Cognitive Architecture

Following a slow moving theme on which I posted here some 18 months ago, I wanted to write something about a kind of "cognitive architecture" in which I am now engaged, and I thought it might be suitable material for this blog.

Eternal truths, if such there be, are of course, once established, a kind of knowledge, and knowledge is the stuff of cognition.  So, the place where one might hope to find eternal truths could be some ideally conceived cognitive system.  A philosophical exposition of what eternal truth might be, how and where we might find it, and how it might be brought to bear in improving our mundane existence might be thought of as a kind of cognitive architecture, and also as a special species of philosophy, which I now like to call synthetic philosophy.

Having thus made a pass at arguing the relevance of this topic to the city of eternal truth, I will try to elucidate more carefully the kind of cognitive architecture which I think might serve the purpose.  I'm going to do this by throwing a bunch of adjectives at it, and explaining how these are to be taken, so that we arrive at a more definite conception.

• architecture - I think  of this as the highest levels in the design of some system, concerned with the system as a  whole, the principal subsystems and how these fit together, and all the considerations which might precede these matters in the development of the system, particularly, in the case of cognitive systems, a whole raft of considerations which are recognisably philosophical.
• cognitive - this tells us what the system is intended to do, viz. to acquire, hold, reason with and apply knowledge.
• synthetic - there are two distinct ways in which the proposed architecture should be considered synthetic.  The first is that the architecture is not intended to be descriptive of any existing cognitive system, but rather prescriptive of various possibilities, which we offer for consideration as models for a future cognitive system which we might strive to realise.  The second is that the system is intended to be in part manufactured, and ultimately, overwhelmingly manufactured.  A third sense is that the aspects of the architecture which may be regarded as philosophical in character (e.g. the account of what in the system counts as knowledge) will be examples of this kind of philosophy which I am calling synthetic philosophy (a term I will elaborate on in due course).
• hybrid - the cognitive systems for which an architecture is offered are intended to be hybrid, a mix of organic and inorganic constituents.  Initially the intelligence will be supplied by organic components (human brains), but eventually some inorganic subsystems will deserve to be considered intelligent as well.
• cosmic - If we first consider our globally networked computing machinery, together with all the human brains which in one way or another connect into that network, as being a computational system slowly morphing into a cognitive system, and think forward to a period between one million and one billion years in the future, when the physical reach of humanity and our progeny extends spatially over a significant part of our galaxy, then we have the context at which the proposed cognitive architecture is aimed.  It is nevertheless intended to be immediately applicable, and hence an architecture for the transition from our present global system to a future cosmic system.  The hybrid/cosmological pair are also intended to help de-anthropomorphise our conception of cognition, we are not concerned merely with human cognition, but with cognition in very different systems.

That's too many adjectives to throw into a name, so I'll stick with cosmic cognitive architecture or just cognitive architecture, and you may understand that, unless the context dictates otherwise, I mean the whole kit and kaboodal.

The first port of call in the exposition of this kind of cognitive architecture is philosophical, it is the articulation of a systematic philosophy in terms of which the cognitive system may be understood, and which will also form bedrock in the "belief system" of this cosmic cognitive system.  Since this most closely relates to the philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, I will talk about it at the Carnap Corner Blog.