Networks Versus Symbol Systems: Two Approaches to Modeling Cognition
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Ai: Early History 1 and Applications
AI: EARLY HISTORY 1 AND APPLICATIONS All men by nature desire to know... —ARISTOTLE, Opening sentence of the Metaphysics Hear the rest, and you will marvel even more at the crafts and resources I have contrived. Greatest was this: in the former times if a man fell sick he had no defense against the sickness, neither healing food nor drink, nor unguent; but through the lack of drugs men wasted away, until I showed them the blending of mild simples wherewith they drive out all manner of diseases. It was I who made visible to men’s eyes the flaming signs of the sky that were before dim. So much for these. Beneath the earth, man’s hidden blessing, copper, iron, silver, and gold—will anyone claim to have discovered these before I did? No one, I am very sure, who wants to speak truly and to the purpose. One brief word will tell the whole story: all arts that mortals have come from Prometheus. —AESCHYLUS, Prometheus Bound 1.1 From Eden to ENIAC: Attitudes toward Intelligence, Knowledge, and Human Artifice Prometheus speaks of the fruits of his transgression against the gods of Olympus: his purpose was not merely to steal fire for the human race but also to enlighten humanity through the gift of intelligence or nous: the rational mind. This intelligence forms the foundation for all of human technology and ultimately all human civilization. The work of Aeschylus, the classical Greek dramatist, illustrates a deep and ancient awareness of the extraordinary power of knowledge. Artificial intelligence, in its very direct concern for Prometheus’s gift, has been applied to all the areas of his legacy—medicine, psychology, biology, astronomy, geology—and many areas of scientific endeavor that Aeschylus could not have imagined. -
Constructing Artificial Intelligence Paul Edwards, the Closed World
* c 4 1 v. N > COMPUTERS . discourse »"• "u m com *»» *l't"'tA PAUL N. EDWARDS The Closed World Inside Technology edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, W. Bernard Carlson, and Trevor Pinch Wiebe E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bahelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, editors, Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies m Sociotechnical Change Stuart S. Blume, Insight and Industry: On the Dynamics of Technological Change in Medicine Louis L. Bucciarelli, Designing Engineers Geoffrey C. Bowker, Science on the Run: Information Management and Industrial Geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920-1940 H. M. Collins, Artificial Experts: Social Knowledge and Intelligent Machines Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America Pamela E. Mack, Viewing the Earth: The Social Construction of the Landsat Satellite System Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance Donald MacKenzie, Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change The Closed World Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America Paul N. Edwards The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England ©1996 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Baskerville by Pine Tree Composition, Inc. and printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Edwards, Paul N. The closed world : computers and the politics of discourse in Cold War America / Paul N. -
Connectionism and the Chinese-Room About Twenty Years
Connectionism and the Chinese-Room About twenty years ago, John Searle began a huge body of discourse with his rejection of a computational theory of mind. Searle is arguing against "strong AI”, his term for computational theory of mind . Strong AI would claim that an appropriately programmed computer can posses cognitive states, that it really is or has a mind. Searle is arguing generally against a computational approach to mind. To this end, he utilizes a now infamous thought experiment, known as the Chinese-Room. At the core of Searle‟s thought experiment there is a human simulating a computer. The human in the room is given meaningless symbols in Chinese script and instructions in English for manipulating them according to their shapes. By following the instructions and correlating the symbols he appears to those outside the room to understand the Chinese language. In reality he understands nothing; he is just manipulating the symbols according to their syntactic properties. Since he is doing in essence what a computer does and he doesn‟t understand Chinese, then no computer can ever come to genuinely understand Chinese, or anything for that matter. At least, not the way humans do. To understand the effects of Searle‟s argument, we must first understand what exactly he is arguing against. Searle directs his efforts at what he calls Strong AI. At the time, this term encompassed all computational theories of mind. To fully analyse the effects of Searle‟s experiment, it is helpful to distinguish two separate types of computational theory. This will be done by examining the use and dismissal of standard symbolic atoms. -
A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity*
