Sam KenyonThe Symbol Grounding Problem Think your AI understands the meanings of words? Or understands anything at all? Guess again. It probably doesn’t! There’s a big […]
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The Seed and the Flower
Or, the Study of Non-Elephants The only flowers which men have built directly, piece by piece, are plastic flowers. If you want to make a […]
Heterarchies and Society of Mind’s Origins
One of the key ideas of Society of Mind is that at some range of abstraction levels, your wetware is a bunch of asynchronous agents. […]
Failure Does Not Necessarily Mean a Theory is Wrong
Many use a metaphor of the type “theory T has failed to explain phenomenon P” or “the field of F has failed…” For example: The […]
Goals and Music
One of the first digital music contraptions was made in 1972. The Triadex Muse was an algorithmic music generator using digital logic, and was designed […]
Multitasking and Cognitive Architecture
Some have pointed out the supposed increase in multitasking during recent decades. Certainly a fascinating sociocultural change. However, humans are not capable of true multitasking. […]
Defining Emotion
What are emotions and why would we put them in AI? In 2003 I started looking at the science of emotion in order to determine […]
Do We Need Fuzzy Substrates?
Computers are embedded in almost all of our devices, and most of them are digital. Information at the low levels is stored as binary. Biology, […]
Learning How to Make Robots in 2001
No, that’s not a typo—I do not mean 2021, I really mean the year 2001 as in 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is the story […]
All Minds Are Real-Time Control Systems
I conjecture that all minds are real-time control systems. Creatures and Real-Time Systems Let’s consider some artificial creatures that exist in either the real world […]