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Computational Models for Neuroscience: Human Cortical Information Processing

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Chapter 4 of this book is the pot of gold: A concrete, detailed description of how the cerebral cortex works. Thinking relies upon an operation which could be called confabulation (in the chapter it is called concensus building). THIS IS NOT REASONING (at least in any classical sense). Yet, because the simple kind of knowledge used (antecedent support probabilities) is exhaustive, concensus building yields excellent conclusions. This cortical theory also shows why AI has failed: reasoning is too difficult and requires too much knowledge of an expensive type. Cortex gets by with a much simpler type of knowledge (which only concerns pairs of object and action attributes, not n-tuples) which, while it is needed in huge quantities, is easy to obtain. An implication of this corticl theory is that we can now proceed to develop successful AI by adopting this cortical design. The theory is illustrated by means of computer thinking experiments that yield compelling results (and which readers can replicate).