The purpose of the Society for Machines and Mentality is to advance philosophical understanding of issues involving artificial intelligence, philosophy, and cognitive science.
The purpose of the Society for Machines and Mentality is to advance philosophical understanding of issues involving artificial intelligence, philosophy, and cognitive science.
The 2004 Annual Meeting will be held on December 28, 2004, from 5:15 to 7:15 pm in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
The meeting is held in conjunction with the 2004 Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. The location is the Boston Marriott Hotel Copley Place. Our meeting is Group Session GV-11 and will convene in the Harvard Room (Third Floor).
The topic for the 2004 meeting is Integrated Cognition. Two papers will be presented.
The Human Intelligence Enterprise
(Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Abstract: There has been substantial progress in some of the subfields of Artificial Intelligence during the past three decades, but the field overall is moving toward increasing subfield isolation and increasing attention to near-term applications, retarding progress toward comprehensive theories and deep scientific understanding, and ultimately, retarding progress toward developing the science needed for higher-impact applications. Recently developed ideas and experimental methods—conceived and developed by visionary people in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, systems neuroscience, and molecular neuroscience—fuel optimism for reversing this trend. These new ideas and methods bring a golden opportunity within reach-the sort of opportunity that comes along just a few times per century. During the next ten to twenty years, we can substantially solve the problem of understanding intelligence. Then, during the next thirty to forty years, we can develop applications with truly humanlike intelligence—applications that will change the world in the same way that aviation and computers changed the world in the 20th century.
A Substrate for Integrated Theories of Cognition
(Department of Cognitive Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Abstract: Understanding human intelligence is difficult in part because it is so vast in method and scope. Hundreds of cognitive phenomena have precise formal models. However, since most human thinking involves many of these phenomena and since particular models involve inference and knowledge representation methods that are difficult to integrate, human cognition outside of the laboratory remains largely unexplained. This talk describes a research program based on the insight that superficially dissimilar knowledge representation and inference methods can be decomposed into common procedural and representational units that comprise a “cognitive substrate”. I suggest that once the problems of understanding human intelligence for this cognitive substrate are solved, that the rest of human cognition can be explained by the relatively simple process of mapping it to the cognitive substrate.
The meeting will be chaired by Selmer Bringsjord (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute).
Society for Machines and Mentality <contact us>
