Seeing red

[emjay]

@emjay...

Maybe it's about time I did?

Given your interest, yah, probably.  Bit like a programmer deciding to learn about hardware and it's manufacture.  Your model will -have- to conform to the kind of system the hardware can support, or else it couldn't be representative of a human mind even if it was a comp mind.  Presumably, if comp is mind...it can be accomplished many ways, but the different manners in which it's accomplished, separate hardware, would lead to noticeable different types of systems with different ranges of ability and different limitations.  It's possible, for example, that you can model an NN or circuit that our bodies just can't build..or that even if they did, due to our anatomy, they wouldn't/couldn't work.

Okey dokes then, 75 quid about to get spent I do pick these things up little by little as I go along, like I'm doing right now with these columns, so I do know something about the brain and areas of interest as they crop up or could relate to my theories, but I've never really been interested in it from the top down... so my knowledge of the large scale anatomy of the brain is very limited. So my approach has essentially been to model these things like you say without much reference to the actual hardware, and thus work on a theory of mind that uses a generic cortical-style network, and just assume that it could handle it. But some of the things I approach from the bottom-up... like trying to theorise how emotion would be associated with the representations... might meet with better success by looking from the top-down. So hopefully this book will be very enlightening and I'll be able to see if I'm on the right track.

Btw I bought the book that goes with the nand2tetris course, and downloaded the software from it's website, but there's no coursera course on it in the near future (as the website recommends) so I might just have to rely on the book. But just letting you know I've got it, and that'll be yet another project to be working on along with all of this. But there's so much on at the moment, don't be surprised if I only do it in dribs and drabs, but I will get there