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by p1esk 1650 days ago
You don't need to write anything up. No one would care to read it (no one you'd care about). I'm guessing at least a hundred "Computational Theory of Mind" papers get published every year. Build a demo of what your system is capable of - ideally it should be a task current deep learning models have trouble with. If it works and is in fact novel, people will notice, and maybe even want to play with it. Only then, if you ever get to that stage, it might become bigger than one person.
1 comments

Thanks for responding, to clarify:

It's a conceptual model and the abstraction is a computational system - as opposed to the current trend of Integrated Information Theory (IIT). Writing up seems to be the means to demonstrate for the time being. If I've misinterpreted please do correct me.

  - IIT is exotic and complicated. Simply reducing the bounds of any problem IIT might be needed to explain may help. I'm absolutely suggesting a more conventional and therefore accessible logical abstraction can explain much of what we see.
  - Perhaps analogous to 'you don't need blockchain or machine learning for that problem!'
The phrase 'bigger than one person' is also ambiguous - I simply meant in the volume of work required to demonstrate the scope of significance. Perhaps more specifically:

  - How might an independent researcher find collaborators with related tangential special interests or experience?
I appreciate I may have said more than you're interested in, but thanks for the opportunity to respond.
I am an AI researcher who's interested in how a brain works. Do I want to be your collaborator? No. Why not? For the reasons I stated above. Even if you had a working demo, it's not very likely it would capture my interest - unless it was doing something truly mind-blowing. I've seen a few demos over the years (OpenCOG, Spaun, Numenta's NUPIC, etc) - not impressed so far. And you haven't even bothered to build a demo.

Even if you describe something that's better than IIT, no one would really care, because no one really cares about IIT either. It does not provide any useful or particularly interesting insight into how a brain works. It's a philosophical theory, and I want to see something a lot more practical.