cognitive science) is a complex of sciences that study cognition and higher thought processes based on the use of information-theoretic models. Includes research in areas such as epistemology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychophysiology, neuroscience, and computer science. The foundations of cognitive science were laid by the mathematician A. Turing's research on finite automata (1936). He was able to show that to carry out any calculation, it is sufficient to repeat elementary operations. This opened up prospects for testing and implementing the well-known idea of T. Hobbes and D. Boole that thinking is calculation. Testing this idea, the mathematician K. Shannon suggested in 1948 that each element of information can be represented as a choice of one of two equally probable alternatives, and the amount of information transmitted through a communication channel can be measured using a binary number system (in bits). K. Shannon also showed that operations of the algebra of logic are performed in electrical circuits. Later, these results were applied to the study of the brain. As early as 1948, W. McCulloch and W. Pitts put forward the hypothesis that thinking, as a process of processing cognitive information, can in principle proceed in neural networks. Somewhat later, they also developed the first neural model of the brain, where the interaction between networks of neurons imitated the logical operations of propositional calculus. This approach was developed in the works of the neurophysiologist K. Lashley, who in 1951 suggested that the brain should be viewed as a dynamic complex consisting of many interacting systems. A significant contribution to the development of cognitive science was also made by the works of N. Wiener and his colleagues in the field of cybernetics and automata theory, which made it possible to explain some characteristic types of activity of the central nervous system, starting from the analogy between the purposeful functioning of technical systems and the corresponding forms of human behavior. These discoveries served as the basis for further systematic attempts to describe the general structure of the human cognitive system and the formation of cognitive psychology. From con. 1960s analysis of the nature of human cognition with the help of information models is becoming a common approach. The computer revolution, the rapid development of computer technology, had a serious impact on the study of cognitive and thought processes in cognitive science. As a result, the direction gradually became dominant here, focused on the creation of new cognitive computer models (for example, , developed back in 1958 by the Logic Theorist program), which in principle could be considered as quite adequate imitations of various aspects of human cognition. Another direction is associated with the development of expert systems, i.e. programs that generalize the expert level of knowledge in specific areas and ensure the fulfillment of prescribed tasks. Modern computer cognitive models are increasingly being used in a wide variety of fields of science, in one way or another related to human cognition - neurophysiology, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, linguistics, epistemology, etc.
Lit .: Naisser W. Cognition and reality. M., 1981; Anderson J. A. The Architecture of Cognition. Cambr., 1983; Gardner The Minds New Science: A History of Cognitive Revolution. N. Y. 1985.
Great Definition
Incomplete definition ↓
cognitive science
COGNITIVE SCIENCE(eng. cognitive science; from lat. cognitio - knowledge, cognition) - an area of interdisciplinary research that studies cognition and higher cognitive functions using models of cognitive information processing. It includes disciplines such as epistemology, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence research, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, and, in the last decade, neurocybernetics and computational neuroscience. The bases K. n. were laid down in the study of the mathematician A. Turing on finite automata (1936), who managed to show that repetition of elementary operations is sufficient to carry out any calculation. Turing described some hypothetical ideal computing machine ("Turing machine"), which can have only a fixed finite number of possible "states" and which allows you to determine which function is computable. This opened up prospects for testing and implementing the well-known idea of T. Hobbes and D. Boole that thinking is calculation. Testing this idea, the mathematician K. Shannon suggested (1948) that information can be represented as a choice of one of two equally probable alternatives, and the amount of information transmitted through a communication channel can be measured in bits or using a binary number system (a bit is a binary digit that can take on the value 0 or 1). As a result, a mathematical formalism was discovered that made it possible to evaluate information regardless of its content and carrier. Shannon also showed that the operations of the algebra of logic are performed in electrical circuits. Subsequently, these results were applied to the study of the cognitive functions of the brain. As early as 1948, McCulloch and W. Pitts put forward the hypothesis that thinking, as a process of processing cognitive information, can, in principle, proceed in neural networks. Somewhat later, they also developed the first neural model of the brain, where the interaction between networks of neurons imitated the logical operations of propositional calculus. This approach was developed in the works of the neurophysiologist K. Lashley, who in 1951 suggested that the brain should be viewed as a dynamic complex consisting of many interacting systems. A noticeable contribution to the formation of K. n. the works of N. Wiener and his colleagues in the field of cybernetics and automata theory also contributed, which made it possible to explain some characteristic types of activity of the central nervous system, starting from the analogy between the purposeful functioning of mechanical systems and the corresponding forms of human behavior. These discoveries served as the basis for further systematic attempts to describe the general structure of the human cognitive system in terms of a model of cognitive information processing and the formation of cognitive psychology. From the end of the 60s of the 20th century. analysis of the nature of human cognition with the help of information processing models becomes the rule rather than the exception. A decisive influence on the study of cognitive and thought processes in K. n. had a computer revolution, which contributed to the formation of two main directions here. One of them focuses on the creation of new cognitive models (for example, the Logical Theorist program developed back in 1958 by Newell et al.), which, in principle, could be considered as quite adequate imitations of various aspects of human cognition. Another direction turned out to be related to the development of expert systems - i.e. programs that summarize the expert level of knowledge in specific areas and ensure the fulfillment of prescribed tasks. In K. n. two standard computational approaches to modeling cognitive systems have been developed. The first, earlier, classical approach - symbolicism - proceeds from the assumption that human thinking is functionally equivalent to the thinking of a computer intelligence, consisting of a central processor, which is able to sequentially (i.e., one element after another) process units of symbolic information. Proponents of the second approach - connectionism - believe that the idea of a central digital processor is, in principle, inapplicable to the human cognitive system due to its incompatibility with the relevant data of neurobiology. From their point of view, the work of the cognitive systems of living beings can be simulated using artificial neural networks consisting of "formal" neurons processing information in parallel. Unlike ordinary digital computers, modern neurocomputers are able to process the most diverse (and not just symbolic) information, which is stored as a pattern of a connection established between nodes. In particular, they can effectively recognize patterns, learn, solve complex problems (if, for example, incoming information is accompanied by noise or if a solution cannot be found using a simple algorithm), etc. However, in solving many purely analytical tasks that require clear high-level rules for processing information (for example, learning a language), they are still inferior to digital computers. Widely attracting various models of information processing, K. n. seeks to explain only those cognitive processes that are empirically (experimentally) fixed by psychology - for example, pattern recognition, attention, memorization, problem solving, reasoning, planning, etc. I. P. Merkulov Lit.: SolsoR. Cognitive psychology. M., 1995; ThagardP Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science. Cambridge, 1996.
Cognitive psychology is one of the most rapidly developing areas of psychological knowledge today. It is an integral part of cognitive science and studies the processes of thinking, attention, memory, perception, etc. The main issue of cognitive psychology is how we cognize the world, how we receive information, process and use it in our behavior and activities.
How did cognitive science begin?
One of the founders of cognitive science, George A. Miller (the author of the famous article on the magic number 7 ± 2), accurately determines the birthday of a new field of knowledge: this is September 11, 1956. At this time, a symposium was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which brought together such scientists as A. Newell and G. Simon, who presented a report on the program they were developing "Logic Theorist", which simulated the proof of mathematical theorems. In addition, Noam Chomsky, the founder of transformational generative grammar, spoke at the symposium, Miller with his hypothesis about a limited amount of working memory, and reports were presented on testing the theory of neural ensembles using the latest supercomputers at that time, on syntax, speed of image recognition, theory signal detection.
