IEd & Steve, You're v. definitely not getting the message. I find Barsalou exciting because he is - although rather modestly and non-trumpetingly - putting forward a potentially even stronger version of Lakoff-Johnson's embodied approach. You might also like to check:
http://psychology.emory.edu/cognition/barsalou/papers/Barsalou_LCP_2003_situated_simulation.pdf No comfort for Steve: he v. explicitly opposes the idea that the conceptual system is a 1) "detached database. As categories are encoded, their invariant properties are extracted and stored in descriptions much like an encyclopaedia. The result is a database of generalised categorical knowledge that is relatively detached from the goals of specific agents." Instead he posits as primary something more like 2) an "agent-dependent instruction manual. According to this metaphor, knowledge of a category is not a general description of its members. Instead a skill that delivers highly specialised packages of inferences to guide an agent's interactions with specific category members in particular situations. Across different siutations, different packages tailor infernces to different goals and situational constraints." IOW our conceptual system exists primarily to help us seek our goals, and instantiate broad general concepts like "go and get food", "reach for that object,""find out where that noise is coming from..." And he is positing that our conceptual system depends on MODAL "SITUATED SIMULATIONS" of concepts. - to make it graphic [my version not his] you have to run cartoon movies and other sensorimotor simulations to instantiate and test conceptual propositions [but NOT "holistic images" - full-blown normal movies]. I think one can now demonstrate convincingly from an AGI POV that a conceptual system - including an NLP - HAS to work, if v. broadly, this way.. Nothing else - certainly no purely symbolic, "word-shuffling", amodal system - will ever work. But I'll leave that for another time. I can understand how you guys misconstrued Barsalou. He doesn't put his points as clearly or dramatically as he could. He repays study though. This is v. important stuff. Ed:I don't see any conflict between the dominant theory in cognitive science and that in cognitive neuroscience quoted below, rather a clarification. The latter quote pretty much says the same thing. The "amodal" nodes could represent combinations of ANDed or ORed "modal" nodes, which fits naturally with the whole notion of hierarchical memory. -----Original Message----- From: Stephen Reed [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, April 20, 2008 1:40 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [agi] Concepts - Cog Sci/AI vs Cog Neurosci Mike, Thanks for the reference, which I will study further. As many know, the Texai KB is currently crisp and symbolic, and will have to stay that way until after the bootstrap English dialog system is developed. I want Texai to be implemented in a cognitively plausible manner, and articles such as this one are very pertinent to my longer range plans for Texai, especially regarding the scoping and organization of agent knowledge. When the future Texai deals with a dog that it sees, visual representations of dogs must be close at hand. More comforting with regard to my current symbolic-only approach is this quote from the paper: Although skepticism that discrete amodal symbols underlie conceptual processing in the brain continues to increase, there is little doubt that the brain is a symbolic system. Unlike cameras and video recorders, the brain uses categorical knowledge to interpret regions of experience that contain agents, objects, actions, mental states, and so forth. The brain does not achieve its powerful forms of intelligence by processing holistic images. Stephen L. Reed Artificial Intelligence Researcher http://texai.org/blog http://texai.org 3008 Oak Crest Ave. Austin, Texas, USA 78704 512.791.7860 ----- Original Message ---- From: Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Cc: dan michaels <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, April 20, 2008 12:17:00 PM Subject: [agi] Concepts - Cog Sci/AI vs Cog Neurosci Current Directions in Psychological Science - April 2008 - In Press http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/cd/17_2_inpress/Barsalou_completed.pdf THE DOMINANT THEORY IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE Across diverse areas of psychology, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy, the dominant account of the conceptual system is the theory of semantic memory (e.g., Smith, 1978). According to this theory, the conceptual system is a modular memory store that contains amodal knowledge about categories. Semantic memory is viewed as modular because it is assumed to be separate from the brain's episodic-memory system and also from the brain's modal systems for perception, action, and affect. Because semantic memory lies outside modal systems, its representations are viewed as different from theirs, providing a higher, amodal level of representation. The transduction principle underlies the view that amodal representations develop for categories in a modular conceptual system THE DOMINANT THEORY IN COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE A very different view of the conceptual system has arisen in cognitive neuroscience. According to this view, categorical knowledge is grounded in the brain's modal systems, rather than being represented amodally in a modular semantic memory (e.g., Martin, 2001). For example, knowledge about dogs is represented in visual representations of how dogs look, in auditory representations of how dogs sound, and in motor representations of how to interact with dogs. Because the representational systems that underlie perception, action, and affect are also used to represent categorical knowledge, the conceptual system is neither modular nor amodal. Instead, perception and conception share overlapping systems. Empirical evidence has been the driving force behind this view. agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG. 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