Cognitive Science
What is cognitive science?
It is essentially a computational science. It is occupied with computing mental processes.
There are many parallels with digital evolution and cognitive sciences.
”The goal is to understand such aspects of intelligenct performance as perception etc. in terms of the computational processes that underwrite these skills, as well as the computational mechanisms (be they silicon hardware or neural tissue) that may instantiate them.”
Against this Newell & Simon argues that ”you cannot play 20 questions with nature and win”.
Basically the studium evolved into the study of psychology and the mind through a binary approach.
Rather all the data has to be put together as one single model, rather than binary purely computational model.
The pursuit is essentially multi-disciplinary, using: computer science, neuroscience, philosophy, linguistics, mathematics and engineering.
How can we talk about mental representations in a scientific way?
It seems we cannot.
What does it even mean for a representation to be wrong?
Accuracy and mental representations are a recipe for disaster.
For Plato, memory was a wax tablet; experience is printed onto humans in an automatic fashion.
The idea is that memory is an automatic process.
They would use the method of the loci in order to remember how to hold their speeches, because they would not use paper or papyrus for that.
Aristotle used the metaphor of the aviary, a giant cake of birds, in order to describe memory. If you store every topic and notion in your cage of birds, and you want to retrieve that notion, you need to go fetch it. It becomes slightly easier to get stuff out of your memory-cage than it is to get those memories from the wherever they came. The interesting thing is of the birds work in flocks and often come together.
The movement of associationism (carried by empiricism) influenced cognitive science heavily. They argued that all knowledge comes directly from experience. A lot of these theories they developed were based on their own experience. They’d work by finding structures in their past experiences.
Wilhelm Wundt opened one of the first psychological laboratories. They wanted to find the most fundamental building blocks of mental experiences, and they wanted to make a periodic table of human experience. They did this through a kind of introspection, but not the same type as before. They would train people to perform introspection, something that took a lot of time.
”Just as a chemist would never rely on an untrained assistant for any byt the simplest measurements, so also the laboratory psychologist cannot rely on untrained introspectors for any but the crudest observations” – completely opposite to much current psychological research.
This method had a lot of limitations. It relied on participants being trained about how to describe their sensations properly. You could not study children. And you could not exactly compare findings between labs, because you cannot know how well trained each introspector was.
Then there was behaviourism, they abandonded the idea that exploring the mind is possible. They only wanted observable data. Some of them even argued that there is no such thing as conscious thought, which they tried to prove by showing that speech organs are still talking inside your own head when you ’hear’ your thoughts.
Smith (1947) made an experiment called the ’curare experiment’, which used amazonian poison. The poison was adopted as a kind of anaestethic because it entirely removes sensation. He thought that taking away the ability to have motor factions should impede the ability to think. He used the poison on himself. He lost all motor functions, and in the meantime he kept thinking, in ways that was still observable, like talking to him and asking if he remembered these things.
Tolan was less extreme in his behaviourism. He argued that there is some truth to mental representations. He thought there is a kind of spatial layout in our minds which we learn and get used to without knowing it.
He would put rats in a t-junction maze. It was made to be specifically complicated to solve. He starved the experimental group rats in the maze. Some he gave food rewards, some he gave no food reward. Then there was also a control group of well-fed rats.
The hungry rats learned very quickly to solve their way around the maze to find food. Hungry rats who did not get food became much like the fed rats, they walk around aimlessly. When food was introduced again they relearned the fact that food would be at the end of the maze.
They made the same experiement but with water and the same thing happened.