16 research outputs found
High level cognitive information processing in neural networks
Two related research efforts were addressed: (1) high-level connectionist cognitive modeling; and (2) local neural circuit modeling. The goals of the first effort were to develop connectionist models of high-level cognitive processes such as problem solving or natural language understanding, and to understand the computational requirements of such models. The goals of the second effort were to develop biologically-realistic model of local neural circuits, and to understand the computational behavior of such models. In keeping with the nature of NASA's Innovative Research Program, all the work conducted under the grant was highly innovative. For instance, the following ideas, all summarized, are contributions to the study of connectionist/neural networks: (1) the temporal-winner-take-all, relative-position encoding, and pattern-similarity association techniques; (2) the importation of logical combinators into connection; (3) the use of analogy-based reasoning as a bridge across the gap between the traditional symbolic paradigm and the connectionist paradigm; and (4) the application of connectionism to the domain of belief representation/reasoning. The work on local neural circuit modeling also departs significantly from the work of related researchers. In particular, its concentration on low-level neural phenomena that could support high-level cognitive processing is unusual within the area of biological local circuit modeling, and also serves to expand the horizons of the artificial neural net field
Human reasoning and cognitive science
In the late summer of 1998, the authors, a cognitive scientist and a logician, started talking about the relevance of modern mathematical logic to the study of human reasoning, and we have been talking ever since. This book is an interim report of that conversation. It argues that results such as those on the Wason selection task, purportedly showing the irrelevance of formal logic to actual human reasoning, have been widely misinterpreted, mainly because the picture of logic current in psychology and cognitive science is completely mistaken. We aim to give the reader a more accurate picture of mathematical logic and, in doing so, hope to show that logic, properly conceived, is still a very helpful tool in cognitive science. The main thrust of the book is therefore constructive. We give a number of examples in which logical theorizing helps in understanding and modeling observed behavior in reasoning tasks, deviations of that behavior in a psychiatric disorder (autism), and even the roots of that behavior in the evolution of the brain
Script Effects as the Hidden Drive of the Mind, Cognition, and Culture
This open access volume reveals the hidden power of the script we read in and how it shapes and drives our minds, ways of thinking, and cultures. Expanding on the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (i.e., the idea that language affects the way we think), this volume proposes the âScript Relativity Hypothesisâ (i.e., the idea that the script in which we read affects the way we think) by offering a unique perspective on the effect of script (alphabets, morphosyllabaries, or multi-scripts) on our attention, perception, and problem-solving. Once we become literate, fundamental changes occur in our brain circuitry to accommodate the new demand for resources. The powerful effects of literacy have been demonstrated by research on literate versus illiterate individuals, as well as cross-scriptal transfer, indicating that literate brain networks function differently, depending on the script being read. This book identifies the locus of differences between the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, and between the East and the West, as the neural underpinnings of literacy. To support the âScript Relativity Hypothesisâ, it reviews a vast corpus of empirical studies, including anthropological accounts of human civilization, social psychology, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, applied linguistics, second language studies, and cross-cultural communication. It also discusses the impact of reading from screens in the digital age, as well as the impact of bi-script or multi-script use, which is a growing trend around the globe. As a result, our minds, ways of thinking, and cultures are now growing closer together, not farther apart. ; Examines the origin, emergence, and co-evolution of written language, the human mind, and culture within the purview of script effects Investigates how the scripts we read over time shape our cognition, mind, and thought patterns Provides a new outlook on the four representative writing systems of the world Discusses the consequences of literacy for the functioning of the min
The Message is Murder
The Message is Murder analyses the violence bound up in the everyday functions of digital media. At its core is the concept of 'computational capital' - the idea that capitalism itself is a computer, turning qualities into quantities, and that the rise of digital culture and technologies under capitalism should be seen as an extension of capitalism's bloody logic.
Engaging with Borges, Turing, Claude Shannon, Hitchcock and Marx, this book tracks computational capital to reveal the lineages of capitalised power as it has restructured representation, consciousness and survival in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Ultimately The Message is Murder makes the case for recognising media communications across all platforms - books, films, videos, photographs and even language itself - as technologies of political economy, entangled with the social contexts of a capitalism that is inherently racial, gendered and genocidal
Aspects of emergent cyclicity in language and computation
This thesis has four parts, which correspond to the presentation and development of a theoretical
framework for the study of cognitive capacities qua physical phenomena, and a case study of locality conditions over natural languages.
