Chapter 5 A Generic Architecture of Human-Like Cognition
5.1 Introduction
When writing the first draft of this book, some years ago, we had the idea to explain CogPrime by aligning its various structures and processes with the ones in the "standard architecture diagram" of the human mind. After a bit of investigation, though, we gradually came to the realization that no such thing existed. There was no standard flowchart or other sort of di- agram explaining the modern consensus on how human thought works. Many such diagrams existed, but each one seemed to represent some particular focus or theory, rather than an overall integrative understanding.
Since there are multiple opinions regarding nearly every aspect of human intelligence, it would be difficult to get two cognitive scientists to fully agree on every aspect of an overall human cognitive architecture diagram. Prior attempts to outline detailed mind architectures have tended to follow highly specific theories of intelligence, and hence have attracted only moderate interest from researchers not adhering to those theories. An example is Minsky’s work presented in The Emotion Machine [Min07], which arguably does constitute an architecture diagram for the human mind, but which is only loosely grounded in current empirical knowledge and stands more as a representation of Minsky’s own intuitive understanding.
But nevertheless, it seemed to us that a reasonable attempt at an integrative, relatively theory-neutral "human cognitive architecture diagram" would be better than nothing. So nat- urally, we took it on ourselves to create such a diagram. This chapter is the result — it draws on the thinking of a number of cognitive science and AGI researchers, integrating their perspectives in a coherent, overall architecture diagram for human, and human-like, general intelligence. The specific architecture diagram of CogPrime, given in Chapter 6 below, may then be understood as a particular instantiation of this generic architecture diagram of human-like cognition.
There is no getting around the fact that, to a certain extent, the diagram presented here reflects our particular understanding of how the mind works. However, it was intentionally constructed with the goal of not being just an abstracted version of the CogPrime architecture diagram! It does not reflect our own idiosyncratic understanding of human intelligence, as much as a combination of understandings previously presented by multiple researchers (including ourselves), arranged according to our own taste in a manner we find conceptually coherent. With this in mind, we call it the "Integrative Human-Like Cognitive Architecture Diagram," or for short "the integrative diagram." We have made an effort to ensure that as many pieces of the integrative diagram as possible are well grounded in psychological and even neuroscientific
95
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013011