The Chinese room argument holds that a program cannot give a computer a "mind", "understanding" or "consciousness", regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave. The argument was first presented by philosopher John Searle in his paper, "Minds, Brains, and Programs", published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 1980. It has been widely discussed in the years since. The centerpiece of the argument is a thought experiment known as the Chinese room.
The mind is a set of cognitive faculties including consciousness, imagination, perception, thinking, judgement, language and memory. It is usually defined as the faculty of an entity's thoughts and consciousness. It holds the power of imagination, recognition, and appreciation, and is responsible for processing feelings and emotions, resulting in attitudes and actions.
Computational biology involves the development and application of data-analytical and theoretical methods, mathematical modeling and computational simulation techniques to the study of biological, ecological, behavioral, and social systems. The field is broadly defined and includes foundations in biology, applied mathematics, statistics, biochemistry, chemistry, biophysics, molecular biology, genetics, genomics, computer science and evolution.
Unsupervised learning is a term used for Hebbian learning, associated to learning without a teacher, also known as self-organization and a method of modelling the probability density of inputs.
Computational neuroscience is a branch of neuroscience which employs mathematical models, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to understand the principles that govern the development, structure, physiology and cognitive abilities of the nervous system.
Eliminative materialism is the claim that people's common-sense understanding of the mind is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist. It is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Some supporters of eliminativism argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. Rather, they argue that psychological concepts of behaviour and experience should be judged by how well they reduce to the biological level. Other versions entail the non-existence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions.
Neurophilosophy or philosophy of neuroscience is the interdisciplinary study of neuroscience and philosophy that explores the relevance of neuroscientific studies to the arguments traditionally categorized as philosophy of mind. The philosophy of neuroscience attempts to clarify neuroscientific methods and results using the conceptual rigor and methods of philosophy of science.
William Hirstein is an American philosopher primarily interested in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, cognitive science, and analytic philosophy. He is a professor of philosophy at Elmhurst College.
Paul Montgomery Churchland is a Canadian philosopher known for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. After earning a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh under Wilfrid Sellars (1969), Churchland rose to the rank of full professor at the University of Manitoba before accepting the Valtz Family Endowed Chair in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and a joint appointments in that institution's Institute for Neural Computation and on its Cognitive Science Faculty.
Peter Samuel Dayan is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. He is co-author of Theoretical Neuroscience, a textbook on Computational neuroscience. He is known for applying Bayesian methods from machine learning and artificial intelligence to understand neural function and is particularly recognized for relating neurotransmitter levels to prediction errors and Bayesian uncertainties. He co-authored an influential scientific article on Q-learning with Chris Watkins, and provided a proof of convergence of TD(λ) for arbitrary λ.
Infomax is an optimization principle for artificial neural networks and other information processing systems. It prescribes that a function that maps a set of input values I to a set of output values O should be chosen or learned so as to maximize the average Shannon mutual information between I and O, subject to a set of specified constraints and/or noise processes. Infomax algorithms are learning algorithms that perform this optimization process. The principle was described by Linsker in 1988.
Neural Computation is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering all aspects of neural computation, including modeling the brain and the design and construction of neurally-inspired information processing systems. It was established in 1989 and is published by MIT Press. The editor-in-chief is Terrence J. Sejnowski. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2014 impact factor of 2.207.
The Computer and the Brain is an unfinished book by mathematician John von Neumann, begun shortly before his death and first published in 1958. Von Neumann was an important figure in computer science, and the book discusses how the brain can be viewed as a computing machine. The book is speculative in nature, but von Neumann discusses several important differences between brains and computers of his day, as well as suggesting directions for future research.
The IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award is a Technical Field Award established by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Board of Directors in 2004. This award is presented for outstanding contributions to the advancement of the design, practice, techniques, or theory in biologically and linguistically motivated computational paradigms, including neural networks, connectionist systems, evolutionary computation, fuzzy systems, and hybrid intelligent systems in which these paradigms are contained.
Neuroepistemology is an empirical approach to epistemology—the study of knowledge in a general, philosophical sense—which is informed by modern neuroscience, especially the study of the structure and operation of the brain involving neural networks and neuronal epistemology. Philosopher Patricia Churchland has written about the topic and, in her book Brain-Wise, characterised the problem as "how meat knows". Georg Northoff, in his Philosophy of the Brain, wrote that it "focuses on direct linkage between the brain on one hand and epistemic abilities and inabilities on the other."
Professor Oron Shagrir is an Israeli philosopher. He is Schulman Chair of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Jerusalem, Israel.
