Saturday, March 05, 2005

Exo-psychology by Timothy Leary

This article (http://www.futurehi.net/docs/Exopsychology.html) is making a lot of sense to me and especially to my current work in neural robotic controllers.
It is not about novelty knowledge - I just like the style of Leary.
I like the part, where the idea for a "local reality" and the accidental imprinting into the neural circuits.
So, the reality is not a global concept - it is just a matter of a "local" electromagnetic activity in result of the temporal "environmental" stimulus and accidental biochemical imprintings.
The "environmental stimulus" is used to describe the process of converting the external sensoral modalities to an electromagnetic activity with emphasis over the electromagnetic representation. The imprintings are biochemical processes of stimulus reactive forming of neural circuits in the childhood. Note that the rules for the neural shaping in response to certain environmental stimulis are defined by the individual DNA. According to this theoretical model the individual may not get out of the behavioral frame defined by these accidental biochemical imprintings.
Actually this is what we see, when evolving digital neural robotic controllers. We all talk about the amazing phenomenon of emerging behavioral patterns, which are not directly evolved or learned on-line. However these patterns are limited by the neural and sensoral structures evolved. The artificial neural plasticity during "learning" is a kind of a sientific holly grail. However the biological neural circuits demonstrates plasticity in the beginning of the individual ontology. It seems like the on-line learning capabilities of the neural circuits are rather exaggerated.
Тhe evolved neural circuits, sensoral structures and neural changes in result of imprinting form the local reality of the agent and limit the number of the behavioral patterns, which may be learned.
It may be beneficial in our searching for solution of the neural plasticity problem to take into account the imprinting phenomenon found in the biological neural circuits.