We investigate computable subshifts and the connection with effective symbolic dynamics. It is shown that a decidable Π01 class P is a subshift if and only if there exists a computable function F mapping 2ℕ to 2ℕ such that P is the set of itineraries of elements of 2ℕ. Π01 subshifts are constructed in 2ℕ and in 2ℤ which have no computable elements. We also consider the symbolic dynamics of maps on the unit interval.

The organization of the complex mixed-mode oscillations generated, in a three-dimensional variable space, by an autocatalytic process formalized as a cubic monomial is analyzed. The generation of the temporal patterns is elucidated by complementary approaches dealing with the three-variable differential continuous system itself and with successive discrete applications modelling its first return map. The extent to which the underlying bifurcation structures could constitute a fingerprint of autocatalytic processes is discussed in connection with the modelling of biological systems.

On the example of the analysis of the content of films-leaders of the box office box office, the value dynamics of the symbols of success is revealed as an objectively occurring sociocultural process in film communication. Cultural production and consumption are being rethought as the self-communication of society, which has sustainable trends. The connections of the sociocultural process of symbolizing success with communicative, semantic and semiotic processes have been studied. The specificity of the dialectical contradiction between sociocentric and personocentric (...) symbols of success is described. The theoretical provisions that reveal the structural and functional side of the socio-cultural process of symbolizing success are presented, its objectivity is proved on the example of the analysis of an array of films, the dominant tendencies in the halo of the cultural space of the general film market are determined. The book is addressed to scientists, students and teachers interested in cultural dynamics, social communication, the role of cinema in modern society. (shrink)

In contrast to industrial markets based on mass-production of material goods, postindustrial markets hinge on images, experiences, and emotions produced and exchanged on screens and in real life. Because postindustrial markets tend to be highly concentrated and technology-driven, they pose a threat to small businesses and low-skill workers in both advanced industrial economies and the Global South, where a large share of the population makes a living in the informal economy. Using the 2014 World Cup as a case of postindustrial (...) economic activity hinged on spectacle, emotional experience, and intellectual property, I analyze the income-making strategies used by street vendors in São Paulo, Brazil. I show that organizers’ control of fan markets was limited by local conceptions of ownership over national symbols as well as informal workers’ flexible relation to legal norms and enforcement-dodging practices. Circumventing market barriers required risky and sophisticated strategies, however, which were more readily available to the more marginal section of the street vending population. (shrink)

The perceptual symbol approach to knowledge representation combines structured frames and dynamic imagery. The perceptual symbol approach provides a good account of the representation of scientific models, of some types of naive theories held by children and adults, and of certain reconstructive memory phenomena. The ontological status of perceptual symbols is unclear and this form of representation does not succeed in accounting for all forms of human knowledge.

In Exploring Robotic Minds: Actions, Symbols, and Consciousness as Self-Organizing Dynamic Phenomena, Jun Tani sets out to answer an essential and tantalizing question: How do our minds work? By providing an overview of his "synthetic neurorobotics" project, Tani reveals how symbols and concepts that represent the world can emerge in a neurodynamic structure--iterative interactions between the top-down subjective view, which proactively acts on the world, and the bottom-up recognition of the resultant perceptual reality. He argues that nontrivial problems of consciousness (...) and free will could be addressed through structural understanding of such iterative, conflicting interactions between the top-down and the bottom-up pathways. A wide range of readers will enjoy this wonderful journey of the mind and will follow the author on interdisciplinary discussions that span neuroscience, dynamical systems theories, robotics, and phenomenology. The book also includes many figures, as well as a link to videos of Tani's exciting robotic experiments. (shrink)

Understanding the dynamics of complex ecosystems is a necessary step to maintain and control them. Yet, reverse-engineering ecological dynamics remains challenging largely due to the very broad class of dynamics that ecosystems may take. Here, this challenge is tackled through symbolic regression, a machine learning method that automatically reverse-engineers both the model structure and parameters from temporal data. How combining symbolic regression with a “dictionary” of possible ecological functional responses opens the door to correctly reverse-engineering (...) ecosystem dynamics, even in the case of poorly informative data, is shown. This strategy is validated using both synthetic and experimental data, and it is found that this strategy is promising for the systematic modeling of complex ecological systems. (shrink)

