Tags / 26 quotes from 10 sources
#representation
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Infinitely many ways to represent numbers
Our concept of the number three can be represented as “3” in base ten, but as “0011” in binary. It is the same idea as using the word “three,” three fingers, or “III” to represent the concept of three. We likely use base ten to count because we have ten fingers and it naturally…
Condemned to treat representations as the world
“Many people would accept that we do not really have knowledge of the world; we have knowledge only of our representations of the world. Yet we seem condemned by our constitution to treat these representations as if they were the world, for our everyday experience feels as if…
What if the brain doesn't represent the world?
Modern neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence often implicitly assume that our senses determine the contents of our conscious experience. The assumption is that the brain is primarily reflexive and simply exists to respond to the environment. The task of AI is to…
The plasticity principle
even if our own private experiences are purely creations of our brains. To paraphrase the late neurobiologist (and Buddhist) Francisco Varela, we are condemned to treat the representations we experience as though they were the world. Will artificial agents that we create also…
Cidoc-crm Version 4.2.4 - Reference Document
Kr primitive
The term primitive as used in knowledge representation characterizes a concept that is declared and its meaning is agreed upon, but that is not defined by a logical deduction from other concepts
Designing A Url Structure For Bbc Programmes | Smethurst
Restful urls
In keeping with the principle of universal access to information, /programmes was designed to be RESTful. Not RESTful as in a RESTful API and some other separate website thing somewhere else. But RESTful as in some resources and some representations where one of those…
How Books Will Become Machines
Cultural tool vs cultural machine
As machines, they offer much more possibilities than traditional ones. However, these various new modes of usage are explicitly programmed. A paper map can be used freely, including for other purposes than its original function (wrapping an object, taking a note). It is a…
What is a regulated representation
A representation is a man-made material document that stands for something else, typically a complex, highly dimensional event or phenomenon. Example: A picture of a scene, a sculpture of a Greek hero, a theater play, a novel. To avoid any misunderstanding we shall make clear…
Simondon and the concretization of technical objects
In the Evolution of Technology, George Basalla gives a rather complete account of these various frameworks. Part of our study is influenced by the work of the French philosopher George Simodon. In Du Mode d’Existence des Objets techniques, Simondon articulates the role of the…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
Distributed representations
The kinds of information processing performed by neural networks can differ fundamentally in nature from those found in symbolic systems. Representations are often distributed in the same way that processing can be distributed. A distributed representation is spread out across…
Artificial neurons rarely represent anything alone
Of course, neural networks themselves are built up from atomic units – artificial neurons – but these units are rarely used by the designer to represent anything in themselves.
A property spread across many neurons
So, in a distributed representation, a single neuron is unlikely to be responsible for representing the number of legs of our candidate animal. Instead, the number of legs would be represented by a complex pattern of activity over a wide number of neurons. Some of these neurons…
You can't point at a distributed representation
As a general rule, you can’t locate specific items of information by pointing your finger at part of a distributed representation in the same way that you can with a local representation.
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…
A frog's eye is not a camera
Importantly, the frog will persist with this behaviour. It will never adapt its behaviour in light of the unsuccessful attempts to capture the fly. The moral of the story is that a frog’s eye does not act as a camera supplying information to the frog’s planning module, which…
The world is its own best model
Situatedness refers to an agent being located in a complex environment, rather than a highly abstracted micro-world. The complexities of real environments are taken to be fundamentally different from those of the abstracted “micro-worlds”. Indeed, being situated permits the…
Making Uris Dereferenceable | Ontogenealogy
How URIs identifying information and non-information resources are dereferenced
URI Dereferencing is the process of looking up a URI on the Web in order to get information about the referenced resource. The W3C’s Dereferencing HTTP URIs distinguished between how URIs identifying information and non-information resources are dereferenced: Information…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Intrinsic versus derived intentionality
Where the mind is concerned we also need a distinction between original or intrinsic intentionality on the one hand and derived intentionality on the other. For example I have in my head information about how to get to San Jose. I have a set of true beliefs about the way to San…
We perceive only the contents of our minds
It is important to understand that on Descartes’ view we do not directly perceive objects and states of affairs in the world. What we directly perceive, that is, perceive without any inferential processes, are the contents of our own minds. So if I hold up my hand in front of…
The representative theory of perception
How do I know that the representation really represents, or represents accurately? Descartes’ view was common in the seventeenth century. It is called the “representative theory of perception,”
Psychological mode, content and aspectual shape
Because intentional states are capable of referring to objects and states of affairs in the world beyond themselves, they must have some sort of content that determines this reference, and indeed we need to distinguish the content of the state from the type of state that it is…
Conditions of satisfaction
Whenever we have an intentional state that has a non-null direction of fit, the fit will either be achieved or not: the belief will be true, the desire will be fulfilled, the intention will be carried out or not, as the case might be. In such cases, we can say that the belief…
Intentionality is representation of conditions of satisfaction
I have given a very brief sketch of the formal structure of intentionality. We can summarize it as follows. For any intentional state, there is a distinction between the type of state it is, and its content. Where the content is a whole proposition, it will represent states of…
Rdf Primer
The graph matters, not the notation
objects in RDF statements may be either URIrefs, or constant values (called literals) represented by character strings, in order to represent certain kinds of property values. Literals may not be used as subjects or predicates in RDF statements. [...] So, for example…
Thesauri Of Historical Periods – A Proposal For Standardization.
Multilingual thesauri of period names
This paper presents the development of a methodology for creating multilingual thesauri of period names based on the specifications of CIDOC, archaeological theory and results from Computer Science and Know ledge Representation.
Where Are The Semantics In The Semantic Web?
Problem of incompatible conceptualizations
Even with a uniform language, there may still be incompatible assumptions in the conceptualization. For example, in [Hayes 96] it is shown that two representations for time, one based on time intervals and another based on time points, are fundamentally incompatible. That is…