Part I deals with computational considerations, setting the tone of the rest of the thesis, and introducing and defining critical concepts like âgrammarâ, âautomatonâ, and the relations between them
. Fundamental questions concerning the place of formal language theory in
linguistic inquiry, as well as the expressibility of linguistic and computational concepts in
common terms, are raised in this part.
Part II further explores the issues addressed in Part I with particular emphasis on how
grammars are implemented by means of automata, and the properties of the formal languages
that these automata generate. We will argue against the equation between effective computation
and function-based computation, and introduce examples of computable procedures which are
nevertheless impossible to capture using traditional function-based theories. The connection
with cognition will be made in the light of dynamical frustrations: the irreconciliable tension
between mutually incompatible tendencies that hold for a given dynamical system. We will
provide arguments in favour of analyzing natural language as emerging from a tension between
different systems (essentially, semantics and morpho-phonology) which impose orthogonal
requirements over admissible outputs. The concept of level of organization or scale comes to
the foreground here; and apparent contradictions and incommensurabilities between concepts
and theories are revisited in a new light: that of dynamical nonlinear systems which are
fundamentally frustrated. We will also characterize the computational system that emerges from
such an architecture: the goal is to get a syntactic component which assigns the simplest
possible structural description to sub-strings, in terms of its computational complexity. A
system which can oscillate back and forth in the hierarchy of formal languages in assigning
structural representations to local domains will be referred to as a computationally mixed
system.
Part III is where the really fun stuff starts. Field theory is introduced, and its applicability to
neurocognitive phenomena is made explicit, with all due scale considerations. Physical and
mathematical concepts are permanently interacting as we analyze phrase structure in terms of
pseudo-fractals (in Mandelbrotâs sense) and define syntax as a (possibly unary) set of
topological operations over completely Hausdorff (CH) ultrametric spaces. These operations, which makes field perturbations interfere, transform that initial completely Hausdorff
ultrametric space into a metric, Hausdorff space with a weaker separation axiom. Syntax, in this
proposal, is not âgenerativeâ in any traditional sense âexcept the âfully explicit theoryâ one-:
rather, it partitions (technically, âparametrizesâ) a topological space. Syntactic dependencies are
defined as interferences between perturbations over a field, which reduce the total entropy of
the system per cycles, at the cost of introducing further dimensions where attractors
corresponding to interpretations for a phrase marker can be found.
Part IV is a sample of what we can gain by further pursuing the physics of language approach,
both in terms of empirical adequacy and theoretical elegance, not to mention the unlimited
possibilities of interdisciplinary collaboration. In this section we set our focus on island
phenomena as defined by Ross (1967), critically revisiting the most relevant literature on this
topic, and establishing a typology of constructions that are strong islands, which cannot be
violated. These constructions are particularly interesting because they limit the phase space of
what is expressible via natural language, and thus reveal crucial aspects of its underlying
dynamics. We will argue that a dynamically frustrated system which is characterized by
displaying mixed computational dependencies can provide straightforward characterizations of
cyclicity in terms of changes in dependencies in local domains
Alien theory : the decline of materialism in the name of matter
The thesis tries to define and explain the rudiments of a 'nonphilosophical'
or 'non-decisional' theory of materialism on the basis of a
theoretical framework provided by the 'non-philosophy' of Francois
Laruelle. Neither anti-philosophical nor anti-materialist in character, non-materialism
tries to construct a rigorously transcendental theory of matter by
using certain instances of philosophical materialism as its source material.
The materialist decision to identify the real with matter is seen to retain a
structural isomorphy with the phenomenological decision to identify the real
with the phenomenon. Both decisions are shown to operate on the basis of a
methodological idealism; materialism on account of its confusion of matter
and concept; phenomenology by virtue of its confusion of phenomenon and
logos. By dissolving the respectively 'materiological' and
'phenomenological' amlphibolies which are the result of the failure to effect a
rigorously transcendental separation between matter and concept on the one
hand; and between phenomenon and logos on the other, non-materialist
theory proposes to mobilise the non-hybrid or non-decisional concepts of a
'matter-without-concept' and of a 'phenomenon-without-logos' in order to
effect a unified but non-unitary theory of phenomenology and materialism.
