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John A. Barnden [14]John Barnden [3]
  1. Connectionism, generalization, and propositional attitudes: A catalogue of challenging issues.John A. Barnden - 1992 - In John Dinsmore (ed.), The Symbolic and Connectionist Paradigms: Closing the Gap. Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 149--178.
    [Edited from Conclusion section:] We have looked at various challenging issues to do with getting connectionism to cope with high-level cognitive activities such a reasoning and natural language understanding. The issues are to do with various facets of generalization that are not commonly noted. We have been concerned in particular with the special forms these issues take in the arena of propositional attitude processing. The main problems we have looked at are: (1) The need to construct explicit representations of generalizations, (...)
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  2. The Meta-Dynamic Nature of Consciousness.John A. Barnden - 2020 - Entropy 22.
    How, if at all, consciousness can be part of the physical universe remains a baffling problem. This article outlines a new, developing philosophical theory of how it could do so, and offers a preliminary mathematical formulation of a physical grounding for key aspects of the theory. Because the philosophical side has radical elements, so does the physical-theory side. The philosophical side is radical, first, in proposing that the productivity or dynamism in the universe that many believe to be responsible for (...)
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  3. Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness: A Meta-Causal Approach.John A. Barnden - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (2):397-425.
    I present considerations surrounding pre-reflective self-consciousness, arising in work I am conducting on a new physicalist, process-based account of [phenomenal] consciousness. The account is called the meta-causal account because it identifies consciousness with a certain type of arrangement of meta-causation. Meta-causation is causation where a cause or effect is itself an instance of causation. The proposed type of arrangement involves a sort of time-spanning, internal reflexivity of the overall meta-causation. I argue that, as a result of the account, any conscious (...)
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  4. Running into Consciousness.John Barnden - 2014 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 21 (5-6):33-56.
    It is proposed that conscious qualia arise when and only when the 'running' of physical processes takes a special, complex form. Running in general is the unified unfolding of processes through time, and is claimed to be an additional quality of physical processes beyond their state trajectories. The type of running needed for conscious qualia is reflexive in physically affecting and responding to itself. Intuitively, running is essentially the flow of causation, and the self-affecting/responding is a matter of causation bearing (...)
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  5. Belief ascription, metaphor, and intensional identification.Afzal Ballim, Yorick Wilks & John Barnden - 1991 - Cognitive Science 15 (1):133-171.
    This article discusses the extension of ViewGen, an algorithm derived for belief ascription, to the areas of intensional object identification and metaphor. ViewGen represents the beliefs of agents as explicit, partitioned proposition sets known as environments. Environments are convenient, even essential, for addressing important pragmatic issues of reasoning. The article concentrates on showing that the transformation of information in metaphors, intensional object identification, and ordinary, nonmetaphorical belief ascription can all be seen as different manifestations of a single environment-amalgamation process. The (...)
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  6. Imputations and Explications: Representational Problems in Treatments of Prepositional Attitudes.John A. Barnden - 1986 - Cognitive Science 10 (3):319-364.
    The representation of propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, etc.) and the analysis of natural-language, propositional-attitude reports presents difficult problems for cognitive science and artificial intelligence. In particular, various representational approaches to attitudes involve the incorrect “imputation,” to cognitive agents, of the use of artificial theory-laden notions. Interesting cases of this problem are shown to occur in several approaches to attitudes. The imputation problem is shown to arise from the way that representational approaches explicate properties and relationships, and in particular from the (...)
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  7. Simulative reasoning, common-sense psychology and artificial intelligence.John A. Barnden - 1995 - In Martin Davies & Tony Stone (eds.), Mental Simulation: Evaluations and Applications. Blackwell. pp. 247--273.
    The notion of Simulative Reasoning in the study of propositional attitudes within Artificial Intelligence (AI) is strongly related to the Simulation Theory of mental ascription in Philosophy. Roughly speaking, when an AI system engages in Simulative Reasoning about a target agent, it reasons with that agent’s beliefs as temporary hypotheses of its own, thereby coming to conclusions about what the agent might conclude or might have concluded. The contrast is with non-simulative meta-reasoning, where the AI system reasons within a detailed (...)
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  8. Varieties and Directions of Interdomain Influence in Metaphor.John A. Barnden, Sheila R. Glasbey, Mark G. Lee & Alan M. Wallington - 2004 - Metaphor and Symbol 19 (1):1-30.
    We consider the varieties and directions of influence that the source and target domains involved in a conceptual metaphor can have on each other during the course of understanding metaphorical utterances based on the metaphor. Previous studies have been restricted both as to direction of influence and as to type of influence. They have been largely confined to the “forward” (source to target) direction of influence, and they have concentrated on the transfer of features or propositions and (to some extent) (...)
