The Computational Structure of Mental Representation
Joscha Bach joscha.bach@hu-berlin.de
Berlin, February 26th, 2013
Now is the time for starting a new Artificial Intelligence initiative.
What is the mind? Last month, a grand proposal by Barack Obama made headlines everywhere in the world: He suggested a large-scale initiative
to create a detailed map of the activity of the human brain, at interesting question that the level of individual neurons. This idea is quite similar to (and
this is arguably the most
? lef if likely inspired by) Henry Markram’s Blue Brain project in lies ‘cocaine Itselt. Lausanne, which recently won a 1.5Bn grant from the European Union. While this is an interesting project in its own right, it will not address the key question of cognitive science:
What is the mind? What are the building blocks and
fundamental operations of thinking and perception?
Here, I would like to suggest the instigation of a project that is at once more ambitious, more narrowly targeted, and likely to yield more profound theoretical, practical and cultural insights than the Brain Activity Mapping initiative: The study of the computational structure of mental representation.
Mental represe ntation, not Cognition is incidentally enabled by human nervous systems,
‘Il inf. h but in its nature, it is not a chemical, biological or physiological neurons will intorm the phenomenon. Instead, cognitive systems are a class of
core our unde rstanding of information processing systems, thinking is a set of certain,
esanition functionally identifiable operations, over certain, functionally g ° identifiable types of representations, and with respect to a set
of problems and properties given by certain environments.
Thus, the Structure of Mental Representation initiative should focus on mental content, with all its dynamic, relational, conceptual, and linguistic elements, and it’s grounding in perception and interaction.
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