Kant's cognitive architecture

Imagine a machine, equipped with sensors, receiving a stream of sensory information. It must, somehow, make sense of this stream of sensory data. But what, exactly, does this involve? We have an intuitive understanding of what is involved in “making sense” of sensory data – but can we specify precisely what is involved? Can this intuitive notion be formalized? In this thesis, we make three contributions. First, we provide a precise formalization of what it means to “make sense” of a sensory sequence. According to our definition, making sense means constructing a symbolic causal theory that explains the sensory sequence and satisfies a set of unity conditions that were inspired by Kant’s discussion in the first half of the Critique of Pure Reason. According to our interpretation, making sense of sensory input is a type of program synthesis, but it is unsupervised program synthesis. Our second contribution is a computer implementation, the Apperception Engine, that was designed to satisfy our requirements for making sense of a sensory sequence. Our system is able to produce interpretable human-readable causal theories from very small amounts of data, because of the strong inductive bias provided by the Kantian unity constraints. A causal theory produced by our system is able to predict future sensor readings, as well as retrodict earlier readings, and impute missing sensory readings. In fact, it is able to do all three tasks simultaneously. The engine is implemented in Answer Set Programming (ASP) and induces theories expressed in an extension of Datalog that includes causal rules and constraints. We test the engine in a diverse variety of domains, including cellular automata, rhythms and simple nursery tunes, multi-modal binding problems, occlusion tasks, and sequence induction IQ tests. In each domain, we test our engine’s ability to predict future sensor values, retrodict earlier sensor values, and impute missing sensory data. The Apperception Engine performs well in all these domains, significantly out-performing neural net baselines. These results are significant because neural nets typically struggle to solve the binding problem (where information from different modalities must somehow be combined together into different aspects of one unified object) and fail to solve occlusion tasks (in which objects are sometimes visible and sometimes obscured from view). We note in particular that in the sequence induction IQ tasks, our system achieves human-level performance. This is notable because the Apperception Engine was not designed to solve these IQ tasks; it is not a bespoke hand-engineered solution to this particular domain. – Rather, it is a general purpose system that attempts to make sense of any sensory sequence, that just happens to be able to solve these IQ tasks “out of the box”. Our third contribution is a major extension of the engine to handle noisy and ambiguous data. While the initial implementation assumes the sensory input has already been preprocessed into ground atoms of first-order logic, our extension makes sense of raw unprocessed input – a sequence of pixel images from a video camera, for example. The resulting system is a neuro-symbolic framework for distilling interpretable theories out of streams of raw, unprocessed sensory experience.Open Acces

The Reality of the World and the Multidimensionality of the Reality of the Individual: The Semantic Meaning of Architecture of Consciousness

In psychology, the world's multidimensionality is manifested in the study of consciousness, in identifying the methodological foundations of psychology and psychology of consciousness. The structure of the multidimensional world of a man is described from the point of view of the subject's understanding of the characteristic features of the realities where man lives. Aims of study are to formulate and consider the problem of the world's reality and the multidimensionality of the reality of the individual in the perspective of the semantic architecture of consciousness and within the framework of a holistic model of representation of the psychology of understanding the human world. The pragmatic aim of the present research is to set a quantitative measure in which a person is drawn into virtual reality (TER). The meta-analysis of publications with quantitative empirical data reporting on the results of staff training using virtual and augmented reality. The criteria of the search were that articles must be published exceptionally in peer-reviewed journals and be issued not older than in 2017. The platform for the effective search was the Google Scholar search engine. The transfer efficiency factor (TER) was the key element of the analysis. All gathered data extracted from the relevant literature sources were interpreted through observation, description, quantitative calculation, complex analysis, methods of comparison, generalization, and abstraction method. Although learning conditions with more virtual immersion lead to slightly worse results than real learning conditions, most people show similar results after learning, regardless of the level of virtual immersion. The inhomogeneity of acceptance by individuals of virtual reality is found out in quantitative data of the considered studies. The average score for the performance of each training condition represented in the scientific works considered for this study, as well as the 95% confidence interval, was calculated. It was found out that the value of TER 0.5 turned into a percentage by multiplication by 100%, indicates that training on the simulator can reduce the time of personal training by half. Presence is a psychological phenomenon that occurs in the human mind, not in specific technologies. The usage of virtual reality in learning affects the sense of presence and immersion. It directly affects an individual's perception of world reality. At the same time, the individual consciously accepts the picture of simulated reality, which emphasizes the multidimensionality of the individual's reality

The Apperception Engine

This paper describes an attempt to repurpose Kant’s a priori psychology as the architectural blueprint for a machine learning system. First, it describes the conditions that must be satisfied for the agent to achieve unity of experience: the intuitions must be connected, via binary relations, so as to satisfy various unity conditions. Second, it shows how the categories are derived within this model: the categories are pure unary predicates that are derived from the pure binary relations. Third, I describe how Kant’s cognitive architecture has been implemented in a computer system (the Apperception Engine) and show in detail what it is like for the system to construct a unified experience from a sequence of raw sensory input

Reaction patterns of secondary school students to the symbolism of mathematics

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Apperceptive patterning: Artefaction, extensional beliefs and cognitive scaffolding

In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog)

An Evaluation of Three Stimulus Media for Evoking Verbalizations from Preschool Children

No abstract provided by author

An Evaluation of Three Stimulus Media for Evoking Verbalizations from Preschool Children

No abstract provided by author