imply that computational states are not "real", and cannot, for example, provide a foundation for the cognitive sciences. In particular, Putnam has argued that every ordinary open physical system realizes every abstract finite automaton, implying that the fact that a particular computational characterization applies to a physical system does not tell one anything about the nature of that system. Putnam's argument is scrutinized, and found inadequate because, among other things, it employs a notion of causation that is too weak. I (...) argue that if one's view of computation involves embeddedness (inputs and outputs) and full causality, one can avoid the universal realizability results. Therefore, the fact that a particular system realizes a particular automaton is not a vacuous one, and is often explanatory. Furthermore, I claim that computation would not necessarily be an explanatorily vacuous notion even if it were universally realizable. (shrink)
In this paper, I investigate the nature of complex bodies, especially living things. I argue that a living thing’s complexity is fundamentally different from that of a machine, so that living things are substances, while machines are not. I further argue that the best way to understand the unity and complexity of a living thing is to follow Aquinas in holding that the elements and other parts are present in wholes by their powers, rather than as substances. I show that (...) presence by power is not refuted by the discoveries of modern physics, and that it can help us understand the relations between parts and wholes in a more universal way which includes both living and non-living things. (shrink)
Concepts are the elementary units of reason and linguistic meaning. They are conventional and relatively stable. As such, they must somehow be the result of neural activity in the brain. The questions are: Where? and How? A common philosophical position is that all concepts—even concepts about action and perception—are symbolic and abstract, and therefore must be implemented outside the brain’s sensory-motor system. We will argue against this position using (1) neuroscientific evidence; (2) results from neural computation; and (3) results about (...) the nature of concepts from cognitive linguistics. We will propose that the sensory-motor system has the right kind of structure to characterise both sensory-motor and more abstract concepts. Central to this picture are the neural theory of language and the theory of cogs, according to which, brain structures in the sensory-motor regions are exploited to characterise the so-called “abstract” concepts that constitute the meanings of grammatical constructions and general inference patterns. (shrink)
At the start of the 20th century the question of whether life could be explained in purely me- chanical terms was as hotly debated as the mind-body problem is today. Two factions opposed each other: Biological mechanists claimed that the properties characteristic of living organisms (metabolism, perception, goal-directed behavior, procreation, morphogenesis) could be ex- plained mechanistically, in the way the behavior of a clock can be explained by the properties and the arrangement of its cogs, springs, and weights. Substantial (...) vitalists, on the other hand, maintained that the explanation envisaged by the mechanists was impossible and that one had to postulate a special nonphysical substance in order to explain life. (shrink)
The best route into philosophy is not to consider a definition, but to get your own philosophical cogs turning. Consider the questions philosophers engage and think about the many different ways they've addressed them. But, most important, grapple with the questions yourself.
