A Review of Peter Robin Hiesinger’s Self-Assembling Brain by Robert Thibadeau on medium.com
This is a very intertesting take on The Self-Assembling Brain by a senior expert on natural language processing. Robert Thibadeau trained with Roger Schank, is an emeritus of Carnegie Mellon University, and writes and teaches about cognitive science, AI, machine learning, and is one of the founding Directors of the Robotics Institute. The full review and links to his work can be found here. Only the beginning is copied below:
Stew. Stew is great stuff. You throw in things like this food and that food for thought and cook them up. Stew. But some people make better stew than others. Robin Hiesinger, a German Chef, makes great stew.
But it is missing something, as a French Chef might sniff out!
The stew he is trying to make is a brain. Lots of people are trying to make brains, but his book is special. His focus is on how you grow a brain out of things as primitive as DNA. He’s in the business of Developmental Computational Cognitive Neuroscience.
Here is his really educational and tasty stew on the Self-Assembling Brain:
The Self-Assembling Brain: How Neural Networks Grow Smarter — Kindle edition by Hiesinger, Peter Robin. Download it…
He assemblies together four types of self-assembling foods to throw into his bubbling cauldron. They have names, and personalities, and wonderfully engage in ten dialogues and seminars about what each other know about growing a brain, thrown into his beautiful stew. They are Alfred (The Neuroscientist), Aki (The Robotics Engineer), Minda (The Developmental Geneticist) and Pramesh (The Artificial Intelligence Researcher.)
He needs another Seminar, perhaps an 11th , and one more kibbitzer for all the seminars, call her Naomi (a Cognitive Scientist) to complete his book.
Sadly, but truthfully, we yet don’t know how a brain self-assembles itself, and we do not know how one grows or how to build one.
Like many other neuroscientists, he thinks a fly’s brain is certainly as interesting as any human brain. See his really cool research lab at www.flygen.org. He is right, until you get to uniquely human brains.
But we have learned a lot without that inclusion, and there are the makings of a fine scientific stew here.
Hiesinger’s book is a major contribution on the common themes that have arisen among the many disciplines on how the brain self-assemblies itself.