Systems Thinking About Purpose

Thinking Systemically About Complex Systems

Thinking slow about thinking fast

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman attributes experientially-learned real-world coping skills to an " associative machine " acting on declarative memories of facts and events. While this attribution is probably correct for the unfamiliar types of situations that are the subject of his famous experiments conducted with Amos Tversky, we argue that experientially-learned real-wo...

Dimensions for Thinking About Thinking

We start by making a distinction between mind and cognition, and by positing that cognition is an aspect of mind. We propose as a working hypothesis a Separability Hypothesis which posits that we can factor off an architecture for cognition from a more general architecture for mind, thus avoiding a number of philosophical objections that have been raised about the "Strong AI" hypothesis. We the...

Critical Thinking about 'critical Thinking'

Purpose-Aware Reasoning about Interoperability of Heterogeneous Training Systems

We describe a novel approach by which software can assess the ability of a confederation of heterogeneous systems to interoperate to achieve a given purpose. The approach uses ontologies and knowledge bases (KBs) to capture the salient characteristics of systems, on the one hand, and of tasks for which these systems will be employed, on the other. Rules are used to represent the conditions unde...