Cognitive

Consciousness cannot be an algorithm In 1989, Roger Penrose — British mathematical physicist, the one who proved black holes are inevitable in general relativity, Nobel Prize 2020 — publishes The Emperor’s New Mind1 and makes a claim that infuriates half the academic world: human consciousness is not computable. The reasoning goes like this. Gödel proved that for any sufficiently powerful formal system, there exist truths the system cannot prove. If the brain were a computer — a formal system executing algorithms — there would be things we couldn’t understand. But we do understand them (mathematical insight, for instance). Ergo: the brain is doing something no algorithm, given any amount of time and memory, can ever do. ...

Introduction In my previous post I wrote about the cognitive architecture ACT-R, mainly putting together what I learnt by research over the topic. In this post, I would like to go more in depth about how ACT-R works, the concepts behind and try to provide my interpretation of some technical examples, regarding coding of the modeling and everything related. What really is ACT-R ACT-R is a production system theory that tries to explain human cognition by developing a model of the knowledge structures that underlie cognition. There are two types of knowledge representation in ACT-R: ...

Introduction I’ve always been fascinated about cognitive systems and all the theories about them. Unfortunately, I never had the chance to actively work on a cognitive architecture: making experiments over these technologies is difficult because it’s difficult to me even only think about some possible toyproblem to solve. So this article is more about the basics, or at least what I found interesting about the topic. ACT-R One of the most famous cognitive architecture is ACT-R: ACT-R a.k.a. “Adaptive Control of Thought—Rational” is a cognitive architecture mainly developed by John Robert Anderson at Carnegie Mellon University. If you don’t know Anderson, no worries but from now on keep in mind that he obtained a B.A. from the University of British Columbia in 1968, a Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford in 1972 to finally become an assistant professor at Yale in 1972. This in the first 25 years of his life. This is to say: if you don’t understand anything about what you will read, it’s most probably not your fault, neither mine’s…and neither Anderson’s actually - it seems there’s a bug in Matrix. ...