cognitive-scientists

"When fascists adopt classical education, … they rely on the flattened, instrumentalized version of it, which does nothing to challenge the practice of viewing people solely in terms of their productive capacity—in the case of women, the capacity to produce children, and in the case of men, the capacity for labor. The Nazis, for example, who praised the virtues of an education in Western civilization, were also responsible for the mass extermination of disabled people. According to the distinguished historian of Nazism Nikolaus Wachsmann, the main criterion in selecting which disabled people should be gassed was "the patients' ability to work: anyone regarded as unproductive would be killed.""

"All education presupposes values, even substantive moral and political ones. The idea that it should not presuppose perspectives, even value-laden ones, involves a false conception of objectivity, and a tendentious and in fact ultimately incoherent distinction between facts and values. All inquiry must make presuppositions, and these presuppositions form an intertangled web of fact and value. The demand for neutral inquiry is philosophically incoherent. No wonder that such demands invariably, and hypocritically, mask political agendas."

"He examines how propaganda operates subtly, how it undermines democracy—particularly the ideals of democratic deliberation and equality—and how it has damaged democracies of the past. … Stanley provides a historically grounded introduction to democratic political theory as a window into the misuse of democratic vocabulary for propaganda's selfish purposes. He lays out historical examples, such as the restructuring of the US public school system at the turn of the twentieth century, to explore how the language of democracy is … used to mask an undemocratic reality."

"In the previous chapters, I laid out the concept of ideology I favor. Using Max Weber, I argued that elites in civil society invariably acquire a flawed ideology to explain their possession of an unjust amount of the goods of society. The purpose of the flawed ideology is to provide an apparently factual (in the best case, apparently scientific) justification for the otherwise manifestly unjust distribution of society’s goods. I then argued that, as a mechanism of social control, the elite seek to instill the ideology in the negatively privileged groups. By this route, the negatively privileged groups acquire the beliefs that justify the very structural features of their society that cause their oppression. I then laid out some very general psychological and epistemological facts that make it plausible that such efforts will be successful."

"Allegiance to the group identity forged by political party affiliation renders Americans blind to the essential similarities between the agendas of the two parties, similarities that can be expected to be exactly the ones that run counter to public interest, in other words, those interests of the deep-pocketed backers of elections to which any politician must be subservient in order to raise the kind of money necessary to run for national office."

"Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Gandhi, was a member of RSS, as was current Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. RSS was explicitly influenced by European fascist movements, its leading politicians regularly praised Hitler and Mussolini in the late 1930s and 1940s."

"To me, my Judaism means an obligation to pay attention to equality and the rights of minority groups."

"You have a media environment in which Trump is very cleverly not at all like a charlatan—behaving exactly like any fascist would, claiming the other side is the democratic threat and being extremely open about his intentions.He's going to replace everyone in the government-by-loyalists. He’s going to target the universities, the schools. This process is called gleichschaltung in the literature on Nazi Germany, where every organization, every government institution turns loyalist-like and is transformed. Their employees are replaced by people loyal to the leader and loyal to the party. And Trump has already announced he’s going to do this. So he's already announced a full fascist plan."

"The massive state bailout of financial institutions, leading to immense public debt, was followed by a demand by those very same financial institutions that were bailed out by those states for the states to pay down their debt."

"QAnon everywhere"

"The most basic problem for democracy raided by propaganda is the possibility that the vocabulary of liberal democracy is used to mask an undemocratic reality. If so, there could be a state that appeared to be a liberal democracy. It would be a state the citizens of which believed was a liberal democracy. But the appearance of liberal democracy would be merely the outer trappings of an illiberal, undemocratic reality."

"If there is no state to support citizens in need, they will be obliged to fall back on their families and religious communities for support. This has the effect of reinforcing traditional social values, since it puts these families and communities in a position to condition their support on the rejection of certain beliefs, identities, or ways of life that they may find objectionable. A robust system of public goods gives citizens the necessary support structures to make their own choices—and to take full advantage of democracy’s freedoms."

