Hurray for brief scientific overviews with citations!
Awesomely, a researcher named Baars already anticipated that conscious processing would involve activation in more regions than unconscious processing!
This sentence caught me off guard. Is it supposed to be impressive that somebody predicted that conscious processing would involve activation in more regions than unconscious processing does? I would have intuitively expected this without having any precise theory of consciousness. Moreover, there are only two possibilities here; it’s not like locating e=mc^2 in the space of possible equations. To see this particular prediction of Baars as exciting reminds me of the creationists who say “See? Big Bang theory says the universe has a beginning, something that Genesis predicted thousands of years ago! Science confirms the Bible!” But the universe either did or didn’t have a beginning, and the fact that a religion got the right answer* there is not impressive or “awesome.”
Of course, it’s not clear that is the right answer, but let’s suppose it is for the sake of illustrating my point. :)
Originally it was going to be a longer version of the sentence which ended up saying something to the effect of “Baars predicted this after looking at neural networks used in late-80s artificial intelligence systems” but I never found any information to support that, so I dropped the end without updating the beginning.
I had thought that because lots of GWT people mention simulations of neural nets as being related to/finding evidence for GWT.
Hurray for brief scientific overviews with citations!
This sentence caught me off guard. Is it supposed to be impressive that somebody predicted that conscious processing would involve activation in more regions than unconscious processing does? I would have intuitively expected this without having any precise theory of consciousness. Moreover, there are only two possibilities here; it’s not like locating e=mc^2 in the space of possible equations. To see this particular prediction of Baars as exciting reminds me of the creationists who say “See? Big Bang theory says the universe has a beginning, something that Genesis predicted thousands of years ago! Science confirms the Bible!” But the universe either did or didn’t have a beginning, and the fact that a religion got the right answer* there is not impressive or “awesome.”
Of course, it’s not clear that is the right answer, but let’s suppose it is for the sake of illustrating my point. :)
Fair point.
Originally it was going to be a longer version of the sentence which ended up saying something to the effect of “Baars predicted this after looking at neural networks used in late-80s artificial intelligence systems” but I never found any information to support that, so I dropped the end without updating the beginning.
I had thought that because lots of GWT people mention simulations of neural nets as being related to/finding evidence for GWT.