This book develops a view of logic as a theory of information-driven agency and intelligent interaction between many agents - with conversation, argumentation and games as guiding examples. It provides one uniform account of dynamic logics for acts of inference, observation, questions and communication, that can handle both update of knowledge and revision of beliefs. It then extends the dynamic style of analysis to include changing preferences and goals, temporal processes, group action and strategic interaction in games. Throughout, the book (...) develops a mathematical theory unifying all these systems, and positioning them at the interface of logic, philosophy, computer science and game theory. A series of further chapters explores repercussions of the 'dynamic stance' for these areas, as well as cognitive science. (shrink)

Cognitive science is, more than anything else, a pursuit of cognitive mechanisms. To make headway towards a mechanistic account of any particular cognitive phenomenon, a researcher must choose among the many architectures available to guide and constrain the account. It is thus fitting that this volume on contemporary debates in cognitive science includes two issues of architecture, each articulated in the 1980s but still unresolved: " • Just how modular is the mind? – a debate initially pitting encapsulated mechanisms against (...) highly interactive ones. • Does the mind process language-like representations according to formal rules? – a debate initially pitting symbolic architectures against less language-like architectures. " Our project here is to consider the second issue within the broader context of where cognitive science has been and where it is headed. The notion that cognition in general—not just language processing—involves rules operating on language-like representations actually predates cognitive science. In traditional philosophy of mind, mental life is construed as involving propositional attitudes—that is, such attitudes towards propositions as believing, fearing, and desiring that they be true—and logical inferences from them. On this view, if a person desires that a proposition be true and believes that if she performs a certain action it will become true, she will make the inference and perform the action. (shrink)

We propose a dynamic hyperintensional logic of belief revision for non-omniscient agents, reducing the logical omniscience phenomena affecting standard doxastic/epistemic logic as well as AGM belief revision theory. Our agents don’t know all a priori truths; their belief states are not closed under classical logical consequence; and their belief update policies are such that logically or necessarily equivalent contents can lead to different revisions. We model both plain and conditional belief, then focus on dynamic belief revision. The key idea we (...) exploit to achieve non-omniscience focuses on topic- or subject matter-sensitivity: a feature of belief states which is gaining growing attention in the recent literature. (shrink)

The concept of complementarity, originally defined for non-commuting observables of quantum systems with states of non-vanishing dispersion, is extended to classical dynamical systems with a partitioned phase space. Interpreting partitions in terms of ensembles of epistemic states (symbols) with corresponding classical observables, it is shown that such observables are complementary to each other with respect to particular partitions unless those partitions are generating. This explains why symbolic descriptions based on an ad hoc partition of an underlying phase space description (...) should generally be expected to be incompatible. Related approaches with different background and different objectives are discussed. (shrink)

Two widely accepted assumptions within cognitive science are that (1) the goal is to understand the mechanisms responsible for cognitive performances and (2) computational modeling is a major tool for understanding these mechanisms. The particular approaches to computational modeling adopted in cognitive science, moreover, have significantly affected the way in which cognitive mechanisms are understood. Unable to employ some of the more common methods for conducting research on mechanisms, cognitive scientists’ guiding ideas about mechanism have developed in conjunction with their (...) styles of modeling. In particular, mental operations often are conceptualized as comparable to the processes employed in classical symbolic AI or neural network models. These models, in turn, have been interpreted by some as themselves intelligent systems since they employ the same type of operations as does the mind. For this paper, what is significant about these approaches to modeling is that they are constructed specifically to account for behavior and are evaluated by how well they do so—not by independent evidence that they describe actual operations in mental mechanisms. (shrink)

Although its roots can be traced to the 19th century, progress in the study of nonlinear dynamical systems has taken off in the last 30 years. While pertinent source material exists, it is strewn about the literature in mathematics, physics, biology, economics, and psychology at varying levels of accessibility. A compendium research methods reflecting the expertise of major contributors to NDS psychology, Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences Using Real Data examines the techniques proven to be the most (...) useful in the behavioral sciences. The editors have brought together constructive work on new practical examples of methods and application built on nonlinear dynamics. They cover dynamics such as attractors, bifurcations, chaos, fractals, catastrophes, self-organization, and related issues in time series analysis, stationarity, modeling and hypothesis testing, probability, and experimental design. The analytic techniques discussed include several variants of the fractal dimension, several types of entropy, phase-space and state-space diagrams, recurrence analysis, spatial fractal analysis, oscillation functions, polynomial and Marquardt nonlinear regression, Markov chains, and symbolic dynamics. The book outlines the analytic requirements faced by social scientists and how they differ from those of mathematicians and natural scientists. It includes chapters centered on theory and procedural explanations for running the analyses with pertinent examples and others that illustrate applications where a particular form of analysis is seen in the context of a research problem. This combination of approaches conveys theoretical and practical knowledge that helps you develop skill and expertise in framing hypotheses dynamically and building viable analytic models to test them. (shrink)

