Human cognition - Citizendia

Human cognition is the study of how the human brain thinks. The human brain controls the Central nervous system (CNS by way of the Cranial nerves and Spinal cord, the Peripheral nervous system (PNS As a subject of study, human cognition tends to be more than only theoretical in that its theories lead to working models that demonstrate behavior similar to human thought. Thought and thinking are mental forms and Processes respectively ("thought" is both The extent to which these models can be measured as similar to, or indistinguishable from, human thought is the measure of the accuracy of the human cognition model. The terms cognitive modeling, and Cognitive architecture are sometimes used as synonyms of human cognition. A cognitive model is an approximation to animal cognitive processes (predominantly human for the purposes of comprehension and prediction A cognitive architecture is a blueprint for Intelligent agents It proposes (artificial Computational processes that act like certain cognitive systems most often Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often defined with reference to human cognition. The study of natural language understanding is the subfield of human cognition that seeks to model the way the human brain processes and understands spoken human languages, such as English language speech. Natural language understanding (NLU is literally what its name implies i Scientific modelling is the process of generating abstract, conceptual, Graphical and or mathematical models. A human language is a Language primarily intended for communication among Humans The two major categories of human languages are Natural languages and English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States

Background and history

One could argue that human cognition began with the mathematical musings of the ancient world that attempted to mathematically codify logic. Logic is the study of the principles of valid demonstration and Inference. Modus ponens is a simple statement from that era that says, "If one knows that A implies B (written as: A → B) is a true statement, then one knows that if A is true, then B is true. In Classical logic, modus ponendo ponens ( Latin: mode that affirms by affirming; often abbreviated to MP or modus ponens) is a " Successive application of the modus ponens principle can yield logical "reasonable" conclusions that may not be as apparent to the casual observer. For example, given the set of the following four statements: C → D, B → C, D → E, and A → B, and also given that you know that A is true, one can conclude that E is true. Is that as easily apparent as seeing that B is true? Modus ponens is the basis of the human cognition model that elicits the human-like deductive reasoning in modern rule-based expert systems.

The English mathematician Alan Turing gave us the Turing Theorem, which is the theoretical basis for John von Neumann's Von Neumann machine which, in turn, became the theoretical basis of the modern digital computer. Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (ˈt(jʊ(ərɪŋ (23 June 1912 &ndash 7 June 1954 was an English Mathematician A computer is a Machine that manipulates data according to a list of instructions. The Turing Theorem is the statement and proof that shows that all problems that can be solved, can be solved by first building a theoretical state-space of all possible state transitions and then traversing this state space until the problem solution is found. Turing was personally interested in creating a machine that could reason like a human, and his theorem was a significant contribution toward that end. We now know that human brains are not very similar at all to modern digital computers, but Turing's and Von Neumann's work gave us the tools to get started in building computer models of human cognition.

Background and history

See also