Consciousness and Language - 2007/06/05 12:51As discussed elsewhere, many topics have arisen regarding the relation between language and consciousness. Let’s cover them here. Thanks!Raúl Arrabales Moreno. conscious-robots.com/raul
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Raúl
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Re:Consciousness and Language - 2007/06/05 12:54This is a excerpt from a Plato Demosthenes post on the matter: Yes, humans do have an excessive impulse to grant sentience to things. Personification which is inherent in our language, I think, plays a large role in it (possibly from the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?).Raúl Arrabales Moreno. conscious-robots.com/raul
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Plato Demosthenes
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Re:Consciousness and Language - 2007/06/05 23:31Hmm...now that the topic has been started, someone might as well ask the obious questions with regards to language and consciousness: Does language determine consciousness? (Sapir-Whorf) Does language define consciousness? (Turing) and Does consciousness need language? (a great many people). What are your opinions on them?
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Plato Demosthenes
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Re:Consciousness and Language - 2007/06/05 23:34As you already mentioned, the topic of personification is important also. Also as you brought up, is language a key role in consciousness, or just a result of it?
Post edited by: Plato Demosthenes, at: 2007/06/06 22:11
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Re:Consciousness and Language - 2007/06/08 00:37Well, I am not an expert in linguistics, but I have some ideas (maybe wrong ones) about the matter. As I am trying to build a machine consciousness prototype which doesn't consider language at all... I have to say that language it not a key factor for producing consciousness Having said that, I have to remark that I think of language as the 'language' (in a more computational sense) of the virtual machine where consciousness run. The virtual machine thing is an idea from Dennett (1991). See this link for details:
I think language could be part of the mechanisms that this virtual machine uses to build a serial conscious experience out of a massive parallel computer like the brain.
There is indeed a strong relation between language, culture and consciousness.
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Plato Demosthenes
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Re:Consciousness and Language - 2007/06/08 22:12What is the general idea or your machine consciousness prototype? The multiple Drafts model?
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Re:Consciousness and Language - 2007/06/09 12:42The CERA/CRANIUM model is based on both the Global Workspace Theory [1] and the Multiple Draft Model [2]. The prototype is very focused in grounding these theories into a control system for an autonomous mobile robot [3].
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Plato Demosthenes
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Re:Consciousness and Language - 2007/06/25 16:52How is it functioning so far? In what way did you combine the two approaches?
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Re:Consciousness and Language - 2007/06/26 12:44Well, actually it is not doing anything spectacular. The model I am applying is still evolving and a lot of development is still underway. What I have now is just a small prototype which is integrated in the Microsoft Robotics Studio development platform. Some experiments have been done using the visual simulation environment, but I need to progress to test it against a real robotics platform (I am using Pioneer 3 DX robots). In order to test consciousness functionality I need to add (at least) visual capabilities to robot, and that is still to be done.
CERA is intended to be an architecture where several components (related to consciousness functions) can be integrated. The architecture is designed to be the control system of an autonomous mobile robot. I think a real embodiness is required to really test the autonomous control system of a physical situated agent.
The two models that are the main inspiration of my work (i.e. Global Workspace Theory and Multiple Draft Model) are not actually combined in the sense of a conceptual integration of the two approaches. Instead, I’ve tried to extract the main functionality features of the two metaphors and use them as requirements for the architectural design. However, trying to ground cognitive metaphors into the realm of engineering is not straightforward. One common feature that is a key aspect of the design is that you always have a number of unconscious concurrent processors (specialized pre-processors if you like) which collaborate and compete giving place at the end to a unique sequential thread of consciousness. One of the challenges here is to implement an adaptive and efficient attention mechanism. It should use parallel unconscious resources in order to direct the agent’s unique attentional focus.
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Re:Consciousness and Language - 2007/07/10 00:10You say that it is still evolving - is it based on genetic algorithms? I have seen a few studies that use memetic algorithms to reproduce certain formal aspects of language. Is that how you would expect language to come about in this model? Using that approach, what would be the standing of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
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