The Computational Theory of Mind (CToM)- how the mind builds representations of the external world from sensory inputs, and how these reprsentations guide behavior.

Pinker HTMW

Human psychology is explained by: brain, culture, language, socialization, learning, complexity, self-organization, and neural-network dynamics.

Why is it so hard to create a robot?

Our visual system identifies how the world looks and what the world is.

• it's deeper than just color. think lighting situations and temperature and tint of the room
• depth: the third dimension is reconstituted by the brain despite seeing a 2D image
• geometry

Movement without wheels is complicated.

An intelligent system cannot be stuffed with facts, it should be equipped with a small list of core truths and rules.

• one must deduce the implications of what it knows, but only the relevant ones.

Isaac Asimov's Fundamental Rules of Robotics:

• a robot may not injure a human being
• must obey orders givenit by human beings except where orders conflict with the above
• a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the above.

Psycology is reverse engineering the mind. The mind is not the brain, but what the brain does (information processing/computation).

Beliefs and desires are infomraiton, incarnated as configurations of symbols.

The brain supplies missing information. It assumes that it is living in a certain world.

Brain modules assume thei ridentity by a combination of what kind of tissue they start out as, where they are in the brain, and what patterns of triggering input they get during critical periods of their development.

Desert Ant

How do small brains do computationally intensive tasks?

It views the world through skylight (polarization) compass, its path inegreator, view-dependent ways of recognizing places, and following landmark routes. It links these modes of naviagtions togehter.

The path inetgration is used as a egocentric guideline to acuquire continually updated sptial ifnormation about places and routes.

Computational Theory of Mind

Representation

Let's explore

1. definitely a representation of or about something
2. what it does: teaches you about that something without having it
3. how: by resembling, also by denoting and structure.

Examples:

• maps: scaled to represent space
• replicas: feature dimesnions
• 1-dimension replicas: direct resemblance
• scaled: scaled resemblance to one dimension.
• transduced: preserves proportions in new medium.

A representation describes features and properties of things. The things/features/properties described are what a representation is about, called the content.

• The media used for the description and the way it is used are called the format or the vehicle.
• The fomrat constrains how easy and hard it is to retrieve that content
• Rely on physical resemblance, but there are other waysL: