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Category: information science – Page 331

Thousands of people die every year due to drunk driving. It’s a statistic that’s both appalling and frightening. We all like to party, but then when the party’s over, many still refuse to recognize the danger they not only put themselves in, but others as well when they choose to drive while mentally impaired. Thankfully a lot of potential situations are averted every year as well due to taxi services, or even friends willing to drive them home.

Today, however, we live in a very sensor-oriented society. Our phones have sensors. Our homes have sensors. Our tablets have sensors. Our cars have sensors. Take Tesla Motors as an example. They have sensors by their doors which detects whether or not the right driver is approaching the vehicle. If it detects its correct driver, then it’ll extrude the door handle out, ready to be open. If you’re not the correct driver, however, like someone trying to hijack the vehicle, then the door handle will not pop out for you. Sorry.

Another good example is the Mercedes-Benz, which has driving sensors attached to its braking system. If any object in front gets too close, then the brakes kick in automatically, preventing any accident from occurring. Too many fatalities occur due to simple, brief loss of eye contact to the road.

So Mercedes-Benz’s braking sensors represent a revolutionary means of saving thousands of lives every year, just as Tesla provides a revolutionary approach towards alleviating car theft.

And what makes them so damn revolutionary? They create a real relationship between the car and its owner — to not just provide transportation for them, but to actually recognize them and protect them when they’re incapable of doing so themselves.

So imagine with me: It’s 2018 and you’re at a party. A lot of drinking and drugs. You realize it’s already early morning and it’s time to go home and get some rest. So you call for an automated vehicle using Uber’s transportation services. The vehicle arrives 10 minutes later. It recognizes via its sensors the debit card in your wallet used to pay for its transportation services and lets you in the vehicle. You try starting the car yourself, but the car doesn’t let you. Instead it alarms you of your blood alcohol content and tells you that it cannot allow you to drive yourself while intoxicated. Given its automated system, it drives you home itself.

Is this not the type of transportation system we’d want as a society keen on safety above all else? I’d surely hope so, because this isn’t just some mere science-fiction tale. It’s a science-fact in the making, which can be seen every year as our cars get smarter and more integrated with our own personal needs and desires. We’ll never be alone — always watched and observed. That may sound scary, but when compared to hundreds of thousands of people dying every year due to car accidents, I find the above prospect of an automobile-sensor revolution to be “heaven on Earth.”

The article above was originally published as a blog post on The Proactionary Transhumanist.

I believe Google is making a huge mistake in completely banning facial recognition systems for its Glass product. In my opinion, such a system could be used to help save thousands of lives. But then, we’re too damn caught up on absolute privacy that we’re willing to sacrifice actual, physical lives to ensure our privacy remains untainted. Such individualist dogma is deadly.

According to the Amber Alert webpage, “A child goes missing in the United States every 40 seconds,” and that “More than 700,000 children go missing annually.” That is an absolutely frightening statistic! Much more frightening than the prospect that some Glass user may know my name.

How far are we willing to go to ensure absolute privacy isn’t diminished whatsoever? When does the right of privacy begin interfering with the right of safety? Can the two come together in harmony, or are they destined to be in conflict until society finally reaches a decision over one or the other?

I understand the desire for privacy, but as I’ve argued in the past, as we as a society become more public and technologically open-source, the idea of privacy slowly fades away. That isn’t to say that some forms of privacy can’t be maintained. Surely we should have the right to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ over whether or not our private data is to be shared publicly. That level of freedom and choice could easily maintain a sense of privacy to each individual.

But then, when it comes to missing children, or even missing adults, should we not then be willing to sacrifice a portion of our privacy to ensure the safety of those who’s gone missing? It doesn’t even have to be that large of a peek into each’s private lives — simply a facial recog. map, a name, and whether or not they’re reported missing, or even possibly wanted.

Picture this with me: It’s 2014 and only a few months have passed since the commercial launch of Google Glass. Hundreds of thousands of people already acquire their own device, scattered across the United States. A mandatory app was included with Glass, which was connected with Amber Alert systems. The app has Glass quietly scanning each face you cross paths with, but doesn’t reveal their names, nor does it alert you that it’s currently scanning. For all you know, it’s a normal day like any other.

Now, as you’re walking down a street, you walk past an adult male with a pre-teen female. You don’t even pay much attention to them. Just another group of people walking by, as far as you’re concerned. But then Glass, on the other hand, knows something you don’t — the little girl has been reported missing. As a result, without alerting you, the app then — albeit quietly — takes a snapshot of the girl and unknown male captor, contacts a 911 operator program, and delivers GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken and in which direction the girl was walking. The police show up, arrest the male captor, and contacts the parents of the missing child informing them that she’d been found and safe.

