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Representation and reality in humans, other living organisms and intelligent machines
Dodig-Crnkovic G., Giovagnoli R., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2017. 378 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319437-82-8)
Date Reviewed: Apr 6 2018

This book comes out of a joint project on which the editors have collaborated since 2012. The book covers various aspects of the subject of representation and its relationship to humans, other living organisms, and machines. This question of the way in which rational and organismic agents construct their “representations” of the real world, and whether indeed they actually do so, lies at the intersection of many disciplines, from artificial intelligence (AI) to cognitive science. Recognizing this, the 19 chapters of the book are arranged into parts, each of which is composed of chapters that share a common perspective. Thus, there are chapters with a cognitive perspective, a computational perspective, a natural sciences perspective, a philosophical perspective, a logical perspective, and a machine perspective.

The editors’ preface to the book contains an overview of the chapters within each part. What this review will try and do is indicate the flavor of each perspective, without going into too much in the way of details on each chapter. One consequence of this approach is that I shall not cite the names of the authors of each chapter. It is to be hoped that the reader will be able to determine whether the book is of interest to him or her based on this.

In the first part, “Cognitive Perspectives,” the four chapters address the issue of meaning for human agents, particularly what internal representations can be said to correspond to the meaning of reality. The chapters lean heavily on the distinction between Shannon’s notion of information and the concept of meaning. The chapter on hallucination provides an interesting view of this issue and of the problems of cognition. One finds here an emphasis on the embodied nature of cognition: one chapter focuses on this in the learning of verbs.

In Part 2, the four chapters address computational perspectives, in particular the question of to what extent cognition is a matter of computation. A particularly interesting chapter concerns itself with the way that a dynamic system can be viewed as a form of computation, where the attractors in the system correspond in some way to cognitive states. While three of the chapters take a somewhat theoretical view, there is one that is more empirical and uses computational models to investigate changes of representation as a model for childhood and early adult cognitive development. Here, some helpful illustrations make the ideas more accessible.

Part 3, “Natural Sciences Perspectives,” contains just two chapters, one that discusses quantum field theory and semantic information. This is one of the more challenging chapters in the book in that it seems to require of the reader a fairly substantial background in quantum physics. The second chapter directly addresses the way in which computational models may allow an agent to construct its model of reality.

The three chapters of Part 4, “Philosophical Perspectives,” concern themselves with the problem of how a living human being’s sense of self and feelings fit into the notions of cognition and the real world. Could a machine have a sense of self? The authors here suggest not. The relationship between language and representation, and the notion of “hyletics,” namely the study of the raw impressions of intentional acts, play a central role in these chapters.

Part 5, consisting of three chapters on logic perspectives, addresses the question of how logics model reality and whether Homo sapiens (sapiens) really is wise. One chapter discusses the logic of comparison and difference--A is to B as C is to D, and A differs from B as C differs from D--setting up a calculus for this. A more concrete chapter describes in some detail a logic that allows a search system to be modified to make use of ontologies. The third chapter considers what is meant by the phrase “rational animals,” particularly as it applies to humans, while concentrating on ambiguity and on the human abilities of laughter, sexuality, and transformation.

In the final Part 6, “Machine Perspectives,” the first chapter considers machines in which the morphology of the machine provides some aspects of control--special forms of grippers for example. The second chapter considers constraints on ontologies derived from reality. The third chapter defends the thesis that however smart machines may become, they will never be more intelligent than humans.

The topics in the book are wide ranging, and most readers will find some of them quite challenging--I found the quantum theory one particularly so. In spite of this, or perhaps because of this, anyone interested in artificial intelligence or cognition, whether human, organismic, or machine-based, will find chapters that illuminate serious questions in their field. Each chapter has its own bibliography, so that the interested reader can further pursue material from a given chapter that interests him or her. The book is a valuable overview of issues in representation.

Reviewer:  J. P. E. Hodgson Review #: CR145956 (1806-0284)
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