Hacker News Reader

Comment by cessor | Hacker News Reader

In cognitive sciences there is a dispute about the nature of cognition and what scientific tools to apply. Some say cognition is computation, others say its just behavior of a dynamic or connectionist system. A good sumary of aspects can be found in Fresco, Nir, 2012 - The explanatory Role of Computation in Cognitive Science, Minds & Machines, 22, 353-380.

The discussion is quite interesting, because computation is very hard to define. Understanding what makes a system compute can yield useful insight for understanding cognition.

View on HN

I think people like Jerry Fodor define computation as the manipulation of logical symbols by some algorithm. The idea is that you use a standard functionalist analysis (see someone like Putnam 67) to analyze the inputs(X) and outputs(Y) of a cognitive system. So you have (schematically) something like: X->?->Y. Where the "?" defines the project of cognitive neuroscience (i.e. figuring out the physical instantiation of the manipulation of intercalated proteins & neurotransmitter). So, in this picture cognition is not a "state" that needs to be defined a priori but a "black-box" process that needs to be spelled out empirically. At bottom, stuff is continuous, not discrete.

But too much ink gets spilled over this philosophical issue. It seems much more fruitful to analyze the mind as a Turing machine (contentious) and apply computational complexity theory to define limits on human computation based on the hierarchy-- my two cents.

Re: Fodor, Folk Psychology, and the Language of Thought hypothesis, obligatory link to Paul Churchland's retort :)

"Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes": http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Chu...

Basically, a critique of the approach of formalizing thought processes as (first predicate, or multipredicate, or whatever kind of) logical computation (of symbols.) It's a good read even if one thinks that the overall debate is pretty fruitless.

Thanks, I'll give it a read! I don't have a definite stance on the topic but I am aware that a lot of people are making a lot of points on this - indeed - very philosophical topic. I often lean back and enjoy the discourse, it is very good entertainment :) I am far away from pointing it out as fruitless but I can definitely understand why many cog-sci folk would thinks so (often depending on their background, really). I particularly liked what Tim van Gelder wrote on dynamicism, although I don't agree with it and he appears to have a poor view on the connectionist perspective.

Hmm, maybe it's high time I gave an honest re-read of http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/connectionism/ - last time I glanced at it, it gave many sparks and inspiration to delve deeper into things. And lots of good pointers. So I guess I can recommend doing the same thing. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com