GaryGaulin
Posts: 5385
Joined: Oct. 2012
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| Quote (N.Wells @ June 28 2014,09:06) | From Gary Marcus' review of Kurzweil's book, at The New Yorker, at
http://www.newyorker.com/online.....nd.html
| Quote | Kurzweil’s critics have not always been kind .... [Doug Hofstadter said] “if you read Ray Kurzweil’s books … what I find is that it’s a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad.”
........... [Kurzweil] offers no references and very little direct evidence.
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Even more disappointing is the fact that Kurzweil never bothers to do what any scientist, especially one trained in computer science, would immediately want to do, which is to build a computer model that instantiated his theory, and then compare the predictions of the model with real human behavior. Does the P.R.T.M. predict anything about human behavior that no other theory has predicted before? Does it give novel insight into any long-standing puzzles in human nature? Kurzweil never tries to find out.
Instead, Kurzweil compares his theory with the physical structure of the brain, hurling a huge amount of neuroanatomy at the reader, and asserting, without a lot of reflection, that it all fits his theory. A recent paper (more controversial than Kurzweil may have realized) claims that the brain is neatly organized into a kind of three-dimensional grid system. Kurzweil happily takes this as evidence that he was right all along, but the fact that the brain is organized doesn’t mean it is organized as Kurzweil suggests. We already knew that the brain is structured, but the real question is what all that structure does, in technical terms. How do the neural mechanisms in the brain map onto the brain’s cognitive mechanisms? Without an understanding of that, Kurzweil’s pointers to neuroanatomy serve more as razzle-dazzle than real evidence for his theory.
The deepest problem is that Kurzweil wants badly to provide a theory of the mind and not just the brain. Of course, the mind is a product of the brain, as Kurzweil well knows, but any theory that seriously engages with what the mind is has to reckon with human psychology—with human behavior and the mental operations that underlie it. Here, Kurzweil seems completely out of his depth. ..... Not a single cognitive psychologist or study is referred to, and he scarcely engages the phenomena that make the human mind so distinctive.
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At the end Kurzweil leaves us with a theory that is generic. Almost anything any creature does could at some level be seen as hierarchical-pattern recognition; that’s why the idea has been around since the late nineteen-fifties. But simply asserting that the mind is a hierarchical-pattern recognizer by itself tells us too little.........
Kurzweil is so confident in his theory that he insists it simply has to be correct. Early in the book, he claims that “the model I have presented is the only possible model that satisfies all the constraints that the research and our thought experiments have established.” ..................
What Kurzweil doesn’t seem to realize is that a whole slew of machines have been programmed to be hierarchical-pattern recognizers, and none of them works all that well ..............
Ultimately Kurzweil is humbled by a challenge that has beset many a great thinker extending far beyond his field—Kurzweil doesn’t know neuroscience as well as he knows artificial intelligence, and doesn’t understand psychology as well as either. |
Unlike Kurzweil, Gary seems to be leaving the "very good food" portion out of his presentation, but otherwise there are some instructive similarities going on. |
If you demand that all theories be proven to be fact before publishing them then there would be no cognitive theories at all. Not a single one that I know of could ever meet your standards.
If you expect talented geniuses to be as creatively boring as you are then it's no surprise to find you in a forum for mocking and ridiculing the scientific leaders of this century, while believing that the real science leaders are the ones hurling insults in order to influence public school religious politics:
| Quote | | Kurzweil’s critics have not always been kind; the biologist PZ Myers once wrote, “Ray Kurzweil is a genius. One of the greatest hucksters of the age.” |
In cognitive science what matters is how much of a theory makes sense. To be useful to someone searching for the same insight only one of its major predictions needs to hold true.
Ray is now at Google directing work related to the testing of his theory and the theory from others from around the world. And those you laugh at are the intelligent cause of what is shown being created in this very ID'ish cognitive science related illustration I found in an informative article about his theory:
Kurzweil's Pattern-Recognition Theory of Mind
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The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
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