Mind Computation

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Zhongzhi Shi

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9789813145825
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Semantics
• Index: Computer Science

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Mind computation is a hot topic of intelligence science. It is explored by computing to explain the theoretical basis of human intelligence. Through long-term research, a mind model CAM (Consciousness and Memory) is proposed, which provides a general framework for brain-like intelligence and brain-like intelligent systems.

This novel book centers on mind model CAM, systematically discusses the theoretical basis of mind computation in nine chapters. Because of its advanced progresses on brain-like intelligence, it is useful as a primary reference volume for professionals and graduate students in intelligence science, cognitive science and artificial intelligence.

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Chapter 1

Introduction

In the 21st century, intelligence science, brain science and cognitive science are becoming mainstream disciplines of scientific research. One of the challenges faced by human science is how to understand the relationship between mind and brain. It is also the goal of intelligence science exploration. Mind issue is one of the most fundamental and significant issues of intelligence science research [421]. This chapter focuses on mind-related issues of philosophy, biological basis, computation representation and so on.

1.1Mind

“Mind” is a polysemous word in English. With respect to substance or body, it means the heart or the spirit. When we talk about sense, it means sanity or normal consciousness. It can also be used as intelligence, understanding, thought, opinion, intention, view, idea, memory and so on. In philosophy, “mind” is generally translated as soul. In intelligence science, “mind” means a series of cognitive abilities, which enable individuals to have consciousness, sense the outside world, think, make judgment and remember things. The mind is a human characteristic, however, other living creatures may also have mind.

The phenomenon and psychological aspects of the mind have long been intertwined. The phenomenon concept of mind is a consciously experienced mental state. This is the most confusing aspect of the mind. The other aspect is the psychological concept of mind, which is a causal or an explanatory basis of behavior. In this, a mental state is defined as a condition where the state plays an appropriate causal role in terms of behavior formation or it at least plays a proper role in terms of behavior interpretation.

In accordance with the concept of phenomenology, mind is depicted by the way it experiences sensations and the sensory qualities of seeing, hearing, etc., while, in accordance with the concept of psychology, the mind is depicted by its behavior. There is no competition between these two mind concepts. None is a correct analysis of the mind. They are different fields of phenomena, both of which are quite real.

A particular mind concept can often be analyzed as a phenomenology concept a psychology concept, or as a combination of both. For example, sensing is best seen as a phenomenology concept in its core meaning. There is a sense that there is a certain sensing status. On the other hand, learning and memory are best viewed as psychological concepts. Roughly speaking, when learning something, it is appropriate for the mind to adjust its capacity to respond to certain environmental stimuli. In general, phenomenological characteristics of the mind are depicted by those subjects with the characteristics. While psychological characteristics of the mind are represented by those roles, which are associated with the causal relation or explanation of behavior.

Soft computing founder Zadeh stated [534] that the role model for fuzzy logic is the human mind. It can emulate human reasoning and its ability to form concepts to provide methods for processing fuzzy information granulation and computing with words. Thus, it plays an important role in real-world fields which utilize partial knowledge, partial certainty, partial truth and approximate expression. Accordingly, it was concluded, “Fuzzy information granulation is an integral part of human cognition. This conclusion has a thought-provoking implication for AI. Without the methodology of fuzzy IG in its armamentarium, AI cannot achieve its goals.” Zadeh emphasized fuzzy information processing capabilities of the human mind.

The states of mind refer to psychological states, including faith, ability, intentions, expectations, motivation, commitment and so on. It is an important factor in determining intelligent social behavior and individual behavior. The concept of the human mind is related to thoughts and consciousness. It is the product of human consciousness development at a certain stage. Anthropologists believe that all creatures have some kind of mind. Mind development went through four stages: (a) Simple reflection stage: For example, the pupil shrinks when the eyes are stimulated by strong light, which cannot be controlled by consciousness; (b) Reflex stage: Pavlov’s famous experiment showed that stimuli can result in outflow of dog saliva; (c) Tool stage: Chimpanzees can get fruits from the tree using sticks; (d) Symbol stage: It is the ability to use language symbol to communicate with the outside world, which only humans can do. Therefore, in comparison with the animal mind at a relatively early stage, human mind is the product of mind development at the highest stage. The generation and development of human intelligence cannot be separated from the symbolic language of mankind.

1.2Philosophy Issues of Mind

For a long time, people are trying to understand the mind from the perspective of philosophy, religion, psychology and cognitive science, and to explore its unique nature. Many famous philosophers studied this domain, including Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Heidegger, Searle, Dennett, etc. Some psychologists, including Freud and James, had also set up a series of influential theories about the nature of the human mind from the perspective of psychology in order to represent and define the mind. In the late 20th century and early 21st century, scientists established and developed a variety of ways and methods to describe the mind and its phenomena in the field of cognitive science. In another field, artificial intelligence began to explore the possibility of the existence of nonhuman mind by combining control theory and information theory. They also looked for the method of realizing the human spirit on the machine.

In recent years, mind philosophy developed rapidly, and has become a fundamental and pivotal subject in the field of philosophy. Earlier, the movement from modern philosophy to contemporary philosophy had gone through “Copernicus revolution” and linguistic philosophy replaced epistemology to become a symbol of contemporary philosophy. Then, mental philosophy became the foundation of contemporary genres. If we say that the solution to the problem of ontology and epistemology cannot be separated from linguistic philosophy, then that of linguistic philosophy depends on the exploration and development of the mental philosophy. For example, to explain the meaning, reference, nature, characteristics of the language, it is definitely required to resort to the intention of the mental state (but it is not the only factor). It is amazing to see the rapid progress in this domain with large number of works, depth and vastness of problems, novel and unique insights, and fierce debates.