What is the relation between the material, conventional symbol structures that we encounter in the spoken and written word, and human thought? A common assumption, that structures a wide variety of otherwise competing views, is that the way in which these material, conventional symbol-structures do their work is by being translated into some kind of content-matching inner code. One alternative to this view is the tempting but thoroughly elusive idea that we somehow think in some natural language (such as English). (...) In the present treatment I explore a third option, which I shall call the "complementarity" view of language. According to this third view the actual symbol structures of a given language add cognitive value by complementing (without being replicated by) the more basic modes of operation and representation endemic to the biological brain. The "cognitive bonus" that language brings is, on this model, not to be cashed out either via the ultimately mysterious notion of "thinking in a given natural language" or via some process of exhaustive translation into another inner code. Instead, we should try to think in terms of a kind of coordination dynamics in which the forms and structures of a language qua material symbol system play a key and irreducible role. Understanding language as a complementary cognitive resource is, I argue, an important part of the much larger project (sometimes glossed in terms of the "extended mind") of understanding human cognition as essentially and multiply hybrid: as involving a complex interplay between internal biological resources and external non-biological resources. (shrink)

Markman and Dietrich¹ recently recommended extending our understanding of representation to incorporate insights from some “alternative” theories of cognition: perceptual symbol systems, situated action, embodied cognition, and dynamical systems. In particular, they suggest that allowances be made for new types of representation which had been previously under-emphasized in cognitive science. The amendments they recommend are based upon the assumption that the alternative positions each agree with the classical view that cognition requires representations, internal mediating states that bear information.² In the (...) case of one of the alternatives, dynamical systems³, this is simply false: many dynamically-oriented cognitive scientists are anti-representationalists.^4,5,6. (shrink)

Concepts are widely agreed to be the basic constituents of thought. Amongst philosophers and psychologists, however, the question of how concepts are structured has been a longstanding problem and a locus of disagreement. I draw on recent work describing how representational content is ascribed to populations of neurons to develop a novel solution to this problem. Because disputes over the structure of concepts often reflect divergent explanatory goals, I begin by arguing for a set of six criteria that a good (...) theory ought to accommodate. These criteria address philosophical concerns related to content, reference, scope, publicity, and compositionality, and psychological concerns related to categorization phenomena and neural plausibility. Next, I evaluate a number of existing theoretical approaches in relation to these six criteria. I consider classical views that identify concepts with definitions, similarity-based views that identify concepts with prototypes or exemplars, theory-based views that identify concepts with explanatory schemas, and atomistic views that identify concepts with unstructured mental symbols that enter into law-like relations with their referents. I conclude that none of these accounts can satisfactorily accommodate all of the criteria. I then describe the theory of representational content that I employ to motivate a novel account of concept structure. I briefly defend this theory against competitors, and I describe how it can be scaled from the level of basic perceptual representations to the level of highly complex conceptual representations. On the basis of this description, I contend that concepts are structured dynamically through sets of transformations of single source representation, and that the content of a given concept specifies the set of potential transformations it can enter into. I conclude by demonstrating that the ability of this account to meet all of the criteria introduced beforehand. I consider objections to my views throughout. (shrink)

A wide range of systems appear to perform computation: what common features do they share? I consider three examples, a digital computer, a neural network and an analogue route finding system based on soap-bubbles. The common feature of these systems is that they have autonomous dynamics — their states will change over time without additional external influence. We can take advantage of these dynamics if we understand them well enough to map a problem we want to solve onto (...) them. Programming consists of arranging the starting state of a system so that the effects of the system''s dynamics on some of its variables corresponds to the effects of the equations which describe the problem to be solved on their variables. The measured dynamics of a system, and hence the computation it may be performing, depend on the variables of the system we choose to attend to. Although we cannot determine which are the appropriate variables to measure in a system whose computation basis is unknown to us I go on to discuss how grammatical classifications of computational tasks and symbolic machine reconstruction techniques may allow us to rule out some measurements of a system from contributing to computation of particular tasks. Finally I suggest that these arguments and techniques imply that symbolic descriptions of the computation underlying cognition should be stochastic and that symbols in these descriptions may not be atomic but may have contents in alternative descriptions. (shrink)

