Program: THE EMBODIED MIND.
Areas: philosophy, psychology, neurology.
Introduction broadcast: october 1995.
Pannel broadcast: november 1995.
The new science of complexity has important implications for the age-old problems concerned with the functioning of the mind and the relation between mind and body. Over the past decade, a new theory of neural networks has had significant successes in showing how learning and adaptation could take place in densely connected networks of parallel computing elements. At the same time there are big debates between the rationalist tradition (further explored by logic and 'classical' Artificial Intelligence and cognitive science) and the viewpoint of situated cognitivists which push for a non-cognitive approach.
The program will survey the state of the art in neural modelling and in building artificial intelligence systems. It will examine new theories of the mind which stress its ability of autopoiesis. The need for explicit symbolic world models will be debated, partly by looking at examples of complexity in artificial systems.
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