chapter 5&7 (Sally & Sabreena)

CHAPTER 5:
In summary, chapter 5 discuses congnitive science and the examination of the human experience through the tradition of mindfulness/awareness meditation. It says that the brain is seen to operate on the basis of massive interconnections which are distributed in such a way that the actual connections resemble neurons, which change as a result of experience.
This theory has been a contributing factor in the renewed interests and the parallel rediscovery of self-organizational ideas in physics and nonlinear mathematics.
The brain is being looked at once again as the main source of metaphors and ideas. Thus connectivists say that theories and modes do not deal with symbolic descriptions anymore, but deal with an army of neuron like, simple global properties, which when connected well, produce interesting global properties. These properties then embody and express the cognitive capacities being sought.
The whole approach therefore basically depends on the introduction of an appropriate connection. The strategy in this model is to build cognitive systems not by starting with symbols and rules, but by starting with simple components that dynamically connect to each other in dense ways.
In this sense, confectionist models are much closer to biological systems, thus one cannot work with degree of integration between AI and neuroscience. This implies that the models re general enough to be applied with little modification, to various domains such as speech recognition and vision.
In the connectionist approach, symbolic computations are replaced by numerical operations. In the connectionist approach however, meaning is not located in particular symbols; it is a function of the global state of the system that is linked to the overall performance of some domain, such as recognition learning. Cognitivism therefore is founded on the hypothesis that taxonomy consists of symbols. This symbolic level constrains the kinds of behaviors that are possible for a cognitive system and so is thought to have an independent explanatory status. This implies that symbols are not taken at a face value, but they are seen as representations of macro level descriptions whose governing principles reside at a symbolic level.

CHAPTER 7:
When the very ideas of representation and information processing change, some form of realist assumptions will still remain. A dissatisfaction with the varieties of cognitive realism is due to a search of a deeper source, an alternative to symbolic processing. This notion thus obscures many essential dimentions of cognition, and not just human experiences, but perception and languages as well as the evolution of life. Is the mind therefore just "mirror of nature?" Not according to cognition, it is not. Cognition perceives perception as an active process of hypothesis formation, not and therefore not as the simple mirroring of a pregiven environment.
In cognition thus there is always a construction or representing of the world in a certain way, or an act on the basis of internal representations.
Through the assumption that the world is pregiven, thus our congnition is of this world - even if only to a partial extant, and the way in which we cognize this pregiven world world is to represent its features ten act on the basis of these representations.

A shift in cognitive science, led to the move from the idea of the world as independent and extrinsic, to the idea of a world as inseparable from the structure of these processes of self modification. This change reflected the necessity of understanding cognitive systems not on the basis of their input and relationships, but by their operational closure. A system that has operational closure is one in which the results of its processes are those processes themselves. Such systems do not operate by representation, but enact a world of domain of distinctions that is seperable from the structure embodied by the cognitive system.