I propose a semi-eliminative reduction of Fodors concept of module to the concept of attractor basin which is used in Cognitive Dynamic Systems Theory (DST). I show how attractor basins perform the same explanatory function as modules in several DST based research program. Attractor basins in some organic dynamic systems have even been able to perform cognitive functions which are equivalent to the If/Then/Else loop in the computer language LISP. I suggest directions for future research programs which could find similar (...) equivalencies between organic dynamic systems and other cognitive functions. This type of research could help us discover how (and/or if) it is possible to use Dynamic Systems Theory to more accurately model the cognitive functions that are now being modeled by subroutines in Symbolic AI computer models. If such a reduction of subroutines to basins of attraction is possible, it could free AI from the limitations that prompted Fodor to say that it was impossible to model certain higher level cognitive functions. (shrink)

We argue that one important aspect of the “cognitive neuroscience revolution” identified by Boone and Piccinini :1509–1534. doi: 10.1007/s11229-015-0783-4, 2015) is a dramatic shift away from thinking of cognitive representations as arbitrary symbols towards thinking of them as icons that replicate structural characteristics of their targets. We argue that this shift has been driven both “from below” and “from above”—that is, from a greater appreciation of what mechanistic explanation of information-processing systems involves, and from a greater appreciation of the problems (...) solved by bio-cognitive systems, chiefly regulation and prediction. We illustrate these arguments by reference to examples from cognitive neuroscience, principally representational similarity analysis and the emergence of dynamical models as a central postulate in neurocognitive research. (shrink)

This article presents a study that identifies the gender dynamics prevailing in a specific context of tokenism – elementary school teaching – in which the members of an otherwise socially dominant group are proportionally scarce – men. The results contradict Kanter’s theory by showing that male elementary school teachers do not experience the tokenism dynamics. In line with Williams’ gender perspective and Amâncio’s gender symbolic asymmetry, the article finds that although men constitute a small minority in elementary (...) education, they do not lose the social advantages they generally have: on the contrary, they seem rather to gain several privileges. Indeed, the results show strong links between the tokenism dynamics and gender asymmetry, putting the token men at an advantage. Thus, tokenism seems to be limited to maintaining the gender social order. (shrink)

Marxism's collapse in the twentieth century profoundly altered the style and substance of Western European radical thought. To build a more robust form of democratic theory and action, prominent theorists moved to reject revolution, abandon class for more fragmented models of social action, and elevate the political over the social. Acknowledging the constructedness of society and politics, they chose the "symbolic" as a concept powerful enough to reinvent leftist thought outside a Marxist framework. Following Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Adventures of the (...) Dialectic, which reassessed philosophical Marxism at mid century, Warren Breckman critically revisits these thrilling experiments in the aftermath of Marxism. The post-Marxist idea of the symbolic is dynamic and complex, uncannily echoing the early German Romantics, who first advanced a modern conception of symbolism and the symbolic. Hegel and Marx denounced the Romantics for their otherworldly and nebulous posture, yet post-Marxist thinkers appreciated the rich potential of the ambiguities and paradoxes the Romantics first recognized. Mapping different ideas of the symbolic among contemporary thinkers, Breckman traces a fascinating reflection of Romantic themes and resonances, and he explores in depth the effort to reconcile a radical and democratic political agenda with a politics that does not privilege materialist understandings of the social. Engaging with the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Žižek, Breckman uniquely situates these important theorists within two hundred years of European thought and extends their profound relevance to today's political activism. (shrink)

