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Prolegomena to a computational theory of experienceConsciousness and Cognition. Under Review. forthcoming.
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44Being in timeIn Shimon Edelman, Tomer Fekete & Neta Zach (eds.), Being in Time: Dynamical Models of Phenomenal Experience, John Benjamins. pp. 88--81. 2012.
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511System, Subsystem, Hive: boundary problems in computational theories of consciousnessFrontiers in Psychology 7 175618. 2016.A computational theory of consciousness should include a quantitative measure of consciousness, or MoC, that (i) would reveal to what extent a given system is conscious, (ii) would make it possible to compare not only different systems, but also the same system at different times, and (iii) would be graded, because so is consciousness. However, unless its design is properly constrained, such an MoC gives rise to what we call the boundary problem: an MoC that labels a system as conscious will do …Read more
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91Being in Time: Dynamical Models of Phenomenal Experience (edited book)John Benjamins. 2012.The chapters comprising this book represent a collective attempt on the part of their authors to redress this aberration.
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8Real systemic solutions to humanity's problems require a radical reshaping of the global political systemBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.Society's problems cannot be alleviated via mere policy interventions, whether individual- or system-level, when the system is the problem. To bring about true and lasting change to the better, we must replace the present global political-economic system – oligarchic capitalism backed by the power of the state – with one that would let the people take charge of their lives.
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59The (lack of) mental life of some machinesIn Shimon Edelman, Tomer Fekete & Neta Zach (eds.), Being in Time: Dynamical Models of Phenomenal Experience, John Benjamins. pp. 88--95. 2012.The proponents of machine consciousness predicate the mental life of a machine, if any, exclusively on its formal, organizational structure, rather than on its physical composition. Given that matter is organized on a range of levels in time and space, this generic stance must be further constrained by a principled choice of levels on which the posited structure is supposed to reside. Indeed, not only must the formal structure fit well the physical system that realizes it, but it must do so in a…Read more
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13The bottleneck may be the solution, not the problemBehavioral and Brain Sciences 39. 2016.As a highly consequential biological trait, a memory “bottleneck” cannot escape selection pressures. It must therefore co-evolve with other cognitive mechanisms rather than act as an independent constraint. Recent theory and an implemented model of language acquisition suggest that a limit on working memory may evolve to help learning. Furthermore, it need not hamper the use of language for communication.
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90Towards a computational theory of experienceConsciousness and Cognition 20 (3): 807-827. 2011.A standing challenge for the science of mind is to account for the datum that every mind faces in the most immediate – that is, unmediated – fashion: its phenomenal experience. The complementary tasks of explaining what it means for a system to give rise to experience and what constitutes the content of experience (qualia) in computational terms are particularly challenging, given the multiple realizability of computation. In this paper, we identify a set of conditions that a computational theor…Read more
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8Life, death, and other inconvenient truths: a realist's view of the human conditionThe MIT Press. 2020.Short essays that touch many topics-anxiety, consciousness, death, happiness, morality, stupidity, & truth-that make the case for realism & help set expectations with regard to the human condition.
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11Damasio, Antonio, 2018. The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures. New York: Pantheon. 336 pages (review)Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 2 (2): 119-124. 2018.
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33Dynamical Emergence Theory (DET): A Computational Account of Phenomenal ConsciousnessMinds and Machines 30 (1): 1-21. 2020.Scientific theories of consciousness identify its contents with the spatiotemporal structure of neural population activity. We follow up on this approach by stating and motivating Dynamical Emergence Theory, which defines the amount and structure of experience in terms of the intrinsic topology and geometry of a physical system’s collective dynamics. Specifically, we posit that distinct perceptual states correspond to coarse-grained macrostates reflecting an optimal partitioning of the system’s …Read more
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18Learning a Generative Probabilistic Grammar of Experience: A Process‐Level Model of Language AcquisitionCognitive Science 39 (2): 227-267. 2015.We introduce a set of biologically and computationally motivated design choices for modeling the learning of language, or of other types of sequential, hierarchically structured experience and behavior, and describe an implemented system that conforms to these choices and is capable of unsupervised learning from raw natural‐language corpora. Given a stream of linguistic input, our model incrementally learns a grammar that captures its statistical patterns, which can then be used to parse or gene…Read more
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22Beyond uncertainty: A broader scope for “incentive hope” mechanisms and its implicationsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 42. 2019.We propose that food-related uncertainty is but one of multiple cues that predicts harsh conditions and may activate “incentive hope.” An evolutionarily adaptive response to these would have been to shift to a behavioral-metabolic phenotype geared toward facing hardship. In modernity, this phenotype may lead to pathologies such as obesity and hoarding. Our perspective suggests a novel therapeutic approach.