"I haven't been focused as much as I should have been on supporting trans rights in the last 12 months. I now realize that this is where the fight for global democracy is. There is no avoiding it."

"The significance of Project 2025 is that it calls for what in the Nazi parlance is called Gleichschaltung, the systematic replacement of civil servants by loyalists—by party loyalists—and the systematic replacement of teachers in schools and universities and, in general, institutions throughout society by party loyalists.In the case of education, it’s completely implausible that Trump is ideologically distant from the goals of Project 2025. Trump has repeatedly said he’s going to target critical race theory, which, let’s face it, is simply Black history. The Project—he’s targeted—he said he’s going to replace education with patriotic education—namely, representing the United States as an exceptional grand nation whose exceptionality is due to its white Christian heterosexual men, who have defined the nation."

"In light of the evolutionary links and behavioural similarities between humans and higher animals, it is hard to believe that belief-desire psychology could explain human behaviour, but not animal behaviour. If humans have beliefs, so do animals."

"Students of the human mind have long noted its ability to mimic internally the positive notions and transformations of objects in the external world. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the British empiricist David Hume wrote that to "join incongruous shapes and appearances costs the imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects" and that "this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience.""

"The subject detects the presence and interrelationships of the basic components of one of the two-dimensional drawings - particularly, the variously oriented straight lines, the several types of vertices by which they are connected and, presumably, something of the structural relationships among these components within the two-dimensional pattern. Then, on the basis of some higher-level processing of these extracted features and their interrelationships, an internal representation, code, or verbal description is generated for each picture separately that captures the intrinsic structure of the three-dimensional object in a form that is independent of the particular orientation in which that object happens to be displayed."

"Nor do such theories provide a ready account for the equivalence of the slopes of the reaction-time functions for the picture-plane and depth pairs. For, in order to explain the dependence of reaction time on angular difference, we must suppose that the features that are being compared are the features of the two-dimensional drawings, which differ more and more with angular departure, and not the features of the three-dimensional objects, which are the same regardless of orientation."

"The universality, invariance, and elegance of principles governing the universe may be reflected in principles of the minds that have evolved in that universe - provided that the mental principles are formulated with respect to the abstract spaces appropriate for the representation of biologically significant objects and their properties. (1) Positions and motions of objects conserve their shapes in the geometrically fullest and simplest way when represented as points and connecting geodesic paths in the six-dimensional manifold jointly determined by the Euclidean group of three· dimensional space and the symmetry group of each object. (2) Colors of objects attain constancy when represented as points in a three-dimensional vector space in which each variation in natural illumination is cancelled by application of its inverse from the three-dimensional linear group of terrestrial transformations of the invariant solar source. (3) Kinds of objects support optimal generalization and categorization when represented, in an evolutionarily shaped space of possible objects, as connected regions with associated weights determined by Bayesian revision of maximum entropy priors"

"The system of constraints that governs the projections and transformations of... bodies in space must long ago have become internalized as a powerful, though largely unconscious, part of our perceptual machinery."

"In spite of some unresolved issues, the close match we have found between mental rotation and their counterparts in the physical world leads inevitably to speculations about the functions and origin of human spatial imagination. It may not be premature to propose that spatial imagination has evolved as a reflection of the physics and geometry of the external world. The rules that govern structures and motions in the physical world may, over evolutionary history, have been incorporated into human perceptual machinery, giving rise to demonstrable correspondences between mental imagery and its physical analogues."

"Most studies employing three-dimensional objects as stimuli have used simultaneous presentation whereas most studies employing two-dimensional objects have used comparison of a single visual stimulus with a memory presentation. We suspect that it is this procedural difference rather than the difference in dimensionality that is the principal determiner of rate of mental rotation."