This was able to occur because each parent — or family member, guardian, etc. — had allowed the missing child’s name and facial recog. map to be archived in a Amber Alert system program, which connects via app on Glass. Was said child’s “privacy” diminished? Yes. But then she’s also alive because of it and a kidnapper is taken off the streets, not able to harm anyone else again.

Isn’t this very real prospect of technologically-enhanced safety worth sacrificing a bit of our own privacy? While I’m not a parent, if anyone of my family were to go missing, their privacy would be the last thing I’d be concerned about. And if I’d gone missing, I’d want everyone to do all they could to find me, even if it meant sacrificing my own privacy.

Google Glass is coming just next year. And with Google’s determination to ban facial recognition using Glass, we must ask ourselves: At what price?

The article above was originally published as a blog post on The Proactionary Transhumanist.

EXCERPT

To further underpin this statement, I will share Peter Drucker’s quote, “…The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic…” And also that of Dr. Stephen Covey, “…Again, yesterday holds tomorrow hostage .… Memory is past. It is finite. Vision is future. It is infinite. Vision is greater than history…” And that of Sir Francis Bacon, “… He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils, for time is the greatest innovator …”

And that of London Business School Professor Gary Hamel, PhD., “…You cannot get to a new place with an old map…” And that of Alvin Toffler, “…The future always comes too fast and in the wrong order…”

View the entire presentation at http://lnkd.in/dP2PmCP

Supermanagement! by Mr. Andres Agostini (Excerpt)

DEEPEST

“…What distinguishes our age from every other is not the world-flattening impact of communications, not the economic ascendance of China and India, not the degradation of our climate, and not the resurgence of ancient religious animosities. Rather, it is a frantically accelerating pace of change…”

Read the entire piece at http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC

Each new technology revolutionizes how we approach life and what we do in it. Take my new Kindle Fire HD for example. Before, I simply picked up a book – whether it be hardback or paperback – and start reading. Usually if there was a busy day ahead of me, each time I picked up a book I’d simply read a chapter, bookmark it – a lot of the cases being “dog ears,” unfortunately – and place it to the side, ready for another chapter to be read for another time.

This was a relatively comfortable motion of life that I adhered to. I read a lot. Though of course there were the slight annoyances that could be made known, but were fortunately tolerable. For example, if you don’t have a real bookmark, you then have to ruin the pages by flapping down a top corner of the page you were last reading from. That was a slight nuisance. Another example being, given I had a busy day and thus in need of scheduling, the fact that I had no clue as to how long it would take me to read the chapter, then placed me in a unfortunate position of not knowing how my day will be handled. At times, though rare, I couldn’t even finish a chapter because it was taking too long and I had to get things done.

So back to my Kindle Fire, these slight annoyances as an avid reader have been completely expropriated! Most MOBI-formatted books are well organized and easily readable. So when I’m reading, the Kindle Fire allows me to simply tap the top right corner and instantly bookmarks the page I’m reading. No “dog ears,” no unnecessary pieces of paper needing to be bought to be used as one. If I’m curious as to how long the chapter I’m reading will take, I simply tap the bottom left corner and it not only gives me the # of minutes left in reading the chapter, but the number of hours it’ll take for me to read the entire book. It detects my reading pattern via its sensors and calculates an estimation of how long each page is read, each chapter, the entire book. I also quite enjoy the fact that it provides a % of how much the book I’ve read so far.

This changes a lot for me as a reader. And really, while I’ve labeled them as slight annoyances, thinking back, I’m not sure how I could’ve tolerated such things. Then again, my love for reading always dominated my desire for perfection. But before the Kindle, there were still such a thing as digital books, which were formatted as PDFs (Portable Document Format). I’ve got a LOT of PDFs on my laptop! But then PDFs are incapable of creating bookmarks, and they weren’t exactly mobile-oriented like a normal hardback/paperback book was. That was an even greater nuisance to reading than normal books provided.

Kindle, however, destroyed those annoyances. Completely. It’s really easy to carry around. It doesn’t take up much space at all. It carries thousands of books, and much more when accessing its cloud server. Its battery life is top notch. It detects and learns your reading pattern. It connects to your online accounts. It integrates itself into your life in mere minutes!

When it comes to a reader, it changes everything. And that is revolutionary!

The article above was originally published as a blog post on The Proactionary Transhumanist.

