Interactions Between Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence: the Role of Intuition And Non-Logical Reasoning In Intelligence

A cognitive architecture that combines internal simulation with a global workspace

“…1 For much of its history, mainstream cognitive science assumed language and reason to be the right conceptual foundations on which to build a scientific understanding of cognition. By contrast, the brain-inspired architecture described here, instead of manipulating declarative, language-like representations in the manner of classical AI and cognitive science, realises cognitive function through topographically organised maps of neurons, which can be thought of as a form of analogical (or diagrammatic or iconic) representation whose structure is close to that of the sensory input of the robot whose actions they mediate (Barsalou, 1999;Glasgow, Narayanan, & Chandrasekaran, 1995;Sloman, 1971).…”

When is a bunch of marks on paper a diagram? Diagrams as homomorphic representations

“…That diagrams are analog, i.e., homomorphic, representations of some kind, and sentential representations are not, has been said many times before, by a lmost everyone who has considered the issue, e.g., (Sloman 1971;Lindsay 1988), and (Barwise and Etchemendy 1991), but largely as an intuitively obvious statement of fact. The only paper that to my knowledge explicitly relates that intuition to the causality of the physical medium is (Shimojima 2001), which proposes that graphical systems, unlike descriptive representations, project nomic constraints -essentially what we have identified as the causal structure of the physical medium -through semantic relation.…”

Programming by example: novice programming comes of age

“…In 1971, Aaron Sloman divided representations into two general types: analogical and "Fregean," after Gottlob Frege, the inventor of predicate calculus [9]. In an analogical representation, Sloman wrote, "the structure of the representation gives information about the structure of what is represented" [9]. A map is an example; from a map, one can tell the relationships between streets, the distance between two points, the locations of landmarks, and which way to turn when you come to an intersection.…”

“…… The structure of such a configuration need not correspond to the structure of what it represents or denotes" [9]. We can, for example, represent some of the information in a map through predicate calculus statements, such as: g: "Gravesend" u: "UnionVille" m: "Manhattan Beach" s: "Sheepshead Bay" East(g, u) EastSouthEast(s, g) South(m, s) "The generality of Fregean systems may account for the extraordinary richness of human thought … It may also account for our ability to think and reason about complex states of affairs involving many different kinds of objects and relations at once.…”