"A psychological space is established for any set of stimuli by determining metric distances between the stimuli such that the probability that a response learned to any stimulus will generalize to any other is an invariant monotonic function of the distance between them. To a good approximation, this probability of generalization (i) decays exponentially with this distance, and (ii) does so in accordance with one of two metrics, depending on the relation between the dimensions along which the stimuli vary. These empirical regularities are mathematically derivable from universal principles of natural kinds and probabilistic geometry that may, through evolutionary internalization, tend to govern the behaviors of all sentient organisms."

"Finke et al. (1992) proposed a cognitive model of creative thinking called geneplore, a name that emphasizes the importance of generative and exploratory phases of the creative process. In the generative phase, one uses processes such as retrieval, analogical transfer, or mental transformation to construct representations of ideas that may take various forms such as visual patterns, verbal combinations, or mental models. These initial ideas, referred to as preinventive forms, ideally have properties such as novelty, meaningfulness, and emergent qualities. Exploratory processes can then be used to develop the initially generated ideas for specific purposes."

"The image discoveries which then ’emerge’ resemble the way perceptual discoveries can follow the active exploration and manipulation of physical objects."

"Perceptual interpretive processes are applied to mental images in much the same way that they are applied to actual physical objects. In this sense, imagined objects can be "interpreted" much like physical objects."

"Restricting the ways in which creative cognition are interpreted encourages creative exploration and discovery and further reduces the likelihood that a person will fall back on conventional lines of thought."

"We generalize from one situation to another not because we cannot tell the difference between the two situations but because we judge that they are likely to belong to a set of situations having the same consequence."

"I suggest that the psychophysical function that maps physical parameter space into a species' psychological space has been shaped over evolutionary history so that consequential regions for that species, although variously shaped, are not consistently elongated or flattened in particular directions."

"R. N. Shepard [1978] has argued that a number of highly original and significant creations of the human mind have been produced by a mode of thinking which was essentially nonverbal, involving internal representations which could best be described as images of a largely spatial, and often visual character. Shepard provides an impressive list of creative scholars whose most outstanding achievements have been the result of highly visual thinking: Einstein, James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, Hermann von Helmholtz, Francis Galton, and Friedrich A. Kekule are on the list as is the mathematician ."

"Surrogate percept, allowing people to detect some pattern or property in a remembered scene that they did not encode explicitly when they saw the scene initially."

"New heuristic (1) is used to prefer revision to premises that support relatively weak generalized beliefs."

"In recent years, researchers have made considerable progress on the of inductive learning tasks, but for theoretical results to have impact on practice, they must deal with the average case. In this paper we present an average-case analysis of a simple algorithm that induces one-level decision trees for concepts defined by a single relevant attribute. Given knowledge about the number of training instances, the number of irrelevant attributes, the amount of class and attribute noise, and the class and attribute distributions, we derive the expected classification accuracy over the entire instance space. We then examine the predictions of this analysis for different settings of these domain parameters, comparing them to experimental results to check our reasoning."

"Research on cognitive architectures varies widely in the degree to which it attempts to match psychological data. ACT-R (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) and EPIC (Kieras & Meyer, 1997) aim for quantitative fits to reaction time and error data, whereas Prodigy (Minton et al., 1989) incorporates selected mechanisms like means-ends analysis but otherwise makes little contact with human behavior. Architectures like Soar (Laird, Newell, & Rosenbloom, 1987; Newell, 1990) and Icarus (Langley & Choi, in press; Langley & Rogers, 2005) take a middle position, drawing on many psychological ideas but also emphasizing their strength as flexible AI systems. What they hold in common is an acknowledgement of their debt to theoretical concepts from cognitive psychology and a concern with the same intellectual abilities as humans."

"Science is a seamless web: each idea spins out to a new research task, and each research finding suggests a repair or an elaboration of the network of theory. Most of the links connecting the nodes are short, each attaching to its predecessors. Weaving our way through the web, we stop from time to time to rest and survey the view — and to write a paper or a book."