J. A. Miller says this about the results of the historical symposium:
I left the symposium with a conviction, more intuitive than rational, that experimental psychology, theoretical linguistics, and computer modeling of cognitive processes are part of a larger whole and that in the future we will see their progressive development and coordination..
Some historians of science evaluate the results of this association as a change in the scientific paradigm and say that there was cognitive revolution.
From the very beginning, experimental psychology and, in particular, the study of cognitive processes - thinking, memory, attention, perception, etc. - has become one of the six components of a new field of knowledge. In addition to it, the philosophy of knowledge, structural linguistics (primarily associated with the name of Chomsky), cognitive anthropology (the science of culture as a specifically human way of knowing), neurophysiology, which studies the processes in the brain associated with cognition, as well as works on mathematical modeling of cognitive processes and the creation of artificial intelligence. Today, they are increasingly adding another area - education.
Why did they unite?
Cognitive science is an illustrative example, showing that sciences can not only be fragmented due to the increase in the volume of scientific knowledge and its differentiation, but also be combined to achieve new goals. The key word for cognitive science is the interdisciplinarity of knowledge. It is no coincidence that the pattern of the structure of this area includes connections between its individual constituent parts. This is exactly the case when the whole is not equal to the sum of its parts (one of the principles of Gestalt psychology, which has significantly influenced cognitive science). By combining the knowledge, means, methods and theoretical approaches of their sciences, cognitive scientists direct their efforts to solve fundamental questions about a person, his knowledge and understanding of himself and the world around him.
Further development
Today, the concept of "cognitive science" is by no means limited to the study of cognition in the classical sense. New directions appear, for example, among the psychological sciences these are: cognitive psychology of emotions, which studies the relationship between cognition and emotions; a social cognitive science that considers all aspects of the knowledge of an individual who is part of a community. There are cognitive psychophysiology and cognitive neuroscience. At the intersection of science and practice, the direction of neuroeconomics and neuromarketing has appeared - the study of consumer reactions to certain product features, which is carried out using methods for recording brain activity, eye movements and behavior. It can be argued that today cognitivism has become not just one of the new fashion trends, but an independent area of theoretical knowledge and practice, which gave rise to new original ideas and approaches.
Cognitive Community
The community of cognitive scientists is expanding every day. The largest association is the Cognitive Science Society, which publishes the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS in Cognitive Science. It hosts an annual international conference (in 2012 in Japan) and also oversees the biennial European Conference on Cognitive Sciences (in 2011 in Bulgaria).
In Russia, cognitive science is represented by the Interregional Cognitive Research Association (MAKI), which also holds an International Conference on Cognitive Science every two years (next
And the theory of artificial intelligence.
In cognitive science, two standard computational approaches to modeling cognitive systems are used: symbolism (the classical approach) and connectionism (the more recent approach). Symbolicism is based on the assumption that human thinking is similar to the thinking of a computer with a central processing unit, sequentially processing units of symbolic information. Connectionism is based on the assumption that human thinking cannot be likened to a central digital processor due to incompatibility with neurobiological data, but can be simulated using artificial neural networks, which consist of "formal" neurons that perform parallel processing of information.
Classical cognitive science ignored the problem of the connection between consciousness and the brain, as well as the problem of the connection between psychology and neuroscience. This caused criticism in her address. In the 1980s, psychologists and neuroscientists began to interact more closely, which led to the emergence of a new science - cognitive neuroscience, using brain imaging methods that make it possible to empirically connect mental phenomena with brain physiology. If classical cognitive science did not take consciousness into account, then in modern cognitive neuroscience consciousness is the subject of study.
The key technical advance that made cognitive science possible was new methods of brain scanning. Tomography and other methods for the first time made it possible to obtain direct data on the functioning of the brain. Increasingly powerful computers also played an important role.
Progress in cognitive science, scientists believe, will allow "unraveling the riddle of the mind," that is, describing and explaining the processes in the human brain that are responsible for higher nervous activity. This will create a system of so-called strong artificial intelligence, which will have the ability to self-learning, creativity, and free communication with a person.
Cognitive science combines computer models drawn from the theory of artificial intelligence and experimental methods drawn from the psychology and physiology of higher nervous activity to develop accurate theories of how the human brain works.
Emergence
Cognitive science emerged as a response to behaviorism, in an attempt to find a new approach to understanding human consciousness. In addition to psychology itself, several scientific disciplines turned out to be at the origins at once: artificial intelligence (McCarthy), linguistics (Chomsky), and philosophy (Fodor). At the peak of the development of cybernetics and the appearance of the first computers, the idea of analogy between the human mind and a computer began to gain strength and in many ways laid the foundation for the main theories of cognitivism. The process of thinking was compared to the work of a computer that receives stimuli from the outside world and generates information that is available for observation. In addition to symbols, as the results of the contact of the mind with the outside world, mental images (or representations) have become the object of research. Thus, there was a division into ‘outside’ (objects, objects, …) and ‘inside’ (representations). When asked if the world exists, Cognitive Science answers: ‘No, but our ideas about this world exist’. On the other hand, cognitivism also brought back Cartesian skepticism and left out subjective experiences and emotions.
Embodied cognitive science
At the beginning of the 21st century, a new direction has developed in cognitive science - embodied cognitive science (eng. embodied cognitive science). Its representatives consider the approach of traditional cognitive science and philosophy of mind, which almost completely ignores the role of the body in the activity of consciousness, to be erroneous. The last decade has seen an increase in empirical research in the field of embodied cognition. Supporters of embodied cognitive science reject the idea that consciousness is generated by the brain or is identical to the brain.
Components of cognitive science
The cognitive sciences also include experimental psychology of cognition, neuroscience, cognitive anthropology, cognitive geography, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics.
see also
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Notes
Literature
- Langakker R. W. Cognitive Grammar. - M.: INION RAN, 1992. - 56 p.
- Lakoff J. Cognitive modeling. Language and intelligence. - M.: "Progress", 1996. - 416 p.
- A short dictionary of cognitive terms. / Under the total. ed. E. S. Kubryakova. - M.: Philol. Faculty of Moscow State University M. V. Lomonosov, 1997. - 245 p.
- Velichkovsky BM Cognitive science: fundamentals of the psychology of knowledge. In 2 vols. - M .: Meaning: Publishing Center "Academy", 2006.
- Cognitive Science and Intelligent Technologies: Ref. Sat. Academy of Sciences of the USSR. - M.: In-t scientific. inform. by society Sciences, 1991. - 228 p.
- Dennett D. Ontological problem of consciousness / Per. from English. A. L. Blinova // Analytical Philosophy: Formation and Development (anthology) / Comp. Gryaznov A. F. - M .: DIC "Progress-Tradition", 1998. - S. 361-375.
- Churchland, P. S. (1986) Neurophilosophy: Towards a Unified Theory of Mind Brain, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bradford Books/MIT Press
- Fodor, Jerry (1998). Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong. New York: Oxford University Press
- Jackendoff, R. (1987) Consciousness and the Computational Mind, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bradford Books/MIT Press
- Pinker, S. (1997). How the Mind Works. presented at the New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company
- Varela, F., Thompson, E. and E. Rosch (1991) The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
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An excerpt characterizing Cognitivistics
Ordering himself a punch and calling Bosse, he began a conversation with him about Paris, about some changes that he intended to make in the maison de l "imperatrice [in the court staff of the empress], surprising the prefect with his memory of all the small details of court relations.He was interested in trifles, joked about Bosse's love of travel and casually chatted like a famous, confident and knowledgeable cameraman does, while he rolls up his sleeves and puts on an apron, and the patient is tied to a bunk: “It's all in my hands and in the head, clear and definite. When I need to get down to business, I will do it like no other, and now I can joke, and the more I joke and calm, the more you should be sure, calm and surprised at my genius.
