16 May
2024
16 May
'24
4:52 a.m.
Lars,
That sentence is inaccurate: "The first wave of cognitive scientists from the 60s
and 70s (esp. from the US) used concepts from information science in order to explain the
workings of the brain."
At MIT, the work on machine translation began in 1950, six years before the first AI
conference at Dartmouth in 1956. But the first wave of cognitive scientists in the US who
also designed computational machines includes the mathematician, logician, philosopher,
and cognitive scientist C. S. Peirce. He published an article on Logical Machines in
Volume 1 of the American Journal of Psychology (1887). And he was a close friend of the
psychologist William James, who said that he had learned more from Peirce than he could
ever repay. For an overview of the issues, see
https://irvine.georgetown.domains/papers/Irvine-SSA-Peirce-Computation-expa…
That 40-page article also cites two of my publications, a book and an article. My work on
AI began with a course on AI by Marvin Minsky, who earned a PhD in mathematics at
Princeton with a dissertation on neural networks in the 1950s. Therefore artificial
neural nets are one of the oldest branches of AI. The first publications on logical
operations computed by artificial neural networks were in the 1940s.
In 1968, I took two related courses, Minsky's course on AI at MIT, and a course on
psycholinguistics by David McNeill at Harvard. I got permission from both of them to
write two related papers about conceptual graphs (my name for a semantic representation
for natural languages). The first paper for McNeill was about the psychological and
linguistic issues about representing natural language semantics in conceptual graphs, and
the second one for Minsky was about the computational methods for representing language
and reasoning with conceptual graphs. I got an A on both papers.
After 16 years, those two papers became the starting point for my book Conceptual
Structures (1984). And by the way, Minsky published a large bibliography of AI, in which
he cited the 1887 article by Peirce as one of the early publications on AI.
As for the central executive, it is an important aspect of any AI system that claims to
represent an intelligent agent. But I admit that AI programs that are used as subroutines
to other technology, need not have anything that resembles a central executive. Those
programs may compute intelligent results, but they do not do anything that resembles an
agent.
As for distributed functions, the research related to a central executive emphasizes the
related functions that are distributed across all parts of the brain, the spinal cord, and
everything connected to them. The frontal lobes are the part of the brain that makes the
final decisions about which actions to perform and when.
There is much more to say (and cite) about all these issues.
John
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From: "Dr. Lars Ludwig" <mail(a)lars-ludwig.com>
John,
The first wave of cognitive scientists from the 60s and 70s (esp. from the US) used
concepts from information science in order to explain the workings of the brain (maybe
that's the reason you find a liking in this). The second wave (inspired by progress in
neuro science) rejected these simplictic models by pointing to the tautological quality of
such explanations (aka Homunculus models). The ideas of a central executive in the brain
are therfore an example of an outdated (rather weak) explanation pattern. Someone in the
list pointed out that it would be better to use "executive functions" and think
of those as manyfold and distributed. That's one way. More modern theories of
cognition (see Wolfgang Prinz) link action (something executive) closely to perception,
which hints into the oppositive direction. Thus, as a cognitive psychologist, I would
strongly advice to drop this idea of a central executive, as it has no validity in current
cognitive sciences.
Lars
_________________________________________________________________
John F Sowa <sowa(a)bestweb.net> hat am 06.05.2024 03:52 CEST geschrieben:
Lars, List,
The Homunculus is a totally different concept proposed by philosophers. It has no
relationship to anything that the psychologists and neuroscientists have been studying.
The origin is an idea that goes back to the 1960s with George Miller and his hypothesis
about short-term memory and the "Magic Number 7, plus or minus 3".
The psychologists Baddeley & Hitch wrote their initial article in 1974. They wrote in
response to Miller's hypothesis. They realized that there is much more to short-term
memory than just words and phonemes. They called Miller's storage "the
phonological loop" and they added a "visuo-spatial scratchpad" for
short-term memory of imagery and feelings. And they continued to revise and extend their
research for another 20 or 30 years. Neuroscientists, who are specialists in different
aspects, have been working on related issues. The consensus is not a single hypothesis,
but a branch of research on issues related to conscious control of action by a central
executive in the frontal lobes vs. subconscious control by the brainstem and the
cerebellum.
For example, when you're walking down the street and talking on your cell phone,
several different systems are controlling your actions: (1) the central executive is in
charge of what you're doing on the phone in talking and pushing buttons; (2) the
cerebellum is guiding your steps in walking and maintaining your balance; (3) the brain
stem is maintaining your breathing, heart beat, and other bodily functions; and (4) the
nerves running done the spine and branching to all parts of your body are controlling
every movement and monitoring any abnormalities, such as a burn, a scratch, or a more
serious injury.
In Freud's terms. the central executive is the ego, and the lower-level systems are
the id. Those ideas are much older, but they illustrate the kinds of issues involved.
The more recent research relates the observational data to actual neural functions in
specific regions of the brain. Since aspects of those functions can be traced back to the
earliest bacteria, worms, and fish, there must be something fundamental about them. AI
systems that do not support related functions do so at their peril.
In my notes and the articles I cite, there are many references to ongoing research. For
more background, don't use those GPT-based things that summarize surface-level trivia.
You can start with Wikipedia, which cites the original research. Then continue with more
detailed studies in neuroscience.
John