Inquire about purchasing the book | Table of Contents | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind
These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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Symbol Processing Craik's ideas predated the theory of knowledge-based systems, which was
formalized when the US economist Herbert Simon and the US mathematician Alan
Newell developed their theory of
physical symbol systems (Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry, 1976). Both
the computer and the mind belong to the category of physical symbol systems,
systems that process symbols to achieve a goal. A physical symbol system is
quite simple: the complexity of its behavior is due to the complexity of the
environment it has to cope with. It was their belief that no
complex system can survive unless it is organized as a hierarchy of subsystems.
The entire universe must be hierarchical, otherwise it would not exist. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Cognition: A General Property of Matter " | Back to the index of all chapters |
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