| ™ |
Tom Veatch
Flames of inspiration often leave smoke signals behind.From mine, these.
| Cognitive Simplification | The requirements of survival and reproduction impose logical structure onto evolved systems. Therefore the study of logical systems, cognitive science, is an essential layer in the study of biological systems. |
| Cognitive Science within Biology | as an epistemological layer imposed by evolution |
| Bliss Theory: Human Evolution | Logic constrains biology, biology constrains us, and yet we think and speak and feel. How did we get here, then, and what parts came in what order? This was a lot of fun to write. |
| Foundations of Future AI | Towards a New Cognitive Science |
| N+V Humor Theory | Veatch's 1998 "A Theory of Humor" |
| The Logic of Irrational Emotion | Emotion in general, considered evolutionarily and logically. Mathematical notation for the emotional process. Review of N+V Humor Theory using it. Veatch asserts that the process of identifying yourself with an emotionally significant circumstance or role has a binding function whereby the emotional system is bound or required to implement the specific emotion that the system associates with that circumstance or role. That is, identification binds emotion. From this, much follows. Bound, a person harmonizes with others in shared understanding, moral assessment, and feeling, around a shared activity. Bound, a person is not free to experience the moment, the now, the timeless flow, but is instead aware of their status and moral self-assessment. Unbound, wherein identification does not occur, emotional flow states, high performance, spiritual goodness, etc., occur with attention paid to the evolving situation rather than to thinking about how it reflects upon you and tells a story about you. Unbound, the person has access to the unconditioned or irrational emotions of bliss, serenity, transcendence, etc. Veatch's Razor, distinguishing these, is given. |
| Math as Language | Underlying intuition reads out as discrete expression. |
| Robot Emotion | On the design of emotional systems for humans and robots. Motivational frames and their relative priorities. Metrics to guide reinforcement learning. |
| Emotional Merger | Emotional change involves the reassessment of circumstances; a process that must come to include new details within the focus of attention, as well as to exclude now-irrelevant aspects of what had previously been focussed. I clarify and define emotional merger and specification as fundamental cognitive/emotional processes in this short theoretical essay, which seems to have as great a significance in the cognitive architecture of emotion as humor theory. |
| Synthetic Perception | Examples include image merger, color qualia, rhythm, object coherence, and stereoscopic movement as object learning. |
| Gesture Learning | How to learn effective physical movement. A research program for reinforcement learning by embodied systems, like people. |
| A More General Theory of the Syllogism | Abstracting logic. Aristotle's
list of syllogisms missed half of them; there's nothing to them
(H!); and we can do better
without. Still it is pretty fun and cool, considering this was the intellectual pinnacle of humanity for 2000 years, and plus I'd say this is not a bad introduction to "term logic", and might be suggested reading for students of computer science, philosophy, classics, and/or math. |
| Evolutionary/Functional/Logical Decomposition | of the elements of Language |