BINDING, INTEGRATION, AND DISSOCIATION
Universite Libre de Bruxelles
JUNE 29th - JULY 2nd, 2000: BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
Brian Logan,
School of Computer Science & IT University of Nottingham
bsl@cs.nott.ac.uk
Matthias Scheutz
School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham
M.Scheutz@cs.bham.ac.uk
We regard intuitive concepts of mentality as "cluster" concepts referring to implicitly presupposed virtual machine (VM) architectures.
These pre-theoretical architectures are very crude approximations to diverse actual VM architectures, which vary during development, across species, and after damage or disease.
Many disagreements on topics like 'emotion', 'consciousness', 'intentionality' arise because researchers focus on different sub-clusters of capabilities and mechanisms within such architectures.
Researchers studying different aspects of mind are often unaware of what they are ignoring, like the proverbial blind men trying to describe an elephant.
Powerful theories require knowledge about evolution, ethology, neuroscience, psychology, phenomenology, and feasibility results from AI.
Our draft architecture-schema for human-like minds includes reactive, deliberative and meta-management layers, which evolved at different times. The layers operate concurrently and asynchronously, interacting in a variety of ways, including production of emotions and several kinds of learning, perception, motivation, etc.
Human-like self-consciousness requires the third layer, though more primitive sorts are implemented in older layers. Future work includes understanding many discontinuities and trade-offs in the evolution of mental architectures.