Tag Archives: cognition
27 Mar Cognition and Emotion
I’m conflicted. I suspect you are too. “Since the time of the ancient Greeks, humans have found it compelling to segregate reason from passion, thinking from feeling, cognition from emotion. These contrasting aspects… have in fact often been viewed as waging an inner battle for control of the human psyche” (LeDoux, 1996, p. 24). In earlier […]
25 Mar Generalization and Inference
What do you do when you encounter something completely new, such as a new flavor. Can you identify that it is a flavor and that it resembles some flavors you’ve encountered before? If you knew about bridges from experience, but had never seen a drawbridge, or a lift bridge or a covered bridge, would you be able […]
24 Mar School of Hard Knocks
Are you a graduate of the School of Hard Knocks, or like me, are you still trying to escape the gravity of freshman year? Lessons about how altitude affects physical objects may be learned by slipping and falling down a few stairs. These lessons become ingrained early. Burned fingers have a profound impact. Notions of hot and cold, […]
22 Mar Common Sense and Thresholds
Finding Thresholds Threshold conditions are boundaries between states, and they exist everywhere, affecting everything. From a computational perspective, thresholds are a valuable tool for limiting the problem space to within manageable limits. In other words, knowing where the edges are can help us computationally color inside the lines. How could we determine a threshold? Observing, […]
20 Mar Section 4 Intro – Perception and Cognition
Wha’cha Thinking? All the developers in the world could work forever to try to imitate brain functions, and even if they begin with a good understanding of the physiology of the brain and the microscopic mechanisms of electrical transmission between neurons, would have great difficulty passing a Turing test without some knowledge of perception, memory and cognition. Add Searle’s more demanding Chinese […]
20 Mar Thresholds in Fuzzy Logic
At what point does temperature change from cold to hot? Tell a person (or a computer) that the beach will be closed if the water is too cold, and their interpretation may differ from yours. This statement is subjective, as are many of the values applied to the thermometer at right. But if you tell […]
19 Mar Fuzzy Logic Section Intro
Why do we find Mr. Spock, Commander Data or C3P0 so lovable? We have all known people like them: they are the ones who see the world in black and white. Spock had an excuse – he was a Vulcan who knew a lot. Computers, on the other hand, can be downright exasperating when they get […]
13 Mar Probability and Expectations
The sun is pretty likely to rise tomorrow – you can have confidence in that, but it is sometimes said that “there is no guarantee.” Scheduling meetings tomorrow based on the sunrise assumption is a safe bet, but there may be any number of other things that interfere with the meeting. Life is filled with […]
12 Mar Building a Concept Hierarchy
Existential knowledge, our knowledge of things that exist, is hierarchical. In other words, we categorize things into classes. Objects in these classes form the content of our thoughts. We have heard about the phylogenetic tree, the “tree of life” or the system of biological classification. This is a beautiful example of a regular taxonomy (irregular might have […]
11 Mar Joe’s Theory of Everything
While my teachers explained that language is about nouns and verbs, I think language is about symbolically representing everything and communicating about anything to anyone. There are many ways to look at the milieu in which we live from the tiniest sub-atomic particle on up. One way is to look at the larger context of […]