Having finished his second glass of punch, Napoleon went to rest before the serious business, which, as it seemed to him, was coming to him the next day.
He was so interested in this task ahead of him that he could not sleep and, despite the runny nose that had worsened from the evening dampness, at three o'clock in the morning, blowing his nose loudly, he went out into the large compartment of the tent. He asked if the Russians had left? He was told that the enemy fires were still in the same places. He nodded his head approvingly.
The duty adjutant entered the tent.
- Eh bien, Rapp, croyez vous, que nous ferons do bonnes affaires aujourd "hui? [Well, Rapp, what do you think: will our affairs be good today?] - he turned to him.
- Sans aucun doute, Sire, [Without any doubt, sovereign,] - answered Rapp.
Napoleon looked at him.
- Vous rappelez vous, Sire, ce que vous m "avez fait l" honneur de dire a Smolensk, - said Rapp, - le vin est tire, il faut le boire. [Do you remember, sir, those words that you deigned to say to me in Smolensk, the wine is uncorked, you must drink it.]
Napoleon frowned and sat silently for a long time, his head resting on his hand.
“Cette pauvre armee,” he said suddenly, “elle a bien diminue depuis Smolensk.” La fortune est une franche courtisane, Rapp; je le disais toujours, et je commence a l "eprouver. Mais la garde, Rapp, la garde est intacte? [Poor army! It has greatly decreased from Smolensk. Fortune is a real whore, Rapp. I have always said this and am beginning to experience it. But the guard, Rapp, are the guards intact?] he said inquiringly.
- Oui, Sire, [Yes, sir.] - answered Rapp.
Napoleon took a lozenge, put it in his mouth and looked at his watch. He did not want to sleep, it was still far from morning; and in order to kill time, it was no longer possible to issue any orders, because everything had been made and was now being carried out.
– A t on distribue les biscuits et le riz aux regiments de la garde? [Have they distributed crackers and rice to the guardsmen?] Napoleon asked sternly.
– Oui, Sire. [Yes, sir.]
Mais le riz? [But rice?]
Rapp replied that he had conveyed the sovereign's orders about rice, but Napoleon shook his head in displeasure, as if he did not believe that his order would be carried out. The servant entered with punch. Napoleon ordered another glass to be served to Rapp and silently sipped from his own.
“I have no taste or smell,” he said, sniffing the glass. - This cold has bothered me. They talk about medicine. What kind of medicine when they can not cure the common cold? Corvisart gave me these lozenges, but they do nothing. What can they treat? Cannot be treated. Notre corps est une machine a vivre. Il est organise pour cela, c "est sa nature; laissez y la vie a son aise, qu" elle s "y defende elle meme: elle fera plus que si vous la paralysiez en l" encombrant de remedes. notre corps est comme une montre parfaite qui doit aller un certain temps; l "horloger n" a pas la faculte de l "ouvrir, il ne peut la manier qu" a tatons et les yeux bandes. Notre corps est une machine a vivre, voila tout. [Our body is a machine for life. It is designed for this. Leave life alone in him, let her defend herself, she will do more alone than when you interfere with her with medicines. Our body is like a clock that must run a certain time; the watchmaker cannot open them and only by groping and blindfolded can he operate them. Our body is a machine for life. That's all.] - And as if embarking on the path of definitions, definitions that Napoleon loved, he suddenly made a new definition. “Do you know, Rapp, what the art of war is?” - he asked. - The art of being stronger than the enemy at a certain moment. Voila tout. [That's all.]
Rapp didn't answer.
Demainnous allons avoir affaire a Koutouzoff! [Tomorrow we will deal with Kutuzov!] - said Napoleon. - Let's see! Remember, in Braunau he commanded an army and not once in three weeks did he mount his horse to inspect the fortifications. Let's see!
He glanced at his watch. It was still only four o'clock. I didn’t feel like sleeping, the punch was finished, and there was nothing to do after all. He got up, walked up and down, put on a warm frock coat and hat, and left the tent. The night was dark and damp; barely audible dampness fell from above. The bonfires did not burn brightly near, in the French guard, and far away through the smoke they shone along the Russian line. Everywhere it was quiet, and the rustle and clatter of the already begun movement of the French troops to take up a position could be clearly heard.
Napoleon walked in front of the tent, looked at the lights, listened to the clatter, and, passing by a tall guardsman in a shaggy hat, who stood sentry at his tent and, like a black pillar, stretched out at the appearance of the emperor, stopped opposite him.
- Since what year in the service? he asked with that habitual affectation of coarse and affectionate militancy with which he always treated his soldiers. The soldier answered him.
- Ah! un des vieux! [A! of the old people!] Got rice in the regiment?
- Got it, Your Majesty.
Napoleon nodded his head and stepped away from him.
At half past six, Napoleon rode on horseback to the village of Shevardin.
It began to dawn, the sky cleared, only one cloud lay in the east. Abandoned fires burned out in the faint morning light.
To the right, a thick lone cannon shot rang out, swept and froze in the general silence. Several minutes passed. There was a second, third shot, the air shook; the fourth and fifth resounded close and solemnly somewhere to the right.
The first shots had not yet finished ringing before others rang out, again and again, merging and interrupting one another.
Napoleon rode up with his retinue to the Shevardinsky redoubt and dismounted from his horse. The game has begun.
Returning from Prince Andrei to Gorki, Pierre, having ordered the bereator to prepare the horses and wake him up early in the morning, immediately fell asleep behind the partition, in the corner that Boris gave him.
When Pierre woke up completely the next morning, there was no one in the hut. Glass rattled in the small windows. The Rector stood pushing him aside.
“Your excellency, your excellency, your excellency ...” the bereytor said stubbornly, without looking at Pierre and, apparently, having lost hope of waking him up, shaking him by the shoulder.
- What? Began? Is it time? Pierre spoke, waking up.
“If you please, hear the firing,” said the bereytor, a retired soldier, “already all the gentlemen have risen, the brightest ones themselves have long passed.
Pierre hastily dressed and ran out onto the porch. Outside it was clear, fresh, dewy and cheerful. The sun, having just escaped from behind the cloud that obscured it, splashed up to half of its rays broken by the cloud through the roofs of the opposite street, onto the dew-covered dust of the road, onto the walls of houses, onto the windows of the fence and onto Pierre's horses standing by the hut. The rumble of cannons was heard more clearly in the yard. An adjutant with a Cossack roared down the street.
cognitive sciences(Kn) (the terms "cognitive science" are also used, which corresponds to English cognitive science, and "cognitivistics") - a holistic interdisciplinary field, the subjects of which are the acquisition, storage, transformation and use of knowledge.
Ph.D. include research conducted in areas such as: philosophy of mind, epistemology, and evolutionary epistemology; cognitive psychology; and psycholinguistics; psychophysiology and neurobiology; computer science, artificial intelligence research and mathematical logic; ethology and sociobiology, psychiatry.
Ph.D. are both a single research interdisciplinary field and a collection of individual sciences. The individual sciences included in them retain autonomy and considerable diversity, but at the same time, research within the Ph.D. almost always involve the approaches and results of several sciences. The subject of K.N. are various aspects of cognition and thinking: the laws of perception, processing, storage and reproduction of information, their connection with the device of the human brain and the possibility of implementing information processing on other media, research in the field of artificial intelligence, the role of language in cognition, the laws of information transmission, problems of understanding and interpretations, the role of evolutionary mechanisms in thinking, the specificity of special types of thinking.
