Neural Networks in Research: A top down approach.

It surprises me as I search the literature that there is so little research into Neural Networks that mimic nature, that mimic our brains. They just aren't fashionable I guess, who was it that made comments in the early days that had that effect? Marvin Minsky? Perhaps that is the reason. Then again perhaps I am looking in the wrong place!

Originally there were all those network that were nothing like a real brain, perceptrons, recurrent networks, Hopfield networks, all carefully organised, understood and solving one function, or making one decision. All these networks seem to be fully connected and perform in a logical way.

The animal brain, on the other hand is totally weird rather than logical, its not likely to be fully connected (though in truth we don't know) and it can do more than one thing. And it certainly seems to me that the mind, consciousness, thoughts, desires, the ability to recognise objects, people, danger, are an emergent property of the brain rather than things that can be found by logic and vivisection.

I have heard so many people say that we can't simulate a brain on a computer because brains are analogue not digital, (which isn't entirely true, but its not entirely true of computers either). These of course are the engineers and computer scientists. On the other hand if you talk to biologists then the problem is that computers are silicon based and not protoplasm based.

This whole thing is a bottom up approach. Attempting to solve fine details when there is a whole mountain to tackle.

Of course the real problem is that people are daunted by the mountain, so they put up the only obstacle that they are not daunted by, some detail.

It seems to me that aiming for a network that we can understand is on of the problems that is holding us back. Emergent properties can not be easily analysed, I mean we can't even define what intelligence is.

Although the working model for most of society seems to be, "whatever a computer can't do"!

The animal brain is the result of evolution, and given that we have a well established artificial evolutionary paradigm it seems to me natural to try and use artificial evolution to evolve artificial neural networks that we don't understand, and which produce *emergent behaviour* rather than compute a well defined function.


Well I think that is my rant over, back to searching the literature, and doing the programming. With any luck if I don't find much in the literature that is relevant to my topic it will be less to write up!