Implications and speculations
Hongtao Zhang
Mar 15, 2003
Research Goal
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Understand human mind.
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Difficulty
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Minds are unobservable
Minds differ human from other animals. It is not
comfortable to make research on it.
Benefits
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Help us understand ourselves more
Help cure some diseases.
Help to write intelligent computer software.
What is mind?
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Cognitive Science hopes to explain mind in
terms of low-level neural events.
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Measure electrical and chemical changes in the
brain as it performs various tasks
Explain mind in terms of such things as synaptic
dynamics and brain modularity
Authors attack this approach as ridiculous as
predicting the weather based on the known behavior
of gas molecules.
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My different thoughts
What is mind?
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Social-psychological science tries to explain
mind in terms of social interactions.
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Minds come from evaluating, comparing, and
imitating one another, from experience and
emulating the success behaviors of others.
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My different thought.
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How to explain inventions, such as integral, relativity theory.
– Wolfram secludes himself for 10 years to write the book
Authors’ Assertions
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Minds are social
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Human intelligence results from social interaction
Culture and cognition are inseparable
consequences of human sociality. Culture emerges
as individuals become more similar through mutual
social learning.
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What is the relation between society and culture?
Particle swarms are a useful computational
intelligence(soft computing) methodology.
Social learning Theory: Bandura
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Arisen out of reinforcement theories of
behaviorism
Human is different from other animals. Human
can learn skills and behaviors by observations
Remnant of reinforcement theory:
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people are more likely to imitate models whose
behavior is rewarded
Why do so many criminals do the same crimes
shortly after they are released from prisons?
Social learning theory: more
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Two advantages:
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Information
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Punishments are more impressive than rewards
Motivation
Sources
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Own experience
Other’s experiences (vicarious experience)
Formation of culture
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Spread of influence
When the influence reaches enough people, a culture is born
What is culture?
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Kroeber, A.L., & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A critical review
of concepts and definitions
161 variation of culture definition was listed.
" Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for
behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the
distinctive achievements of human groups, including their
embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of
traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and
especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one
hand, be considered as products of action, and on the other as
conditioning elements of further action."
Culture’s influence on individuals
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Individuals’ reasoning depends on their culture
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Kaiping peng and richard Nisbett’s explanations on
the different history of science in China and The
West.
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Different reasoning styles:
Reasoning styles in China and the west
China
West
Principle of Change:
Law of Identity
Reality is a dynamical, constantly-changing
process. The concepts that reflect reality
must be subjective, active, flexible.
Everything is what it is. Thus it is a
necessary fact that A equals A, no matter
what A is
Principle of Contradiction
Law of Noncontradiction
Reality is full of contradictions and never
clear-cut or precise. Opposites coexist in
harmony with one another, opposed but
connected
No statement can be both true and false.
Principle of Relationship
Law of the Excluded Middle
To know something completely, it is
Every statement is either true or false.
necessary to know its relations, what it affects There is no middle term.
and what affects it.
Human behavior 1: Group Polarization
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Risky shift Phenomenon
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Caution Shift phenomenon was found later.
Group Polarization:
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Old belief: Groups make more conservative choices that
individuals.
Experiment result: Group decisions are more extreme than
individual decisions.
The individuals really changed their views after group
discussions.
Groups tend to exaggerate the opinions of the individuals.
Question: Do we need to change the jury system?
Explanation of Group Polarization
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Persuasive argument
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Normative argument
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Individuals change their views because they are exposed to a
greater number of arguments in favor of one position
In order to get other members’ recognition or approval,
individuals tend to shift their view towards the extreme.
Particle swarm theoretical argument
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Social learning and influence tends to make individuals to try
more extreme positions to get optimized results.
Human behavior 2: Self-Esteem
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People tend to seek behaviors and situations that help
them value themselves positively and to avoid those
that make them feel bad about who they are.
High self-esteem helps the individual deal with stress
and other negative emotions and improves their
confidence and persistence to achieve their goals
Low self-esteem makes the individual depressed and
less confident and easy to give up their efforts.
Explanation of self-esteem
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Self-esteem is a measure of how well the
individuals are accepted by their social group.
Self-esteem can facilitate the maintenance of
social groups
People do not have the need to maintain selfesteem itself; instead, they have the need to be
included in the social group
Human behavior 3: Self-attribution and social illusion
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Common belief: people have direct, immediate
knowledge of our thoughts and feelings
People make attributions about themselves on the
basis of the same kind of information they used to
interpret the action of others (Daryl Bem)
Schachter and Singer’s “misattribution” paradigm.
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What would happen if the subjects know the effect of those
drugs?
Nisbett and Wilson’s self-report experiment
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People are sometimes unable to report their own mental
process because they are not aware of how they think.
Computer intelligence
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Particle swarm computing.
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Imitating human society.
Every particle can be considered as a person and particles
interact with each other.
According to the social learning theory each particle is
constantly watching the particles around it to see how they are
doing and adjust its behavior accordingly. (people can learn by
observation)
Each particle also has a memory of its behavior history.
(people can learn from their own experiences)
Soft computing: Research Areas
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Evolutionary algorithms and genetic
programming
Neural science and neural network systems
Fuzzy set theory and fuzzy systems
Chaos theory and chaotic systems
Soft computing: attributes
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Hard computing requires programs to be written; soft computing
can evolve its own programs
Hard computing uses two-valued logic; soft computing can use
multivalued or fuzzy logic
Hard computing is deterministic; soft computing incorporates
stochasticity
Hard computing requires exact input data; soft computing can deal
with ambiguous and noisy data
Hard computing is strictly sequential; soft computing allows
parallel computations
Hard computing produces precise answers; soft computing can
yield approximate answers