When a programmer begins to write his code, he is not merely writing abstract messages to be translated into simple ones and zeros but creating a carefully detailed dance pattern between him and his machine. At the moment of powering up his computer and watching it boot up with controlled anticipation, he is watching decades of digital choreography come to play in front of his eyes. This dazzling spectacle is the threshold of where his creative energies take place. This is where his mind goes to work in creating precise and detailed instructions for his machine to put into action. This may be true but to the true programmer, one who puts his heart and soul into his keyboard and pushes his combined passion and creativity to the next level, is the one who truly masters the art and becomes legendary. To these people, they are not merely writing code but are creating art that comes alive at the push of a button. This is one aspect of programming that a computer jockey wishes to do: create art.

The arena that a programmer wishes to dance in is always at his discretion. Be it Eclipse, Visual Basic, or even a simple word processor, they all have their merits. This is where the artist creates. This is where the programmer takes their initial keystrokes and gingerly pecks at them with blazing speed and mechanical accuracy. To those around him, the programmer appears to be rushing to complete task but this is not the case. To those who program and write code, time seems to stand still as they carefully work on their masterpiece. They put all other issues aside and commit their time and energy into designing their next creation, their new child. They take pleasure in their work and commit much of their lives to perfecting this art and designing innovative creations. To them, this in itself is a dance within the massive operating system and their dance partner is the code itself. Around the duo is a multitude of processes, other couples composed of daemons that maintain a proper status quo and the many parent/child processes around. This may not be a dance for them, but a dance made possible by love and circuitry. This dance is beautiful, but one careless misstep will cause the fellow dancer to become dissatisfied and will refuse to dance. Even though the code may be your child, your child is a picky creature that is only satisfied by the successive combination of accuracy and precision.

After the dance is complete and with all syntax as elegant as a well-played ballad, the debugger shall take hold of the remaining tasks. She is a lovely creature that plays as the nurse for your newly born child. She makes sure that your child is flawless and only speaks when she has found your child to be defective. If this occurs, the dance resumes and the creator begins again. As one ages with time, one should strive to become perfect or to work hard enough to write perfect code. After the debugger has nursed your child into being, with one keystroke she comes alive and begins to speak with you. She will be as intelligent as you make her and as resourceful as you are, only to make as many mistakes as you made in your dance. She is a loyal child, one that completes every task that you ask of her. Your child’s only request is that you keep her safe and to give her the resources she needs. When this criterion isn’t met, she will become unhappy and will refuse to help you. Rather than showing rage and frustration, the artist must be patient and be giving to the child.

With the creation of a new child, a responsible artist will show her to the world and allow others to share similar experiences that the programmer has had. Others will shelter the child, making sure that their child will not be taken from them. The programmer must be smart, and must take protective measures to make sure this doesn’t happen. Some will ask outsiders for help, others will make sure that fellow digital craftsman will acknowledge that their child is theirs and only theirs. As with any parent, they will respect the programmer as they share the same vision and passion for the art as they do. As the programmer shows their child to the world, their child is able to help others and those in need. The programmer’s child will become another part of the user’s life as the child assists them with their needs. The programmer will take pride in their child for all the good their child has done. Eventually, other programmers will want to take the child and will execute a more intimate dance with her. This is most often out of your hands, so all you can do is hope that she is used for benevolent purposes only. This intimate dance will alter your child and create an offspring, a variant of your original design. This will continue ad infinitum until your child has aged to where she is no longer useful. With teary eyes and a heavy heart, the programmer will see his creation fade away from existence.

As many will undergo the intimate dance with your child, others will attempt to rape and defile your child with malicious code and devious intentions. Fueled by greed and an appetite for destruction, these infiltrators will use and abuse the child by exploiting her weaknesses and will corrupt her into a monstrosity capable of numerous problems for the programmer and others. These infiltrators are cunning, capable of taking the child and making her into a monster with the use of a single code. As with all artists and creators, one would hope that these nefarious individuals would be apprehended by the authorities but this is not always the case. Many of these fiends go unnoticed by hiding in plain sight, only conversing with others like them. This is not even the worst. The worst case scenario is that the child, a year’s worth of work in one result, can be defiled and used for creating a horrid abomination with the capacity of more harm than the child could ever accomplish. One could only hope that this never happens but often does more times than one could ever want. This is one negative consequence of creation; what one creates, another can destroy.

As true as in real life, there are more people willing to destroy than there are willing to create. Thankfully, creators and fellow programmers are not without protection. There are other programmers who create for the sake of creating other creators. These protectors create their own children with the intent of protecting them from those who want to corrupt them. These children are not made the same as other children, possessing code that is able to scan other children and safeguard them from harm. As with any program, they range from extremely potent to completely useless but they are all made with the best intentions. Often their designers are fellow artists that have the same concerns that any other programmer does but possess the knowledge to write code that is specifically designed to protect other programs from harm. All programmers lend their gratitude to the vanguards that keep them and their child safe from malicious individuals and criminals.