The study of mind philosophy is mainly about the form, scope, nature, characteristics, relationship between mind and body, psychological content and its source, and the philosophical reflection [166] on the explanatory model of folk psychology. With the deepening of cognition, mental philosophy has changed or is changing the traditional psychology. As the psychological phenomenon is an important part of the cosmic structure, the newest exploration has touched the fundamental cosmic view, such as collateral, dependence, decision, covariance, reduction, rule and so on. There are indications that the development of mental philosophy will be one of the most important sources and forces of the future philosophy. From this point of view, the philosophy of mind is not a narrow mental knowledge, but a profound domain with stable core, fuzzy boundary, open character and broad future. At present, the focus is as follows:

(1) Mind–body problem

Mind–body problem means the nature of psychological phenomenon and the relationship between the mind and the body. The current debate is mainly concentrated in the reductionism, the functionalism, and the dilemma of realizationism and physicalism.

The problem of the nature is the relationship between the brain and the nervous system. Mind–body dichotomy discusses whether the mind is independent of human flesh to some extent (dualism) and whether the flesh is from physical phenomena and can be regarded as physical phenomena including neural activity (physicalism). It also discusses that the mind is not consistent with our brain and its activity. The other question is whether it is only the man who has the mind, or some or all of the animals and all creatures also have the mind, or whether even a man-made machine would have the mind.

Regardless of the relationship between the mind and the body, it is generally believed that the mind makes the individual subjective and intentional of the environment. Accordingly, an individual can perceive and respond to the stimulation by a certain medium. At the same time, the individual can think and feel.

(2) Consciousness

The consciousness here is in a limited sense, meaning the common awareness, which runs through the human being’s various psychological phenomena. Around consciousness, scientists have formed a special and independent research field, some of whom also put forward the concept of “consciousness”. There are numerous problems of consciousness, which can be classified into two kinds: “difficult problem” and “easy problem”. The former refers to the problem of “experience” that attracts much more attention.

(3) Sensibility

It is the subjective characteristic or phenomenological nature of people experiencing the psychological state of feeling. Nonphysicalists argue that physicalism has been able to assimilate all kinds of counterexamples except the qualia. Sensibility is the new world of the psychological world, a nonphysical thing that cannot be explained by the physical principle. However, physicalists will give that back tit for tat, struggling to move physicalism forward.

(4) Supervenience

It is a new problem and a new paradigm in mental philosophy of referring to the characteristic that psychological phenomenon is interdependent on physical phenomenon. Definitely, it can also be generalized to other relations or attributes, so as to become a universal philosophical category. Throughout its study, people try to further grasp the essence and characteristic of mental phenomena and its status in the cosmic structure. They also want to look for the product of a middle path between reductionism and dualism. All these relate to the crucial problem of decision, reduction, inevitability, psychophysical law in mental philosophy and cosmology.

(5) The language of thought

The language of thought refers to the “machine language”, different from the natural language, which is the real medium of the human brain. It seems to many people that natural language has echoism so it cannot be processed by the brain.

(6) Intentionality and content theory

This is an old but new problem, which is the intersection of linguistic philosophy and mental philosophy. Many people think that the meaning of natural language is related to the mental state, and the latter is rooted in the semantic of both language of thought and mental representation. But what is the semantic of language of thought? What is the relationship between it and the function of mental state? What is the relationship between it and the syntactic of psychological statement? All these are the focuses of debates.

(7) Mental representation

Mental representation is the expression of information, which is stored and processed by people. The information is attained when they acquaint themselves with the world and their own. These studies deeply reach the internal structure, operation and mechanism of the mental world.

(8) Machine mind

It is the problem about the “other mind”, i.e., is there any other mind except human mind? If it exists, how can we recognize and prove that? What is the basis, reason and process of that? What is the foundation to judge whether the object like robot is intelligent? The debate focuses on the skepticism and analogous argumentation of the “other mind”.

The mental philosopher has been arguing about the relationship between the phenomenological consciousness and the brain and mind. Recently, neural scientists and philosophers discussed the problem of neural activity in the brain that constitutes a phenomenological consciousness and how to distinguish between neural correlates of consciousness and nervous tissue? What levels of neural activity in the brain can constitute a consciousness? What might be a good phenomenon for study, such as binocular rivalry, attention, memory, emotion, pain, dreams and coma? What should consciousness know and explain in this field? How to apply tissue relationship to the brain, mind and other relationships like identity, nature, understanding, generation and causal preference? The literature [313] brings together the interdisciplinary discussion of the problems by neural scientists and philosophers.

In 2004, Chinese scholars held the first “Mind and Machine” Seminar in Xiamen. In 2007, the Institute of Artificial Intelligence, the School of Information, Xiamen University, founded the journal, Mind and Computation. In October 2014, the 11th “Mind and Machine” Seminar, discussed consciousness issue from different angles among philosophy, brain science, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, psychiatry and artificial intelligence. The conference set three themes: philosophy of consciousness, science of consciousness and project of consciousness.

Experimental philosophy [239] is a new concept in the 21st century. In just over a decade, like a powerful cyclone, it shook the philosophers’ dream about the rationality of traditional research methods and sparked a reflection on philosophical methodology. With the heated debate...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• Preface
• Acknowledgment
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Mind Model CAM
• Chapter 3 Memory
• Chapter 4 Consciousness
• Chapter 5 Visual Perception
• Chapter 6 Motor Control
• Chapter 7 Language Cognition
• Chapter 8 Learning
• Chapter 9 Brain-Like Computing
• References
• Index