42 3 A Patternist Philosophy of Mind
most AI algorithms suffer from combinatorial explosions: the number of possible elements to be combined in a synthesis or analysis is just too great, and the algorithms are unable to filter through all the possibilities, given the lack of intrinsic constraint that comes along with a “general intelligence” context (as opposed to a narrow-AI problem like chess-playing, where the context is constrained and hence restricts the scope of possible combinations that needs to be considered). In an AGI architecture based on cognitive synergy, the different learning mechanisms must be designed specifically to interact in such a way as to palliate each others’ combinatorial explosions - so that, for instance, each learning mechanism dealing with a certain sort of knowledge, must synergize with learning mechanisms dealing with the other sorts of knowledge, in a way that decreases the severity of combinatorial explosion.
One prerequisite for cognitive synergy to work is that each learning mechanism must rec- ognize when it is “stuck,” meaning it’s in a situation where it has inadequate information to make a confident judgment about what steps to take next. Then, when it does recognize that it’s stuck, it may request help from other, complementary cognitive mechanisms.
3.4 The General Structure of Cognitive Dynamics: Analysis and Synthesis
We have discussed the need for synergetic interrelation between cognitive processes correspond- ing to different types of memory ... and the general high-level cognitive dynamics that a mind must possess (evolution, autopoiesis). The next step is to dig further into the nature of the cog- nitive processes associated with different memory types and how they give rise to the needed high-level cognitive dynamics. In this section we present a general theory of cognitive processes based on a decomposition of cognitive processes into the two categories of analysis and synthesis, and a general formulation of each of these categories 3.
Specifically we focus here on what we call focused cognitive processes; that is, cognitive processes that selectively focus attention on a subset of the patterns making up a mind. In general these are not the only kind, there may also be global cognitive processes that act on every pattern in a mind. An example of a global cognitive process in CogPrime is the basic attention allocation process, which spreads “importance” among all knowledge in the system’s memory. Global cognitive processes are also important, but focused cognitive processes are subtler to understand which is why we spend more time on them here.
3.4.1 Component-Systems and Self-Generating Systems
We begin with autopoesis — and, more specifically, with the concept of a “component-system”, as described in George Kampis’s book Self-Modifying Systems in Biology and Cognitive Science [IKam91], and as modified into the concept of a “self-generating system” or SGS in Goertzel’s book Chaotic Logic [Goe94]. Roughly speaking, a Kampis-style component-system consists of a set of components that combine with each other to form other compound components. The
3 While these points are highly compatible with theory of mind given in [Goe06al, they are not articulated there. The material presented in this section is a new development within patternist philosophy, presented previously only in the article [GPPGO6].
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