Like the continuous battle between infiltrators and protectors, other programmers tend to have their own battles. Their intentions are primarily material, fighting over the attention of users and other programmers. They will often steal from each other, use misconduct, and lie to consumers to meet their goals. These programmers are not fueled by the passion to create, but the passion to create profit. As such, their children are not filled with the love and passion that other children are filled with, but are utilitarians that do only what they are asked to do. These husks are often targeted by those who seek to defile them because they are not made with the careful craftsmanship of a passionate artist, but by the hands of greedy businessmen who are as careless as they are desperate for profit. This joke is as eternal as life itself and tends to be just as cruel.

As with any great artist, one does not stop with the creation of their child but will seek to improve her with time and carefully designed upgrades. These revisions serve the purpose of immortalizing the child and improving her like time and biology ages their fleshy counterparts. Unlike flesh children, a digital child can live forever with a continuing cycle of revision and constant upgrades. With a close eye to the voice of the users, a creator can design a child that can live forever by meeting the demands that a user asks for. These revisions can take the crude design of simple child and transfigure her into an elegant and omnipotent being that can tackle any challenge within their world. While these revisions take place, a programmer won’t stop with one creation but will create more and more programs. The constant drive to create, improve, and create again is what fuels the silicon and copper heart of a passionate programmer. This cycle will go on until the very programmer dies. The programmer will not have died without making an impact on the world and will have died doing what the programmer does best: create. With their work, the programmer is immortalized like their revised children.

At the end of the day, the programmer will power down their workstation and will rest for the next day to come. This will not be their final day of creation, for there are many other creations to come about and will beg to be created. Once again, the elegant digital waltz will begin again in the dance floor where all dances are conducted. The dance always has the same mechanical accuracy and precision as the first time it was enacted, the feverish pecking upon a keyboard to produce electrical impulses that result in ones and zeros. The important difference is that a new child is under construction, with a new set of objectives and tasks to complete. Of course, this is for another day and another time. The artist will click the shutdown icon, another beautifully crafted piece of code, and watch as the computer turns itself off. The daemons, parent, and child processes will rest until it is time for them to dance once again.

The arXiv blog on MIT Technology Review recently reported a breakthrough ‘Physicists Discover the Secret of Quantum Remote Control’ [1] which led some to comment on whether this could be used as an FTL communication channel. In order to appreciate the significance of the paper on Quantum Teleportation of Dynamics [2], one should note that it has already been determined that transfer of information via a quantum tangled pair occurs *at least* 10,000 times faster than the speed of light [3]. The next big communications breakthrough?

Quantum Entanglement Visual

In what could turn out to be a major breakthrough for the advancement of long-distance communications in space exploration, several problems are resolved — where if a civilization is eventually established on a star system many light years away, for example, such as on one of the recently discovered Goldilocks Zone super-Earths in the Gliese 667C star system, then communications back to people on Earth may after all be… instantaneous.

However, implications do not just stop there either. As recently reported in The Register [5], researchers in Israel at the University of Jerusalem, have established that quantum tangling can be used to send data across both TIME AND SPACE [6]. Their recent paper entitled ‘Entanglement Between Photons that have Never Coexisted’ [7] describes how photon-to-photon entanglement can be used to connect with photons in their past/future, opening up an understanding into how one may be able to engineer technology to not just communicate instantaneously across space — but across space-time.

Whilst in the past many have questioned what benefits have been gained in quantum physics research and in particular large research projects such as the LHC, it would seem that the field of quantum entanglement may be one of the big pay-offs. Whist it has yet to be categorically proven that quantum entanglement can be used as a communication channel, and the majority opinion dismisses it, one can expect much activity in quantum entanglement over the next decade. It may yet spearhead the next technological revolution.

[1] www.technologyreview.com/view/516636/physicists-discover-the…te-control
[2] Quantum Teleportation of Dynamics http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.0319
[3] Bounding the speed of ‘spooky action at a distance’ http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.0614
[4] http://www.universetoday.com/103131/three-potentially-habita…iese-667c/
[5] The Register — Biting the hand that feeds IT — http://www.theregister.co.uk/
[6] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/03/quantum_boffins_get_spooky_with_time/
[7] Entanglement Between Photons that have Never Coexisted http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.4191

The recent scandal involving the surveillance of the Associated Press and Fox News by the United States Justice Department has focused attention on the erosion of privacy and freedom of speech in recent years. But before we simply attribute these events to the ethical failings of Attorney General Eric Holder and his staff, we also should consider the technological revolution powering this incident, and thousands like it. It would appear that bureaucrats simply are seduced by the ease with which information can be gathered and manipulated. At the rate that technologies for the collection and fabrication of information are evolving, what is now available to law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the United States, and around the world, will soon be available to individuals and small groups.

