Message from Dean - May 8th 2007
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 128.2
EAN: 9780262524575
Edition: 1
ISBN: 0262524570
Label: The MIT Press
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 492
Publication Date: March 01, 2006
Publisher: The MIT Press
Studio: The MIT Press
Alternate Versions: Click to Display
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
In What Is Thought? Eric Baum proposes a computational explanation of thought. Just as Erwin Schrodinger in his classic 1944 work What Is Life? argued ten years before the discovery of DNA that life must be explainable at a fundamental level by physics and chemistry, Baum contends that the present-day inability of computer science to explain thought and meaning is no reason to doubt there can be such an explanation. Baum argues that the complexity of mind is the outcome of evolution, which has built thought processes that act unlike the standard algorithms of computer science and that to understand the mind we need to understand these thought processes and the evolutionary process that produced them in computational terms.
Baum proposes that underlying mind is a complex but compact program that corresponds to the underlying structure of the world. He argues further that the mind is essentially programmed by DNA. We learn more rapidly than computer scientists have so far been able to explain because the DNA code has programmed the mind to deal only with meaningful possibilities. Thus the mind understands by exploiting semantics, or meaning, for the purposes of computation; constraints are built in so that although there are myriad possibilities, only a few make sense. Evolution discovered corresponding subroutines or shortcuts to speed up its processes and to construct creatures whose survival depends on making the right choice quickly. Baum argues that the structure and nature of thought, meaning, sensation, and consciousness therefore arise naturally from the evolution of programs that exploit the compact structure of the world.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I'm really interested in machine learning and artificial intelligence, but the author's outright assumption that he is going to do for thought what Schrödinger's did for DNA (before its discover) is pretty arrogant. I don't know what it is (perhaps using mind as a proper noun inconsistently), but halfway through the book I couldn't take it anymore and ditched it in favor for Hawkins' "On Intelligence". Life is too short.
Rating:  -
In many respects Baum's book is orthodox cognitive science: "the
discussion in this book follows what I perceive to be folk wisdom
among computer scientists interested in cognition." (page 2) In
fact, it is probably the best such text that I've read in years.
I highly recommend this book to anyone studying cognitive systems.
Baum basically agrees with Werbos' definition of an intelligence:
"a system to handle all of the calculations from crude inputs
through to overt actions in an adaptive way so as to maximize
some measure of performance over time" (P. J. Werbos, IEEE Trans.
Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 1987, pg 7). Or, in Baum's words:
"I am proposing to think about creatures...that are given a reward
function...learning and computing algorithms...The creatures then
apply these algorithms to maximize reward during life." (page 396)
Of course programs that do exactly that have been around for a long ... Read More
Rating: -
Baum's book is always stimulating and in some ways admirable, especially in its instance that there is nothing magical in the brain. But he's wrong in several crucial ways, the same ways that Pinker get's wrong (for example, in "The Slate's Last Stand").
1. Despite his neural network background, Baum fatally underestimates the power of unsupervised learning. While he's right that complex networks cannot be explicitly trained without astronomically numerous examples, it's now clear that unsupervised learning (where the number of examples is quite literally astronomical) combined with the rather regular (albeit complex) structure of the world, can do most of the heavy lifting, with supervision filling in details. Explaining unsupervised learning to a lay audience is not easy (I know of no successful attempts) but cannot be shirked.
2. Because of his background, Baum fatally overestimates the power of Darwinian evolution. For example, he completely omits the Eigen error threshold ... Read More
Rating: -
The main thesis of this book, asserted repetitively, is that the mind is a computer program. Once this is borne in mind, pardon the alliteration, most of the book is reduced to an argument in its favour, rather than an investigation into its credibility. The book often reaches for blunt assertions to support its positions and only afterwards begins a slight retracing of steps. For example, we are told that inductive bias and learning algorithms are coded into the genome. It is obvious, bit of speculation on DNA, evolution and algorithms and out comes the result!
In his observance of Occam's Razor, the author confuses the appeal of the simplest explanatory hypothesis with the belief that he has found such. The discussion of neural networks leaves aside recurrent networks, which are probably more biologically plausible than competitors.
Likewise the idea that the brain essentially 'runs' compressed programs due to evolutionary endowments is unconvincing and philosophically ... Read More
Rating: -
In the introduction to this handsomely bound book, the author suggests that it is an appropriate time for an explanation of how the dynamics of a human brain can be accounted for by computer science. His title is motivated by Erwin Schrödinger's enormously influential "What is life?" which launched the field of evolutionary biology by inducing both Francis Crick and James Watson to successfully seek the molecular basis of biological evolution, but the analogy is strained for several reasons.
Schrödinger's book is less than 100 pages in a current edition, while Baum's is about five times as long. In the context of Schrödinger's lifelong interest in biological problems and based on a series of three public lectures that he presented to the Irish intelligentsia in 1943 (as one of his statutory duties as the founding director of the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies), "What is Life?" is a classic example of his exceptional expository skill---in a second language, no less---whereas Baum's ... Read More
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