Maths/CogSci/MathPsych lazyweb: Are there any algebras in which you have subtraction but don't have negative values? Pointers appreciated. I am hoping that the abstract maths might shed some light on a problem in cognitive modelling.
The context is that I am interested in formal models of cognitive representations and I want to represent things (e.g. cats), don't believe that we should be able to represent negated things (i.e. I don't think it should be able to represent anti-cats), but it makes sense to subtract representations (e.g. remove the representation of a cat from the representation of a cat and a dog, leaving only the representation of the dog).
"... 1. Can Violence Be Turned into an Autonomous Object of Philosophical Reflection? ...
,,, . A typical tendency of modernity leads to avoiding the analysis of violence (especially visible, strong, bloody violence), liquidating it through a sort of easy “psychiatrization”: violent people are people who “are not well”—that is, crazy people. In most cases, however, psychiatry has nothing to do with it ... "
@cogsci
The notion of role-filler binding as central to cognitive(ish) representations has been around for ages (possibly under different names, such as slot-value in GOFAI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(artificial_intelligence)). This is hardly surprising because it's effectively the same as variable-value.
The role is generally treated as though it's an atomic symbol, whereas it's not uncommon for the filler to be taken as a composite value (e.g. a tree). I am toying with embracing the idea of roles also being composite representations.
In a cognitive-agent/robotic context, I think it might be useful for the role to be a "sensorimotor program" and the filler to be the sensory input arising from running the sensorimotor program specified by the role. (This is heading towards a Predictive State Representation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_state_representation).
(1) I would greatly appreciate any pointers to discussions of role-filler bindings as sensorimotor predictions (similar or related to the sense above).
"Attention" could be construed as a "run/don't_run" flag in the sensorimotor program. This is basically treating attention as a kind of action and "don't attend" as not doing that action. (If that were true it's possible that there may also be other attention mechanisms, e.g. the precision weighting posited by Predictive Coding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding#Precision_weighting).
(2) I would greatly appreciate any pointers to discussions of attention as a kind of executable sensorimotor action.
Most of the Artificial Neural Net simulation research I have seen (say, at venues like NeurIPS) seems to take a very simple conceptual approach to analysis of simulation results - just treat everything as independent observations with fixed effects conditions, when it might be better conceptualised as random effects and repeated measures. Do other people think this? Does anyone have views on whether it would be worthwhile doing more complex analyses and whether the typical publication venues would accept those more complex analyses? Are there any guides to appropriate analyses for simulation results, e.g what to do with the results coming from multi-fold cross-validation (I presume the results are not independent across folds because they share cases).
Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of "maps" or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it.
New publication, led by my brilliant co-author Michal Gath-Morad on the role of strategic visibility for wayfinding behaviour in multi-level buildings, published in Nature Scientific Reports
“In the early days of modern consciousness science, back in the 1990s, researchers focused on identifying empirical correlations between aspects of conscious experience and properties of brain activity. […] In recent years, however, there has been a blossoming of neurobiological theories of consciousness.”
Held my first talk at a company event today. It was quite successful! Maybe this could be a new side gig, to bring academic research to the general public. @cogsci@philosophy#cognitivescience#philosophyofmind