We must come to terms with the current information revolution and take the first steps to form global institutions that will assure that our society, and our governments, can continue to function through this chaotic and disconcerting period. The exponential increase in the power of computers will mean that changes the go far beyond the limits of slow-moving human government. We will need to build new institutions to the crisis that are substantial and long-term. It will not be a matter that can be solved by adding a new division to Homeland Security or Google.

We do not have any choice. To make light of the crisis means allowing shadowy organizations to usurp for themselves immense power through the collection and distortion of information. Failure to keep up with technological change in an institutional sense will mean that in the future government will be at best a symbolic façade of authority with little authority or capacity to respond to the threats of information manipulation. In the worst case scenario, corporations and government agencies could degenerate into warring factions, a new form of feudalism in which invisible forces use their control of information to wage murky wars for global domination.

No degree of moral propriety among public servants, or corporate leaders, can stop the explosion of spying and the propagation of false information that we will witness over the next decade. The most significant factor behind this development will be Moore’s Law which stipulates that the number of microprocessors that can be placed economically on a chip will double every 18 months (and the cost of storage has halved every 14 months) — and not the moral decline of citizens. This exponential increase in our capability to gather, store, share, alter and fabricate information of every form will offer tremendous opportunities for the development of new technologies. But the rate of change of computational power is so much faster than the rate at which human institutions can adapt — let alone the rate at which the human species evolves — that we will face devastating existential challenges to human civilization.

The Challenges we face as a result of the Information Revolution

The dropping cost of computational power means that individuals can gather gigantic amounts of information and integrate it into meaningful intelligence about thousands, or millions, of individuals with minimal investment. The ease of extracting personal information from garbage, recordings of people walking up and down the street, taking aerial photographs and combining then with other seemingly worthless material and then organizing it in a meaningful manner will increase dramatically. Facial recognition, speech recognition and instantaneous speech to text will become literally child’s play. Inexpensive, and tiny, surveillance drones will be readily available to collect information on people 24/7 for analysis. My son recently received a helicopter drone with a camera as a present that cost less than $40. In a few years elaborate tracking of the activities of thousands, or millions, of people will become literally child’s play. Continue reading “The Impending Crisis of Data: Do We Need a Constitution of Information?” | >

I have seen the future of Bitcoin, and it is bleak.

The Promise of Bitcoin

If you were to peek into my bedroom at night (please don’t), there’s a good chance you would see my wife sleeping soundly while I stare at the ceiling, running thought experiments about where Bitcoin is going. Like many other people, I have come to the conclusion that distributed currencies like Bitcoin are going to eventually be recognized as the most important technological innovation of the decade, if not the century. It seems clear to me that the rise of distributed currencies presents the biggest (and riskiest) investment opportunity I am likely to see in my lifetime; perhaps in a thousand lifetimes. It is critically important to understand where Bitcoin is going, and I am determined to do so.

Continue reading “Bitcoin’s Dystopian Future” | >

A response to McClelland and Plaut’s
comments in the Phys.org story:

Do brain cells need to be connected to have meaning?

Asim Roy
Department of Information Systems
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona, USA
www.lifeboat.com/ex/bios.asim.roy

Article reference:

Roy A. (2012). “A theory of the brain: localist representation is used widely in the brain.” Front. Psychology 3:551. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00551

Original article: http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/FullText.aspx?s=196&n…2012.00551

Comments by Plaut and McClelland: http://phys.org/news273783154.html

Note that most of the arguments of Plaut and McClelland are theoretical, whereas the localist theory I presented is very much grounded in four decades of evidence from neurophysiology. Note also that McClelland may have inadvertently subscribed to the localist representation idea with the following statement:

“Even here, the principles of distributed representation apply: the same place cell can represent very different places in different environments, for example, and two place cells that represent overlapping places in one environment can represent completely non-overlapping places in other environments.”

The notion that a place cell can “represent” one or more places in different environments is very much a localist idea. It implies that the place cell has meaning and interpretation. I start with responses to McClelland’s comments first. Please reference the Phys.org story to find these quotes from McClelland and Plaut and see the contexts.