History of the cognitive sciences
As a single research field K.N. developed in the 1960s and 1980s. The foundations of cognitive science were laid by the mathematician A. Turing's research on finite automata (1936). He was able to show that to carry out any calculation, it is sufficient to repeat elementary operations. This opened up prospects for testing and implementing the well-known idea of T. Hobbes and D. Boole that thinking is calculation. Testing this idea, the mathematician K. Shannon suggested in 1948 that each element of information can be represented as a choice of one of two equally probable alternatives, and the amount of information transmitted through a communication channel can be measured using a binary number system (in bits). Subsequently, these results were applied to the study of the functioning of the human central nervous system. Mathematical modeling of human information processing processes went hand in hand with the experimental study of these processes, the beginning of which was laid by the work of the Gestalt psychology school. In 1948, a hypothesis was put forward that thinking, as a process of processing cognitive information, can proceed in neural networks. Somewhat later, the first neural model of the brain was developed, where the interaction between networks of neurons imitated the logical operations of propositional calculus.
In the 1950s, the circle of problems of K.N. - human information processing, the structure of language and its influence on thinking (works by N. Chomsky), the development of artificial intelligence.
A significant contribution to the development of cognitive science was also made by the works of N. Wiener and his colleagues in the field of cybernetics and automata theory, which made it possible to explain some characteristic types of activity of the central nervous system, starting from the analogy between the purposeful functioning of technical systems and the corresponding forms of human behavior. These discoveries served as the basis for further systematic attempts to describe the general structure of the human cognitive system and the formation of cognitive psychology. From con. 1960s analysis of the nature of human cognition with the help of information models is becoming a common approach. The computer revolution, the rapid development of computer technology, had a serious impact on the study of cognitive and thought processes in cognitive science. As a result, the direction gradually became dominant here, focused on the creation of new cognitive computer models that could be considered as adequate enough imitations of various aspects of human cognition. Subsequently, a large role in Ph.D. studies in ethology and sociobiology also began to play, as well as techniques that make it possible to directly observe the work of the brain, such as magnetic resonance imaging.
Main areas of research, tasks and methods of cognitive sciences
To date, cognitive linguistics is represented in the world by several powerful areas, each of which is distinguished by its settings, its own area and special analysis procedures. However, a number of rather different schools undoubtedly unite the desire to give linguistic facts and linguistic categories a psychological explanation and, in one way or another, to correlate linguistic forms with their mental representations and with the experience that they reflect as structures of knowledge. Various theories in different aspects reveal the connection between the knowledge embedded in the language and the subject of perception, cognition, thinking, behavior and practical activity; refraction of the real world - its vision, understanding and structuring - in the mind of the subject and fixing it in the language in the form of subject (and ethnically) oriented concepts, ideas, images, concepts and models.
In recent decades, studies in anthropology, ethology, and sociobiology, and even in such initially distant fields as psychiatry, have also begun to join the classical circle of cognitive sciences. Cognitive anthropology arose in the mid-1950s as a result of understanding the phenomenon of culture in a broad sense. Until that time, the definitions of culture were primarily behaviorist - culture was presented as a model of behavior, actions or customs. Behavioral accents, as already mentioned, were also placed in linguistics and psychology. However, after there was a gradual departure from behaviorism, researchers turned to the study of the cultural aspects of thinking and cognition. This turn took place simultaneously in three areas - in cultural anthropology, in linguistics and in psychology. The goal of cognitive anthropology has become the study of cultural "competence", the abstract "theory of culture" stored in the minds of its representatives. However, over time, "culture" began to be defined in cognitive anthropology primarily as a system of knowledge - an internal conceptual system that justifies and controls real behavior and observed events, or as an explicitly expressed public system of meanings (the second concept resulted in symbolic anthropology). Today there are more than a dozen scientific directions, which, using one or another vocabulary and terminology, aim to study the "picture of the world" or "mentality". In particular, psychological anthropology (ethnopsychology) and cognitive anthropology are quite close to each other in terms of tasks. For ethnopsychology, the task is as follows: to explain how and why a people's specific perception of themselves and the outside world is formed, and how this perception affects people's actions and behavior. The goal of cognitive anthropology was to solve a very close problem - the study of the structure of the picture of the world. The picture of the world is a vision of the universe, characteristic of a particular nation, it is the representation of members of society about themselves and about their actions, their activity in the world. But if the concept of "national character" (ethnopsychology) implies a view of culture from the side of an external observer, then cognitive anthropology tries to look at the picture of the world from the inside, through the eyes of a bearer of culture, to understand and describe the world of people of other societies in their own terms, as they perceive it and are experienced. Thus, the object of study of cognitive anthropology is the system of mental organization of the elements of culture.
Appeal to the data of ethology allowed the cognitive sciences to enrich themselves with a new vision of the instinctive, innate, naturally conditioned components of human behavior. From ethological practice, such sciences as sociobiology borrowed methods of multidimensional study of behavior, which, in turn, made it possible to pose a number of new tasks for the study of the process of cognition: the study of the recognition of natural signals and conventional signs, the emotional regulation of cognitive activity, and the hypothesis of the competitive organization of cognitive processes. Similarly, the data of psychiatry make it possible to enrich the vision of the cognitive process with a number of its special types, which makes it possible to raise the question of the natural mechanisms of the formation of attitude, interpretation and constructive activity of cognition. Thus, the anthropologist G. Bateson used material on ethnography, ethology, psychiatry and ecology in his method of cybernetic analysis of communication.
The main theoretical directions Ph.D.
To date, three main theoretical directions have developed in cognitive science: the model-symbolic approach, the modular approach, and connectionism (a direction also called the neural network approach or parallel-distributed processing models). The first of these directions is based on a computer metaphor, which involves consideration of human cognition and its relationship with the work of the brain, by analogy with a personal computer, in which programs (software) that perform certain functions can be implemented on a different “substratum” (hardware). It is usually assumed that there is also some CPU with limited bandwidth. Theorists of the modular approach compare the human psyche with a Swiss army knife, which is adapted to perform many functions because, unlike a conventional knife with a single blade, it is armed with many tools: scissors, a corkscrew, etc. According to this approach, human cognition can be represented as a set of parallel functioning "modules" (works by J. Fodor) that work independently of each other. However, in this case, it is usually assumed that there is a central processor that accumulates the output data of these modules and uses them in the processes of knowledge coordination and decision making. Finally, connectionism is based on the "brain" metaphor of cognition, where cognitive processes appear as processes of parallel processing of information by a network consisting of several levels of simple units - models of neurons, the connections between which have different weight coefficients, and these coefficients can change depending on the training of the neural network. networks to solve a certain type of problem. In these models, quite often there is no central processor.
From August 13 every Wednesday at 20:05 at a frequency of 99.6 coming out program "Neutral Territory", a joint project "Finam-FM" and public lectures "Polit.ru". The project is dedicated to trying to understand the radio format, how the reality around us works. We will publish transcripts of broadcasts. As a test, two programs were made that did not go on the air. We will start the publication with them.
Dmitry Itskovich: Good evening. We are starting the Neutral Territory project, a joint project between Finam-FM and Polit.ru public lectures. Dmitry Itskovich, Polit.ru, and Boris Dolgin, public lecturer and editor of Polit.ru, are in the studio. And our guest is Ilya Utekhin, Dean of the Faculty of Anthropology at the European University in St. Petersburg.
