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Computational Neuroscience and Compartmental Modeling
Published in Bahman Zohuri, Patrick J. McDaniel, Electrical Brain Stimulation for the Treatment of Neurological Disorders, 2019
Bahman Zohuri, Patrick J. McDaniel
The computational theory of mind holds that the mind is a computation that arises from the brain acting as a computing machine. The theory can be elaborated in many ways, the most popular of which is that the brain is a computer and the mind is the result of the program that the brain runs.28 A program is the finite description of an algorithm or effective procedure, which prescribes a sequence of discrete actions that produces outputs based only on inputs and the internal states (memory) of the computing machine. Therefore, the computational theory of mind is the claim that the mind is a computation of a machine (the brain) that derives output representations of the world from input representations and internal memory in a way that is consistent with the theory of computation.
Thinking in Circles
Published in John Flach, Fred Voorhorst, A Meaning Processing Approach to Cognition, 2019
There is a strong tendency for conventional approaches to cognition to posit centralized control mechanisms in the brain that ‘direct’ action in a top-down hierarchical fashion. This reflects a kind of ‘clockwork’ logic that fits with conventional views of causality and leads naturally to a tendency to look for the ‘causes’ of behavior in the centralized control agency. For example, consider Steven Pinker’s explanation of why Bill gets on the bus: This insight, first expressed by the mathematician Alan Turing, the computer scientists Alan Newell, Herbert Simon, and Marvin Minsky, and the philosophers Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, is now called the computational theory of mind. It is one of the great ideas in intellectual history, for it solves one of the puzzles that make up the ‘mind-body problem’: how to connect the ethereal world of meaning and intention, the stuff of our mental lives, with a physical hunk of matter like the brain. Why did Bill get on the bus? Because he wanted to visit his grandmother and knew the bus would take him there. No other answer will do. If he hated the sight of his grandmother, or if he knew the route had changed, his body would not be on that bus. For millennia this has been a paradox. Entities like “wanting to visit one’s grandmother” and “knowing the bus goes to Grandma’s house” are colorless, odorless, and tasteless. But at the same time they are causes of physical events, as potent as any billiard ball clacking into another.The computational theory of mind resolves the paradox. It says that beliefs and desires are information, incarnate as configurations of symbols. The symbols are the physical states of bits of matter, like chips in a computer or neurons in the brain. They symbolize things in the world because they are triggered by those things via our sense organs, and because of what they do once they are triggered. If the bits of matter that constitute a symbol are arranged to bump into the bits of matter constituting another symbol in just the right way, the symbols corresponding to one belief can give rise to new symbols corresponding to another belief logically related to it, which can give rise to symbols corresponding to other beliefs, and so on. Eventually the bits of matter constituting a symbol bump into bits of matter connected to the muscles, and behavior happens. The computational theory of mind thus allows us to keep beliefs and desires in our explanations of behavior while planting them squarely in the physical universe. It allows meaning to cause and be caused.5 Although an explicit goal of Pinker’s book is to avoid the homunculus problem by linking computational theories of minds with the dynamics of natural selection, when I read this passage I can’t help but see the image of a little general (homunculus) in the control room of the brain sending down commands to the body: ‘go to grandmother’s house.’
The role of shared mental models in human-AI teams: a theoretical review
Published in Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 2023
Robert W. Andrews, J. Mason Lilly, Divya Srivastava, Karen M. Feigh
While computational theory of mind remains difficult, in principle it is perhaps the approach most closely in line with the SMM construct. Indeed, the most fully-featured SMM implementations to date (Scheutz, DeLoach, and Adams 2017; Gervits et al. 2020) are based on theory of mind. However, it should be reiterated for clarity that an estimated cognitive state of a teammate is not the same as a mental model. Rather, theory of mind systems contain a mental model of their subjects within the rules they use to infer this state.