In this erudite, insightful and detailed article Owen Matson explains why why AI discourse needs Katherine Hayles's theory of cognition. I had to switch my brain into neutral to read this one; none of it is wrong in any sense, but a lot of it is written in a language I don't use in my own thinking on the subject. It's a lot of work but the writing rewards the effort. Here's the core: "Cognition becomes an emergent property of systems that interpret information in context and connect it to meaning—not through language or logic, but through modulation, selection, and adaptation." This takes a lot of unpacking, and Matson leads us through it, and out the other side we get what might be an embodied theory of cognition (where it's left unsaid that this is where the real difference between human and AI cognition will be found). My criticism? This: we could tell exactly the same story without the use of the term 'meaning'. "Meaning is just relevance in context," writes Matson. "It's the fact that the interpretation leads to something that makes a difference." But what does 'makes a difference' mean? Something merely physical, like 'results in a change of state?' Or something requiring a mythical 'eye in the sky', like 'furthers the survival of the species'? Via Graham Attwell.
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