Could "cognitive neuroscience" be an oxymoron? "Cognitive" and "neuroscience" cohere only to the extent that the entities identified as "cognitive" can be coordinated with entities identified as neural. This coordination is typically construed as intertheoretic reduction between "levels" of scientific description. On the cognitive side, folk psychological concepts crystallize into behavioral taxonomies, which are further analyzed into purported cognitive capacities. These capacities are expressed or operationalized in paradigmatic experimental tasks. These cogs comprise a stable ontology, sustaining more than a (...) century of psychology. On the neural side, the biological hierarchy from cells to brains also affords a .. (shrink)
In her presentation at the Monte Verità workshop, Maja Mataric showed us a videotape of her robots cruising together through the lab, and remarked, aptly: "They're flocking, but that's not what they think they're doing." This is a vivid instance of a phenomenon that lies at the heart of all the research I learned about at Monte Verità: the execution of surprisingly successful "cognitive" behaviors by systems that did not explicitly represent, and did not need to explicitly represent, what they (...) were doing. How "high" in the intuitive scale of cognitive sophistication can such unwitting prowess reach? All the way, apparently, since I want to echo Maja's observation with one of my own: "These roboticists are doing philosophy, but that's not what they think they're doing." It is possible, then, even to do philosophy--that most intellectual of activities--without realizing that that is what you are doing. It is even possible to do it well, for this is a good, new way of addressing antique philosophical puzzles. (shrink)
Embedded Rationality1 Philosophers and laymen alike have traditionally assumed that whether you can reason well, make valid inferences, avoid logical mistakes and so forth is entirely a matter of how well the cogs in your head are fashioned and oiled. Partner to this is the assumption that careful reflection is always the method by which we discover whether an inference or reasoning process is correct. In particular, further experience, observation or experiment never bear on the question whether an inference (...) is valid. Validity is best checked with your eyes tightly closed so you can attend solely to the internal relations among your ideas. (shrink)
In her presentation at the Monte Verità workshop, Maja Mataric showed us a videotape of her robots cruising together through the lab, and remarked, aptly: "They're flocking, but that's not what they think they're doing." This is a vivid instance of a phenomenon that lies at the heart of all the research I learned about at Monte Verità: the execution of surprisingly successful "cognitive" behaviors by systems that did not explicitly represent, and did not need to explicitly represent, what they (...) were doing. How "high" in the intuitive scale of cognitive sophistication can such unwitting prowess reach? All the way, apparently, since I want to echo Maja's observation with one of my own: "These roboticists are doing philosophy, but that's not what they think they're doing." It is possible, then, even to do philosophy--that most intellectual of activities--without realizing that that is what you are doing. It is even possible to do it well, for this is a good, new way of addressing antique philosophical puzzles. (shrink)
1. Where is the trouble? Let us take it for granted that a person can be interested in researches that go on in different fields, for example, in physics and in psychology. Undoubtedly, this will raise problems not shared by a person whose research is confined to one field only. There may be difficulty in deciding which of the two is that person's primary field of interest; members of his secondary field of interest may be flattered or feel slighted or (...) even threatened by his intrusion into their field. Let us fully ignore all these problems and pretend that they do not exist. Nevertheless, there may be different kinds of problems, and such that are hard to overlook. For example, a researcher may study the behavior of another researcher as a secondary field of research or even, worse, as a primary one. A professor of medical education who has studied the lecturing techniques of professors in his own medical school and found them very poor, meets with an understandable hostility in his own medical school. A (structuralist) sociologist may discover that his colleagues persistently speak of their teaching chores as serious undertakings and as sheer nuisance; he will be considered an enemy of education. A social psychologist may find a certain group of mathematicians or physicists in his own school or country over-ambitious and so rather unfriendly to competitors; they will then not like that social psychologist. A professor of education who thinks that biology professors shamelessly and immorally exploit their graduate students by forcing them to play cogs in their own research machinery, will find it difficult to get a job in a university with a strong biology department. And so it goes on. Let us agree that we can live with this difficulty too and even defend the researcher who meets this kind of hostility. Now the worst case is still different: i.e. when the outsider is also inte rested in the same research as the insider, and criticizes it and offers better ways of doing it.. (shrink)
Despite their divergent metaphysical assumptions, Reformed and evolutionary epistemologists have converged on the notion of proper basicality. Where Reformed epistemologists appeal to God, who has designed the mind in such a way that it successfully aims at the truth, evolutionary epistemologists appeal to natural selection as a mechanism that favors truth-preserving cog- nitive capacities. This paper investigates whether Reformed and evolutionary epistemological accounts of theistic belief are compatible. We will argue that their chief incompatibility lies in the noetic effects of (...) sin and what may be termed the noetic effects of evolution, systematic tendencies wherein human cognitive faculties go awry. We propose a reconceptualization of the noetic effects of sin to mitigate this tension. (shrink)
Arguments about whether a robot could ever be conscious have been conducted up to now in the factually impoverished arena of what is possible "in principle." A team at MIT of which I am a part is now embarking on a longterm project to design and build a humanoid robot, Cog, whose cognitive talents will include speech, eye-coordinated manipulation of objects, and a host of self-protective, self-regulatory and self-exploring activities. The aim of the project is not to make a conscious (...) robot, but to make a robot that can interact with human beings in a robust and versatile manner in real time, take care of itself, and tell its designers things about itself that would otherwise be extremely difficult if not impossible to determine by examination. Many of the details of Cog's "neural" organization will parallel what is known (or presumed known) about their counterparts in the human brain, but the intended realism of Cog as a model is relatively coarse-grained, varying opportunistically as a function of what we think we know, what we think we can build, and what we think doesn't matter. Much of what we think will of course prove to be mistaken; that is one advantage of real experiments over thought experiments. (shrink)
cal basis of consciousness. We continue by discussing the relation between spatiotem- One of the outstanding problems in the cog- poral patterns of brain activity and con- nitive sciences is to understand how ongo- sciousness, with particular attention to pro- ing conscious experience is related to the cesses in the gamma frequency band. We workings of the brain and nervous system. then adopt a critical perspective and high-.
