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55Deceiving ourselves about self-deceptionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (1): 25-26. 2011.Were we just the Darwinian adaptive survival/reproduction machines von Hippel & Trivers invoke to explain us, the self-deception problem would not only be simpler, but also nonexistent. Why would unconscious robots bother to misinform themselves so as to misinform others more effectively? But as we are indeed conscious rather than unconscious robots, the problem is explaining the causal role of consciousness itself, not just its supererogatory tendency to misinform itself so as to misinform (or …Read more
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22Distributed cognition: Cognizing, autonomy and the Turing TestPragmatics and Cognition 14 (2): 209-213. 2006.Some of the papers in this Special Issue distribute cognition between what is going on inside individual cognizers' heads and their outside worlds; others distribute cognition among different individual cognizers. Turing's criterion for cognition was for individual, autonomous input/output capacity. It is not clear that distributed cognition could pass the Turing Test.
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95Creativity : method or magic?In Henri Cohen & Brigitte Stemmer (eds.), Consciousness and Cognition: Fragments of Mind and Brain, Academic Press. 2007.Creativity may be a trait, a state or just a process defined by its products. It can be contrasted with certain cognitive activities that are not ordinarily creative, such as problem solving, deduction, induction, learning, imitation, trial and error, heuristics and "abduction," however, all of these can be done creatively too. There are four kinds of theories, attributing creativity respectively to (1) method, (2) "memory" (innate structure), (3) magic or (4) mutation. These theories variously …Read more
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15Maturana’s autopoietic hermeneutics versus Turing’s causal methodology for explaining cognition (review)Pragmatics and Cognition 15 (3): 599-603. 2007.Kravchenko suggests replacing Turing’s suggestion for explaining cognizers’ cognitive capacity through autonomous robotic modelling by ‘autopoiesis’, Maturana’s extremely vague metaphor for the relations and interactions among organisms, environments, and various subordinate and superordinate systems therein. I suggest that this would be an exercise in hermeneutics rather than causal explanation.
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44Does mind piggyback on robotic and symbolic capacity?In Harold J. Morowitz & Jerome L. Singer (eds.), The Mind, the Brain, and Complex Adaptive Systems, Addison-wesley. 1995.Cognitive science is a form of "reverse engineering" (as Dennett has dubbed it). We are trying to explain the mind by building (or explaining the functional principles of) systems that have minds. A "Turing" hierarchy of empirical constraints can be applied to this task, from t1, toy models that capture only an arbitrary fragment of our performance capacity, to T2, the standard "pen-pal" Turing Test (total symbolic capacity), to T3, the Total Turing Test (total symbolic plus robotic capacity), t…Read more
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2A subversive proposalIn A. Okerson & J. O'Donnell (eds.), Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing., . 1995.
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20Controversies in Neuroscience III Signal transduction in the retinaBehavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (3): 401-401. 1995.
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472Can a machine be conscious? How?Journal of Consciousness Studies 10 (4-5): 67-75. 2003.A "machine" is any causal physical system, hence we are machines, hence machines can be conscious. The question is: which kinds of machines can be conscious? Chances are that robots that can pass the Turing Test -- completely indistinguishable from us in their behavioral capacities -- can be conscious (i.e. feel), but we can never be sure (because of the "other-minds" problem). And we can never know HOW they have minds, because of the "mind/body" problem. We can only know how they pass the Turin…Read more
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19Broca's area and language evolutionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (4): 1-5. 2005.: Grodzinsky associates Broca's area with three kinds of deficit, relating to articulation, comprehension (involving trace deletion), and production (involving "tree priming"). Could these be special cases of one deficit? Evidence from research on language evolution suggests that they may all involve syllable structure or those aspects of syntax that evolved through exploiting the neural mechanisms underlying syllable structure
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47Against computational hermeneuticsSocial Epistemology 4 167-172. 1990.Critique of Computationalism as merely projecting hermeneutics (i.e., meaning originating from the mind of an external interpreter) onto otherwise intrinsically meaningless symbols.
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64Dalgaard's recent article [3] argues that the part of the Web that constitutes the scientific literature is composed of increasingly linked archives. He describes the move in the online communications of the scientific community towards an expanding zone of secondorder textuality, of an evolving network of texts commenting on, citing, classifying, abstracting, listing and revising other texts. In this respect, archives are becoming a network of texts rather than simply a classified collection of…Read more
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18Codes, communication and cognitionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 42. 2019.Brette criticizes the notion of neural coding because it seems to entail that neural signals need to “decoded” by or for some receiver in the head. If that were so, then neural coding would indeed be homuncular, requiring an entity to decipher the code. But I think Brette's plea to think instead in terms of complex, interactive causal throughput is preaching to the converted. Turing has already shown the way. In any case, the metaphor of neural coding has little to do with the symbol grounding p…Read more
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67Artificial life: Synthetic versus virtualIn Chris Langton (ed.), Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity. Volume XVI: 539ff, Addison-wesley. 1993.Artificial life can take two forms: synthetic and virtual. In principle, the materials and properties of synthetic living systems could differ radically from those of natural living systems yet still resemble them enough to be really alive if they are grounded in the relevant causal interactions with the real world. Virtual (purely computational) "living" systems, in contrast, are just ungrounded symbol systems that are systematically interpretable as if they were alive; in reality they are no m…Read more
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101Consciousness: An afterthoughtCognition and Brain Theory 5 29-47. 1982.There are many possible approaches to the mind/brain problem. One of the most prominent, and perhaps the most practical, is to ignore it
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155Symbol grounding and the symbolic theft hypothesisIn Angelo Cangelosi & Domenico Parisi (eds.), Simulating the Evolution of Language, Springer Verlag. pp. 191--210. 2002.Scholars studying the origins and evolution of language are also interested in the general issue of the evolution of cognition. Language is not an isolated capability of the individual, but has intrinsic relationships with many other behavioral, cognitive, and social abilities. By understanding the mechanisms underlying the evolution of linguistic abilities, it is possible to understand the evolution of cognitive abilities. Cognitivism, one of the current approaches in psychology and cognitive s…Read more
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McGill UniversityProfessor
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McGill UniversityProfessor (Part-time)
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