John.
If you could put an exact copy of Conceptual Structures (1984) book online for free access as a historical artefact, that would be most useful for everyone, especially as it’s out-of-print
and not online.
Thanks!
Simon
From: John F Sowa <sowa@bestweb.net>
Sent: Thursday, May 16, 2024 3:53 AM
To: ontolog-forum@googlegroups.com
Cc: CG <cg@lists.iccs-conference.org>
Subject: [CG] Re: [ontolog-forum] The central executive
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-expanded-version.pdf
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
From: "Dr. Lars Ludwig" <mail@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@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