Cognitive Scientists

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Some researchers, such as Igor Aleksander, were even describing their laptops as conscious."

"To date there seems to be only one serious attempt to create an artificially conscious entity. This is the goal of Igor Aleksander at Imperial College, where he has created an artificial neural net (ANN) called Magnus, designed to be conscious in the sense of being able to tell us what it is like to be Magnus."

"The point of a brain is that it's not one huge neural network with feedback, it has up to 50 to 60 identified areas, all of which have feedback and all of which are capable of knowledge storage. We've got a complex system and, within this complex system, we can start discovering what the mechanisms that support deliberation are. Consciousness must come out of these interactions."

"I am not interested so much in behaviour from which you infer consciousness because that is a mug's game. I don't know whether you're conscious. I take a good guess that you are and you can take a good guess that I am but it's not something you can prove. We can't work out what someone else feels."

"A neural network is a massively parallel distributed processor that has a natural propensity for storing experiential knowledge and making it available for use. It resembles the brain in two respects: 1. Knowledge is acquired by the network through a learning process. 2. Interneuron connection strengths known as synaptic weights are used to store the knowledge."

"Trying to understand the brain's abilities leads to philosophical difliculties. Penrose (1994) argues that the task is sterile and that science, including neural networks, has not yet advanced to the stage where it can explain conscious thought. At the other extreme there are philosophers such as Fodor (1975) who believed that thought has language-like properties and can be analysed in the same logical way as one can anlayse the structure of language."

"Neural Computing is the study of networks of adaptable nodes which through a process of learning from task examples, store experiential knowledge and make it available for use."

"An opportunity for cybernetics to change the course of the philosophy of mind was missed when intentionality was misinterpreted as "the providing of coded knowledge"."

"Consciousness is an incredibly delicate subject because it offend. It's a subject that scientific groups kept away from. They said it was a philosophical concept."

"Machine consciousness refers to attempts by those who design and analyse informational machines to apply their methods to various ways of understanding consciousness and to examine the possible role of consciousness in informational machines."

"Neural computing is the study of cellular networks that have a natural property for storing experimental knowledge. Such systems bear a resemblance to the brain in the sense that knowledge is acquired through training rather than programming and is retained due to changes in node functions. The knowledge takes the form of stable states or cycles of states in the operation of the et. A central property of such nets is to recall these states or cycles in response to the presentation of cues."

"Dan Dennett once said that if he hadn't become a philosopher, he might have become an engineer. I think Igor has shown us that the gap between the two professions may be smaller than we think."

"Looking back to data, we can see if the consequences are plausible; looking forward to theory, we can see if general principles are suggested."

"There is more of a mystery to the origin of the pin factory that Adam Smith (1776) discusses in his Wealth of Nations than is generally realized."

"Evolution continually innovates, but at each level it conserves the elements that are recombined to yield the innovations."

"Unwrapping occurs when the "solution" is explicitly built into the program from the start."

"Model building is the art of selecting those aspects of a process that are relevant to the question being asked. As with any art, this selection is guided by taste, elegance, and metaphor; it is a matter of induction, rather than deduction. High science depends on this art."

"The end point, a cas simulation with a realistic interface, is highly desirable, because it enables an ecologist, or economist, or politician to try out alternatives that could not possibly tried in real systems."

"Actually quite recently, within the last four or five years, Bill and I have got back together again to build agent-based models of language acquisition; so that was a kind of longrange boomerang"

"We had summer courses in what was called automata theory; after the first year I directed them. Herb Simon, Al Newell, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, they all came and lectured on them, so there was quite a bit of interaction."

"So anyhow I did math and I had actually started writing a dissertation in mathematics – on cylindrical algebras, algebras that extended Boolean algebras to predicate logic with quantifiers"

"The measure of performance of any given agent is the amount of money it accumulates through its actions."

"I think it’s still true, you had to do a dissertation for your bachelor’s degree. I decided that I wanted to do something that was really quite new: work with the first real-time computer"

"That time at IBM was obviously an influence on me. I worked for them for eighteen months and then decided I really did want to go to graduate school."

"Not particularly, although my parents always encouraged me and supported my interest, from the first chemistry set they bought me,"

"Holland's and Kauffman's work, together with Dawkins' simulations of evolution and Varela's models of autopoietic systems, provide essential inspiration for the new discipline of artificial life, This approach, initiated by Chris Langton (1989, 1992), tries to develop technological systems (computer programs and autonomous robots) that exhibit lifelike properties, such as reproduction, sexuality, swarming, and co-evolution."

"The multiplier effect is a major feature of networks and flows. It arises regardless of the particular nature of the resource, be it goods, money, or messages."

"The recycling of resource by the aggregate behavior of a diverse array of agents is much more than the sum of the individual actions."

"This use of building blocks to generate internal models is a pervasive feature of complex adaptive systems."

"If we are to understand the interactions of a large number of agents, we must first be able to describe the capabilities of individual agents."