Bulletin of Mothemnticnl Biology Vol. 52, No. l/2. pp. 99-115. 1990. oo92-824OjW$3.OO+O.MI Printed in Great Britain. Pergamon Press plc Society for Mathematical Biology A LOGICAL CALCULUS OF THE IDEAS IMMANENT IN NERVOUS ACTIVITY* n WARREN S. MCCULLOCH AND WALTER PITTS University of Illinois, College of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry at the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, U.S.A. Because of the “all-or-none” character of nervous activity, neural events and the relations among them can be treated by means of propositional logic. It is found that the behavior of every net can be described in these terms, with the addition of more complicated logical means for nets containing circles; and that for any logical expression satisfying certain conditions, one can find a net behaving in the fashion it describes. It is shown that many particular choices among possible neurophysiological assumptions are equivalent, in the sense that for every net behaving under one assumption, there exists another net which behaves under the other and gives the same results, although perhaps not in the same time. Various applications of the calculus are discussed. 1. Introduction. Theoretical neurophysiology rests on certain cardinal assumptions. The nervous system is a net of neurons, each having a soma and an axon. Their adjunctions, or synapses, are always between the axon of one neuron and the soma of another. At any instant a neuron has some threshold, which excitation must exceed to initiate an impulse. This, except for the fact and the time of its occurence, is determined by the neuron, not by the excitation. -
THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS of the Mcculloch
JHBS—WILEY RIGHT BATCH Top of ID Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 38(1), 3–25 Winter 2002 ᭧ 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (PHYSIO)LOGICAL CIRCUITS: THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF THE Base of 1st McCULLOCH–PITTS NEURAL NETWORKS line of ART TARA H. ABRAHAM This article examines the intellectual and institutional factors that contributed to the col- laboration of neuropsychiatrist Warren McCulloch and mathematician Walter Pitts on the logic of neural networks, which culminated in their 1943 publication, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.” Historians and scientists alike often refer to the McCulloch–Pitts paper as a landmark event in the history of cybernetics, and funda- mental to the development of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. This article seeks to bring some historical context to the McCulloch–Pitts collaboration itself, namely, their intellectual and scientific orientations and backgrounds, the key concepts that contributed to their paper, and the institutional context in which their collaboration was made. Al- though they were almost a generation apart and had dissimilar scientific backgrounds, McCulloch and Pitts had similar intellectual concerns, simultaneously motivated by issues in philosophy, neurology, and mathematics. This article demonstrates how these issues converged and found resonance in their model of neural networks. By examining the intellectual backgrounds of McCulloch and Pitts as individuals, it will be shown that besides being an important event in the history of cybernetics proper, the McCulloch– Pitts collaboration was an important result of early twentieth-century efforts to apply mathematics to neurological phenomena. ᭧ 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. -
THE RISE of CYBORG CULTURE OR the BOMB WAS a CYBORG David Porush
Document generated on 09/25/2021 8 a.m. Surfaces THE RISE OF CYBORG CULTURE OR THE BOMB WAS A CYBORG David Porush SUR LA PUBLICATION ÉLECTRONIQUE Article abstract ON ELECTRONIC PUBLICATION Pictured by the author as a cybernetic rather than an atomic age, the Cold War Volume 4, 1994 is shown to be structured by the quest for a cybernetic modelling of human intelligence capable to eliminate uncertainty. The rise of the cyborg figure in URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1064963ar science fiction is brought into consideration as an illustration. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/1064963ar See table of contents Publisher(s) Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal ISSN 1188-2492 (print) 1200-5320 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this article Porush, D. (1994). THE RISE OF CYBORG CULTURE OR THE BOMB WAS A CYBORG. Surfaces, 4. https://doi.org/10.7202/1064963ar Copyright © David Porush, 1994 This document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ THE RISE OF CYBORG CULTURE OR THE BOMB WAS A CYBORG David Porush ABSTRACT Pictured by the author as a cybernetic rather than an atomic age, the Cold War is shown to be structured by the quest for a cybernetic modelling of human intelligence capable to eliminate uncertainty. -
How Cybernetics Connects Computing, Counterculture, and Design