1. McClelland – “what basis do I have for thinking that the representation I have for any concept – even a very familiar one – is associated with a single neuron, or even a set of neurons dedicated only to that concept?”

There’s four decades of research in neurophysiology on receptive field cells in the sensory processing systems and on hippocampal place cells that shows that single cells can encode a concept – from motion detection, color coding and line orientation detection to identifying a particular location in an environment. Neurophysiologists have also found category cells in the brains of humans and animals. See the next response which has more details on category cells. The neurophysiological evidence is substantial that single cells encode concepts, starting as early as the retinal ganglion cells. Hubel and Wiesel won a Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1981 for breaking this “secret code” of the brain. Thus there’s enough basis to think that a single neuron can be dedicated to a concept and even at a very low level (e.g. for a dot, a line or an edge).

2. McClelland – “Is each such class represented by a localist representation in the brain?”

Cells that represent categories have been found in human and animal brains. Fried et al. (1997) found some MTL (medial temporal lobe) neurons that respond selectively to gender and facial expression and Kreiman et al. (2000) found MTL neurons that respond to pictures of particular categories of objects, such as animals, faces and houses. Recordings of single-neuron activity in the monkey visual temporal cortex led to the discovery of neurons that respond selectively to certain categories of stimuli such as faces or objects (Logothetis and Sheinberg, 1996; Tanaka, 1996; Freedman and Miller, 2008).

I quote Freedman and Miller (2008): “These studies have revealed that the activity of single neurons, particularly those in the prefrontal and posterior parietal cortices (PPCs), can encode the category membership, or meaning, of visual stimuli that the monkeys had learned to group into arbitrary categories.”

Lin et al. (2007) report finding “nest cells” in mouse hippocampus that fire selectively when the mouse observes a nest or a bed, regardless of the location or environment.

Gothard et al. (2007) found single neurons in the amygdala of monkeys that responded selectively to images of monkey faces, human faces and objects as they viewed them on a computer monitor. They found one neuron that responded in particular to threatening monkey faces. Their general observation is (p. 1674): “These examples illustrate the remarkable selectivity of some neurons in the amygdala for broad categories of stimuli.”

Thus the evidence is substantial that category cells exist in the brain.

References:

  1. Fried, I., McDonald, K. & Wilson, C. (1997). Single neuron activity in human hippocampus and amygdala during recognition of faces and objects. Neuron 18, 753–765.
  2. Kreiman, G., Koch, C. & Fried, I. (2000) Category-specific visual responses of single neurons in the human medial temporal lobe. Nat. Neurosci. 3, 946–953.
  3. Freedman DJ, Miller EK (2008) Neural mechanisms of visual categorization: insights from neurophysiology. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 32:311–329.
  4. Logothetis NK, Sheinberg DL (1996) Visual object recognition. Annu Rev Neurosci 19:577–621.
  5. Tanaka K (1996) Inferotemporal cortex and object vision. Annu Rev Neurosci 19:109–139.
  6. Lin, L. N., Chen, G. F., Kuang, H., Wang, D., & Tsien, J. Z. (2007). Neural encoding of the concept of nest in the mouse brain. Proceedings of theNational Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104, 6066–6071.
  7. Gothard, K.M., Battaglia, F.P., Erickson, C.A., Spitler, K.M. & Amaral, D.G. (2007). Neural Responses to Facial Expression and Face Identity in the Monkey Amygdala. J. Neurophysiol. 97, 1671–1683.

3. McClelland – “Do I have a localist representation for each phase of every individual that I know?”

Obviously more research is needed to answer these types of questions. But Saddam Hussein and Jennifer Aniston type cells may provide the clue someday.

4. McClelland – “Let us discuss one such neuron – the neuron that fires substantially more when an individual sees either the Eiffel Tower or the Leaning Tower of Pisa than when he sees other objects. Does this neuron ‘have meaning and interpretation independent of other neurons’? It can have meaning for an external observer, who knows the results of the experiment – but exactly what meaning should we say it has?”

On one hand, this obviously brings into focus a lot of the work in neurophysiology. This could boil down to asking who is to interpret the activity of receptive fields, place and grid cells and so on and whether such interpretation can be independent of other neurons. In neurophysiology, the interpretation of these cells (e.g. for motion detection, color coding, edge detection, place cells and so on) are obviously being verified independently in various research labs throughout the world and with repeated experiments. So it is not that some researcher is arbitrarily assigning meaning to cells and that such results can’t be replicated and verified. For many such cells, assignment of meaning is being verified by different labs.

