16,245 research outputs found
Entering the blackboard jungle: canonical dysfunction in conscious machines
The central paradigm of Artificial Intelligence is rapidly shifting toward biological models for both robotic devices and systems performing such critical tasks as network management and process control. Here we apply recent mathematical analysis of the necessary conditions for consciousness in humans in an attempt to gain some understanding of the likely canonical failure modes inherent to a broad class of global workspace/blackboard machines designed to emulate biological functions. Similar problems are likely to confront other possible architectures, although their mathematical description may be far less straightforward
Astrobiological Perspectives on Consciousness
The Stanley Miller experiment suggests that amino acid-based life is ubiquitous in our universe, although its varieties are not likely to have followed the particular, highly contingent and path-dependent, trajectory found on Earth. Are many of these life forms likely to be conscious in ways that we would recognize? Almost certainly. Will many conscious entities develop high order technology? Less likely. If so, will we be able to communicate with them? Only on a basic level, and only with profound difficulty. The argument is straightforward
Gene Expression and its Discontents: Developmental disorders as dysfunctions of epigenetic cognition
Systems biology presently suffers the same mereological and sufficiency fallacies that haunt neural network models of high order cognition. Shifting perspective from the massively parallel space of gene matrix interactions to the grammar/syntax of the time series of expressed phenotypes using a cognitive paradigm permits import of techniques from statistical physics via the homology between information source uncertainty and free energy density. This produces a broad spectrum of possible statistical models of development and its pathologies in which epigenetic regulation and the effects of embedding environment are analogous to a tunable enzyme catalyst. A cognitive paradigm naturally incorporates memory, leading directly to models of epigenetic inheritance, as affected by environmental exposures, in the largest sense. Understanding gene expression, development, and their dysfunctions will require data analysis tools considerably more sophisticated than the present crop of simplistic models abducted from neural network studies or stochastic chemical reaction theory
The cultural epigenetics of psychopathology: The missing heritability of complex diseases found?
We extend a cognitive paradigm for gene expression based on the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory to the epigenetic epidemiology of mental disorders. In particular, we recognize the fundamental role culture plays in human biology, another heritage mechanism parallel to, and interacting with, the more familiar genetic and epigenetic systems. We do this via a model through which culture acts as another tunable epigenetic catalyst that both directs developmental trajectories, and becomes convoluted with individual ontology, via a mutually-interacting crosstalk mediated by a social interaction that is itself culturally driven. We call for the incorporation of embedding culture as an essential component of the epigenetic regulation of human mental development and its dysfunctions, bringing what is perhaps the central reality of human biology into the center of biological psychiatry. Current US work on gene-environment interactions in psychiatry must be extended to a model of gene-environment-culture interaction to avoid becoming victim of an extreme American individualism that threatens to create paradigms particular to that culture and that are, indeed, peculiar in the context of the world's cultures. The cultural and epigenetic systems of heritage may well provide the 'missing' heritability of complex diseases now under so much intense discussion
Layers in the Fabric of Mind: A Critical Review of Cognitive Ontogeny
The essay is critically examines the conceptual problems with the influential modularity model of mind. We shall see that one of the essential characters of modules, namely informational encapsulation, is not only inessential, it ties a knot at a crucial place blocking the solution to the problem of understanding the formation of concepts from percepts (nodes of procedural knowledge). Subsequently I propose that concept formation takes place by modulation of modules leading to cross-representations, which were otherwise prevented by encapsulation. It must be noted that the argument is not against modular architecture, but a variety of an architecture that prevents interaction among modules. This is followed by a brief argument demonstrating that module without modularization, i.e. without developmental history, is impossible. Finally the emerging picture of cognitive development is drawn in the form of the layers in the fabric of mind, with a brief statement of the possible implications
Computational Evidence that Self-regulation of Creativity is Good for Society
Excess individual creativity can be detrimental to society because creators
invest in unproven ideas at the expense of propagating proven ones. Moreover, a
proportion of individuals can benefit from creativity without being creative
themselves by copying creators. We hypothesized that (1) societies increase
their rate of cultural evolution by tempering the novelty-generating effects of
creativity with the novelty-preserving effects of imitation, and (2) this is
carried out by selectively rewarding and punishing creativity according to the
value of the individuals' creative outputs. We tested this using an agent-based
model of cultural evolution in which each agent self-regulated its
invention-to-imitation ratio as a function of the fitness of its cultural
outputs. In self-regulating societies, agents segregated into creators and
imitators. The mean fitness of cultural outputs was higher than in
non-self-regulating societies, and changes in diversity were rapider and more
pronounced. We discuss limitations and possible social implications of our
findings.Comment: 6 pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1310.475
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