As the accompanying articles in the Special Issue on Semiotic Scaffolding will attest, my colleagues in biosemiotics have done an exemplary job in showing us how to think about the critically generative role that semiotic scaffolding plays “vertically” – i.e., in evolutionary and developmental terms – by “allowing access to the upper floors” of biological complexity, cognition and evolution.In addition to such diachronic considerations of semiotic scaffolding, I wish to offer here a consideration of semiotic scaffolding’s synchronic power, as well (...) – and in particular the ability that it can afford its users to access new and other sign relations “horizontally” as a function of the way that multiple semiotically scaffolded relations intertwine to result in a “definite semantic topology that determines the ways that symbols modify each other’s referential functions in different combinations”.Taking up, in turn, Terrence Deacon’s later challenge that what the sciences of cognition – and biology more generally – needs to “come to grips with [is] the process of semiosis; the dynamic of interpretive activity by which semiotic relationships emerge from other semiotic relationships [as] intrinsically dynamic phases in a generative process”, I attempt here to show how Deacon’s own Peirce-inspired matrix of referential sign relations as presented in The Symbolic Species, when viewed as a semiotic scaffold of interactional constraints and possibility biases, provides the key to understanding the essentially thirdness-manifesting nature of symbol reference, formation and growth. (shrink)

Empirical studies indicate that business compliance with the UK Modern Slavery Act is disappointing, but they struggle to make sense of this phenomenon. This article offers a novel framework to understand how business organizations construct the meaning of compliance with the UK Modern Slavery Act. Our analysis builds on the endogeneity of law theory developed by Edelman. Empirically, our study is based on the analysis of the modern slavery statements of 10 FTSE 100 (Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index) companies (...) in the food and tobacco sector, backed by interviews with business, civil society, and public officers. We offer a dynamic model that draws attention to the role of compliance professionals in framing ambiguous rules and devising a variety of organizational responses to modern slavery law. Contrary to extant research that tends to praise organizations for going “beyond compliance”, our study underlines the risks of managerialization of modern slavery law, whereby merely symbolic structures come to be associated with legal compliance, even when they are ineffective at tackling modern slavery. (shrink)

We give a commentary on Newelski's suggestion or conjecture [8] that topological dynamics, in the sense of Ellis [3], applied to the action of a definable group $G(M)$ on its “external type space” $S_{G,\textit{ext}}(M)$, can explain, account for, or give rise to, the quotient $G/G^{00}$, at least for suitable groups in NIP theories. We give a positive answer for measure-stable (or $fsg$) groups in NIP theories. As part of our analysis we show the existence of “externally definable” generics of (...) $G(M)$ for measure-stable groups. We also point out that for $G$ definably amenable (in a NIP theory) $G/G^{00}$ can be recovered, via the Ellis theory, from a natural Ellis semigroup structure on the space of global $f$-generic types. (shrink)

We interpret the basic notions of topological dynamics in the model-theoretic setting, relating them to generic types of definable group actions and their generalizations.

The Zapatista Indigenous Movement from Chiapas, Mexico is an example of the anthropological dynamics between the visible and the invisible in Western culture and the possible revolution of perceiving reality as such since they had to cover their faces with masks in their rebel anti-system movement in order to be considered as having the same dignity as other human beings: they performed a revolutionary act that changed the symbolic order of the visible by the public exhibition of their (...) colonial submission. The mask gave them a face, disrupting the order of the visible with uncanny faces. In this article, a nondual model is proposed to capture the inessential ground of the given composed of endless perspectives in continuous transformation by the generation of ontological novelty: an open cognitive horizon of symbolically empty points of view irreducible to one perspective. For Krishnamurti, the revolutionary act is to see without an image in order to phenomenologically attend to things as they are beyond the known and the unknown such as Stilinovi? and Malevich pursued the dissolution of symbolic representations through art for the transformation of human reality. (shrink)

What new implications does the dynamical hypothesis have for cognitive science? The short answer is: None. The _Behavior and Brain Sciences _target article, “The dynamical hypothesis in cognitive science” by Tim Van Gelder is basically an attack on traditional symbolic AI and differs very little from prior connectionist criticisms of it. For the past ten years, the connectionist community has been well aware of the necessity of using (and understanding) dynamically evolving, recurrent network models of cognition.

