Explanatory Aspirations and the Scandal of Cognitive Neuroscience

  • Authors:
  • Ross W. Gayler;Simon D. Levy;Rens Bod

  • Affiliations:
  • Philosophy Program, La Trobe University, Bundoora VIC 3086, Australia (r.gayler@gmail.com);Department of Computer Science, Washington and Lee University, Lexington VA 24450, USA (levys@wlu.edu);Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Plantage Muidergracht 24, Amsterdam NL-1018 TV, The Netherlands (rens.bod@uva.nl)

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2010 conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures 2010: Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the BICA Society
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In this position paper we argue that BICA must simultaneously be compatible with the explanation of human cognition and support the human design of artificial cognitive systems. Most cognitive neuroscience models fail to provide a basis for implementation because they neglect necessary levels of functional organisation in jumping directly from physical phenomena to cognitive behaviour. Of those models that do attempt to include the intervening levels, most either fail to implement the required cognitive functionality or do not scale adequately. We argue that these problems of functionality and scaling arise because of identifying computational entities with physical resources such as neurons and synapses. This issue can be avoided by introducing appropriate virtual machines. We propose a tool stack that introduces such virtual machines and supports design of cognitive architectures by simplifying the design task through vertical modularity.