simply could not learn, or exhibit any of the behaviors described, if they had no external environment with which to interact. This clearly axiomatic observation is so taken for granted in studies of biological organisms, that it is often overlooked when modeling them."

"On the other hand, consider the abstract concept of pure unsupervised learning. In a practical sense, this isn't really possible or doable either. If you place a learner directly into an isolation tank at birth, it will not learn. "

"...Of course, when the system is adaptive, and the external environment sits directly in the feedback path [diagram], this relationship can be stated in the opposite direction as well. That is to say, it is simultaneously about making output signals more consistent for each given set of input stimuli. Essentially, if we take both directions into account, it is the world changing the network, changing the world, changing the network, ... ad infinitum."

. . .

"To summarize, feedback loops of signals originating in the brain and returning can remain inside the brain, go outside the brain but remain inside the organism, or include complex chains of causal activities completely outside of the organism."

"We have seen that we can not expect a biological learning entity to learn anything, if we simply place it directly into an isolation tank at birth. We shouldn't expect anything that we build to exhibit sentient behaviors either, if we don't give it the ability to be an integral, interacting part of the complex world around it. Without such interactive capabilities, anything we build will have a restriction that is functionally identical to a biological organism in an isolation-tank. Even if all other facilities to support consciousness are in place, it will not be capable of using them, if denied the ability to interact with a complex milieu."

Netlab Loligo - New Approaches to Neural Network Simulation — This is the book. If you have an interest in machine hosted neural network simulations and have been looking for something that radically departs from the current list of formulaic, paint-by-numbers approaches, this book may be just what you've been looking for. It is in stock and shipping now, if you would like to check it out now, prior to the press-release being distributed. It is also available from Amazon.com Not sure? Check out the excerpts pages for a little bit of a peek into the book.