Doug,

The central executive was proposed by the neuroscientists Baddeley & Hitch, not by AI researchers.  There is nothing "machine-like" in the idea, by itself.   Without something like it, there is no way to explain how a huge tangle of neurons could act together and coordinate their efforts to support a common effort.

It reminds me of a neighboring town (to my residence in Croton on Hudson, NY), which was doing some major developments without hiring a general contractor.  They thought that their local town employees could schedule all the processes.  It turned out to be a total disaster.  All the subcontractors did their tasks in a random order, each one interfering with some of the others, and causing a major mess.  There were lawsuits back and forth, and the town management was found  guilty and had losses that were many times greater than the cost of hiring a general contractor.

It is certainly true that there is a huge amount of computation going on in the brain that is below conscious awareness.  Most of that is done by the cerebellum (little brain), which is physically much smaller than the cerebral cortex.  But it contains over four times the number of neurons.  In effect, the cerebellum behaves like a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) which is a superfast, highly specialized processor for all the perception and action that takes place without conscious awareness. 

For example, when you're walking down the street talking on your cell phone, the cerebellum is monitoring your vision, muscles, and strides -- until you step off the curb and get run over by a bus. That's why you need a central controller to monitor and coordinate all the processes.

Sharks and dolphins are about the same size and they eat the same kind of prey.  Sharks have a huge cerebellum and a small lump for a cerebellum.   Dolphins have a huge cerebral cortex and a huge cerebellum.  They are as agile as sharks, but they can plan, communicate, and coordinate their activities.  When the food is plentiful, they can both eat their fill.  But when it's scarce, the dolphins are much more successful.

Please look at the citations in my previous note and the attached Section7.pdf.   The cycle of abduction, induction, testing, and induction depends on a central executive that is responsible for planning, coordinating, and integrating those steps of conscious feeling, thinking, reasoning, and acting.   With a central executive, an AI system would be more intelligent.  But much, much more R & D would be required before anything could be called "Artificial General Intelligence"  (AGI).  That's why I have very little faith in anything called AGI.

John

On Wed, April 10, 2024 14:07, John F Sowa wrote:

> In today's ZOOM meeting, I objected to the term 'neuro-symbolic hybrid' of

> artificial neural networks (ANNs) with symbols. Hybrids simply relate two

> (sometimes more) distinctly different things. But all the processes in

> the mind and brain are integrated, and they all operate continuously in

> different parts of the brain, which are all monitored and controlled by a

> central executive. ...

This seems to me to be modeling the body as a machine and not an accurate

description.

There are a wide variety of processes in the mind and brain -- many

processes in the brain occur independently without being integrated either

with each other or with the mind. I am excluding standard cellular level

processes that go on in every cell and the processes of the circulatory

system in the brain. Every neuron regularly chemically interacts with

adjacent neurons & passes electrical signals along its surface.

As far as i understand, much that goes on in the brain we are unaware of,

neurohormone production, for example. Sensory input processing does not

seem to be integrated with a number of other processes. I have seen no

evidence of a central executive in the brain that monitors and controls

all the other processes. I'm not sure how such a central executive could

have evolved.