I like to test ideas in class. The pandemonium model has stood the test of time and provides insight into how the student brain deals with all the novelty in a course. It also provides me with a simple way of improving information for student consumption. I especially like the "automatic" view of the brain that removes the concept of IQ; this allows me to believe that all students to learn anything (given enough time, reinforcement, motivation for the topic).
Pandemonium Architecture is an early connectionist AI technique proposed by Oliver Selfridge in 1959, noted for its success in modelling human pattern recognition.More reading on the Pandemonium model:
In a pandemonium architecture proposed for an AI brain, multiple competing theories are developed and the best is integrated in the brain's consciousness.
- Introduction to Pandemonium theory.
- The short sighted falacy that we observe ourselves. Homunculus argument - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
- Full of ideas: JOLT - Journal of Online Learning and Teaching
- pandemonium model - Buscar con Google
Some related material:
- Neural network simulator page 14+ are interesting for IF statements . Page 19 opposes the OR AND operators. http://epsych.msstate.edu/biological/NeuralNetworks/Part1/index.html
- AND NAND OR NOR XOR XNOR practice with truth tables Part 2 page 10: Artificial Neural Networks
- part 3 page 13: “So every time we make an error, the weights are changed slightly in a way to reduce the error.”http://epsych.msstate.edu/biological/NeuralNetworks/Part3/index.html
- Adaptive Mind Contents
- Example: Using the familiar (Pop can tabs) to teach multiple topics thwww.rmhclittlerock.org/pdf/educational packet.pdf
Book Review – Consciousness Explained written by Daniel C. Dennett – The story of how consciousness’ magic fades away
Prepare for the destruction of the myth of consciousness’ plenum.
It is not that we speak the words, think the thoughts, but that the words speak us, the thoughts think us. What we call “us” is an abstraction just like the center of gravity is to a physical object, a narration that looks as if it is spoken by someone (The Immaterial Meaner, The Immaterial Thinker), but in reality it speaks itself through the fight, turmoil, pandemonium between the coalitions of neurons that make our brains.
What you’ll find out by reading the book will be, among other things, that there is no difference between feeling something, be it emotion (anger, love), sensation (feeling cold, warm), and thinking. In reality we can safely say that all cognitive processes result in some form of thinking. It’s all about thinking. The color red is a thought, the feeling of love is a thought, the emotion of anger is a thought just like adding 2+2 in your head is a thought. The only difference between them is their idiosyncratic functional implementation which transforms these neuronal arrangements into the unique tools useful for carrying their bodies around the “possible to predict” environment in which they will carry their lives.
It is not that we speak the words, think the thoughts, but that the words speak us, the thoughts think us. What we call “us” is an abstraction just like the center of gravity is to a physical object, a narration that looks as if it is spoken by someone (The Immaterial Meaner, The Immaterial Thinker), but in realityit speaks itself through the fight, turmoil, pandemonium between the coalitions of neurons that make our brains.
...in reality the “ordered coherent acts” are not so ordered and coherent on close inspection after all. They’re the result of the pandemonium, the turmoil, the fight of neuronal structures in the brain for the “fame in the brain“, result which has the more than average chance that it will yield the behavior necessary for the survival of the conscious observer.
Consciousness is the state of the brain, that is, the competition or “political fame” between content fixation mechanisms (daemons or neuronal structures) or more exactly between alliances of these neural structures. This is consciousness. The pandemonium! The turmoil! The fight for control! The act of those structures fighting with each other, over and over again, that is what it means for a person to be conscious.
In Chapter 6 Dan tries to explain how the representation of time in the brain is achieved. What matters, as Dan put it, is not the time when specific individual content fixations happen in the brain, but their temporal information. For a mind to consciously experience that event “A happened before event B“, there’s no need to fix the content A somewhere in the brain before fixing the content B; you just need to fix the content (conclusion) that “A happened before B“, again, not for the perusal of someone in the brain, but for the usage of behavior generating structures that might need that information in the future .
When words get out of our mouth they do so because they’re the result of the fight for control of certain neural structures in the brain (daemons), not because there’s a Central Commander that issues the utterances. The words speak themselves building a Theorist’s Fiction, a Center of Narrative Gravity that is meant to be us. Meant by who? By no one. They just happen to be the result of millions of years of evolution. How is this result achieved? With the help of the pandemonium model that yields, with a greater than average chance, coherent, logical, purposeful utterances to others and most importantly to oneself.
...when we admire a great painting, or when we watch people walking on the street, the brain doesn’t have to represent that detail in some part of itself. No, the detail remains in the world, while the brain is only endowed with pattern recognition mechanisms that make sense of the details of the world. It’s only “as if” that detail is in your brain, but that is just an illusion, albeit a very persuasive one.
...the book is packed with tons of great ideas that can twist your mind forever.
Consciousness Explained - How Conciousness' magic fades away | Science and Technology Explained