Walker Art Center — Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia — Exhibit Catalog — October 2015 How cybernetics connects computing, counterculture, and design Hugh Dubberly — Dubberly Design Office — [email protected] Paul Pangaro — College for Creative Studies — [email protected] “Man is always aiming to achieve some goal language, and sharing descriptions creates a society.[2] and he is always looking for new goals.” Suddenly, serious scientists were talking seriously —Gordon Pask[1] about subjectivity—about language, conversation, and ethics—and their relation to systems and to design. Serious scientists were collaborating to study Beginning in the decade before World War II and collaboration. accelerating through the war and after, scientists This turn away from the mainstream of science designed increasingly sophisticated mechanical and became a turn toward interdisciplinarity—and toward electrical systems that acted as if they had a purpose. counterculture. This work intersected other work on cognition in Two of these scientists, Heinz von Foerster and animals as well as early work on computing. What Gordon Pask, took an interest in design, even as design emerged was a new way of looking at systems—not just was absorbing the lessons of cybernetics. Another mechanical and electrical systems, but also biological member of the group, Gregory Bateson, caught the and social systems: a unifying theory of systems and attention of Stewart Brand, systems thinker, designer, their relation to their environment. This turn toward and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. Bateson “whole systems” and “systems thinking” became introduced Brand to von Foerster.[3] Brand’s Whole Earth known as cybernetics. Cybernetics frames the world in Catalog spawned a do-it-yourself publishing revolution, terms of systems and their goals. -
Warren S. Mcculloch: What Is a Number, That a Man May Know It, and a Man, That He May Know a Number?, In: (Winter-Edition 2008/09), J
Winter-Edition 2008/09 Warren S. McCulloch [*] What Is a Number, that a Man May Know It, and a Man, that He May Know a Number? GENTLEMEN: I am very sensible of the honor you have conferred upon me by inviting me to read this lecture. I am only distressed, fearing you may have done so under a misapprehension; for, though my interest always was to reduce epistemology to an experimental science, the. bulk of my publications has been concerned with the physics and chemistry of the brain and body of beasts. For my interest in the functional organization of the nervous system, that knowledge was as necessary as it was insufficient in all problems of communication in men and machines. I had begun to fear that the tradition of experimental epistemology I had inherited through Dusser de Barenne from Rudolph Magnus would die with me, but if you read "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain," written by Jerome Y. Lettvin, which appeared in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers, November 1959, you will realize that the tradition will go on after I am gone. The inquiry into the physiological substrate of knowledge is here to stay until it is solved thoroughly, that is, until we have a satisfactory explanation of how we know what we know, stated in terms of the physics and chemistry, the anatomy and physiology, of the biological system. At the moment my age feeds on my youth – and both are unknown to you. It is not because I have reached what Oliver Wendell Holmes would call "our anecdotage" – but because all impersonal questions arise from personal reasons and are best understood from their histories – that I would begin with my youth. -
Cybernetics, Information Turn, Biocomplexity
INDIANA [email protected] Nature.com; ANDY POTTS; TURING FAMILY UNIVERSITY informatics.indiana.edu/rocha McCulloch & Pitts Memory can be maintained in circular networks of binary switches McCulloch, W. and W. Pitts [1943], "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity". Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5:115-133. A Turing machine program could be implemented in a finite network of binary neuron/switches Neurons as basic computing unit of the brain Circularity is essential for memory (closed loops to sustain memory) Brain (mental?) function as computing Others at Macy Meeting emphasized other aspects of brain activity Chemical concentrations and field effects (not digital) Ralph Gerard and Fredrik Bremmer INDIANA [email protected] UNIVERSITY informatics.indiana.edu/rocha cybernetics post-war science Synthetic approach Macy Conferences: 1946-53 Engineering-inspired Supremacy of mechanism Postwar culture of problem solving Interdisciplinary teams Cross-disciplinary methodology All can be axiomatized and computed Mculloch&Pitts’ work was major influence “A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity”. Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5:115-133 (1943). A Turing machine (any function) could be implemented with a network of simple binary switches (if circularity/feedback is present) Warren S. McCulloch Margaret Mead Claude Shannon INDIANA [email protected] UNIVERSITY informatics.indiana.edu/rocha cybernetics universal computers and general-purpose informatics the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation Meetings post-war science 1946-1953 Interdisciplinary Since a large class of ordinary phenomena exhibit circular causality, and mathematics is accessible, let’s look at them with a war-time team culture Participants John Von Neumann, Leonard Savage, Norbert Wiener, Arturo Rosenblueth, Walter Pitts, Margaret Mead, Heinz von Foerster, Warren McCulloch, Gregory Bateson, Claude Shannon, Ross Ashby, etc. -
