I noticed myself being dismissive of this approach despite being potentially relevant to the way I’ve been thinking about things. Investigating that, I find that I’ve mostly been writing off anything that pattern matches to the ‘cognitive architectures’ family of approaches. The reason for this is that most such approaches want to reify modules and structure. And my current guess is that the brain doesn’t have a canonical structure (at least, on the level of abstraction that cognitive architecture focuses on). That is to say, the modules are fluid and their connections to each other are contingent.
Thanks for commenting on your reaction to this post!
That being said, I’m a bit confused by your comment. You seem to write off approaches which attempt to provide a computational model of mind, but my approach is literally the opposite: looking only at the behavior (but all the behavior), extract relevant statistics to study questions related to goal-directedness.
I noticed myself being dismissive of this approach despite being potentially relevant to the way I’ve been thinking about things. Investigating that, I find that I’ve mostly been writing off anything that pattern matches to the ‘cognitive architectures’ family of approaches. The reason for this is that most such approaches want to reify modules and structure. And my current guess is that the brain doesn’t have a canonical structure (at least, on the level of abstraction that cognitive architecture focuses on). That is to say, the modules are fluid and their connections to each other are contingent.
Thanks for commenting on your reaction to this post!
That being said, I’m a bit confused by your comment. You seem to write off approaches which attempt to provide a computational model of mind, but my approach is literally the opposite: looking only at the behavior (but all the behavior), extract relevant statistics to study questions related to goal-directedness.
Can you maybe give more details?