The result is a materialisation of thinking that operates according to matter's
foreclosure to decision. That is to say, a transcendental theory of the
phenomenon that licenses limitless phenomenological plasticity,
unconstrained by the apparatus of eidetic intuition or any horizon of
apophantic disclosure; yet one which is simultaneously a transcendental
theory of matter, uncontaminated by the bounds of empirical perception and
free of all phenomenological circumscription
Frontiers in psychodynamic neuroscience
he term psychodynamics was introduced in 1874 by Ernst von BruĚcke, the renowned German physiologist and Freudâs research supervisor at the University of Vienna. Together with Helmholtz and others, BruĚcke proposed that all living organisms are energy systems, regulated by the same thermodynamic laws. Since Freud was a student of BruĚcke and a deep admirer of Helmholtz, he adopted this view, thus laying the foundations for his metapsychology.
The discovery of the Default Network and the birth of Neuropsychoanalysis, twenty years ago, facilitated a deep return to this classical conception of the brain as an energy system, and therefore a return to Freud's early ambition to establish psychology as natural science. Our current investigations of neural networks and applications of the Free Energy Principle are equally âpsychodynamicâ in BruĚckeâs original sense of the term.
Some branches of contemporary neuroscience still eschew subjective data and therefore exclude the brainâs most remarkable property â its selfhood â from the field, and many neuroscientists remain skeptical about psychoanalytic methods, theories, and concepts. Likewise, some psychoanalysts continue to reject any consideration of the structure and functions of the brain from their conceptualization of the mind in health and disease. Both cases seem to perpetuate a Cartesian attitude in which the mind is linked to the brain in some equivocal relationship and an attitude that detaches the brain from the body -- rather than considering it an integral part of the complex and dynamic living organism as a whole.
Evidence from psychodynamic neuroscience suggests that Freudian constructs can now be realized neurobiologically. For example, Freudâs notion of primary and secondary processes is consistent with the hierarchical organization of self-organized cortical and subcortical systems, and his description of the ego is consistent with the functions of the Default Network and its reciprocal exchanges with subordinate brain systems. Moreover, thanks to new methods of measuring brain entropy, we can now operationalize the primary and secondary processes and therefore test predictions arising from these Freudian constructs.
All of this makes it possible to deepen the dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis, in ways and to a degree that was unimaginable in Freud's time, and even compared to twenty years ago. Many psychoanalytical hypotheses are now well integrated with contemporary neuroscience. Other Freudian and post-Freudian hypotheses about the structure and function of the mind seem ripe for the detailed and sophisticated development that modern psychodynamic neuroscience can offer.
This Research Topic aims to provide comprehensive coverage of the latest advances in psychodynamic neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis. Potential authors are invited to submit papers (original research, case reports, review articles, commentaries) that deploy, review, compare or develop the methods and theories of psychodynamic neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis.
Potential authors include researchers, psychoanalysts, and neuroscientists
Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque
How might we think differently? This book is an attempt to respond to this question. Its contributors are all interested in non-standard modes of knowing. They are all more or less uneasy with the restrictions or the agendas implied by academic modes of knowing, and they have chosen to do this by working with, through, or against one important Western alternative â that of the baroque.
Why the baroque? One answer is that the baroque made space for and fostered many forms of otherness. It involved knowing things differently, extravagantly, excessively, and in materially heterogeneous ways, and it apprehended that which is other and could not be caught in a cognitive or symbolic net. It also involved knowing in ways that did not gather into a single point, and knew itself to be performative. A part of a great Western division between rationalist and non-rationalist modes of knowing, the baroque is therefore a possible resource for creating ways of knowing differently, a storehouse of possible alternative techniques. To say this is not to say that it is the right mode of knowing. The bookâs authors do not seek to create a âbaroque social scienceâ whatever that might be, but instead work in a range of ways to explore how drawing on the âresources of the baroqueâ can help us to think differently