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Harnad, S. (2003b) Categorical Perception . Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science . Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan. http://www.youtube.com...
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(10a. Comment Overflow) (50+)
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Psychology PSYC 538, Winter 2018: Categorization, Communication and Consciousness Time : Tuesdays 2:35-5:25 Place : STBIO S3/3 ...
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ReplyDelete“If I ask you who your 3rd grade school-teacher was, your brain has to do a computation, a computation that is invisible and impenetrable to introspection. The computation is done by our
ReplyDeleteheads implicitly, but successful cognitive theory must make it explicit, so it can be
tested (computationally) to see whether it works.”
If this computation is invisible and impenetrable to introspection, but “explanation in all disciplines originates from human observation and reflection” (page 2 paragraph 2), is it that there is a step in between introspection and explicit cognitive theory that we are missing or need to find? We surely cannot reject requiring introspection but we have to do something with these very questions we ask (the reflections) about the implicit to make it explicit.
“The gist of the Turing Test is that on the day we will have been able to put together a system that can do everything a human being can do, indistinguishably from the way a human being does it, we will have come up with at least one viable explanation of cognition. “ (page 7)
ReplyDeleteAlthough I truth in the logic, I don’t see how this can prove anything about cognition. Just because the same output can be derived from a machine using a given software, does not necessarily prove that our brains produce the output using the same (or similar) software. I don’t see how this accounts for variation in the mechanism of action.
How does the imagery theory described on page four account for individuals who cannot recall the picture of their teacher (e.g. the blind)? Or perhaps, if it does not account for this, is this also considered to be another one of its failings?
ReplyDeleteIn terms of cognition, what is to say that there is only one way of understanding or learning? How can we create a machine that passes for human and then assume that the way it learns is the same process by which a human learns? After-all the machine is all but an imitation of the human. If the whole composition of our being is entirely different, can be really really assume that the process the a machine is going through is the same a human is going through when it comes to cognition if we were ever able to build a machine that was to be able to pass for human? Can we really learn something fundamental about human cognition by studying something we created?
ReplyDelete“Core grammatical rules are not learnable by trial and error and corrective feedback… That database is simply not rich enough for any inductive mechanism to learn the requisite rules on the basis of the data and the time allotted to the child; hence the child must already have the rules built-in in advance.”
ReplyDeleteThis notion that there is something implicit within our cognitive system that allows us to understand language structure without explicit training offers a key insight into the structure of our cognitive system beyond a simple input-computation-output system postulated by computationalists. Cognition must be something more than just the manipulation of syntactic symbols and the interpretation of the output. Where does the understanding of these symbols come from? What structures our innate “competence” in the brain? – That is a question that should be answered before we delve into computer models of cognition.
“Behaviourists had rightly pointed out that sitting in an armchair and reflecting on how our mind works will not yield an explanation of how it works”
ReplyDeleteI agree with this saying because of the biases we have as humans of our own interpretation of thoughts. If we used this method to explain cognition there would be a lot of subjectivity in its explanation. This goes with the How and Why phenomenon where you can explain why you thought this but how? This goes the symbol manipulation of being able to describe how you did long division in your head and in a computer program but how
What is computation?
ReplyDeleteAlthough there is no clear answer at the moment, I thought that Professor Harnad brought up some great points about what our definition of computation should include. Firstly, Professor Harnad pointed out that “computations need to be dynamically implemented in order to run…”. I believe this is an obvious, yet important point to highlight. Computation is the basis of every action or thought that we produce. If we are not actively thinking or doing something, no computations will be performed. We cannot compute the answer to “Who is was your third-grade teacher” without being aware of the question being asked and without an active mind.
Secondly, Professor Harnad writes that “computation is rule based symbol manipulation… and the manipulation rules are syntactic, being based on the symbol’s shapes, not their meanings”. Computation is something that is done automatically. Humans are unable to come up with an answer when asked how they were able to remember the name of their third-grade teacher because the meaning of the symbols being manipulated to conjure up the answer are not important for the computation of this answer. Humans are only able to remember and state the name of their previous teachers, meaning that once computations are complete, they are interpretable (Fodor & Pylyshyn).
Looking back at the question at hand, computation can be described as meaningless rule based manipulations of information that are dynamically implemented when we are in thought or doing something to produce meaningful answers and actions. But, to put it in a more kid-sib friendly way… Computation is an active process. Computation is something that happens automatically when we think or do something. Computations manipulate the information we receive from the world and produce meaningful thoughts and actions.