Language Does Not Shape Thought

Cognition causes language, not the other way around. Correlations between changes in thought with changes in language abound. But the arguments are very weak for causality from language to cognition in this context. What do People Mean by Language Shapes Thought? Lera Boroditsky likes to spread the meme language shapes thought. Others have used it [...]

Syndicated 2013-05-18 06:24:56 from SynapticNulship

Symbol Grounding and Symbol Tethering

Philosopher Aaron Sloman claims that symbol grounding is impossible. I say it is possible, indeed necessary, for strong AI. Yet my own approach may be compatible with Sloman’s. Sloman equates “symbol grounding” with concept empiricism, thus rendering it impossible. However, I don’t see the need to equate all symbol grounding to concept empiricism. And what [...]

Syndicated 2013-04-03 04:17:37 from SynapticNulship

Sherlock Holmes, Master of Code

What if I told you that fictional mysteries contain practical real-world methodologies? I have pointed out the similarities between detectives solving mysteries to software debugging before. My day job of writing code often involves fixing bugs or solving bizarre cases of bad behavior in complex systems. In a new book called Mastermind: How to Think [...]

Syndicated 2013-03-29 03:20:19 from SynapticNulship

Biomimetic Emotional Learning Agents

Since I didn’t blog in back in 2004, you get to suffer—I mean, enjoy—another breathtaking misadventure down memory lane. In 2004 I started designing and coding (in C++) a cognitive architecture called Biomimetic Emotional Learning Agents (BELA). The Grand Plan This antique diagram reveals my old plans: The diagram indicates general flow of time from [...]

Syndicated 2013-03-26 04:16:20 from SynapticNulship

Comparison: ChainLocker vs. Heirarchical Mutexes

In “Concurrent Programming with Chain Locking,” Gigi Sayfan presents a C# class demonstrating chain locked operations on a hierarchical data structure. This reminded me of lock hierarchies described by Anthony Williams in the book C++ Concurrency in Action. To take a step back for a moment, the overall goal is to create multithreaded code which [...]

Syndicated 2013-03-08 06:59:00 from SynapticNulship