Cogprints: No conditions. Results ordered Title. 2018-01-17T14:22:09ZEPrintshttp://cogprints.org/images/sitelogo.gifhttp://cogprints.org/1998-06-09Z2011-03-11T08:53:48Zhttp://cogprints.org/id/eprint/305This item is in the repository with the URL: http://cogprints.org/id/eprint/3051998-06-09ZActa Cum Fundamentis in ReIt will be the thesis of this paper that there are among our mental acts some which fall into the category of real material relations. That is: some acts are necessarily such as to involve a plurality of objects as their relata or fundamenta. Suppose Bruno walks into his study and sees a cat. To describe the seeing, here, as a relation, is to affirm that it serves somehow to tie Bruno to the cat. Bruno's act of seeing, unlike his feeling depressed, his putative thinking-about-Santa-Claus or his musing, abstractedly, about the tallest spy, has at least two fundamenta: it is, as a matter of necessity, dependent for its existence upon both Bruno himself and the cat that he sees. This idea will naturally raise echoes of Russell's doctrine of knowledge by acquaintance. 'I am acquainted with an object', Russell tells us, 'when I have a direct cognitive relation to that object, i. e. when I am directly aware of the object itself' (1918, p. 209). And indeed a distinction in many ways like that between acquaintance and description will find a place within the theory here projected, but there are crucial differences.B. Smith1998-03-04Z2011-03-11T08:54:06Zhttp://cogprints.org/id/eprint/607This item is in the repository with the URL: http://cogprints.org/id/eprint/6071998-03-04ZThe Egg Revealed"Problem Solving" needs either a brief and summary appraisal or an extended one--too long for the space likely to be allotted. Written lucidly and persuasively, it demonstrates that Dr. Skinner can define and analyze a broad set of behaviors using a limited set of behavioral terms and concepts. Believers will find it convincing, even brilliant. Behaviorists who have worked on problem solving, who have observed their subjects carefully, and who have collected data analytically--especially those who have also labored to clarify the technical terminology of behaviorism operationally--will find it a good deal less than persuasive. Glib, superficial and misleading are more appropriate terms. Closely argued and exemplified points are followed by one liners, such as: "But to speak of the purpose of an act is simply to refer to its characteristic consequences." That cannot survive critical examination.W S Verplanck1998-09-06Z2011-03-11T08:53:43Zhttp://cogprints.org/id/eprint/175This item is in the repository with the URL: http://cogprints.org/id/eprint/1751998-09-06ZThe evolution of reciprocal sharingGenetical models of the evolution of reciprocal altruism (as distinct from cooperation, mutualism, or nepotism) have difficulty explaining the initial establishment of an altruist gene in a selfish deme. Though potential mechanisms have been suggested, there is an alternative: much "altruistic" behavior may in fact be purely selfish in origin and consequently reciprocity need not be invoked to provide a selective benefit to the actor. _Sharing_ and _helping_ are fundamentally different behavior categories and should not be confused. Patterns of resource sharing in chimpanzees correspond to predictions made by a selfish model but not to those of a reciprocal altruism model, and many observations of human gift exchange are consistent with the selfish, but not the altruistic, model. This suggests that presumed hominid meat exchange may have been the result of competition, not altruism or even cooperation, and that evolutionary models of "altruistic" behavior should be treated with caution.Jim Moore1998-09-06Z2011-03-11T08:53:43Zhttp://cogprints.org/id/eprint/176This item is in the repository with the URL: http://cogprints.org/id/eprint/1761998-09-06ZFemale transfer in primatesIntergroup transfer by males is nearly universal among social primates. Furthermore, among the most frequently studied monkeys - savanna baboons and Japanese and rhesus macaques - females typically remain in their natal groups, so troops are composed of related matrilines. These facts strongly support two major theories: 1) that kin selection is a powerful force in patterning sociality (if one is to live in a group, one should prefer a group of one's relatives), and 2) that the ultimate explanation for intergroup transfer is the avoidance of inbreeding depression (though both sexes would prefer to live with kin, one sex has to disperse to avoid inbreeding and for a variety of reasons the losing sex is generally male). Substantial rates of transfer by females in social species with routine male transfer would cast doubt on both ideas. In fact, evidence reviewed here indicates that female transfer is not unusual and among folivorous primates (e.g., _Alouatta_, the Colobinae) it seems to be routine. In addition to casting doubt on the demographic significance of inbreeding avoidance and favoring mutualistic and/or game theory interpretations of behavior over nepotistic ones, this finding supports the hypothesis that predator detection is the primary selective pressure favoring sociality for many primates. Finally, while female bonding [_sensu_ Wrangham, R. W. (1980), _Behaviour_ 75: 262-299] among primates appears to be less common than generally believed, the observed correlation between female transfer and morphological adaptations to folivory provides empirical support for Wrangham's model for the evolution of female-bonded groups.Jim Moore2005-06-05Z2011-03-11T08:56:04Zhttp://cogprints.org/id/eprint/4381This item is in the repository with the URL: http://cogprints.org/id/eprint/43812005-06-05Z Recognition and recall of words with a single meaningTwenty-four subjects were tested for recognition of famous surnames and then were tested for cued recall of the same surnames. For common names (e.g., Cooper), the usual pattern of recognition failure of recallable words (Tulving & Wiseman, 1975) was found. For unique, "single-node" names (e.g., Kierkegaard), virtually no recognition failure (1.4%) of recallable words was obtained. These results fit well with generation-recognition theory.Paul Muter2001-12-08Z2011-03-11T08:54:51Zhttp://cogprints.org/id/eprint/1970This item is in the repository with the URL: http://cogprints.org/id/eprint/19702001-12-08ZSocial organization of small heterosexual groups of Green swordtails (Xiphophorus helleri, Pisces, Poeciliidae) under conditions of captivitySixteen populations, each of four male and four female green 'swordtail fish, were observed in 54 litre tanks separated into two unequal volumes by a partition allowing swimming from one area to another only at the surface. Each population was observed on 2 4 occasions, making a combined total of 50 observation periods of 2 hours each. Chase right orders, spatial positions as well as several agonistic and epigamic behaviour units were noted during each period of observation. Males and females apparently form distinct hierarchies which are perfectly linear and transitive in 68% and 42% of the cases respectively. Some dominance structures are incomplete, but no intransitivity is noted. Alpha males are much more aggressive than their isosexual subordinates. In females, the frequency of aggressive behaviour appears to be more proportional to the social rank of the initiator, but the number of chases received from other females is the best indicator of rank in the female hierarchies. Alpha males are responsible for 80% of all sexual activity and have privilege to behaviour leading to insemination with a high probability in 85 % of the cases. Females are not courted according to their position in the female hierarchy, nor to their size. In the two compartment situation of the present study, which allowed spacing out and visual isolation of the individuals, the alpha males occupied the larger area of the aquarium in the company of the four females while the three subordinate males were restricted to the smaller area, unaccompanied by any females. This spacing out pattern emerged with neat regularity from the data and was apparently caused and maintained by aggressive behaviour, especially by charges, initiated by the alpha male toward male rivals. However, it is not evident that the behaviour of the alpha male should be neatly qualified as territorial defence, since specific area linked dominance was never realized in the present study. The social scheme most readily applicable to the present social and spatial organization is the "one male to several females" system or monarchistic male hierarchy, in which one male becomes very dominant over the others, occupies the larger area and is also the sole individual to court the females and to attempt insemination (haremic). These results support the sociobiological theorem that to dominate is to have priority of access to the necessities of life and reproduction.Jacques P. BeaugrandJean CaronLouise Comeau1998-02-27Z2011-03-11T08:53:54Zhttp://cogprints.org/id/eprint/423This item is in the repository with the URL: http://cogprints.org/id/eprint/4231998-02-27ZSome Expert Systems Need Common SenseAn expert system is a computer program intended to embody the knowledge and ability of an expert in a certain domain. The ideas behind them and several examples have been described in other lectures in this symposium. Their performance in their specialized domains are often very impressive. Nevertheless, hardly any of them have certain common sense knowledge and ability possessed by any non-feeble-minded human. This lack makes them ``brittle''. By this is meant that they are difficult to extend beyond the scope originally contemplated by their designers, and they usually don't recognize their own limitations. Many important applications will require common sense abilities. The object of this lecture is to describe common sense abilities and the problems that require them. Common sense facts and methods are only very partially understood today, and extending this understanding is the key problem facing artificial intelligence. This isn't exactly a new point of view. I have been advocating ``Computer Programs with Common Sense''since I wrote a paper with that title in 1958. Studying common sense capability has sometimes been popular and sometimes unpopular among AI researchers. At present it's popular, perhaps because new AI knowledge offers new hope of progress. Certainly AI researchers today know a lot more about what common sense is than I knew in 1958 -- or in 1969 when I wrote another paper on the subject. However, expressing common sense knowledge in formal terms has proved very difficult, and the number of scientists working in the area is still far too small. One of the best known expert systems is MYCIN (Shortliffe 1976; Davis, Buchanan and Shortliffe 1977), a program for advising physicians on treating bacterial infections of the blood and meningitis. It does reasonably well without common sense, provided the user has common sense and understands the program's limitations. MYCIN conducts a question and answer dialog. After asking basic facts about the patient such as name, sex and age, MYCIN asks about suspected bacterial organisms, suspected sites of infection, the presence of specific symptoms (e.g. fever, headache) relevant to diagnosis, the outcome of laboratory tests, and some others. It then recommends a certain course of antibiotics. While the dialog is in English, MYCIN avoids having to understand freely written English by controlling the dialog. It outputs sentences, but the user types only single words or standard phrases. Its major innovations over many previous expert systems were that it uses measures of uncertainty (not probabilities) for its diagnoses and the fact that it is prepared to explain its reasoning to the physician, so he can decide whether to accept it. Our discussion of MYCIN begins with its ontology. The ontology of a program is the set of entities that its variables range over. Essentially this is what it can have information about. MYCIN's ontology includes bacteria, symptoms, tests, possible sites of infection, antibiotics and treatments. Doctors, hospitals, illness and death are absent. Even patients are not really part of the ontology, although MYCIN asks for many facts about the specific patient. This is because patients aren't values of variables, and MYCIN never compares the infections of two different patients. It would therefore be difficult to modify MYCIN to learn from its experience. MYCIN's program, written in a general scheme called EMYCIN, is a so-called production system. A production system is a collection of rules, each of which has two parts -- a pattern part and an action part. When a rule is activated, MYCIN tests whether the pattern part matches the database. If so this results in the variables in the pattern being matched to whatever entities are required for the match of the database. If not the pattern fails and MYCIN tries another. If the match is successful, then MYCIN performs the action part of the pattern using the values of the variables determined by the pattern part. The whole process of questioning and recommending is built up out of productions. The production formalism turned out to be suitable for representing a large amount of information about the diagnosis and treatment of bacterial infections. When MYCIN is used in its intended manner it scores better than medical students or interns or practicing physicians and on a par with experts in bacterial diseases when the latter are asked to perform in the same way. However, MYCIN has not been put into production use, and the reasons given by experts in the area varied when I asked whether it would be appropriate to sell MYCIN cassettes to doctors wanting to put it on their micro-computers. Some said it would be ok if there were a means of keeping MYCIN's database current with new discoveries in the field, i.e. with new tests, new theories, new diagnoses and new antibiotics. For example, MYCIN would have to be told about Legionnaire's disease and the associated Legionnella bacteria which became understood only after MYCIN was finished. (MYCIN is very stubborn about new bacteria, and simply replies ``unrecognized response''.) Others say that MYCIN is not even close to usable except experimentally, because it doesn't know its own limitations. I suppose this is partly a question of whether the doctor using MYCIN is trusted to understand the documentation about its limitations. Programmers always develop the idea that the users of their programs are idiots, so the opinion that doctors aren't smart enough not to be misled by MYCIN's limitations may be at least partly a consequence of this ideology. An example of MYCIN not knowing its limitations can be excited by telling MYCIN that the patient has Cholerae Vibrio in his intestines. MYCIN will cheerfully recommend two weeks of tetracycline and nothing else. Presumably this would indeed kill the bacteria, but most likely the patient will be dead of cholera long before that. However, the physician will presumably know that the diarrhea has to be treated and look elsewhere for how to do it. On the other hand it may be really true that some measure of common sense is required for usefulness even in this narrow domain. We'll list some areas of common sense knowledge and reasoning ability and also apply the criteria to MYCIN and other hypothetical programs operating in MYCIN's domain.J McCarthy1999-06-15Z2011-03-11T08:53:40Zhttp://cogprints.org/id/eprint/101This item is in the repository with the URL: http://cogprints.org/id/eprint/1011999-06-15ZStatistical mechanics of neocortical interactions. Derivation of short-term-memory capacityA theory developed by the author to describe macroscopic neocortical interactions demonstrates that empirical values of chemical and electrical parameters of synaptic interactions establish several minima of the path-integral Lagrangian as a function of excitatory and inhibitory columnar firings. The number of possible minima, their time scales of hysteresis and probable reverberations, and their nearest-neighbor columnar interactions are all consistent with well-established empirical rules of human short-term memory. Thus, aspects of conscious experience are derived from neuronal firing patterns, using modern methods of nonlinear nonequilibrium statistical mechanics to develop realistic explicit synaptic interactions.Lester Ingber