Machine learning: Trends, perspectives, and prospects

Abstract

Ever since William James 1 categorized different senses of the self at the end of the 19th century, philosophers and psychologists have refined and expanded the possible variations of this concept. James' inventory of physical self, mental self, spiritual self, and the ego has been variously supplemented. Neisser, for example, suggested important distinctions between ecological, interpersonal, extended, private and conceptual aspects of self 2. More recently, when reviewing a contentious collection of essays from various disciplines, Strawson found an overabundance of delineations between cognitive, embodied, fictional and narrative selves, among others 3. It would be impossible to review all of these diverse notions of self in this short review. Instead, I have focused on several recently developed approaches that promise the best exchange of ideas between philosophy of mind and the other cognitive sciences and that convey the breadth of philosophical analysis on this topic. These approaches can be divided into two groups that are focused, respectively, on two important aspects of self-the 'minimal' self and the 'narrative' self Several recently developed philosophical approaches to the self promise to enhance the exchange of ideas between the philosophy of the mind and the other cognitive sciences. This review examines two important concepts of self: the 'minimal self', a self devoid of temporal extension, and the 'narrative self', which involves personal identity and continuity across time. The notion of a minimal self is first clarified by drawing a distinction between the sense of self-agency and the sense of self-ownership for actions. This distinction is then explored within the neurological domain with specific reference to schizophrenia, in which the sense of self-agency may be disrupted. The convergence between the philosophical debate and empirical study is extended in a discussion of more primitive aspects of self and how these relate to neonatal experience and robotics. The second concept of self, the narrative self, is discussed in the light of Gazzaniga's left-hemisphere 'interpreter' and episodic memory. Extensions of the idea of a narrative self that are consistent with neurological models are then considered. The review illustrates how the philosophical approach can inform cognitive science and suggests that a two-way collaboration may lead to a more fully developed account of the self. 91 Traxler, M.J. and Pickering, M.J. (1996) Plausibility and the processing of unbounded dependencies: an eyetracking study. 93 Altmann, G.T.M. et al. (1992) Avoiding the garden path: eye movements in context. J. Mem. Lang. 31, 685-712 94 Britt, M.A. (1994) The interaction of referential ambiguity and argument structure in the parsing of prepositional phrases. J. Mem. Lang. 33, 251-283 95 Liversedge, S.P. et al. (1998) Processing arguments and adjuncts in isolation and context: the case of by-phrase ambiguities in passives. Syntactic ambiguity resolution in discourse:modeling the effects of referential context and lexical frequency. J. Exp. Psychol. 24, 1521-1543 98 Trueswell, J.C. et al. (1994) Semantic influences on parsing: use of thematic role information in syntactic disambiguation. J. Mem. Lang. 33, 285-318 99 MacDonald, M. (1994) Probabilistic constraints and syntactic ambiguity resolution. Lang. Cognit. Processes 9, 157-201 100 Spivey-Knowlton, M.K. and Sedivy, J. (1995) Resolving attachment ambiguities with multiple constraints. Cognition 55, 227-267 101 Traxler, M.J. et al. (1998) Adjunct attachment is not a form of lexical ambiguity resolution. J. Mem. Lang. 39, 558-592 102 Van Gompel, R.P.G. et al. Unrestricted race: a new model of syntactic ambiguity resolution. In Reading as a Perceptual Process (Kennedy, A. et al., eds), Elsevier (in press) 103 Garrod, S. et al. (1994) The role of different types of anaphor in the on-line resolution of sentences in a discourse.