What is Computational Intelligence (CI) and what are its relations with Artificial Intelligence (AI)? A brief survey of the scope of CI journals and books with ``computational intelligence'' in their title shows that at present it is an umbrella for three core technologies (neural, fuzzy and evolutionary), their applications, and selected fashionable pattern recognition methods. At present CI has no comprehensive foundations and is more a bag of tricks than a solid branch of science. The change of focus from methods (...) to challenging problems is advocated, with CI defined as a part of computer and engineering sciences devoted to solution of non-algoritmizable problems. In this view AI is a part of CI focused on problems related to higher cognitive functions, while the rest of the CI community works on problems related to perception and control, or lower cognitive functions. Grand challenges on both sides of this spectrum are addressed. (shrink)

In this paper I offer an explanation of the ineffability (linguistic inexpressibility) of sensory experiences. My explanation is put in terms of computational functionalism and standard externalist theories of representational content. As I will argue, many or most sensory experiences are representational states without constituent structure. This property determines both the representational function these states can serve and the information that can be extracted from them when they are processed. Sensory experiences can indicate the presence of certain external states of (...) affairs but they cannot convey any more information about them than that. So, format- or code-conversion mechanisms that link different systems of representation (linguistic and perceptual) to each other will fail to extract any relevant information from sensory experiences that could be coded in language. They only way to establish specific roles for sensory experiences in communication and the organization of behavior is to attach to them, by associative links, words, or other behavioral responses. If a sensory experience has no linguistic label associated to it in a particular subject, then no linguistic description can token, or activate, that state in the subject. In other words, no linguistic description can cause a subject to undergo an unlabeled perceptual state. On the contrary, complex, or syntactically structured perceptual states can be built up, on the basis of descriptions, by mechanisms of constructive imagination (conceived here as one sort of format conversion). It is this difference between complex and unstructured representational states that gives us an understanding of the phenomenon we call the ineffability of qualia. (shrink)