Ilya Utekhin: Yes, hello.
D.I.: That sounds great. The third and rather lengthy conference on cognitive sciences has now taken place in Moscow. That's what kind of science, we'll talk. The level of the conference is evidenced by the fact that it was attended by Nobel laureates. Cognitive sciences is a very important area, which already has state support, but at the same time, almost no one knows about them. First question: what is cognitive science? How to translate it, how to explain it?
I. U.: Previously, they used to speak Russian, as far as I understand, cognitive sciences, because there are a lot of them. Now it's called cognitive science.
D.I: Because there are few of them.
I.U.: There is a Russian Association of Cognitive Science. The word "cognitive" means "pertaining to the processes of cognition". In general, this is an interdisciplinary field of science that arose at the junction of several areas. First of all, this includes psychology.
D.I.:"Related to the processes of cognition" - cognitive science.
I. U.: Yes, but cognitive, not in the sense that we read a book or saw something - and learned. They didn't even recognize it at university. When we learned friend or understood that a red light is on at a traffic light, this is also a cognitive process, a process of cognition.
Boris Dolgin: The process of perception and processing of information by a person.
I.W.: Yes, the process of perception, memorization, processing. Everything that a person does with information ...
D.I.: What examples can you give to make it immediately clear what you are talking about?
I. U.: First of all, perception, and much more: memory, language processes, understanding, reasoning - all these are cognitive processes. And precisely because they are so diverse, the cooperation of representatives of different disciplines is required. Psychology and linguistics are closely intertwined here. Cognitive psychology, which deals with perception, memory, reasoning. And linguistics, because human cognition is tied to a language that gives a person categories, ways to think and understand the world, and, well, artificial intelligence, because it is necessary to somehow model these processes. And since the place of action of these processes is our brain, our nervous system, neurophysiology is another integral part of cognitive science. And anthropology is a science about a person in the most general sense, considering some cultural variations, some cultural factors that show how all this happens in a person. So at the junction of all these sciences in the last third of the last century, a new discipline arose.
D. Ya.: That is, it is formalized as a collaboration of several disciplines?
I. U.: To be honest, I can hardly stand it when they say that this is an interdisciplinary topic for us. A suspicion immediately arises that the people who are engaged in it may not specifically understand anything in one, nor in the other, nor in the third, and therefore refer to interdisciplinarity. Cognitive science is an area where people work at the intersection of disciplines who nevertheless understand one of the disciplines basic to this science. And at the same time, they take material from their neighbors for their completely new developments.
B.D.: That is, material for generalizations, for their theoretical constructions?
I. U.: Yes, they take this material from neighboring disciplines. And here is the emergence of an understanding of problems, the formation of new knowledge at the intersection of sciences - this is a very characteristic feature of cognitive science, which, moreover, has always been associated with practice.
D. Ya.: When did this science appear?
I. U.: It is difficult to name the exact time, but, most likely, in the 60s - 70s of the XX century.
B. D.: In a sense, the appearance of what was called cybernetics can be called the beginning of cognitive science?
I. W.: Yes, it is, because it is the theory of control processes. I would like to give a simple example so that radio listeners can understand what all this has to do with practical life. One of the most practical areas in which cognitive science works is the interaction between man and technology. In particular, what is called human-computer interaction. You know, there is such a terrible term - usability. This is an example of a cognitive subdiscipline.
B. D.: Since not everyone knows what it is, it is better to explain.
I. U.: Each of us had to deal with such a situation: when we buy a new device (from a microwave oven to a mobile phone), it turns out that, judging by the very thick instructions, this thing can do a lot of things. But to understand how to get her to do all this, there is no way. And, as a rule, a person uses a very narrow range of opportunities - out of 100%, he uses 6-7%, and this is normal. In life, this often happens. We buy some pressure cooker for pancakes. We use it once and put it on the far shelf so as not to get it anymore.
D.I.: So we use our fate for the same 6-7% compared to our capabilities.
I.W.: Yes, probably. But this problem is largely due to the fact that all devices that contain computing devices, from an ATM to a computer to a microwave, behave very unfriendly towards people. They were designed by people with technical brains, who can do everything if they want, and not ordinary people who are “you” with technology. And then it turns out that the ATM asks me some unnecessary questions, and I enter the wrong number - and it sends my money to no one knows where.
B. D.: That is, the machine is configured so that it performs its functions, and not so that a person understands it.
I.W.: It turns out that the machine is aimed at some of its own goals, and these goals are not always consistent with ours, and therefore it is inconvenient for us to communicate with it. She makes us serve some of her needs. For example, Windows asks me a question, but should I install this, and would you like to do this? God, the most helpful sources on the internet are Windows tech service guides that you can turn off to make life easier. In order to make it comfortable and convenient for a person to communicate with technology, it is necessary to make this interaction correspond to the “human format”. And how is it arranged? It becomes clear that common ideas of traditional linguistics do not work here.
B. D.: That is, this is not the transfer of information?
I. U.: This is not the transfer of information. For example, I am talking now, radio listeners are listening, but no information is being transmitted. I have no illusions that I can convey my thoughts well to someone else.
D.I.: At a distance or with the help of speech?
I. U.: With the help of speech. I can only make someone think about something of my own, and by some external signs I will understand that this “my” of this person somehow correlates with what I tried to convey to him.
B. D.: But this understanding requires the receipt of some kind of signal hinting at this "one's own".
I. U.: Undoubtedly. It’s easier for me with the person sitting next to me, because I look at him and see how he reacts, nods his head.
B. D.: That is, there are extralinguistic means of communication. And so we come to the question of where in general each person encounters cognitive procedures.
I. U.: And we started talking about how the interaction works, the design of which is simply impossible without taking into account cognitive patterns.
B. D.: In the 60-70s, and partly in the 80s, the phrase "artificial intelligence" was very popular. Very high hopes were pinned on him, they hoped that almost an analogue of the natural human intellect would soon appear. We haven't heard much about this lately. Is this area dead?
I. U.: No, it is actively developing, but the development does not go along the paths that were laid down at the time and about which they talked a lot. That is, of course, the basic ideas remained regarding the main question: can a machine think? Can a robot think?
B. D.: Once upon a time there was a program on television called “Obvious - Incredible”, and an American film was shown there, where a very funny criterion of artificial intelligence was formulated: is a machine capable of doing what a person does when they say what he thinks?
I. U.: That's absolutely right, because Alan Turing, who put this question point-blank, was trying to do the thought experiment exactly like that. Imagine that you are communicating with a computer, and you don’t know who you are communicating with: with a bod program that imitates a person, or there is actually a person there .. If you communicated indefinitely and could not determine whether it is a bod or a person, it means that this program has all those intellectual and linguistic abilities that we define as a manifestation of intelligence. Accordingly, if this is a program, then it has intelligence ...
D.I.: As part of this action.
I. U.: Yes, in terms of doing this particular action, because we now know that computers are capable of many different interesting things. For example, to beat the world champion in chess, despite the fact that there is a very large amount of calculations. But a machine and a person think differently, because the world chess champion thinks fundamentally differently, he does not go through all the options, as a computer does. A person gropes for some narrow zone, and there he already counts. And the fact that the machine beat the world chess champion is not yet an indicator of what it thinks. She's just good at counting. And the problem with artificial intelligence was this. The human intellect is connected not just with the mind of a person, which is enclosed in the brain, but with the fact that this human mind is in the head, and the head is in the body, it is attached to this body. The computer does not have a body, the computer does not have the world around it, the context in which it is included. The computer has only what the programmer writes down for him in the program. Accordingly, everything that bod will answer you is something that it does on a purely language level. You can't say that when he talks about cheese, he knows what cheese is. He didn't eat cheese. And the robot will not taste the cheese and will not understand this word in a human way. So his reactions will remain imitation. There are a lot of interesting implications from this, because when they first started making robots...