Dynamic Topological Logic ( $\mathcal{DTL}$ ) is a modal framework for reasoning about dynamical systems, that is, pairs 〈X, f〉 where X is a topological space and f: X → X a continuous function. In this paper we consider the case where X is a metric space. We first show that any formula which can be satisfied on an arbitrary dynamic topological system can be satisfied on one based on a metric space; in fact, this space can be taken to (...) be countable and have no isolated points. Since any metric space with these properties is homeomorphic to the set of rational numbers, it follows that any satisfiable formula can be satisfied on a system based on $\mathbb{Q}$ . We then show that the situation changes when considering complete metric spaces, by exhibiting a formula which is not valid in general but is valid on the class of systems based on a complete metric space. While we do not attempt to give a full characterization of the set of valid formulas on this class we do give a relative completeness result; any formula which is satisfiable on a dynamical system based on a complete metric space is also satisfied on one based on the Cantor space. (shrink)

The dynamic of religious expression employs symbolic language, actions, and art. These symbols are symbols of transcendence because it is transcendence which is the unique referent that sets apart symbols which give rise to religious understanding from symbols which do not. The main objective of this book is to demonstrate that in Louis Dupre's work all religious expression, insofar as it has a transcendent reference, is intrinsically symbolic. Religious language is never purely objective nor purely subjective, but a (...) dialectical relation with a transcendent dimension. True to the teachings of Dupre, this book uncovers that without a transcendent referent, religious symbols lose their religious significance. This is the plight of the (late-post)modern condition which resulted from the fracturing of nature into its cosmic, human and transcendent components. To regain a sense of transcendence the believer is forced to make an inward turn akin to the mystical practice of past ages. This does not recover a sense of transcendence for culture but can do so for the believer's personal spiritual life. (shrink)

The sociology of violence still struggles with two critical questions: What motivates people to act violently on behalf of groups and how do they come to identify with the groups for which they act? Methodologically the article addresses these puzzling problems in favor of a relational sociology that argues against both micro- and macro-reductionist accounts, while theoretically it proposes a twofold reorientation: first, it makes a plea for the so called cognitive turn in social theory; second, it proposes following praxeological (...) accounts of social action that focus on the dynamic interpenetration of cognition and socio-cultural practices. The argument is that symbolic boundaries constitute the “missing link” that allows for overcoming the micro-macro gap in violence research: Symbolic boundaries can cause people's participation in collective violence by providing the essential relational resources for violent action and by triggering the cognitive/affective mechanisms necessary for social actors to become drawn into mobilization processes that can cause their engaging in coordinated attacks on sites across the boundary. The article offers a new theoretical argument by drawing on knowledge from violence research, social action theory and cognitive science allowing for a non-reductionist theory of action that explains how and why people engage in collective violence. (shrink)

The sociology of violence still struggles with two critical questions: What motivates people to act violently on behalf of groups and how do they come to identify with the groups for which they act? Methodologically the article addresses these puzzling problems in favor of a relational sociology that argues against both micro- and macro-reductionist accounts, while theoretically it proposes a twofold reorientation: first, it makes a plea for the so called cognitive turn in social theory; second, it proposes following praxeological (...) accounts of social action that focus on the dynamic interpenetration of cognition and socio-cultural practices. The argument is that symbolic boundaries constitute the “missing link” that allows for overcoming the micro-macro gap in violence research: Symbolic boundaries can cause people's participation in collective violence by providing the essential relational resources for violent action and by triggering the cognitive/affective mechanisms necessary for social actors to become drawn into mobilization processes that can cause their engaging in coordinated attacks on sites across the boundary. The article offers a new theoretical argument by drawing on knowledge from violence research, social action theory and cognitive science allowing for a non-reductionist theory of action that explains how and why people engage in collective violence. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to shortly outline the approaches to the mind-body problem that are currently discussed within psychology. In the introduction the attitude of a contemporary psychologist to the mind-body problem is assessed. It seems that due to the functional approach, that for the last 50 years prevailed (especially in cognitive psychology), the mind-body issue is not central to psychological thinking, and in the investigation of many problems researchers can abstract away from it. Next, three approaches to the (...) mind-body problem viewed from a perspective of the embodiment of a symbolic (and/or symbolically described) mind are briefly sketched. The already "traditional", symbolic information-processing approach in contrasted with 1) an approach that accepts both symbolic and dynamic description of mind, analyzes their relation, and advocates the indispensability of symbols; and 2) an approach that agrees that brain is a dynamical device but still cannot see the possibility of the same level description for the brain and its emergent properties. Neither approach, of course, offers a definitive solution to the mind-body problem. What they try to do is take away some of the "formal", "digital", "syntactic" properties of symbols, make them more "semantic" and "embodied", and show how they relate to the dynamics of the cognitive system. In conclusion of the article a supposition is made that the growing acknowledgement of the role of semantics and embodiment in description of symbolic systems (which means abandoning functionalist assumption), may result in a greater involvement in the mind/body problem even in those areas of psychology, in which previously scientists could just turn their back on it. (shrink)

