Applying Global Workspace Theory to the Frame Problem

International Journal of Machine …, 2009

Metascience, 2012

camera: How the physical brain captures a landscape of abstract universals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012, x+289pp, $35 HB Athanassios Raftopoulos Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012

2008 AAAI Fall Symposium on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures, 2008

In this paper we describe insights for theories of natural intelligence that arise from recent advances in architectures for robot intelligence. In particular we advocate a sketch theory for the study of both natural and artificial intelligence that consists of a set of constraints on architectures. The sketch includes the use of multiple shared workspaces, parallel asynchronous refinement of shared representations, statistical integration of evidence within and across modalities, massively parallel prediction and content ...

Revue internationale de philosophie

While we agree that the frame problem, as initially stated by McCarthy and Hayes (1969), is a problem that arises because of the use of representations, we do not accept the anti-representationalist position that the way around the problem is to eliminate representations. We believe that internal representations of the external world are a necessary, perhaps even a defining feature, of higher cognition. We explore the notion of dynamically created context-dependent representations that emerge from a continual interaction between working memory, external input, and long-term memory. We claim that only this kind of representation, necessary for higher cognitive abilities such as counterfactualization, will allow the combinatorial explosion inherent in the frame problem to be avoided.

Progress in brain research, 2005

Global workspace (GW) theory emerged from the cognitive architecture tradition in cognitive science. Newell and co-workers were the first to show the utility of a GW or "blackboard" architecture in a distributed set of knowledge sources, which could cooperatively solve problems that no single constituent could solve alone. The empirical connection with conscious cognition was made by Baars (1988, 2002). GW theory generates explicit predictions for conscious aspects of perception, emotion, motivation, learning, working memory, voluntary control, and self systems in the brain. It has similarities to biological theories such as Neural Darwinism and dynamical theories of brain functioning. Functional brain imaging now shows that conscious cognition is distinctively associated with wide spread of cortical activity, notably toward frontoparietal and medial temporal regions. Unconscious comparison conditions tend to activate only local regions, such as visual projection areas. Fr...

Space in Languages: Linguistic Systems and Cognitive Categories, 2006

It is widely assumed that perception essentially involves a relative or egocentric frame of reference. Stephen Levinson has explicitly challenged this assumption and proposed a 'neo-Whorfian'hypothesis according to which the frame of reference that is dominant in a given language infiltrates spatial representations in non-linguistic modalities. Our aim is to assess this hypothesis at the philosophical level and to explore the further possibility that perception may be perspective-free, at least at the most basic level, in the sense that it does not ...

Mind and Language, vol 23. no. 1, pp. 123-143, 2008

In The Mind Doesn't Work That Way, Jerry Fodor argues that mental representations have context sensitive features relevant to cognition, and that, therefore, the Classical Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) is mistaken. We call this the Globality Argument. This is an in principle argument against CTM. We argue that it is self-defeating. We consider an alternative argument constructed from the materials in the discussion, which avoids the pitfalls of the official argument. We argue that it is also unsound and that, while it is an empirical issue whether the context sensitive features of mental representation are relevant to cognition, it is empirically implausible.

Perhaps it's a mark of the sheer vitality of the relatively young field of cognitive science that it's grappling with its third major paradigm in the space of just thirty years. While the roots of the discipline can be traced back to 1960s, its real beginnings occurred in the early 1970s with the application of ideas derived from conventional digital computers to human cognition, spawning the now appropriately named classical computational theory of mind: the doctrine that cognition is a species of symbol manipulation. Then, in the mid-1980s, the field witnessed its first major shake-up with the advent of neurally-inspired, parallel distributed processing (PDP) computational models, which substituted operations over activation patterns for symbol manipulations, and many theorists in the field started talking passionately about connectionism. Now, scarcely ten years later, the field is once again in tumult, this time with the arrival of dynamical systems theory, which, because it eschews the concept of representation, threatens to create an even greater rift in the field than that which occurred between connectionism and classicism.

2003

One of the questions that frequently come up in discussions of situated, embodied and distributed cognition is w here to draw the boundary between cognisers and their environment. Adams and Aizawa (2001) have recently formulated a critique of what they consider a "radical view of tool use", i.e., the view of tools as part of the cognitive system. We analyse their critique and show that much of what they consider 'radical' turns out to be compatible with what they consider 'common sense'. Hence, we argue that much of the debate boils down to a disagreement over different uses of the term 'cognitive', whereas there is growing agreement about the central role that agent-environment interaction in general, and tool use in particular, play in cognitive processes. We therefore suggest to drop the 'bounds of cognition' debate, and conclude by raising what we consider more important questions in the study of cognitive tool use.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1990

Typological Studies in Language, 2006

It is widely assumed, both in philosophy and in the cognitive sciences, that perception essentially involves a relative or egocentric frame of reference. In his discussion of a variant of Molyneux's question concerning the relationship between the frames of reference used in particular languages and the frames of reference involved in non-linguistic spatial representations, Levinson has explicitly challenged this assumption. Instead, he argues in favour of the 'neo-Whorfian' hypothesis that the frame of reference dominant in a given language infiltrates spatial representations in non-linguistic, and in particular perceptual, modalities.

Frames of knowledge and perception, 2020

Neural Networks, 2007

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:

Frontiers in Psychology, 2018

In this paper, we argue that several recent ‘wide’ perspectives on cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed) are only partially relevant to the study of cognition. While these wide accounts override traditional methodological individualism, the study of cognition has already progressed beyond these proposed perspectives toward building integrated explanations of the mechanisms involved, including not only internal submechanisms but also interactions with others, groups, cognitive artifacts, and their environment. Wide perspectives are essentially research heuristics for building mechanistic explanations. The claim is substantiated with reference to recent developments in the study of “mindreading” and debates on emotions. We argue that the current practice in cognitive (neuro)science has undergone, in effect, a silent mechanistic revolution, and has turned from initial binary oppositions and abstract proposals toward the integration of wide perspectives with the rest of the cognitive (neuro)sciences.