B. D.: First of all, please explain what a robot is.
I. U.: A robot is a machine that can move around, do something in the outside world, for example, it can collect empty cans that you left from beer in your laboratory.
D.I.: Or play football with other robots.
B. D.: Is it a machine for which some spatial and temporal things are fundamentally significant?
I. U.: Yes, a machine that has a body. By the way, here's a side note. I recently bought a robot. This is the most expensive toy that Lego has, it costs about 350 euros. But I did not know before that there is a shortage in the Western consumer society. They are not in stores, and when they appear, a queue forms behind them. You can buy on the Internet, but the site says that more than five pieces in one hand are not given.
B. D.: This expression is very familiar to our people.
I. U.: And that's because this robot is not a toy, it's real. Almost. As well as radio-controlled crawlers. All institutes and colleges where artificial intelligence and robots take place buy them. It has ultrasonic and light eyes. He can distinguish colors. He has ears. I suspect that it is possible with some effort to make it move to the music, because it has motors. Its eyes can detect light and its ears can detect sounds.
B. D.: Not even just to register, but also to recognize visual and sound images?
I. U.: Yes, and when he touches something, he not only "understands", he feels what he touches.
B. D.: That is, he is able to read some separate information?
I. U.: Yes.
D.I.: And is he cute?
I. U.: No, he is not cute, but if you assemble him in the form of a car, then you can put him on the floor so that he looks for and picks up, say, red balls and does not pick up blue ones. He can be taught. It has a computing unit that can be programmed.
D.I.: Powerful?
IW: Pretty powerful, because it has to process a lot of information in real time. It can also be programmed using a special computer program, and this is very simple to do. You just need to drag the icons from one place to another with the mouse, and show him how he should process this flow of information. That is, theoretically, it is possible to teach a very smart child, who still does not read and write very well, to interact with this robot. How is it fundamentally different from early attempts at artificial intelligence? The fact that it was previously believed that you need to give the robot a model of the environment, a map. Let's say we say: robot Petya, collect beer cans in our laboratory! To do this, he needs to draw a map of this laboratory and implant it in his head. A map can be infinitely detailed. And he must rely on this model of the environment, but now it is changing. The man passed, the chair was moved to another place. And what, all over again to recalculate? And it turns out that such a reliance on a map and on a detailed model of the environment is very unproductive, because this map does not change dynamically. And besides, this is a very large amount of calculations. In principle, this can be dispensed with, because information from the environment is directly available to him. That is, it turns out that the new paradigm in robotics and the new paradigm in artificial intelligence are fundamentally not based on a complex imitation of human knowledge. We do not know how human knowledge about the environment is stored in the head and what it consists of. And you can do it much easier. Here, for example, is an industrial robot that has to screw some kind of nut. So he moved the wrong way, and the sensor is triggered, which sends information to the input, but all this is very difficult to set up. And you can do it simply. You can put rubber hinges in the joint, and if something moves, just the rubber band will work. It performs the function of a huge calculator. And this simplification, this revolution in new robotics has already happened, and even more interesting things await us in the near future.
B. D.: What is left of artificial intelligence? Apparently, speech recognition, visual pattern recognition? What else?
I. U.: Work with knowledge. If earlier we were working with data, now we are working with knowledge, somehow trying to represent it. In expert systems, for example. In many respects, we are talking about an attempt to imitate human abilities by fundamentally new means. And the most interesting of the new ideas are presented in the latest book by Marvin Minsky, one of the biggest experts in the field of artificial intelligence.
I. U.: Yes, his book "Emotional Thinking" was translated into Russian even at the end of the 70s. He works with thinking in terms of artificial intelligence. The point is that emotions are just as important a component of our communication, understanding of the world as logical constructions. In other words, logical constructions do not exhaust how we understand the world.
D.I.: By the way, we had a lecture by Andrey Zorin about the history of emotions.
B. D.: About the history of emotions on the material, first of all, of the 18th century.
I. U.: It's terribly interesting. But we have no doubts about the presence of emotions in a person.
DI.:. Emotions design the world.
B. D.: And human emotions themselves are constructed on the basis of cultural patterns.
I. U.: That is, in different eras they can take different forms. It is interesting that we have emotions that animals also have, even their manifestations are similar. Darwin once wrote a wonderful book, The Expression of the Emotions in Animals and in Man. The book is brilliant, it even formed the basis of an entire field called zoosemiotics.
B.D.: So this is the science of sign systems in animals?
I. U.: Yes, about how animals communicate with each other.
D.I.: And this science is projected onto people.
B. D.: But you need to do it very carefully.
I. U.: Since a person is still an animal, part of what happens to him and what he does himself happens within the framework of his biological capabilities. Therefore, zoosemiotic patterns are also applicable to it. But still human - it is different, specific. It was not by chance that I began to say that emotions are different. There are more complex, reflective emotions - shame, embarrassment, or pride - these are emotions that require some idea of yourself, how you look in the eyes of another. There are quite significant differences between cultures here: for example, what is the source of such emotions, what scenarios are manifested, and so on. But I started talking about this in the context of a discussion of artificial intelligence. One of the directions is when you communicate with a computer or with some other system, it not only answers you with a human voice, but also shows its face on the screen. There was a big meeting on this topic today.
DI.: Is the system showing its face?
I.U.: This is a system, a computer. It could be him, it could be her. But in order for a person to adequately communicate with such a thing, it is not necessary that it be very similar to a person. The maximum similarity is just annoying. But she must communicate more or less adequately: for example, blink at the right moments, which is not easy, because a person does not always blink. If a person listens attentively, is focused or chooses a word, he looks somewhere to the side. And in which direction he looks, by the way, depends on what he has a leading hemisphere, a leading hand, and so on. And then he doesn't blink. Why is the car blinking, why does it need it? But this is not enough, she not only blinks, she must, for example, understand what a person is doing when sadness, joy, embarrassment or misunderstanding are written on his face.
B.D.: That is, we are talking about recognizing human emotions by a machine or about making it convenient for a person to recognize a machine due to its transformation into a person? Anthropomorphization, what is it called, say, in relation to domestic animals?
I.U.: Well, both. On the one hand, in order to communicate adequately, a machine must understand more than just words. She must understand why the interlocutor mumbles, why he pauses, why he repeats something. It is not simple. In addition, a person has a facial expression that also means something.
D.AND: Must know the owner.
I.U.: Yes. On the other hand, this agent that we see on the screen, who communicates with us, he himself imitates emotions. Of course, we cannot say that these are his emotions. You know, Pavlov also forbade his employees (and even took a fine from the guilty) if they said: the dog thought or the dog was delighted. And he did the right thing, because we have no reason to transfer our emotions to her, to anthropomorphize her.
B.D.: I'm afraid some biologists would disagree with you. The direction of ethology is now very fashionable.
I. U.: Well, ethology is a wonderful science.
D.I.: What is ethology?
B.D.: An attempt to analyze the behavior of animals and then try to derive human behavior from the behavior of animals.
