🚀 go-pugleaf

    WJ Freeman: FRAMING IS A DYNAMIC PROCESS
		Commentary on Ford & Hayes on the Frame Problem

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
psycoloquy.92.3.62.frame-problem.3.freeman     Monday, November 2, 1992
ISSN 1055-0143                   (4 paragraphs, 5 references, 87 lines)
PSYCOLOQUY is sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA)
                Copyright 1992 Walter J. Freeman

		FRAMING IS A DYNAMIC PROCESS
        Commentary on Ford & Hayes on the Frame Problem

		Walter J. Freeman
		MCB LSA 129
		Division of Neurobiology
		University of California
		Berkeley CA 94720
                wfreeman@garnet.berkeley.edu

1.0  Hayes (1992) begins his PSYCOLOQUY summary of Ford & Hayes (1991)
with an appeal to the ratiocinative capacity of a child, in part as an
existence proof, and in part as an emulative goal or criterion of
success (yet this appeal to an example of biological intelligence does
not seem to be pursued explicitly in the topics listed in the Table of
Contents of Ford & Hayes 1991). It appears that Hayes's premises are
that the primitive reasoning of a child suffices for framing and that
the superior reasoning of a highly educated adult should do better.
But, to quote von Neumann (1958) concerning the language of the brain:
"Thus the outward forms of our mathematics are not absolutely relevant
from the point of view of evaluating what the mathematical or logical
language truly used by the central nervous system is"; and again:
"whatever the system is, it cannot fail to differ considerably from
what we consciously and explicitly consider as mathematics". In current
terminology, brains do logic poorly, and logical devices do framing
poorly.

1.1  My own experience with animal intelligence indicates that framing
is a dynamic process (Freeman 1991). Rabbits trained to discriminate
odors give evidence, during learning, that synaptic changes occur
selectively throughout the olfactory system. Recordings of electrical
activity of the bulb and cortex show that spatiotemporal patterns of
neural activity recur with each act of discrimination and that the
patterns reflect not the stimulus properties but the meanings of the
stimuli for the individual subjects. Each new conditioned stimulus or
change in a reinforcement contingency is accompanied by changes in all
the known pre-existing central activity patterns relating to odors.

1.2  From these findings it follows that centrally stored information
about the environment is not invariant -- nor could it be, in a true
associative memory, which links each new class of discriminanda with
all those that precede it. It also follows that sensory learning must be
accompanied by motor learning, and that stimulus-response invariance is
maintained by successful actions into and through the environment.

1.3  These properties and the chaotic dynamics that underlie them have
been simulated in primitive form with networks of nonlinear ordinary
differential equations, suggesting that nonlinear systems techniques
may offer a new route to understanding brain function, and, in that
way, can open new approaches to the study of artificial intelligence,
including the frame problem.

1.4  Hayes writes (paragraph 1.0): "Any child knows that the brick is
now held in the air, there is one fewer object on the ground, and
THAT'S ALL." That is not all. The child may not "know" or care that it
has a "brick" in hand or that "one fewer" remains, but it knows (see
Gibson, 1979 on affordances) that it has picked up an object to build a
play house, strike a threatening snake, break a window, or merely
please an adult who has a hypothesis it cannot comprehend. Framing is
the natural outcome of the dynamic process by which meaning is created
in the forebrain under the influence of sensory flow, past experience
embedded in synaptic change, and the immediacy of impending action and
expected reward. On the whole, this view, emerging from current
research in neuroscience would have been pleasing, I think, to Hume.

REFERENCES

Ford, K.M. and P.J. Hayes (1991) Reasoning Agents in a Dynamic World:
The Frame Problem, Greenwich: JAI Press.

Hayes, P. J. (1992) Summary of Ford & Hayes (1991). PSYCOLOQUY 3(59)
frame-problem.1.

Freeman, W. J.  (1991) The Physiology of Perception. Scientific American
264: 78-85.

Gibson, J.J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin

Von Neumann, J. (1958) The Computer and the Brain. New Haven: Yale
University Press.