Fundamental Principles of Neural Organization of Cognition

The manuscript advances a hypothesis that there are few fundamental principles of neural organization of cognition, which explain several wide areas of the cognitive functioning. We summarize the fundamental principles, experimental, theoretical, and modeling evidence for these principles, relate them to hypothetical neural mechanisms, and made a number of predictions. We consider cognitive functioning including concepts, emotions, drives-instincts, learning, “higher” cognitive functions of language, interaction of language and cognition, role of emotions in this interaction, the beautiful, sublime, and music. Among mechanisms of behavior we concentrate on internal actions in the brain, learning and decision making. A number of predictions are made, some of which have been previously formulated and experimentally confirmed, and a number of new predictions are made that can be experimentally tested. Is it possible to explain a significant part of workings of the mind from a few basic principles, similar to how Newton explained motions of planets? This manuscript summarizes a part of contemporary knowledge toward this goal

Categories of Emotion names in Web retrieved texts

The categorization of emotion names, i.e., the grouping of emotion words that have similar emotional connotations together, is a key tool of Social Psychology used to explore people's knowledge about emotions. Without exception, the studies following that research line were based on the gauging of the perceived similarity between emotion names by the participants of the experiments. Here we propose and examine a new approach to study the categories of emotion names - the similarities between target emotion names are obtained by comparing the contexts in which they appear in texts retrieved from the World Wide Web. This comparison does not account for any explicit semantic information; it simply counts the number of common words or lexical items used in the contexts. This procedure allows us to write the entries of the similarity matrix as dot products in a linear vector space of contexts. The properties of this matrix were then explored using Multidimensional Scaling Analysis and Hierarchical Clustering. Our main findings, namely, the underlying dimension of the emotion space and the categories of emotion names, were consistent with those based on people's judgments of emotion names similarities

Physics of the Mind

Is it possible to turn psychology into hard science? Physics of the mind follows the fundamental methodology of physics in all areas where physics have been developed. What is common among Newtonian mechanics, statistical physics, quantum physics, thermodynamics, theory of relativity, astrophysics... and a theory of superstrings? The common among all areas of physics is a methodology of physics discussed in the first few lines of the paper. Is physics of the mind possible? Is it possible to describe the mind based on the few first principles as physics does? The mind with its variabilities and uncertainties, the mind from perception and elementary cognition to emotions and abstract ideas, to high cognition. Is it possible to turn psychology and neuroscience into hard sciences? The paper discusses established first principles of the mind, their mathematical formulations, and a mathematical model of the mind derived from these first principles, mechanisms of concepts, emotions, instincts, behavior, language, cognition, intuitions, conscious and unconscious, abilities for symbols, functions of the beautiful and musical emotions in cognition and evolution. Some of the theoretical predictions have been experimentally confirmed. This research won national and international awards. In addition to summarizing existing results the paper describes new development theoretical and experimental. The paper discusses unsolved theoretical problems as well as experimental challenges for future research

Review Toward physics of the mind: Concepts, emotions, consciousness, and symbols

www.elsevier.com/locate/plrev Mathematical approaches to modeling the mind since the 1950s are reviewed, including artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, and neural networks. I analyze difficulties faced by these algorithms and neural networks and relate them to the fundamental inconsistency of logic discovered by Gödel. Mathematical discussions are related to those in neurobiology, psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy. Higher cognitive functions are reviewed including concepts, emotions, instincts, understanding, imagination, intuition, consciousness. Then, I describe a mathematical formulation, unifying the mind mechanisms in a psychologically and neuro-biologically plausible system. A mechanism of the knowledge instinct drives our understanding of the world and serves as a foundation for higher cognitive functions. This mechanism relates aesthetic emotions and perception of beauty to “everyday” functioning of the mind. The article reviews mechanisms of human symbolic ability. I touch on future directions: joint evolution of the mind, language, consciousness, and cultures; mechanisms of differentiation and synthesis; a manifold of aesthetic emotions in music and differentiated instinct for knowledge. I concentrate on elucidating the first principles; review aspects of the theory that have been proven in laboratory research, relationships between the mind and brain; discuss unsolved problems, and outlin

Physical Theory of Information Processing in the Mind: Concepts and Emotions

The paper discusses a possibility that a multiplicity of mind phenomena can be understood from few fundamental principles of the mind organization, which are mathematically formulated. The paper discusses the role of concepts and emotions in the information processing by the mind and identifies an “elementary thought process ” in which an event (in the outside world, or inside the mind) is understood as a concept. Previous attempts in artificial intelligence at describing thought processes are briefly reviewed and their fundamental (mathematical) limitations are discussed. The role of emotional signals in overcoming these past limitations is emphasized. An elementary thought process is related to semiotical notions of signs and symbols. It is further related to understanding, imagination, intuition, and to the role of aesthetic emotions and beauty in functioning of the mind. Relationships between the mind and brain are briefly discussed. All the discussed notions are grounded in psychological data and mathematical theory, yet knowledge of mathematics is not assumed, discussions related to the mathematical theory are given conceptually, and the paper is accessible to non-mathematicians. A theory described here could possibly serve as a prolegomenon to a physical theory of mind

FUZZY DYNAMIC LOGIC

Fuzzy logic is extended toward dynamic adaptation of the degree of fuzziness. The motivation is to explain the process of learning as a joint model improvement and fuzziness reduction. A learning system with fuzzy models is introduced. Initially, the system is in a highly fuzzy state of uncertain knowledge, and it dynamically evolves into a low-fuzzy state of certain knowledge. We present an image recognition example of patterns below clutter. The paper discusses relationships to formal logic, fuzzy logic, complexity and draws tentative connections to Aristotelian theory of forms and working of the mind.Fuzzy logic, complexity, fuzzy dynamic logic, mind, image recognition