I.U.: Many do not take this second step. Human ethology is a separate interesting area, but let's get back to artificial animals. So, these artificial human heads and bodies that move, can imitate emotions and respond to what a person says, they themselves can speak. So far, the speech recognition system is not very good, but if it is communication with the keyboard, they have achieved a lot. As recently as today I watched a wonderful video of how a person communicates with such an artificial comrade. And the artificial friend rolls his eyes and raises his eyebrows. And everything is not just like that, but is directly related to the meaning of interaction. It seems to me that this is a miracle, and there are many such miracles in cognitive science and its practical applications. And this is undoubtedly one of the practical applications.
D.I.: And why are Nobel Prizes given now in the cognitive sciences? And who was at the conference of the Nobel laureates?
I.U.: Daniel Kahneman, who talked about his latest work. He talked about a person's sense of well-being: how and why a person is happy, and how this affects his decision-making. And, on the contrary, about the experience of trouble by a person. Kahneman expounded his approaches, but other interesting scientists worked in a similar area. For example, a person with the most terrible surname of all scientists, it is read as Chiksantmihai. And since it's Hungarian, you can imagine how it's spelled. He invented the concept flow experience. For example, you surf the Internet and find something interesting. You go from one page to another, and it fills you with such enthusiasm that you do not notice that it is already four in the morning, dawn and the beer is over.
B. D.: I think many radio listeners are familiar with this feeling.
I. U.: So, the feeling of happiness and well-being or, on the contrary, trouble, can really be explored, although, perhaps, this is not the most mainstream direction. Kahneman is an outstanding person, very interesting. And there were many very prominent and interesting scientists at the conference. From different countries, which is especially valuable. Remarkable domestic scientists were among the organizers of this conference. First of all, before this conference, Boris Mitrofanovich Velichkovsky, a prominent cognitive psychologist, was the president of the Russian Association for Cognitive Science.
DI.: And what does he do?
I.U.: He is in charge of a whole research institute in Dresden, but he is involved in many things, problems of attention, which are studied in a variety of ways. We also do this, because in Dresden we were taught to use a special device, an eye-tracker. What is she doing?
B. D.: Ai - in the sense of "eye"?
I. U.: Yes, eye. The eye tracker tracks the movement of a person's eyes when they look at something. In this area, Boris Mitrofanovich did a lot of interesting things. By the way, I will tell you why there is a need to investigate this. When we look, it seems to us that there is an organized world around us, a complete picture, all of it is colored. In fact, in all the details we can see, for example, read, and even see the color, only at a very small point.
B. D.: At the same minute, at the same second, and not at all ever?
I. U.: Yes. Now, if we look at our thumb, then this thumb approximately covers the point at which we can examine everything in detail. Everything else is a reconstruction. In order for us to see the face of the interlocutor or read the page, we need our eyes to move. And they move, jump from one place to another. And the jumps are very big. In what sequence these fixations occur, how long the gaze is fixed on something, this is very important information, because visual perception is a cognitive process, it is a thinking process. And how the eyes go their way, and what they fixate on, is an important source of information about how thinking occurs. There are also absolutely practical applications, for example, testing how a person communicates. Here we are looking at the computer screen, and someone says: oh, what wonderful banners we have, look, all users see them. And with the help of such a machine, you can prove that in fact no one sees them.
D.I.: Is it possible to expose them?
I.U.: Not only expose.
B.D.: The results will serve as a guide to putting these banners in the right place next time.
I.U.: Quite right. And not only banners, but also all sorts of buttons in the menu so that they become noticeable. In addition, one of the practical applications of the developments of the Dresden Institute was the joint work with automotive companies. Now some cars are equipped with devices that track the movements of the driver's eyes. These devices are mounted, it seems, in a mirror. This is part of the safety system and interaction with the driver, because the on-board computer understands how a person looks in mirrors and how he monitors the situation on the road. This is important because it is known that if the driver starts to fall asleep while driving, he still drives the car for a while, but does it automatically and pays less attention to the mirrors. This is very dangerous, and therefore the machine must do something in order to ...
D.I.: Wake him up.
B. D.: The car must clearly understand that the driver's attention has begun to fall, and somehow signal him.
I. U.: And, on the contrary, she understands that a person can steer himself. He's awake, everything's fine. Here, in order for her to understand this, such technology is needed.
B. D. A: All this is very interesting. And what exactly are you doing yourself? We know that you are the dean of the department of anthropology, and you named this science at the very end of the cognitive disciplines. How do your classes relate to cognitive science, to the problems that were discussed at the conference?
I. U.: Dean is an administrative position. And my scientific interests are indirectly related to anthropology. I am interested in the ethnography of communications, how communication between people works. I work in the Cognitive Research Laboratory under the leadership of Tatyana Vladimirovna Chernigovskaya, President of the Russian Cognitive Science Association. This is a famous scientist, she often appears on TV shows where she talks about the brain. She is a neurophysiologist and a linguist at the same time. It is very rare for a linguist to have a degree in the biological sciences at the same time. One of the projects of our laboratory is devoted to what is called "the theory of mind". I will now try to explain it very simply. Imagine that there is a screen between us. And we do not see each other, but we hear. I will contact Dima Itskovich. Dima, you are holding a Lego structure in your hands, which is not very complicated.
D.I.: What?
I. U.: Some kind of house or something like that. But such a design that cannot be described in one word. Therefore, the house is not suitable, it will be too simple.
D.I.: And if with a courtyard?
I. U.: Well, for example. I have all the same parts that make up this design, only scattered. We can communicate as we want, but we do not see each other. And most importantly, you do not see What I collect under your guidance, and the purpose of our communication is that I get exactly the same design as yours. And we start talking. You have to do everything to be successful. For this, it is necessary that you have a more or less clear picture in your head of what is currently in my head. More precisely, not even in the head, but before the eyes.
B. D.: How can you exchange images?
D.I.: I think that in such an experiment it is necessary to describe everything in great detail.
I. U.: But it turns out that it is not necessary to be extremely detailed. Most often, some small descriptions are enough, but you should try to check exactly ...
D.I.: Reaction?
I. U.: Exactly. The interaction in which we confirm or verify are two different effective strategies. Ordinary people cope with such tasks very well. But people who have schizophrenic disorders do not cope with this.
D.I.: Who are schizophrenics in terms of cognitive science?
I. U.: If we translate the word "schizophrenia" literally, then "schizo" means "split", "split", and "fren" - mind, mind, heart, soul. That is, schizophrenia is a split mind. (The ancient Greeks, by the way, thought that the human mind is in the diaphragm). Such people have a lot of problems, some of them we work with the help of psychiatrists. As for what schizophrenia is in terms of cognitive science, I'm just not qualified to talk about it. We have psychiatrists, neurophysiologists, and my part of the research concerns communications.
D.I.: And what is schizophrenia in terms of communications?
I. U.: That's what I can talk about, because schizophrenics have complicated communication, and this is the biggest problem.
B. D.: And you need to communicate with yourself and, moreover, with someone else, which is all the more difficult.
I. U.: Well, if a person has hallucinations, he has people in his head who communicate with him. He hears them, and in an acute period, perhaps even sees them. And everyone around you does not hear and does not see. This is the process of communication, which, unfortunately, I cannot touch on, because it is impossible to get into a person’s head. But here's how such people communicate with each other, it can be seen. And we plant not Dima and me to assemble the Lego constructor. This is done by a couple of people with problems who try to avoid communication, and many of them try not to go out at all, because they have to meet other people there, from whom they don’t know what to expect. There is one of the varieties of symptoms when paranoid effects are noted, when the patient attributes to other people thoughts that they do not have. Thoughts, intentions, feelings towards yourself. And the state of affairs seems dangerous to such a person.