On the other hand, this probably is a question about whether that cell is a category cell and how to assign meaning to it. The interpretation of a cell that responds to pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but not to other landmarks, could be somewhat similar to a place cell that responds to a certain location or it could be similar to a category cell. Similar cells have been found in the MTL region — a neuron firing to two different basketball players, a neuron firing to Luke Skywalker and Yoda, both characters of Star Wars, and another firing to a spider and a snake (but not to other animals) (Quiroga & Kreiman, 2010a). Quian Quiroga et al. (2010b, p. 298) had the following observation on these findings: “…. one could still argue that since the pictures the neurons fired to are related, they could be considered the same concept, in a high level abstract space: ‘the basketball players,’ ‘the landmarks,’ ‘the Jedi of Star Wars,’ and so on.”

If these are category cells, there is obviously the question what other objects are included in the category. But, it’s clear that the cells have meaning although it might include other items.

References:

  1. Quian Quiroga, R. & Kreiman, G. (2010a). Measuring sparseness in the brain: Comment on Bowers (2009). Psychological Review, 117, 1, 291–297.
  2. Quian Quiroga, R. & Kreiman, G. (2010b). Postscript: About Grandmother Cells and Jennifer Aniston Neurons. Psychological Review, 117, 1, 297–299.

5. McClelland – “In the context of these observations, the Cerf experiment considered by Roy may not be as impressive. A neuron can respond to one of four different things without really having a meaning and interpretation equivalent to any one of these items.”

The Cerf experiment is not impressive? What McClelland is really questioning is the existence of highly selective cells in the brains of humans and animals and the meaning and interpretation associated with those cells. This obviously has a broader implication and raises questions about a whole range of neurophysiological studies and their findings. For example, are the “nest cells” of Lin et al. (2007) really category cells sending signals to the mouse brain that there is a nest nearby? Or should one really believe that Freedman and Miller (2008) found category cells in the monkey visual temporal cortex that identify certain categories of stimuli such as faces or objects? Or should one believe that Gothard et al. (2007) found category cells in the amygdala of monkeys that responded selectively to images of monkey faces, human faces and objects as they viewed them on a computer monitor? And how about that one neuron that Gothard et al. (2007) found that responded in particular to threatening monkey faces? And does this question about the meaning and interpretation of highly selective cells also apply to simple and complex receptive fields in the retina ganglion and the primary visual cortex? Note that a Nobel Prize has already been awarded for the discovery of these highly selective cells.

The evidence for the existence of highly selective cells in the brains of humans and animals is substantive and irrefutable although one can theoretically ask “what else does it respond to?” Note that McClelland’s question contradicts his own view that there could exist place cells, which are highly selective cells.

6. McClelland – “While we sometimes (Kumeran & McClelland, 2012 as in McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981) use localist units in our simulation models, it is not the neurons, but their interconnections with other neurons, that gives them meaning and interpretation….Again we come back to the patterns of interconnections as the seat of knowledge, the basis on which one or more neurons in the brain can have meaning and interpretation.”

“one or more neurons in the brain can have meaning and interpretation” – that sounds like localist representation, but obviously that’s not what is meant. Anyway, there’s no denying that there is knowledge embedded in the connections between the neurons, but that knowledge is integrated by the neurons to create additional knowledge. So the neurons have additional knowledge that does not exist in the connections. And single cell studies are focused on discovering the integrated knowledge that exists only in the neurons themselves. For example, the receptive field cells in the sensory processing systems and the hippocampal place cells show that some cells detect direction of motion, some code for color, some detect orientation of a line and some detect a particular location in an environment. And there are cells that code for certain categories of objects. That kind of knowledge is not easily available in the connections. In general, consolidated knowledge exists within the cells and that’s where the general focus has been of single cell studies.

7. Plaut – “Asim’s main argument is that what makes a neural representation localist is that the activation of a single neuron has meaning and interpretation on a stand-alone basis. This is about how scientists interpret neural activity. It differs from the standard argument on neural representation, which is about how the system actually works, not whether we as scientists can make sense of a single neuron. These are two separate questions.”

Doesn’t “how the system actually works” depend on our making “sense of a single neuron?” The representation theory has always been centered around single neurons, whether they have meaning on a stand-alone basis or not. So how does making “sense of a single neuron” become a separate question now? And how are these two separate questions addressed in the literature?

8. Plaut – “My problem is that his claim is a bit vacuous because he’s never very clear about what a coherent ‘meaning and interpretation’ has to be like…. but never lays out the constraints that this is meaning and interpretation, and this isn’t. Since we haven’t figured it out yet, what constitutes evidence against the claim? There’s no way to prove him wrong.”

