Saturday 2 January 2016

Closing Overview of Categorization, Communication and Consciousness

Closing Overview of 
Categorization, Communication and Consciousness





5 comments:

  1. Here's the review list of the core concepts. If you have questions on any of them, skywrite, and email me the URL and I'll respond -- until the day I distribute the exam.

    Abstraction, Invariants
    Adaptive Advantage of Language
    Altruism, Selfishness, Kinship
    Algorithms
    Analog/Digital (Dynamic/Symbolic)
    Artificial Life Simulations
    Behaviorism
    Brain's Relevance
    Categorical Perception
    Categorization, Category Learning
    Causality
    Certainty, Uncertainty
    Chinese Room Argument
    Church/Turing Thesis (Strong and Weak)
    Chunking
    Cognition
    Cognitive Technology
    Compression/Separation
    Computation
    Computationalism, Strong AI
    Consciousness/Feeling
    Dictionary-Go-Round
    Discrimination/Categorization
    Distal/Proximal Stimulus in Evolution
    Distributed Cognition
    Dynamical Systems
    EEA (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness)
    Equivalence, Strong & Weak
    Evolution
    Evolution of Language
    Evolutionary Psychology
    Explanation
    Extended Mind
    Explanatory Gap
    Explicit/Implicit Cognition
    Free Will
    Funes the Memorious
    Gesture/Speech
    Grounding
    Hard/Easy Problem
    Hearsay
    Heterophenomenology
    Homunculus Problem
    Icon/Symbol
    Implementation-Independence
    Implicit/Explicit Learning
    Induction/Instruction
    Information
    Introspection
    Language
    Meaning
    Mental Rotation
    Mental States
    Minimal Grounding Set
    Mind-Reading
    Mind/Body Problem
    Mirror Neurons
    Neural Nets
    Other-Minds Problem
    Pantomime/Pointing/Propositions
    Poverty of the Stimulus
    Positive/Negative Evidence
    Proposition/Predication
    Psychokinesis (Telekinesis)
    Reverse Engineering
    Robotics
    Sensorimotor Affordances
    Searle’s Periscope
    Show/Tell
    Supervised/Unsupervised Learning
    Symbol Grounding Problem
    Symbol System
    Syntax/Semantics
    Turing Machine
    Turing Test
    t1/T2/T3/T4/
    Ugly Duckling Theorem
    Uncomplemented Categories
    Underdetermination/Overdetermination
    Universal Grammar (UG) & Ordinary Grammar
    Vanishing Intersections
    Whorf/Sapir Hypothesis

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  2. Hi all,

    I came across this piece today on Al-Jazeera:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7plu5-nYhc Obviously this company isn't the first to make meat and animal product alternatives, but what is interesting is they are using computer learning algorithms to determine the best way to mimic the structure and taste of meat and animal products.

    I thought I would share it because it relates to different parts of the course material quite well (and it's pretty cool).

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    Replies
    1. I hope we don't have to wait till we can duplicate the exact taste of meat before people stop torturing animals for the taste. It would be a really sad testimony to our decency if we were ready to continue their agony till our taste was fully satisfied (and I simply can't believe that people could be that cruel and selfish).

      But I can say with Cartesian certainty that the tastes available eating "only" vegan are not only enough to keep everyone happy, but once our omnivore metabolism gets the message that it is no longer consuming animal protein (about 8 months, in my case) it changes our tastebuds and makes herbivore food taste infinitely better than when we were carnivores (and that includes vegetarians, who are still eating animal protein). So it is our own metabolism that is the best at providing the taste. (But while your system is still in carnivore mode, you have no way of knowing that -- and that's why kids don't want to eat their vegetables: while they are eating meat, they hardly have any taste, and are hardly needed.) Try it -- but not for the taste: for the mercy.

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  3. Hello everyone! Two small clarifications I would love to have before we take a stab at the final.

    Firstly, and very minor: I feel like I always mess up the proximal/distal evolution distinction. For example, would the distal cause of our propensity for sugar eating be the need for high-energy foods, whereas the proximal would be.. just a craving?

    Secondly: I was hoping for a brief explanation of the exact relationship between symbol grounding and categorization. I feel like I have an intuition of how they're interconnected, but I really struggle to put it into words.


    Thanks!
    Adrienne

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    Replies
    1. Hi Adrienne, yup, excatly for distal/proximal (but it's not on the final!).

      The symbol grounding problem is the problem of connecting symbols (words) to their referents. Being able to categorize their referents when you see, hear, feel, taste them is the solution. The rest can be verbal combinations of grounded words, defining more and more abstract categories.

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