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Microsoft Word - Computational Structure of Mental Representations proposal
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1 The Computational Structure of Mental Representation Joscha Bach joscha.bach@hu-berlin.de Berlin, February 26th, 2013 Now is the time for starting a new Artificial Intelligence initiative. What is the mind? –this is arguably the most interesting question that our species can ask itself. Last month, a grand proposal by Barack Obama made headlines everywhere in the world: He suggested a large-‐scale initiative to create a detailed map of the activity of the human brain, at the level of individual neurons. This idea is quite similar to (and likely inspired by) Henry Markram’s Blue Brain project in Lausanne, which recently won a 1.5Bn grant from the European Union. While this is an interesting project in its own right, it will not address the key question of cognitive science: What is the mind? What are the building blocks and fundamental operations of thinking and perception? Here, I would like to suggest the instigation of a project that is at once more ambitious, more narrowly targeted, and likely to yield more profound theoretical, practical and cultural insights than the Brain Activity Mapping initiative: The study of the computational structure of mental representation. Mental representation, not neurons will inform the core our understanding of cognition. Cognition is incidentally enabled by human nervous systems, but in its nature, it is not a chemical, biological or physiological phenomenon. Instead, cognitive systems are a class of information processing systems, thinking is a set of certain, functionally identifiable operations, over certain, functionally identifiable types of representations, and with respect to a set of problems and properties given by certain environments. Thus, the Structure of Mental Representation initiative should focus on mental content, with all its dynamic, relational, conceptual, and linguistic elements, and it’s grounding in perception and interaction. 2 The study of mental representations requires a new scientific discipline […]