3. History of Mind, Knowledge and Information


Discover for yourself an important relationship.


The Mind
Mind is traditionally conceived across the ages as related to language and thinking.
Model of mind is a model of language use and "mental arithmetic".

Here is a very short list.

Raimundus Lullus                algebraic notation of thought; concepts and symbols interchangeable, conceptual representation
Juan Huarte                        human thought is language (as opposed to animal, which is just percept)
Thomas Hobbes
Rene Descartes                   "parcel movement"; mind is thinking, thought is mathematical operation ("addition" etc.)
Wilhelm Leibniz                   rediscovery of algebraic notation
George Boole                      rediscivery of algebraic notation
Charles Babbage                 rediscovery of algebraic notation

U. Eco (1995): The Search for the Perfect Language, Blackwell, New York.

Descartes is one summary, but usually he is quoted:
            mind is based on a language,
            knowledge is a symbol in the mind





The Computer (& the Concept of Information)

The same models of human thought were models of computing at the same time.
This parallel also inspired A. Turing (and others, like E.Post)


This identity is expressed by others in a new concept, information -
        the essence (!) of mental content and thinking
        something that the mind uses and can be:
                coded,
                stored,
                processed.


cf. T.Roszak (1994): The Cult of Information, University of California Press                Beware!

History of Information theory
L. Floridi: Philosophy of Information Theory                Floridi bibliography                    paper1        paper2







Artificial Intelligence, Brain Theory, and Knowledge Representation


Hixon Symposium 1948                    Jeffress, L. A., ed. (1951), Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, John Wiley, New York.
J. von Neumann
W. McCulloch & W. Pitts.
K. Lashley

C. Shannon & W. Weaver
N.Wiener


Gardner, Howard (1987): The Mind's New Science:
        A History of the Cognitive Revolution. New York: Basic Books.


Symposium on Information Theory 1956
H.. Simon
M, Minsky


The birth of the computer metaphor of intelligence, brain functioning, and knowledge.
Details taken from early mind theorists (Lullus, Babbage...) and logicians (Boole, Frege etc)
[whose concern was also the mind]





Summary: Knowledge is a Derived Concept

There is a top-down relationship
        From the historical examples of the mind's concepts we get this:
        the concept of knowledge directly depends on the concept of mind


Illustration.
Knowledge representation defines an "ontology" (generally accepted)
Ontology = what  the objects of knowledge are, and how they behave etc.
It is an ontology about the mind.



The "classical" (or Cartesian) concept of knowledge is based on the oldest,
completely speculative, naive ideas about the mind.

(By the way, they were theologically motivated too. The rest was introspection,
which is another bad advisor.)

It is no wonder that with the raise of modern science this should change.




Continued