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  9. Consciousness and Common Sense: Metaphors of Mind.John A. Barnden - 1997 - In S. O'Nuillain, Paul McKevitt & E. MacAogain (eds.), Two Sciences of Mind. John Benjamins. pp. 311-340.
    The science of the mind, and of consciousness in particular, needs carefully to consider people's common-sense views of the mind, not just what the mind really is. Such views are themselves an aspect of the nature of (conscious) mind, and therefore part of the object of study for a science of mind. Also, since the common-sense views allow broadly successful social interaction, it is reasonable to look to the common-sense views for some rough guidance as to the real nature of (...)
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  10. Michael A. Arbib, The metaphorical brain 2: Neural networks and beyond.John A. Barnden - 1998 - Artificial Intelligence 101 (1-2):301-309.
    The book is thought-provoking and informative, wide in scope while also being technically detailed, and still relevant to modem AI [at least as of 1998, the time of writing this review, but probably also at the time of posting this entry here, 2023] even though it was published in 1989. This relevance lies mainly in the book’s advocacy of distributed computation at multiple levels of description, its combining of neural networks and other techniques, its emphasis on the interplay between action (...)
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  11. Metaphor and its unparalleled meaning and truth.John A. Barnden & Alan M. Wallington - 2010 - In Armin Burkhardt & Brigitte Nerlich (eds.), Tropical Truth(S): The Epistemology of Metaphor and Other Tropes. De Gruyter. pp. 85-122.
    This article arises indirectly out of the development of a particular approach, called ATT-Meta, to the understanding of some types of metaphorical utterance. However, the specifics of the approach are not the focus of the present article, which concentrates on some general issues that have informed, or arisen from, the development of the approach. The article connects those issues to the questions of metaphorical meaning and truth. -/- A large part of the exploration of metaphor in fields such as Cognitive (...)
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  12. Broadly reflexive relationships, a special type of hyperbole, and implications for metaphor and metonymy.John Barnden - 2018 - Metaphor and Symbol 33 (3):218-234.
    As the author has previously argued, a statement of form “Y is X” can often be taken as hyperbolic for a notably high degree of likeness between Y and X, or, instead, as hyperbolically stating how important Y is as a part of X. The present article goes further and argues that these types of hyperbole, as well as various others, are just special cases of reflexive hyperbole, a style that appears not previously to have been explored in its own (...)
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  13. Time phases, pointers, rules and embedding.John A. Barnden - 1993 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (3):451-452.
    This paper is a commentary on the target article by Lokendra Shastri & Venkat Ajjanagadde [S&A]: “From simple associations to systematic reasoning: A connectionist representation of rules, variables and dynamic bindings using temporal synchrony” in same issue of the journal, pp.417–451. -/- It puts S&A's temporal-synchrony binding method in a broader context, comments on notions of pointing and other ways of associating information - in both computers and connectionist systems - and mentions types of reasoning that are a challenge to (...)
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  14. Chaos, symbols, and connectionism.John A. Barnden - 1987 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (2):174-175.
    The paper is a commentary on the target article by Christine A. Skarda & Walter J. Freeman, “How brains make chaos in order to make sense of the world”, in the same issue of the journal, pp.161–195. -/- I confine my comments largely to some philosophical claims that Skarda & Freeman make and to the relationship of their model to connectionism. Some of the comments hinge on what symbols are and how they might sit in neural systems.
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  15. Connectionist value units: Some concerns.John A. Barnden - 1986 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9 (1):92-93.
    This paper is a commentary on the target article by Dana H. Ballard, “Cortical connections and parallel processing: Structure and function”, in the same issue of the journal, pp. 67–120. -/- I raise some issues about the connectionist or neural-network implementation of information and information processing. Issues include the sharing of information by different parts of a connectionist/neural network, the copying of complex information from one place to another in a network, the possibility of connection weights not being synaptic weights, (...)
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  16. The centrality of instantiations.John A. Barnden - 1987 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (3):437-438.
    This paper is a commentary on the target article by Michael Arbib, “Levels of modeling of mechanisms of visually guided behavior”, in the same issue of the journal, pp. 407–465. -/- I focus on the importance of the inclusion of an ability of a system to entertain, at a given time, multiple instantiations of a given schema (situation template, frame, script, action plan, etc.), and complications introduced into neural/connectionist network systems by such inclusion.
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  17. Uncertain reasoning about agents' beliefs and reasoning.John A. Barnden - 2001 - Artificial Intelligence and Law 9 (2-3):115-152.
    Reasoning about mental states and processes is important in various subareas of the legal domain. A trial lawyer might need to reason and the beliefs, reasoning and other mental states and processes of members of a jury; a police officer might need to reason about the conjectured beliefs and reasoning of perpetrators; a judge may need to consider a defendant's mental states and processes for the purposes of sentencing and so on. Further, the mental states in question may themselves be (...)
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