The last two decades have produced unprecedented successes in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML), due almost entirely to advances in deep neural networks (DNNs). Deep hierarchical memory networks are not a novel concept in cognitive science and can be traced back more than a half century to Simon's early work on discrimination nets for simulating human expertise. The major difference between DNNs and the deep memory nets meant for explaining human cognition is that the latter are (...) symbolic networks meant to model the dynamics of human memory and learning. Cognition-inspired symbolic deep networks (SDNs) address several known issues with DNNs, including (1) learning efficiency, where a much larger number of training examples are required for DNNs than would be expected for a human; (2) catastrophic interference, where what is learned by a DNN gets unlearned when a new problem is presented; and (3) explainability, where there is no way to explain what is learned by a DNN. This paper explores whether SDNs can achieve similar classification accuracy performance to DNNs across several popular ML datasets and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. Simulations reveal that (1) SDNs provide similar accuracy to DNNs in most cases, (2) SDNs are far more efficient than DNNs, (3) SDNs are as robust as DNNs to irrelevant/noisy attributes in the data, and (4) SDNs are far more robust to catastrophic interference than DNNs. We conclude that SDNs offer a promising path toward human-level accuracy and efficiency in category learning. More generally, ML frameworks could stand to benefit from cognitively inspired approaches, borrowing more features and functionality from models meant to simulate and explain human learning. (shrink)

The traditional view of symbol grounding seeks to connect an a priori internal representation or ‘form’ to its external referent. But such a ‘form’ is usually itself systematically composed out of more primitive parts, so this view ignores its grounding in the physics of the world. Some previous work simulating multiple talking/listening agents has effectively taken this stance, and shown how a shared discrete speech code can emerge. Taking the earlier work of Oudeyer, we have extended his model to include (...) a dispersive force intended to account broadly for a speaker’s motivation to increase auditory distinctiveness. New simulations show that vowel systems result that are more representative of the range seen in human languages. These simulations make many profound abstractions and assumptions. Relaxing these by including more physically and physiologically realistic mechanisms for talking and listening is seen as the key to replicating more complex and dynamic aspects of speech, such as consonant-vowel patterning. (shrink)

The traditional view of symbol grounding seeks to connect an a priori internal representation or ‘form’ to its external referent. But such a ‘form’ is usually itself systematically composed out of more primitive parts, so this view ignores its grounding in the physics of the world. Some previous work simulating multiple talking/listening agents has effectively taken this stance, and shown how a shared discrete speech code can emerge. Taking the earlier work of Oudeyer, we have extended his model to include (...) a dispersive force intended to account broadly for a speaker’s motivation to increase auditory distinctiveness. New simulations show that vowel systems result that are more representative of the range seen in human languages. These simulations make many profound abstractions and assumptions. Relaxing these by including more physically and physiologically realistic mechanisms for talking and listening is seen as the key to replicating more complex and dynamic aspects of speech, such as consonant-vowel patterning. (shrink)

One of the most profound insights of the dynamic systems perspective is that new structures resulting from the developmental process do not need to be planned in advance, nor is it necessary to have these structures represented in genetic or neurological templates prior to their emergence. Rather, new structures can emerge as components of the individual and the environment self-organize; that is, as they mutually constrain each other's actions, new patterns and structures may arise. This theoretical possibility brings into developmental (...) theory the important concept of indeterminism--the possibility that developmental outcomes may not be predictable in any simple linear causal way from their antecedents. This is the first book to take a critical and serious look at the role of indeterminism in psychological and behavioral development. * What is the source of this indeterminism? * What is its role in developmental change? * Is it merely the result of incomplete observational data or error in measurement? It reviews the concepts of indeterminism and determinism in their historical, philosophical, and theoretical perspectives--particularly in relation to dynamic systems thinking--and applies these general ideas to systems of nonverbal communication. Stressing the indeterminacy inherent to symbols and meaning making in social systems, several chapters address the issue of indeterminism from metaphorical, modeling, and narrative perspectives. Others discuss those indeterministic processes within the individual related to emotional, social, and cognitive development. (shrink)