In an all too familiar part of our lives, we are sometimes strongly tempted to do things we think we shouldn’t do. Consider the burning desire to eat one of the donuts your coworker brought to work while you are on a diet. Often times we surrender to temptation. But sometimes we fight the urges and refrain—we exhibit will-power. Much of our ordinary thinking involves reference to “the will” in this sort of way. Yet for quite some time many contemporary (...) philosophers have avoided talk of the will in their accounts of human action. This is largely because the will was thought to be a mysterious and superfluous thing—a ghostly cog in psychological theory that serves no explanatory purpose. However, there is a growing trend in philosophy that is bringing back talk of the will. Willing, Wanting, Waiting is, refreshingly, part of that trend. Holton develops a unique account of the will and related phenomena that is both empirically informed and philosophically rigorous in a way that is accessible to an interdisciplinary audience. (shrink)
It is argued that, based on Kant's descriptive metaphysics, one can prescribe the necessary metaphysical underpinnings for the possibility of conscious experience in an artificial system. This project is developed by giving an account of the a priori concepts of the understanding in such a system. A specification and implementation of the nomological conditions for a conscious system allows one to know a priori that any system possessing this structure will be conscious; thus enabling us to avoid possible false-indicators of (...) consciousness like that offered in a behaviouristic analysis. This is an alternative approach to the bottom-up or top-down approaches adopted by, for example CYC (Lenat and Feigenbaum 1992) and COG (Brooks 1994; Brooks and Stein 1993), neither of which, alone, or in some hybrid form, have proved productive. (shrink)
What''s computation? The received answer is that computation is a computer at work, and a computer at work is that which can be modelled as a Turing machine at work. Unfortunately, as John Searle has recently argued, and as others have agreed, the received answer appears to imply that AI and Cog Sci are a royal waste of time. The argument here is alarmingly simple: AI and Cog Sci (of the Strong sort, anyway) are committed to the view that cognition (...) is computation (or brains are computers); butall processes are computations (orall physical things are computers); so AI and Cog Sci are positively silly.I refute this argument herein, in part by defining the locutions x is a computer and c is a computation in a way that blocks Searle''s argument but exploits the hard-to-deny link between What''s Computation? and the theory of computation. However, I also provide, at the end of this essay, an argument which, it seems to me, implies not that AI and Cog Sci are silly, but that they''re based on a form of computation that is well beneath human persons. (shrink)
In this paper, we discuss the thesis of selective representing — the idea that the contents of the mental representations had by organisms are highly constrained by the biological niches within which the organisms evolved. While such a thesis has been defended by several authors elsewhere, our primary concern here is to take up the issue of the compatibility of selective representing and realism. In this paper we hope to show three things. First, that the notion of selective representing (...) is fully consistent with the realist idea of a mind-independent world. Second, that not only are these two consistent, but that the latter (the realist conception of a mind-independent world) provides the most powerful perspective from which to motivate and understand the differing perceptual and cog- nitive profiles themselves. And third, that the (genuine and important) sense in which organism and environment may together constitute an integrated system of scientific interest poses no additional threat to the realist conception. (shrink)