"nonlinear interactions almost always make the behavior of the aggregate more complicated than would be predicted by summing or averaging."

"If there is to be a competition, there must be some basis for resolving it. It is also clear that the competition should be experienced based."

""Doing science," particularly the synthesis of disparate ideas, is not as arcane as it is often made out to be. Discipline and taste play a vital role, but the activity is familiar to anyone who has made some effort to be creative."

"When a new building block is discovered, the result is usually a range of innovations."

"Even though these complex systems differ in detail, the question of coherence under change is the central enigma for each."

"With theory, we can separate fundamental characteristics from fascinating idiosyncrasies and incidental features. Theory supplies landmarks and guideposts, and we begin to know what to observe and where to act."

"Particular individuals do not recur, but their building blocks do."

"Let me close with a picture. My picture of our situation is not the famous Neurath picture of science as the enterprise of reconstructing a boat while the boat floats on the open ocean, but it is a modification of it. I would change Neurath's picture in two ways. First, I would put ethics, philosophy, in fact the whole culture, in the boat, and not just 'science', for I believe all the parts of the culture are inter- dependent. And, second, my image is not of a single boat but of a fleet of boats. The people in each boat are trying to reconstruct their own boat without modifying it so much at anyone time that the boat sinks, as in the Neurath image. In addition, people are passing supplies and tools from one boat to another and shouting advice and encouragement (or discouragement) to each other. Finally, people sometimes decide they don't like the boat they're in and move to a different boat altogether. (And sometimes a boat sinks or is abandoned.) It's all a bit chaotic; but since it is a fleet, no one is ever totally out of signalling distance from all the other boats. There is, in short, both collectivity and individual responsibility. If we hanker for more, is that not our old and unsatisfiable yearning for Absolutes?"

"If reason is both transcendent and immanent, then philosophy, as culture-bound reflection and argument about eternal questions, is both in time and eternity. We don't have an Archimedean point; we always speak the language of a time and place; but the rightness and wrongness of what we say is not just for a time and a place."

"To require that all of these must be reducible to a single version is to make the mistake of supposing that 'Which are the real objects?' is a question that makes sense independently of our choice of concepts."

"Even if we consider not words by themselves but rules deciding what words may appropriately be produced in certain contexts — even if we consider, in computer jargon, programs for using words — unless those programs themselves refer to something extra-linguistic there is still no determinate reference that those words possess. This will be a crucial step in the process of reaching the conclusion that the Brain-in-a-Vat Worlders cannot refer to anything external at all (and hence cannot say that they are Brain-in-a-Vat Worlders)."

"What we have is a device for producing sentences in response to sentences. But none of these sentences is at all connected to the real world. If one coupled two of these machines and let them play the Imitation Game with each other, then they would go on 'fooling' each other forever, even if the rest of the world disappeared! There is no more reason to regard the machine's talk of apples as referring to real world apples than there is to regard the ant's 'drawing' as referring to Winston Churchill."

"To me, believing that some correspondence intrinsically just is reference (not as a result of our operational and theoretical constraints, or our intentions, but as an ultimate metaphysical fact) amounts to a magical theory of reference. Reference itself becomes what Locke called a 'substantial form' (an entity which intrinsically belongs with a certain name) on such a view. Even if one is willing to contemplate such unexplainable metaphysical facts, the epistemological problems that accompany such a metaphysical view seem insuperable. For, assuming a world of mind- independent, discourse-independent entities (this is the presupposition of the view we are discussing), there are, as we have seen, many different 'correspondences' which represent possible or candidate reference relations (infinitely many, in fact, if there are infinitely many things in the universe)."

"Before I give the argument, let us consider why it seems so strange that such an argument can be given (at least to philosophers who subscribe to a 'copy' conception of truth). We conceded that it is compatible with physical law that there should be a world in which all sentient beings are brains in a vat. As philosophers say, there is a 'possible world' in which all sentient beings are brains in a vat. (This 'possible world' talk makes it sound as if there is a place where any absurd supposition is true, which is why it can be very misleading in philosophy.) The humans in that possible world have exactly the same experiences that we do. They think the same thoughts we do (at least, the same words, images, thought-forms, etc., go through their minds). Yet, I am claiming that there is an argument we can give that shows we are not brains in a vat. How can there be? And why couldn't the people in the possible world who really are brains in a vat give it too? The answer is going to be (basically) this: although the people in that possible world can think and 'say' any words we can think and say, they cannot (I claim) refer to what we can refer to. In particular, they cannot think or say that they are brains in a vat {even by thinking 'we are brains in a vat)."

"The problem with all this--the problem I discussed in the first lecture--is that if the causes/background conditions distinction is fundamentally subjective, not descriptive of the world in itself, then current philosophical explanations of the metaphysical nature of reference are bankrupt."

"Even though the model referred to satisfies the theory, etc., it is 'unintended'; and we recognize that it is unintended from the description through which it is given (as in the intuitionist case). Models are not lost noumenal waifs looking for someone to name them; they are constructions within our theory itself. and they have names from birth."