Baby Data Mining?

Researchers performing cognitive experiments on toddlers claim that children acquire language through a process similar to data mining. The toddlers were shown a series of object pairs while recordings of two words were played. During each iteration, one of the words corresponded to one of the objects. Over time, the children were able to disambiguate the references and determine which words corresponded to which objects.

While the scientists claim this language learning method to be akin to data mining, to me it seems less like a statistical searching process and more like rule-based pattern recognition and association building.

via Slashdot

Using PageRank in a Brain

Following up on my post about modeling & consciousness...

The use of a PageRank-like algorithm would explain some behaviors of the human brain. The most popular ideas or concepts require less processing time to recall, and the less popular take more. Likewise, the most popular pages show up first in a Google search, and you have to dig down deeper to find the less popular. The PageRank algorithm constantly updates; as new pages are indexed, the scores of the pages they link to are refreshed, just as the neural connections between frequently access bits of memory are strengthened in the human mind.

Other people have suggested that PageRank works like the human brain, and it makes a lot of sense to me. The amount of information collected by a brain (of any type) is vast, and requires some efficient method of determining what's important and what's not.

Attack of the P-Zombies

Digg points us to a New York Times article about the increasing support for physicalism coming from our growing understanding of the material origin of thought. More and more research indicates that physical structures and processes in the brain are solely (no pun intended) responsible for the emergence of emotions, morality and consciousness, challenging the proponents of dualism who claim a distinction between mind and spirit.

A quote by Pope John Paul II in 1996 struck a chord with me; he said these materialistic ideas were "incompatible with the truth about man." Facts and evidence are incompatible with "the truth?" Sounds like something Galileo would hear...

The Mechanism of Human Consciousness

KurzweilAI.net picked up an article from The Economist about a possible breakthrough in the search for the neural correlate of consciousness.

In his latest (and final) published paper, Francis Crick (the late co-discoverer of DNA) speculates that the neurological basis of human consciousness is the claustrum, a thin layer of gray matter with two-way connections to every region of the cortex. It is possible that the claustrum is responsible for processing all of the various inputs from different parts of the brain to create a "cohesive, conscious experience." If research demonstrates this conclusion to be true, it will unequivocally prove the Materialist view that consciousness is merely a product of a physical system, and therefore can be artificially reproduced by mechanical means.