Piero Scaruffi

These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"

The Self-organizing Schema Schemas resurface also in the work of the Australian mathematician Michael Arbib.� Just like with Minsky�s frames and Schank�s scripts, Arbib argues that the mind constructs reality through a network of countless schemas. And, again, a schema is both a mental representation of the world and a process that determines action in the world. Arbib's theory of schemas is based on two notions, one developed by a US mathematician of the 19th century, Charles Peirce, and one due to the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget�of the 1930s. The first one is the notion of a "habit", a set of operational rules that, by exhibiting both stability and adaptability, lends itself to an evolutionary process. The second one is the notion of a "schema", the generalizable characteristics of an action that allow the application of the same action to a different context (yet another variation on Selz). Both assume that schemas are compounded as they are built to yield successive levels of a cognitive hierarchy. Arbib argues that categories are not innate, they are constructed through the individual's experience. What is innate is the process that underlies the construction of categories. Therefore, Arbib�s view of the rules of categories is similar to Noam Chomsky's view of the rules of language. What sets Arbib�s theory apart from Minsky�s and Schank�s is that Arbib�s theory is more closely modeled after a view of the brain as an evolving self-organizing system of interconnected units, e.g. with neural networks.   Back to the beginning of the chapter "Cognition: A General Property of Matter " | Back to the index of all chapters