We argue that thought insertion primarily involves a disruption of the sense of ownership for thoughts and that the lack of a sense of agency is but a consequence of this disruption. We defend the hypothesis that this disruption of the sense of ownership stems from a fail- ure in the online integration of the contextual information related to a thought, in partic- ular contextual information concerning the different causal factors that may be implicated in their production. Loss of unity (...) of consciousness, manifested by incoherent subjective experiences is a general phenomenal characteristic of schizophrenia. This loss of coherence has been hypothesized to reflect a generalized deficit of contextual information integration not conveyed by, but related to, a target event. This deficit is manifested across many cog- nitive domains. We argue that it is also manifested in the process of thinking itself, result- ing in causally decontextualized thoughts that are experienced as inserted thoughts. (shrink)
One of the interesting and occasionally controversial aspects of Dennett’s career is his direct involvement in the scientific process. This article describes some of Dennett’s participation on one particular project conducted at MIT, the building of the humanoid robot named Cog. One of the intentions of this project, not to date fully realized, was to test Dennett’s multiple drafts theory of consciousness. I describe Dennett’s involvement and impact on Cog from the perspective of a graduate student. I also describe the (...) problem of coordinating distributed intelligent systems, drawing examples from robot intelligence, human intelligence, and the Cog project itself. (shrink)
Joseph Agassi in his ?Rationality and the Tu Quoque Argument? (Inquiry, Vol. 16 [1973], pp. 395?406) characterizes the Popperian and Polanyian approaches as rationalist and irrationalist, respectively. Such a characterization of Polanyi is only possible, however, if one ignores the most fundamental aspect of the whole problem: the factual question of the constitutive conditions for inquiry. It is suggested that an investigation along these lines would lead to a normative theory of rationality grounded in cog?nitional fact, the uncovering of which (...) would be nothing less than a self?appropriation of our rational consciousness. (shrink)
Living in “the Machine Age” (dem Maschinenzeitalter), we can not avoid asking ourselves, whether every one of us lives as "a Part" (ein Bestand) in the world much like a cog in “a Machine” (einer Maschine). Heidegger made this concept clear by his phenomenology. In addition, he regarded a human being as a special Part, that could transform all beings into Parts. In order to overcome this dangerous situation, namely, "the Desolation of the Being" (dieSeinsverlassenheit), he considers deeper at “the (...) Essence of Technology” (das Wesen der Technik), the most important element of the Machine Age. Founding on this consideration he finds a way of overcoming, namely, “Art” (die Kunst). By Art can we begin to ask about “the Being” (das Sein) and to think about the change of "the Understanding of the Being" (das Seinsverständnis). What makes this change possible is "the Basic Mood" (die Grundstimmung). Therefore this Basic Mood must above all things be awoken. Drawing on Heidegger's philosophy, I would like to make several observations on the Machine Age and its overcoming. In this way I hope to make a contribution to the Machine Age, so that the modern world will not be regarded as a Machine, all beings will not be regarded as Parts and the modern human being will not be regarded as a special Part. (shrink)
This article challenges the common view that improvements in critical thinking are best pursued by investigations in informal logic. From the perspective of research in psychology and neuroscience, hu-man inference is a process that is multimodal, parallel, and often emo-tional, which makes it unlike the linguistic, serial, and narrowly cog-nitive structure of arguments. At-tempts to improve inferential prac-tice need to consider psychological error tendencies, which are patterns of thinking that are natural for peo-ple but frequently lead to mistakes in judgment. (...) This article discusses two important but neglected error ten-dencies: motivated inference and fear-driven inference. (shrink)