In the article, I used the standard definition from cognitive science for localist units, which is a simple one, that localist units have meaning and interpretation. There is no need to invent a new definition for localist representation. The standard definition is very acceptable, accepted by the cognitive science community and I draw attention to that in the article with verbatim quotes from Plate, Thorpe and Elman. Here they are again.

  • Plate (2002):“Another equivalent property is that in a distributed representation one cannot interpret the meaning of activity on a single neuron in isolation: the meaning of activity on any particular neuron is dependent on the activity in other neurons (Thorpe 1995).”
  • Thorpe (1995, p. 550): “With a local representation, activity in individual units can be interpreted directly … with distributed coding individual units cannot be interpreted without knowing the state of other units in the network.”
  • Elman (1995, p. 210): “These representations are distributed, which typically has the consequence that interpretable information cannot be obtained by examining activity of single hidden units.”

The terms “meaning” and “interpretation” are not bounded in any way other than that by means of the alternative representation scheme where “meaning” of a unit is dependent on other units. That’s how it’s constrained in the standard definition and that’s been there for a long time.

Neither Plaut nor McClelland have questioned the fact that receptive fields in the sensory processing systems have meaning and interpretation. Hubel and Wiesel won the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1981 for breaking this “secret code” of the brain. Here’s part of the Nobel Prize citation:

“Thus, they have been able to show how the various components of the retinal image are read out and interpreted by the cortical cells in respect to contrast, linear patterns and movement of the picture over the retina. The cells are arranged in columns, and the analysis takes place in a strictly ordered sequence from one nerve cell to another and every nerve cell is responsible for one particular detail in the picture pattern.”

Neither Plaut nor McClelland have questioned the fact that place cells have meaning and interpretation. McClelland, in fact, accepts the fact that place cells indicate locations in an environment, which means that he accepts that they have meaning and interpretation.

9. Plaut – “If you look at the hippocampal cells (the Jennifer Aniston neuron), the problem is that it’s been demonstrated that the very same cell can respond to something else that’s pretty different. For example, the same Jennifer Aniston cell responds to Lisa Kudrow, another actress on the TV show Friends with Aniston. Are we to believe that Lisa Kudrow and Jennifer Aniston are the same concept? Is this neuron a Friends TV show cell?”

Want to clarify three things here. First, localist cells are not necessarily grandmother cells. Grandmother cells are a special case of localist cells and this has been made clear in the article. For example, in the primary visual cortex, there are simple and complex cells that are tuned to visual characteristics such as orientation, color, motion and shape. They are localist cells, but not grandmother cells.

Second, the analysis in the article of the interactive activation (IA) model of McClelland and Rumelhart (1981) shows that a localist unit can respond to more than one concept in the next higher level. For example, a letter unit can respond to many word units. And the simple and complex cells in the primary visual cortex will respond to many different objects.

Third, there are indeed category cells in the brain. Response No. 2 above to McClelland’s comments cites findings in neurophysiology on category cells. So the Jennifer Aniston/Lisa Kudrow cell could very well be a category cell, much like the one that fired to spiders and snakes (but not to other animals) and the one that fired for both the Eiffel Tower and the Tower of Pisa (but not to other landmarks). But category cells have meaning and interpretation too. The Jennifer Aniston/Lisa Kudrow cell could be a Friends TV show cell, as Plaut suggested, but it still has meaning and interpretation. However, note that Koch (2011, p. 18, 19) reports finding another Jennifer Aniston MTL cell that didn’t respond to Lisa Kudrow:

“One hippocampal neuron responded only to photos of actress Jennifer Aniston but not to pictures of other blonde women or actresses; moreover, the cell fired in response to seven very different pictures of Jennifer Aniston.”

References:

  1. Koch, C. (2011). Being John Malkovich. Scientific American Mind, March/April, 18–19.

10. Plaut – “Only a few experiments show the degree of selectivity and interpretability that he’s talking about…. In some regions of the medial temporal lobe and hippocampus, there seem to be fairly highly selective responses, but the notion that cells respond to one concept that is interpretable doesn’t hold up to the data.”

There are place cells in the hippocampus that identify locations in an environment. Locations are concepts. And McClelland admits place cells represent locations. There is also plenty of evidence on the existence of category cells in the brain (see Response No. 2 above to McClelland’s comments) and categories are, of course, concepts. And simple and complex receptive fields also represent concepts such as direction of motion, line orientation, edges, shapes, color and so on. There is thus abundance of data in neurophysiology that shows that “cells respond to one concept that is interpretable” and that evidence is growing.

The existence of highly tuned and selective cells that have meaning and interpretation is now beyond doubt, given the volume of evidence from neurophysiology over the last four decades.