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11Identity, Immortality, Happiness: Pick TwoJournal of Evolution and Technology 28 (1): 1-17. 2018.To the extent that the performance of embodied and situated cognitive agents is predicated on fore- thought;such agents must remember; and learn from; the past to predict the future. In complex; non-stationaryenvironments; such learning is facilitated by an intrinsic motivation to seek novelty. A significant part of anagent’s identity is thus constituted by its remembered distilled cumulative life experience; which the agent isdriven to constantly expand. The combination of the drive to novelty …Read more
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52Generative grammar with a human face?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (6): 675-676. 2003.The theoretical debate in linguistics during the past half-century bears an uncanny parallel to the politics of the (now defunct) Communist Bloc. The parallels are not so much in the revolutionary nature of Chomsky's ideas as in the Bolshevik manner of his takeover of linguistics (Koerner 1994) and in the Trotskyist (“permanent revolution”) flavor of the subsequent development of the doctrine of Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG) (Townsend & Bever 2001, pp. 37–40). By those standards, Jac…Read more
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77Towards structural systematicity in distributed, statically bound visual representationsCognitive Science 23 (1): 73-110. 2003.The problem of representing the spatial structure of images, which arises in visual object processing, is commonly described using terminology borrowed from propositional theories of cognition, notably, the concept of compositionality. The classical propositional stance mandates representations composed of symbols, which stand for atomic or composite entities and enter into arbitrarily nested relationships. We argue that the main desiderata of a representational system — productivity and systema…Read more
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17Brahe, looking for KeplerBehavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (4): 538-540. 2000.Arbib, Érdi, and Szentágothai's book should be a required reading for any serious student of the brain. The scope and the accessibility of its presentation of the neurobiological data (especially the functional anatomy of select parts of the central nervous system) more than make up for the peculiarities of the theoretical stance it adopts.
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49We outline an unsupervised language acquisition algorithm and offer some psycholinguistic support for a model based on it. Our approach resembles the Construction Grammar in its general philosophy, and the Tree Adjoining Grammar in its computational characteristics. The model is trained on a corpus of transcribed child-directed speech (CHILDES). The model’s ability to process novel inputs makes it capable of taking various standard tests of English that rely on forced-choice judgment and on magn…Read more
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38Word recognition is the Petri dish of the cognitive sciences. The processes hypothesized to govern naming, identifying and evaluating words have shaped this field since its origin in the 1970s. Techniques to measure lexical processing are not just the back-bone of the typical experimental psychology laboratory, but are now routinely used by cognitive neuroscientists to study brain processing and increasingly by social and clinical psychologists (Eder, Hommel, and De Houwer 2007). Models develope…Read more
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42Idealized mo dels of receptive elds (RFs) can be used as building blocks for the creation of p owerful distributed computation systems. The present rep ort concentrates on inv estigating the utility of collections of RFs in representing 3D objects under changing viewing conditions. The main requirement in this task is that the pattern of activity of RFs vary as little as p ossible when the object and the camera move relative to each other. I propose a method for representing objects by RF activi…Read more
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43A Swan, and Pike, and a crawfish walk into a barJournal of Experimental and Theoretical Ai 20 261-268. 2008.The three commentaries of Van Orden, Spivey and Anderson, and Dietrich (with Markman’s as a backdrop) form a tableau that reminds me of a fable by Ivan Andreevich Krylov (1769 - 1844), in which a swan, a pike, and a crawfish undertake jointly to move a cart laden with goods. What transpires then is not unexpected: the swan strives skyward, the pike pulls toward the river, and the crawfish scrambles backward. The call for papers for the present ecumenically minded special issue of JETAI was designe…Read more
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38Neural spaces: A general framework for the understanding of cognition?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (4): 664-665. 2001.A view is put forward, according to which various aspects of the structure of the world as internalized by the brain take the form of “neural spaces,” a concrete counterpart for Shepard's “abstract” ones. Neural spaces may help us understand better both the representational substrate of cognition and the processes that operate on it. [Shepard].
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35Variation set structure — partial alignment of successive utterances in child-directed speech — has been shown to correlate with progress in the acquisition of syntax by children. The present study demonstrates that arranging a certain proportion of utterances in a training corpus in variation sets facilitates word segmentation and phrase structure learning in miniature artifi- cial languages by adults. Our findings have implications for understanding the mechanisms of L1 acquisition by children, …Read more
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85How seriously should we take Minimalist syntax?Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (2): 60-61. 2003.Lasnik’s review of the Minimalist program in syntax [1] offers cognitive scientists help in navigating some of the arcana of the current theoretical thinking in transformational generative grammar. One may observe, however, that this journey is more like a taxi ride gone bad than a free tour: it is the driver who decides on the itinerary, and questioning his choice may get you kicked out. Meanwhile, the meter in the cab of the generative theory of grammar is running, and has been since the publi…Read more
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47To learn a visual code in an unsupervised manner, one may attempt to capture those features of the stimulus set that would contribute significantly to a statistically efficient representation. Paradoxically, all the candidate features in this approach need to be known before statistics over them can be computed. This paradox may be circumvented by confining the repertoire of candidate features to actual scene fragments, which resemble the “what+where” receptive fields found in the ventral visual stre…Read more
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60Although computational considerations suggest that a resource-limited memory system may have to trade off capacity for generalization ability, such a trade-off has not been demonstrated in the past. We describe a simple model of memory that exhibits this trade-off and describe its performance in a variety of tasks.
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58A metaphor that has dominated linguistics for the entire duration of its existence as a discipline views sentences as edifices consisting of Lego-like building blocks. It is assumed that each sentence is constructed (and, on the receiving end, parsed) ab novo, starting (ending) with atomic constituents, to logical semantic specifications, in a recursive process governed by a few precise algebraic rules. The assumptions underlying the Lego metaphor, as it is expressed in generative grammar theories…Read more
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Cornell UniversityRegular Faculty
Ithaca, New York, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Cognitive Sciences |