How does a child understand the impossibility of separating linked rings?
Neither ancient forms of spatial reasoning, used by mathematicians and engineers
centuries before Euclid, nor spatial abilities of intelligent species such as
squirrels, crows, elephants, pre-verbal humans, and newly hatched creatures,
like the young avocets in this video clip from a BBC Springwatch programme:
https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/movies/avocets/avocet-hatchlings.mp4
can be explained by currently fashionable neural net theories, since neural nets
cannot be trained inside eggs, and they cannot represent, let alone prove,
spatial impossibility or necessity.
As Immanuel Kant pointed out in 1781, necessity and impossibility are not very high and very low probabilities. Recently developed logic-based formal reasoning mechanisms can't explain abilities of ancient humans, pre-verbal toddlers, and other intelligent species. The only remaining possibility seems to be that hitherto unnoticed chemistry-based mechanisms, required for biological assembly, also underpin these complex, species-specific, forms of intelligence. Different hatchlings, such as baby alligators or turtles, have very different physical forms and very different capabilities.
What chemical processes in eggs can determine both complex physical forms (including intricate internal physiology) and also complex physical behaviours, unmatched by current robots?
Production, within each individual, of bones, tendons, muscles, glands, nerve fibres, skin, hair, scales, or feathers, and also intricate networks of blood vessels, nerve-fibres and other physiological structures, are clearly chemistry-based, and far more complex than chemistry based behaviours of shape changing organisms, such as slime molds.
The combination of complexity, compactness, energy-efficiency, and speed of production of assembly processes in an egg are unmatched by human designed assembly-lines.
Early stages of gene expression are well understood, but not the later processes, including processes in eggs that produce species-specific forms of intelligence in newly hatched individuals. How are these extraordinarily complex assembly processes controlled?
I'll suggest that those control processes use virtual machines with hitherto unknown, non-space occupying mechanisms, whose construction needs to be boot-strapped via multi-layered assembly processes that are far more complex than anything achieved in human designed assembly plants, though the processes in eggs use far less matter and energy in their operation.
Developing adequate explanatory theories will need new forms of multi-disciplinary collaboration, with profound implications for theories of brain function. Currently popular theories based on neural nets that collect statistics and derive probabilities cannot explain ancient mathematical discoveries involving possibility, necessity and impossibility. Necessity and impossibility are not points on probability scales (as Immanuel Kant understood.)
The construction mechanisms in eggs must be primarily chemistry-based, since neurons develop relatively late. We need an entirely new form of brain science giving far more credit to chemical processes whose computational powers exceed those of both digital computers and neural nets. Is that why Alan Turing was exploring chemistry-based morphogenesis shortly before he died? (There is an obscure hint in his Mind 1950 paper.)
Perhaps Turing would have approved of the new approaches being developed by
Michael Levin, to be reported in his response to my talk.
Note:
A messy, incomplete extended collection of notes in preparation for this talk is
available online here:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/sloman-morcom.html