Here are some interesting texts that I’ve read recently related to Cognitive Science:

  • Psychology in Cogsci: 1978-2038: A very nice paper on criticism to invasion of Psychology to Cognitive Science. I agree with most of the the author’s thoughts and I have to admit -by opposing to the common belief- that Cognitive Science isn’t merely the study of human mind. The word “cognitive” in the Cognitive Science implies the information processing and the process of thought(Frege’s gedanke perhaps). So I guess it is legitimate to claim that this “information processing ability” isn’t unique to Humans, but Animals, Insects, Martians or Machines can do it in some way. Limiting this broad term to only human mind with implications to psychological studies is merely wrong. Perhaps we should say Cognitive Sciences instead of Cognitive Science. Because from one side the inter-relations between the tracks of Cognitive Science is not explicit as it used to be. This may be caused because of these subjects aren’t as interrelated as we used to thought them to be. For instance why should we use a system for AI that is based on bad analogies to the human neural system(connectionist) while performing poorly (both performance and accuracy) and there are better symbolic mathematical and statistical alternatives. Meanwhile we know that human mind performs very poorly in many simple tasks(like arithmetics). Hence I found trying to copy the neural structure of human mind into a machine to create Strong AI as a really redundant thing (By the same reasons recently I have hard times understanding the ambition in people to beat the human mind or trying to create human-like behaving machines- but again probably I’m thinking too functionalist).What happens when language scientists use their own children as test subjects?

    Fodor’s critics about Neuroscience: Shortly Fodor says that instead of investing government’s scientific fundings to Neuroscience studies, we should invest to more useful things(this time he is trolling to neuroscience- btw I recommend you to read the comments too). Also after I’ve read this, I immediately remebered this little gem too: Scanning Dead Salmon in fMRI Machine Highlights Risk of Red Herrings this one is like a joke but real :) .

    Deceptive robots hint at machine self-awareness

    Brain Coprocessors Are the Operating Systems intervening human brains and computers possible?

    MIT Neuroscientists Reveal How The Brain Learns To Recognize Objects

    Intelligent Nihilism:
    Hummel’s argument related to the cause of “traditional” models on which thought and language is deeply symbolic and involves algebraic rules versus Ramscar’s idea which is related to “recent” alternative models that are built on associate learning.

    Syntactic Theory of Visual Communication

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