🚀 go-pugleaf

> Now, lets say we can implement a state machine (software) which can do
> these table look ups (perhaps the table is associative to enable
> "guesses").

That's correct, I think... these are associative memories we are talking
about (as someone else pointed out)...

> But how are states arranged spatially in a nice way?  Guessing does
> not work, because the flies will not survive long enough to "evolve"
> the correct spatial orientation of states.  In humans, (as was
> mentioned in the article I am responding to), "attributes" are used,
> although they may be obscure.  Any ideas?

That is something I have wondered a lot about.  I asked a cognitive
psychologist (who is in fact somewhere on the Usenet, but probably not
reading net.arch) about this, because I was wondering whether people come
"preconfigured" with something that causes the initial inputs they
receive to get stored in a spatially satisfactory manner -- i.e., in a
way such that different categories are spread uniformly through the state
space rather than being lumped together in one place, where adjacent
memories would tend to interact and confuse one another.  I don't think
the person I asked ever answered the question exactly, though, other than
to mention that the first few categories people are exposed to do seem to
have an influence on the way that they categorize other later things.

I presently tend to suspect (but haven't yet reached any real opinion)
that possibly in humans there is a hierarchical arrangement of information
storage, such that some "top-level" set of remembered states (maybe some
way of looking at an input and categorizing it based on some salient
attributes) is used to determine how to encode the things about the input
that will be remembered.  For example, I have a tendency not to be able to
remember people in terms of what they look like; I've decided that this is
because the set of things I tend to automatically remember about a person
when I first see them are not particularly good distinguishing features
(the color of their hair, how tall they are, etc; for some reason I never
remember whether or not a person has a beard, for example) -- I
hypothesize that this is because when I see "A Person", the way I encode
their attributes is in terms of hair color and height.  Probably, I
suspect, there would also be nonobvious pieces of information involved
about how to encode this information -- for example, the set of distinct
hair colors, a set of height-classifiers ("As tall as Alf"*, "real tall,"
"kind of tall," "about average," "short," "as short as Sarah"*, <heights
based on ages of children>), etc. -- which might also be managed by this
top-level information-encoding (categorizing) system.

Obviously, that is only a guess.

---------
* Notice how the two items marked by stars -- which I noticed yesterday
  seem to be real attributes I apply to people -- suggest that the categories
  are *not* predefined, since obviously "Alf" and "Sarah" mean something
  different to you than to me.  However, the names might actually be just
  convenient tags stuck on the predefined categories by association. At
  present I tend to doubt this, however.  (The names have been changed
  to protect the category-representatives.)
-- 
E. Roskos

Eat your orts!