Category: cognitive science RSS feed for this category
Intelligence and its Discontents
A very interesting article on the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies page by Daniel Eubanks (Is Intelligence Self-Limiting?) toys with the idea that intelligence may be self-limiting – in the following way: modifying the environment is not that much different from modifying the input signals from the environment, save that modifying input signals is typically easier. He gives the example of a mining robot with self-diagnostic and -repair capabilities. Some clever Hans in management gets the bright idea to make these robots mildly intelligent, so that they can figure out new mining techniques. He builds them with an internal
Dynamical Symbols
Noah put me on to some gratifying articles on the Dynamical Systems approach to cognition appearing in the latest edition of Topics in Cognitive Science. They all share a skepticism of Dynamical Systems as a scientific movement. Sure, it’s a useful approach that should be pursued; it tells us things about cognition we would otherwise have difficulty modeling, but is it really necessary to make a religion out of it? Or, as Matthew Botvinick puts it in “Why I Am Not a Dynamicist:” The message is that one must choose: One may either use differential equations to explain phenomena, or
