Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Sowing the Seeds of Artificial Intelligence.


Before the cognitive revolution the dominant school of thought in psychology was behaviorism. Following from the scientific method of observation psychologists believed that they could learn all they needed to know from behavioral observation. More extreme behaviorists, B.F. Skinner among them, denied the existence of minds in effect disregarding the possibility of mental processes. More moderates entertained the possibility of internal stimuli to explain behavior. But at the end of the day, behaviorists relied on behavior as the only path through which we learn.

          In contrast to behaviorism, cognitive psychology seeks to study of how people perceive, remember, think, and solve problems. More sophisticated studies of memory such as that of episodic memory dealing with our memories of events, semantic memory dealing with the  power of speech, and procedural memory which are the things we do repeatedly, like drive home or sign our names. These are all areas that are explored by cognitive psychologists.

          Ulrich Neisser first coined the term in his 1967 book entitled, Cognitive Psychology. In it he defines the field as he conceived it, and describes people as information processors, as opposed to the aforementioned behaviorists who measured only what they could observe in behavior.

          The “Cognitive Revolution” was an intellectual movement in the 1950s conceived within the context of interdisciplinary communication between psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. One of more revolutionary ideas borne out of this revolution is that of AI, the thinking behind it was that by creating Artificial Intelligence in computer science, scientists could, by way of reverse engineering make inferences of analogous mental processes in humans.

          In his book Blank Slate, prominent modern linguist Steven Pinker stated, “The first bridge between biology and culture is the science of mind , cognitive science. The second bridge between mind and matter is neuroscience, and the third bridge between the biological and the mental is behavioral genetics, the study of how genes affect behavior”.

          The point of these examples is to demonstrate the dramatic shift in thinking regarding the way in which the sciences looked at, and tried to make sense of human behavior. Where the focus was to look from outside, now it is completely reverse. Even behavior is explained with genetics which is part of our biological makeup. 

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