"Given a sample of data S, a learning algorithm L, and a feature set A, feature xi , is incrementally useful to L with respect to A if the accuracy of the hypothesis that L produces using the feature set {xi} ∪ A is better than the accuracy achieved using just the feature set A."

"As aims to address larger, more complex tasks, the problem of focusing on the most relevant information in a potentially overwhelming quantity of data has become increasingly important."

"In the scientist’s house are many mansions... Outsiders often regard science as a sober enterprise, but we who are inside see it as the most romantic of all callings. Both views are right. The romance adheres to the processes of scientific discovery, the sobriety to the responsibility for verification..."

"A cognitive architecture specifies aspects of an intelligent system that are stable over time, much as in a building’s architecture. These include the memories that store perceptions, beliefs, and knowledge, the representation of elements that are contained in these memories, the performance mechanisms that use them, and the learning processes that build on them. Such a framework typically comes with a programming language and software environment that supports the efficient construction of knowledge-based systems."

"In all of these cases, the error arose from accepting “loose” fits of a law to data, and the later, correct formulation provided a law that fit the data much more closely. If we wished to simulate this phenomenon with BACON, we would only have to set the error allowance generously at the outset, then set stricter limits after an initial law had been found."

"BACON.4 does not have heuristics for considering trigonometric functions of variables directly . Thus, in the run described here we simply told the system to examine the sines. In the following chapter we will see how BACON can actually arrive at the sine term on its own in a rather subtle manner."

"Cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn objected that Shepard's mentally rotated images and Kosslyn's mentally compared images had to be constructed from imageless propositions in the central nervous system—propositions containing all of the information necessary to identify the correct answer without constructing any imagery."

"The expression 'cognitive penetrability' is borrowed from a cognitive scientist, Zenon Pylyshyn. He distinguishes between our cognitively penetrable mental functions on the one hand and our functional architecture on the other."

"Some skeptics, such as the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn, argue that images are “epiphenomenal.”"

"During the late 1970s and early 1980s there was vigorous debate about the nature of visual mental imagery. One position (championed primarily by Pylyshyn 1973, 1981) held that representations that underlie the experience of mental imagery are the same type as those used in language; the other position (which my colleagues and I supported, e.g., Kosslyn, 1980, 1994) held that these representations serve to depict, not describe, objects. The debate evolved over time... but always centred on the nature of the internal representations that underlie the experience of visualisation."

"Rather than a series of levels, we have a distinguished level, , the level at which interpretation of the symbols is in the intentional, or cognitive, domain or in the domain of the objects of thought."

"[If] we equip the programmed computer with transducers so it can interact freely with a natural environment and a linguistic one, as well as the power to make inferences, it is far from obvious what if any latitude the theorist (who knows how the transducers operate and therefore what they respond to) would still have in assigning a coherent interpretation to the functional states so as to capture psychologically relevant regularities in behavior. If the answer is that the theorist is left with no latitude beyond the usual inductive indeterminism all theories have in the face of finite data, it would be perverse to deny that these states had the semantic content assigned to them by the theory."

"The term knowledge raises philosophical eyebrows (strictly speaking, it should be called belief)."

"When taken as a way of modeling cognitive architecture, really does represent an approach that is quite different from that of the classical cognitive science that it seeks to replace. Classical models of the mind were derived from the structure of Turing and Von Neumann machines. They are not, of course, committed to the details of these machines as exemplified in Turing's original formulation or in typical commercial computers—only to the basic idea that the kind of computing that is relevant to understanding cognition involves operations on symbols.. In contrast, connectionists propose to design systems that can exhibit intelligent behavior without storing, retrieving, or otherwise operating on structured symbolic expressions. The style of processing carried out in such models is thus strikingly unlike what goes on when conventional machines are computing some function."

"[A computer program for Task A qua an explanatory model and how a human cognizer actually carries out Task A are equivalent in the strong sense when it can be shown that]... the model and the organism are carrying out the same process."