And in other cases, the patient cannot, and does not want to understand what is happening behind the screen. He lacks motivation, and therefore communication is difficult. But if you put him in a situation where you need to interact effectively, then a very interesting experimental situation arises: how does the communication of people with such a pathology differ from the communication of normal people? Why is it harder for them to complete this task? Not because they think worse, they have completely preserved cognitive abilities. They understand, they think, they can even mentally rotate this figure in the same way as healthy people. But at the level of communication they have problems.
B. D.: That is, being visually separated from the interlocutor, they will not be able to assemble the same figure?
I. U.: In some cases, they manage to collect it correctly, but the statistics are much worse than those of normal people. While I was giving you the most preliminary results, in this project we have collected material, but we have not yet fully analyzed it. As a result of the project, it will be possible to talk about the parameters in which communication in a pair of schizophrenics differs from communication in the norm.
B. D.: And the option "schizophrenic - not schizophrenic" was considered?
I. U.: No. But preliminary it can be said that this will depend on whether the person knows who his partner is. In addition, it is known that one of the partners in the event of some problems often tries to take over part of the work of the other. In principle, it is easy to imagine a life situation that is a model of such interaction. For example, you are in another city, and you need your grandmother to send you an email. Then you call on the phone and explain to your grandmother the algorithm of actions: a) how to turn on the computer; b) how to find the program and start e-mail; c) how to find the file you need to send; d) how to do it.
B.D.: And explain it in a language that grandmother will understand.
I. U.: Yes, exactly, “sharpening” your message for a grandmother. And she is afraid to approach an ATM, what other computer is there?
D.I.: Will break yet.
I. U.: In fact, a situation arises when we use a person as a kind of “remote hand”. And for this we need to have a very good idea of its coordinate system, and we are in another city, that is, we are kind of behind a screen ..
B. D.: And what areas of development of cognitive science seem to you the most promising?
I. U.: My opinion is not very competent, in any case, not equally competent in all areas. Of course, we can expect the penetration of various cognitive technologies into our daily lives. First of all, this applies to all kinds of technical devices that are becoming smarter and smarter, and will interact with us better and better. There are a lot of problems on this way, and first of all, this is everything related to the use of natural language.
D.I.: What is natural language?
I. U.: It's not just a language, if I just said "language", everything would be fine. When I said "natural language", I simply out of habit contrasted the human language, the one that we are now speaking, with artificial languages. The computer understands artificial languages well, such as C++, but poorly understands our human language. And I would like him to interact with us. Remember, there were such films - "Moscow - Cassiopeia" and "Youths in the Universe." In one of them there was such a wonderful artifact - on the chest of the heroes, when they got to another planet, there was a little thing that looked like a transistor receiver. When they spoke, it was immediately translated into some foreign, yet unknown alien language. I'm afraid to seem like an unnecessary skeptic, but, in my opinion, such a thing is absolutely impossible and fantastic.
B. D.: And what exactly is fantastic here: a translation into a yet unknown language? It's clear. Or is it basically impossible to translate into any language? After all, it is being implemented.
I. U.: Translation into a language that we know, especially in a narrow subject area, is not only possible, but also implemented. By the way, back in the 60s, it was figured out how to do this. For example, to translate not from Russian directly into French or English, but first into a special intermediary language, and already from it into English, that is, to introduce an intermediate stage. This is quite real, because Russian and English are not too far from one another, closer than, say, Russian from Chinese or Russian from German. And about the alien and say nothing. They encode the surrounding reality in different ways, offer us a different grid of concepts for a person to use them in communication.
B.D.: You talk about how people in different cultures see the world a little differently and feel differently.
I. U.: And this is due, in particular, to the fact that they have a different language. And this is one of the basic premises. By the way, many reports at the conference were devoted to one or another aspect of this particular problem - how language determines our thinking. And precisely because different languages relate to the world differently, we need to make such an intermediary language that would take into account all possible options. And in a narrow sphere it is possible. And just chatting with the computer will be more difficult, because the computer program will not have context. The computer has no context, but you and I have a context. And too much becomes clear to us from the context.
D.I.: And here are modern breakthroughs, when computing power becomes huge, the latest American experiments, when a supercomputer becomes just a network one. And we are building supercomputers at the Kurchatov Institute - this is a fundamentally different array of information, different speeds. In such conditions, the context can be built in some other way, to look for ways to solve this problem.
B. D.: Another array, other speeds... But, as I understand it, it's not about speed, but about the principle. But on the other hand, if robots create a bodily context, an emotional context, will it not be possible to somehow create a cognitive context as well?
I. U.: In any case, there will be a model. And the problem of this model is how perfect it will be, that is, to what extent it will take into account everything that is available to a person.
D.I.: A science fiction writer would ask: is everything around us a model too?
B. D.: And I want to ask how important it is to take into account everything that exists around us? If it is decided not to take into account everything in relation to space, not to create models of space, then perhaps such a rigid need does not exist at all?
I. U.: A selection principle is needed so that the computer understands what is important and what is not. After all, a person does not perceive everything: from speech, from the surrounding reality, we perceive exactly what is important to us at the moment. This is a phenomenon of attention, but how to transfer it to a computer? How to do it? Supercomputers, of course, have something to do with this, but it's not just about them. Experts in the field of neurophysiology know quite a lot about how all sorts of processes are mapped. There are many ways to show which areas of the brain are activated when a person looks at pictures, when they hear a verb or an adjective. You can say: here the light bulb lights up, and here it lights up. We can describe a lot of things, but here is how it all happens ... But even if we know all this in great detail, at some point it becomes necessary to interpret. And it turns out that yes, we know in which areas the cerebral cortex is activated. And then what? We know that if there is damage in some part of the brain, some functions fall out. But we need a theory that would allow us to understand How it works. Usually the researcher is smarter than what he is studying, but the brain is an infinitely complex thing. The brain is more complex than the researcher. And this is a big problem.
D.I.: We're running out of time. And I would like to sum up not even the result, but to ask you to formulate very briefly what awaits us in this area further.
B.D.: I want to add. Our state is now paying great attention to what is called nanotechnology. A whole program has been created in this area, the Kurchatov Institute has been declared the leading structure and given a special status. And it created a unit headed by the above-mentioned Boris Velichkovsky, which is designed to deal with cognitive problems. What can the cognitive area give, why is it so much less important today than the nanoindustry?
I. U.: It seems to me that now an understanding is beginning to emerge that the field of cognitive sciences, neurophysiology, and artificial intelligence is also very important. This is something that in the near future can provide a breakthrough and lay the foundation for even more powerful development in the long term. Therefore, I hope that just as today the state has created a unique program in the field of nanotechnology, tomorrow something similar will be created with cognitive science. In any case, there is hope for this.
B. D.: Is it done in the world?
I. U.: Yes, it is done in the world.
D.I.: This is the direction of the nearest breakthrough. In the same way as it is happening now with nanotechnologies, biotechnologies…
I. U.: And with cognitive technologies.
D.I.: Yes, and with social technologies. And now it's time to say goodbye. Say goodbye to the Neutral Territory program, a joint project between Finam-FM and the Polit.ru Internet channel. Dmitry Itskovich, scientific editor of the Polit.ru channel Boris Dolgin and Dean of the Faculty of Anthropology of the European University Ilya Utekhin were on the air with you.