Assignment 1 How Does an NPTEL Online Course Work? the Due Date for Submitting This Assignment Has Passed
1/23/2021 Artificial Intelligence Search Methods For Problem Solving - - Unit 4 - Week 1 X (https://swayam.gov.in) (https://swayam.gov.in/nc_details/NPTEL) [email protected] NPTEL (https://swayam.gov.in/explorer?ncCode=NPTEL) » Artificial Intelligence Search Methods For Problem Solving (course) Announcements (announcements) About the Course (preview) Ask a Question (forum) Progress (student/home) Mentor (student/mentor) Unit 4 - Week 1 Course outline Assignment 1 How does an NPTEL online course work? The due date for submitting this assignment has passed. Due on 2020-09-30, 23:59 IST. As per our records you have not submitted this assignment. Pre-requisite Assignment The questions in this assignment are recall based, essentially to remind you about the key points in the long history of the desire and quest for building Week 0 thinking machines. 1) ________ is often referred to as the “first programmer” 1 point Week 1 Charles Babbage The Notion of Mind in Lady Ada Lovelace Philosophy (unit? unit=6&lesson=119) Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz Alan Turing Reasoning = Computation (unit?unit=6&lesson=120) No, the answer is incorrect. Score: 0 Concepts and Categories Accepted Answers: (unit?unit=6&lesson=121) Lady Ada Lovelace How did AI get its name? 2) Who among the following was the first to build a calculating machine? 1 point (unit?unit=6&lesson=122) The Chess Saga (unit? Blaise Pascal unit=6&lesson=123) Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz A Brief History of AI (unit? Thomas de Colmar unit=6&lesson=124) Galileo Galilei The Worlds in our Minds No, the answer is incorrect. -
Kathleen A. Powers Dissertation
UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Cybernetic Origins of Life Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9d8678w5 Author Powers, Kathleen Alicia Publication Date 2020 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Cybernetic Origins of Life By Kathleen A. Powers A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and the Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Chair Professor David Bates Professor James Porter Professor Emeritus Gaetan Micco Professor Sandra Eder Fall 2020 1 Abstract The Cybernetic Origins of Life by Kathleen A. Powers Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and the Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor David Bates, Chair This dissertation elucidates the cybernetic response to the life question of post-World War II biology through an analysis of the writings and experiments of Warren S. McCulloch. The work of McCulloch, who was both a clinician and neurophysiologist, gave rise to what this dissertation refers to as a biological, medical cybernetics, influenced by vitalist conceptions of the organism as well as technical conceptions of the organ, the brain. This dissertation argues that the question ‘what is biological life?’ served as an organizing principle for the electrical, digital model of the brain submitted in “Of Digital Computers Called Brains” (1949) and the formal, mathematical model of the brain required by the McCulloch-Pitts neuron in “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” (1943). -
Frameworks for Intelligent Systems
Frameworks for Intelligent Systems CompSci 765 Meeting 3 Pat Langley Department of Computer Science University of Auckland Outline of the Lecture • Computer science as an empirical discipline • Physical symbol systems • List structures and list processing • Reasoning and intelligence • Intelligence and search • Knowledge and intelligence • Implications for social cognition 2 Computer Science as an Empirical Discipline! In their Turing Award article, Newell and Simon (1976) make some important claims: • Computer science is an empirical discipline, rather than a branch of mathematics. • It is a science of the artificial, in that it constructs artifacts of sufficient complexity that formal analysis is not tractable. • We must study these computational artifacts as if they were natural systems, forming hypotheses and collecting evidence. They propose two hypotheses based on their founding work in list processing and artificial intelligence.! 3 Laws of Qualitative Structure! The authors introduce the idea of laws of qualitative structure, which are crucial for any scientific field’s development: • The cell doctrine in biology • Plate tectonics in geology • The germ theory of disease • The atomic theory of matter They propose two such laws, one related to mental structures and another and the other to mental processes. 4 Physical Symbol Systems! Newell and Simon’s first claim, the physical symbol system hypothesis, states that: • A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action. They emphasize general cognitive abilities, such as humans exhibit, rather than specialized ones. This is a theoretical claim that is subject to empirical tests, but the evidence to date generally supports it.! 5 More on Physical Symbol Systems! What do Newell and Simon mean by a physical symbol system? • Symbols are physical patterns that are stable unless modified.