Cybercognition - Cybernetic Cognition Theory - the silver bullet for a broken science -© 2014
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Cybernetic Cognition - Introduction, definition and purpose
by Charles Dyer BE (Mech.) BSc (Hons). Copyright © October 2014
The Problem
Cognitive Science is broken, for the same reason that many marriages are broken, by the failure of each party to understand the viewpoint of the other. Those that study the phenomenon of cognition and those who maintain the institution of science have fallen out of love with one another. There is a mutual lack of trust in the other displayed by both parties. Like all trust, it falters when mutual understanding fails. The folk who study human and animal minds seem to have forgotten that metaphysics is a poor substitute for physics, the founding 'father of sciences'. They seem to have collectively forgotten the central role of Physicalism as the key credo of the enlightenment. But the fault is not all on one side. Institutional (big-'S') Science must also bear its share of the blame. In spite of being presented with the problem on many occasions, it has consistently failed to modify its core canons in order to include the unique demands of a science whose main analytical tool (the mind) is the very topic it purports to study. Despite the periodic[1], albeit infrequent, publication of papers describing the key to mathematical operationalization of subjectivity[1], the proper, triadic view of meaning [2], it consistently fails to recognize the importance of these discoveries. The situation is made worse by information barriers between the arts and the sciences[3].
In the midst of all this thematic and historical confusion, there innocently and honestly arose cybernetics, a type of systems science originally based upon the use of information feedback loops to control behavior of abstract systems, structures and processes. Cybernetics happens to be utterly agnostic to the dichotomies that plague the subjective/objective paradigm, and therefore promises a unified scientific model of cognition. This new paradigm is Cybernetic Cognition.
In this discussion, the same physicalist solution to the problem of modelling cognition is derived in two different ways. In the first way, the reader is invited to invest in the subjective/objective dichotomy. In the second approach, a cybernetic derivation that is agnostic to the issue is used to obtain the identical end solution.
The last task that must be completed is dealing with Kant's 'fifth column', namely those who would use language in invalid ways, using words and constructing sentences which describe apparitions and miasmas which are alien to the world of things or thoughts about things, etc. Those who would have us believe in two metaphysical sub-types types of consciousness spring immediately to mind. Ideally, the provision of a transparent and functional cybernetic model of both inner and outer aspects of the command and control of cognition should suffice. However, some people are not 'visual thinkers' but rely on rational language construction to ascertain truth. Hence, a two-tiered system of 'logic' is described, with which valid language statements can be newly formed, and the validity of statements already formed may be checked.
The Solution
To fix Cognitive Science, certain sub-problems were overcome in a particular order, and that order, while probably not unique, did seem to reduce the expected level of difficulty by a significant amount. The first hurdle to be overcome was to understand subjectivity scientifically, that is, operationalize it by converting it into a mathematical, logical model. The key insight here is one first reported by Kant. Everything we perceive arrives as information input via our sensory subsystem. The outside world of things is easy to fit into this scheme, but the sensations we receive from our body's internal sensors (proprioception, such as joint angles and interoception , such as pain signals) are also part of the array of stimuli, which we automatically sort and simplify, group and generalise, until we obtain suitably abstract and useful high-level variables, which can be displayed to our mind's eye, our cognitive version of the 'dials and gauges' used to show the operational condition of all industrial machinery (including those in your cars dashboard). Uexkull called the total self-in-world percept integration the umwelt. The umwelt was composed of the proximal perceptual signals from our body (the innenwelt) and the distal perceptual signals from other bodies (the umbegung). Using the metaphor of a vehicle's interior (the 'Cartesian dashboard', perhaps), the innenwelt is equivalent to the messages obtained from the dashboard instruments, while the umbegung is equivalent to the information received through the glass windshield.
The next challenge was to make sense of the cybernetics, especially to distinguish between system instructions using feedback information (controls, operation) and those using feedforward data (commands, organisation). Just as Uexkull discovered the key facts about subjectivity many years ago, so Niko Tinbergen discovered the key cybernetic relationships during the pre-war period, in the form of a Tinbergen tree, which he claimed was a description of how all simple animals were functionally organised.
1. W. James in the 1880's, von Uexkull in the 1920's, Bill Powers in the 1970's and Charles Dyer in 2010.
2. C.S.Pierce discovered/invented the triadic (3-part) model of meaning. In doing so, he corrected a serious flaw in the public view of meaning, namely the dyadic (2-part, ie symbol and referent) Saussurian model.
3. Jacob von Uexkull, was ignored, because his stuff was labelled 'hermeneutics' and he wasn't an Anglophone from Harvard or Oxford. Philosophers like Heidegger who were actually doing cognitive science were ignored because what they did it was labelled 'philosophy'. Tinbergen did the same stuff as James R. Albus but wasn't given credit at the time because his work was labelled 'biology' or 'ethology', and, again, he was European and not a native English speaker
Predicate-Propositional Representation of all (both biological and artificial) cognitive systems
The holy grail of cognitive science is a description of processing which includes both human thought and digital computation as sub-types. The Predicate-Propositional Representation (PPR) qualifies as the desired canon.