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On 30/06/2011 10:55 PM, Darren New wrote:
> http://www.evl.uic.edu/swami/crabcanon
>
> My favorite prelude in Godel Escher Bach.
My a startling coincidence, last week I opened GEB on a random page, and
this just happened to be the page I opened on.
This text is a pristine example of why I stopped reading GEB. I got the
book hoping to learn something new and interesting. What I got instead
was tedious riddles. Lots of them.
Opening the book a few more times at random, I did eventually come
across something actually mildly interesting. A discussion of the human
brain. Specifically, visual processing. Apparently there are cells which
detect light, cells which process differences in light, right the way up
to cells which fire in response to particular visual patterns. Simple
basic shapes and textures.
But what about higher levels of complexity? Taking this to its logical
conclusion, is there a "grandmother cell", which fires if and only if
you happen to be looking at the image of your grandmother?
It's an interesting question. And the discussion mentions some
interesting experimental results (e.g., cells which fire when you're
standing at a particular point in space). But, to me, asking whether
there's one cell which fires when you see your grandmother is a bit like
asking whether there's one transistor somewhere in a computer which
switches on only if you happen to be running MS Word.
What you put it that way, the absurdity of the question becomes obvious.
"MS Word" is an abstraction created not by one transistor, but by the
concerted activity of millions of them. I would expect that complex
high-level phenomena like recognising a person's face is a similar
matter for the human brain.
So far, that's about the only moderately interesting thing I've managed
to get from GEB.
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