John T. Langton : philosophy : research statement
In contemplating the nature of cognition, I have formed two tenets:
1. any intelligent system most likely evolves its cognition from
some fundamental axioms, and 2. the logical place to
look for these axioms is in a biological substrate, since that is
currently the only place we perceive intelligence. My research interests
therefore center on an investigation of the computational properties of
biological systems.
I'm very interested in the information theory behind membrane
potential in neural systems and knowledge representation in dynamical
systems. I believe one of the major hurdles for artificial intelligence
has been digitally representing the continuous and complex systems of a
biological substrate. The common approach is to model natural systems
and try to exploit that model's computational power, however I would
like to take the approach of directly exploiting the computational power
of organic materials. A slightly less common approach is to imbue the
organic materials with digital computation, such as forming logic gates
out of DNA molecules in bacteria. While very interesting, I think
computation already exists in the organic materials and am interested in
unlocking it, not making it conform to our computational theory. For example,
as I understand it (not being a neuroscientist),
some neural systems operate in a continuous firing pattern where
"equilibrium" is achieved in a cycle of network activity. Our binary
systems, however, operate via on/off activity. Perhaps there's a
fundamental way to rethink VLSI.