Design for a darwinian brain: Part 1. philosophy and neuroscience

Abstract

Fodor and Pylyshyn in their 1988 paper denounced the claims of the connectionists, claims that continue to percolate through neuroscience. In they proposed that a physical symbol system was necessary for open-ended cognition. What is a physical symbol system, and how can one be implemented in the brain? A way to understand them is by comparison of thought to chemistry. Both have systematicity, productivity and compositionality, elements lacking in most computational neuroscience models. To remedy this woeful situation, I examine cognitive architectures capable of open-ended cognition, and think how to implement them in a neuronal substrate. I motivate a cognitive architecture that evolves physical symbol systems in the brain. In Part 2 of this paper pair develops this architecture and proposes a possible neuronal implementation. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.