Tags / 19 quotes from 3 sources
#cognitive-science
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Intelligence derives from being conscious
Within contemporary cognitive science there is a blurry and awkward line between intelligence and consciousness. However, it seems clear to me that much of our intelligence derives from the fact that we are conscious. This is despite the fact that it is well known that most of…
Explaining consciousness away
This indifference to consciousness in practical AI research among those who are actually writing code and coming up with algorithms (and for whom, to be absolutely clear, I have a great deal of respect) is inherited from a long tradition in cognitive science and the philosophy…
Chess programs teach nothing about human chess
From a practical scientific perspective, the main benefit of the quest for artificial intelligence is what it will invariably teach us about the brain. But a note of caution is warranted here. As renowned cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter points out, the supercomputer…
The mind as a symbol-manipulating machine
Since Turing’s time, cognitive science has also assumed the mind to be a symbol-manipulating machine, an analogy to the abstract mathematical Turing machine. But as the example of computers that can play chess illustrates, how a computer does math and how a human does math may…
Top-down attention and the invisible gorilla
In cognitive science Kant and Nietzsche are mostly ignored and the view of the mind as representational prevails.51 The closest we might find to Kant’s idea is sometimes referred to as top-down and bottom-up processing. Top-down processing includes our expectations, our…
The global neuronal workspace
the global neuronal workspace, which was developed by cognitive scientist Bernard Baars.
Computationalism as a form of dualism
Hardly any cognitive scientists are dualists in the Cartesian sense. While the Cartesians believed that the mind represented the world, they also believed it was separate from the brain and made of nonmaterial substance. However, the idea that human thought is computational is…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
Cognition as the manipulation of symbols
The classical approach to AI encompasses a set of principles and practices used to explore the validity of cognitivism, and specifically, to investigate the hypothesis proposed by Newell and Simon. Cognition is best understood as the formal manipulation of symbolic structures.
Fodor: the mind as task-specific modules
Fortunately, cognitive brain functions are not part of a complex mush that cannot be decomposed. Many have argued that our brain is structured rather like an interconnected set of sub-computers. Some of these sub-computers seem to work independently, which is good news for Al…
Perception works independently of knowledge
“module” must be working independently of this knowledge.
The whole is more than its neurons
However, the Chinese Gym does serve as an illustration that the whole can be more than the sum of the parts. In a sub-symbolic system, the atomic units, neurons and their structured relationship to other neurons, do not individually do much at all. Only when the collection is…
The retina catches the fly on its own
as Maturana and Varela went on to show, the fly-catching behaviour is solved by the retina itself, independent of the processes going on in the rest of the frog’s brain. This experiment illustrates how certain behaviours, such as foraging for food, are realized through a tight…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
The invention of cognitive science
invention of “cognitive science,” a new discipline that attempts to go deeper into the nature of the mind than was customary in traditional empirical psychology. Cognitive science…
Mind is to brain as program is to hardware
The idea was based on a convergence of work in philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence. It seemed that we knew the answer to the question that faced us: the way the system works is that the brain is a digital computer and…
The brain as a universal Turing machine
Turing, in an important mathematical result known as Turing’s Theorem, proved that there is a Universal Turing machine that can simulate the behavior of any other Turing machine. More precisely, Turing proved that there is a Universal Turing machine, UTM, such that for any…
Recursive decomposition and human intelligence
Again, the idea of recursive decomposition seemed to give us an important clue to understanding human intelligence. Complex intelligent human tasks are recursively decomposable into simple tasks, and that is how we are so intelligent.
The computational theory of mind
The collection of ideas that I have just explained contains the tools necessary to articulate the single most influential and powerful theory of the mind in the last decades of the twentieth century. The brain is a digital computer, in all probability a Universal Turing…
The research program of cognitive science
And we now have a research project; indeed, it is the research project of cognitive science. We try to discover the programs that are implemented in the brain by designing programs for our commercial machines that will pass the Turing test, and then we ask the psychologists to…
Intentionality rather than information
Readers familiar with cognitive science will recognize that when we talk about intentionality we are discussing what in cognitive science is known as “information.” I prefer “intentionality” because “information” is systematically ambiguous between a genuinely…