Fool

Do supporters of the Hologramic theory of mind ever discuss Hopfield auto-association artificial neural networks? It always seemed to me that the prescient aspects of the Hologramic Theory Of Mind can be explained much more simply through the elegant equations Hopfield developed to model a potential mechanism whereby neurons can remember patterns. In his model, memory is distributed across neurons (delocalized), and in practice there is very graceful degradation - meaning, the pattern as a whole is not unduly disrupted by the removal of one or more neurodes that make up the representation. Anyway, I only have a passing familiarity with the 'Hologramic Theory', but it vaguely seemed like a fantastic theory, where one wasn't necessary.

Did the program attempt to describe how ESP and quantum entanglement were related, or was that assertion simply made blindly. For example, attempts have at least been made to describe how a soul (in the religious, ghost-like sense) could interact with a brain using quantum indeterminancy in calcium re-uptake at synapses. (Which I personally consider a rather weak, but strangely honest attempt at the subject.) Was any similar attempt made on this show? Or did they merely give a vague impression that one really weird aspect of the universe, could explain the appearance of another?

Thanks for the informed and rational responses. I'd like to tip my own hand now, and say that after studying fuzzy logic a bit on my own, the useful aspects are easily integrated within formal logic systems, by allowing the systems to identify intermediate values with precision. In the example above, all that is really entailed is to recognize that an apple with a bite out of it can be accurately described as 95% of an apple, and that an apple core is perhaps 10% of an apple. (Specifically, it depends on the context of what the logical representational system needs in order to define an apple. In other contexts, an apple core could be considered an apple with 10% the mass of full apple. Or in another system, an apple core could be measured as 10% likely to be classified as an apple for a given purpose. Or in another scenario, an apple core could be considered a full 'apple' if the purpose of usage is for using the apple seeds, etc.) Proponents of fuzzy logic sometimes argue that this approach misses the point. That this sort of system merely defines precise 'shades of gray' instead of accepting the world as a set of continuous values which are all subjectively interpreted. When proponents go that far, they've begun to overstep the bounds of rational classification and reason that have proved so useful over the centuries. What's worse, is they imply that we should not attempt to use our minds to classify and interpret. And some do. What's interesting about fuzzy logic to me, is that fundamentally it is a useful concept, that some people wish to attempt to use to undermine all of western logic. I am a software engineer, and find fuzzy logic a useful tool in modelling aspects of the world, especially in artificial neural networks. One of the reasons I wrote the original post, was to understand to what degree any vague challenge to something that sounds like 'A is not A' would be received by objectivists. I'm heartened to see that there was very little in the way of knee-jerk reaction. I was afraid more people would try claiming that apple cores should be considered apples. Or that any attempt to add granularity to a logic system should be met with immediate contempt, just by using the word 'fuzzy'. As a side note, 'Fuzzy Logic' is actually used much more often in Asian engineering, where it is called something that sounds much more like 'Adaptive Logic'. "Fuzzy" sounds derogatory and inferior, when in reality, arguably, fuzzy logic is an attempt to model the world much more precisely than more traditional logic approaches.

First, a quick primer on 'Fuzzy Logic' Lets say you have an apple. It is what it is ('A' is 'A'). Now take a bite out of it. Is it still an apple? Yes. Now continue eating it until it there is nothing left but the core. is it still an apple? No, its just a core. So here is the crux of how 'Fuzzy Logic' differs from traditional western logic. In traditional logic, the apple began as 'A', and at the end became 'not A'. Some indeterminable bite of the apple made it pass precipitously from one absolute, to another. In 'Fuzzy Logic' the statement 'this object is an apple' would have a degree of truth to it, as opposed to a binary truth value. In practice, this means that as each bite is taken out of the apple, the truth value is a continuous variable. Proponents of Fuzzy Logic cast it as a challenge to western logic. They point out that while traditional formal logic systems declare, at an axiomatic level, that the essence of contradition is to say "A and not A". Whereas in fuzzy logic, a value can in essence, be both true and not true. In the example above, once you've eaten roughly half the apple, it is, by degrees, both true and not true that the object is an apple. For those familiar with logic formalism, it defies the law of the 'excluded middle', in a rather seductive way. And so, I was curious what the objectivist position on Fuzzy Logic might be.