To describe and analyze the unstable periodic orbits of the Rucklidge system, a so-called symbolic encoding method is introduced, which has been proven to be an efficient tool to explore the topological properties concealed in these periodic orbits. In this work, the unstable periodic orbits up to a certain topological length in the Rucklidge system are systematically investigated via a proposed variational method. The dynamics in the Rucklidge system are explored by using phase portrait analysis, Lyapunov exponents, and (...) Poincaré first return maps. Symbolic encodings of the periodic orbits with two and four letters based on the trajectory topology in the phase space are implemented under two sets of parameter values. Meanwhile, the bifurcations of the periodic orbits are explored, significantly improving the understanding of the dynamics of the Rucklidge system. The multiple-letter symbolic encoding method could also be applicable to other nonlinear dynamical systems. (shrink)

A genome of a living organism consists of a long string of symbols over a finite alphabet carrying critical information for the organism. This includes its ability to control post natal growth, homeostasis, adaptation to changes in the surrounding environment, or to biochemically respond at the cellular level to various specific regulatory signals. In this sense, a genome represents a symbolic encoding of a highly organized system of information whose functioning may be revealed as a natural multilayer structure in (...) terms of complexity and prominence. In this paper we use the mathematical theory of symbolic extensions as a framework to shed light onto how this multilayer organization is reflected in the symbolic coding of the genome. The distribution of data in an element of a standard symbolic extension of a dynamical system has a specific form: the symbolic sequence is divided into several subsequences (which we call layers) encoding the dynamics on various “scales”. We propose that a similar structure resides within the genomes, building our analogy on some of the most recent findings in the field of regulation of genomic DNA functioning. (shrink)

1.1 The predominant approach to cognitive modeling is still what has come to be called "computationalism" (Dietrich 1990, Harnad 1990b), the hypothesis that cognition is computation. The more recent rival approach is "connectionism" (Hanson & Burr 1990, McClelland & Rumelhart 1986), the hypothesis that cognition is a dynamic pattern of connections and activations in a "neural net." Are computationalism and connectionism really deeply different from one another, and if so, should they compete for cognitive hegemony, or should they collaborate? These (...) questions will be addressed here, in the context of an obstacle that is faced by computationalism (as well as by connectionism if it is either computational or seeks cognitive hegemony on its own): The symbol grounding problem (Harnad 1990). (shrink)

Graded epistemic logic is a logic for reasoning about uncertainties. Graded epistemic logic is interpreted on graded models. These models are generalizations of Kripke models. We obtain completeness of some graded epistemic logics. We further develop dynamic extensions of graded epistemic logics, along the framework of dynamic epistemic logic. We give an extension with public announcements, i.e., public events, and an extension with graded event models, a generalization also including nonpublic events. We present complete axiomatizations for both logics.

"In his Phenomenology of Cognition, Cassirer provides a comprehensive and systematic account of the dynamic process involved in the whole of human culture as it progresses from the world of myth and its feeling of social belonging to the highest abstractions of mathematics, logic and theoretical physics. Cassirer engages with the most sophisticated and cutting-edge work in fields ranging from ethnology to classics, egyptology and assyriology to ethology, brain science and psychology to logic, mathematics and theoretical physics. His command of (...) philosophy, literature, and the arts is superb. Echoing his work on Kant, Cassirer begins ThePhilosophy of Symbolic Formswith the problem posed by the meaning of being for philosophy since Plato. But Cassirer also shows that this problem gains new significance with Kant and with the development of modern culture. Cassirer weaves his conception of the development of knowledge into a broadly Kantian and German idealist dynamic-historical conception of significance and of experience that refuses to accept a fundamental opposition between literary, philosophical and scientific culture. In consequence of his great vision grounded in careful reflection and argument, Cassirer's systematic conception of the Copernican cosmopolitan-cosmological revolution is still philosophically and scientifically unmatched in contemporary philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic and of the Pacific." - Pierre Keller, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Riverside, USA. This new translation makes Cassirer's seminal work available to a new generation of scholars. Each volume includes an introduction by Steve Lofts, a foreword by Peter Gordon, a glossary of key terms, and an index. Steve Lofts is Professor of Philosophy at King's University College, Canada. He is the translator of Cassirer's The Logic of the Cultural Sciences and The Warburg Years : Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology. (shrink)