Biomolecular Cognitive Science

1 Background Cognitive Science, quite simply, attempts to provide solutions to the question of how mind and brain are related or, more generally, what constitutes mind/brain. Classical cognitive science (CCS), together with its subdiscipline of artiicial intelligence (AI), is based on Newell and Simon's (1976) explicit commitment to thèPhysical Symbol System Hypothesis' | the idea that all intelligent action and behaviour can be necessarily and suuciently described and explained by symbols and rules operating on those symbols, where the rules themselves have symbolic form. Furthermore, these rules and symbols must be realised in any system for which claims of intelligent action and behaviour are made. 1 AI's concern has been with computational representations of physical symbol systems. CCS and AI have been attacked on the following three grounds: (a) that rule-following by itself is not suucient (and may not even be necessary) for intelligence, awareness and consciousness; (b) that because CCS and AI are anti-materialist and perhaps anti-reductionist in nature they cannot explain how brain gives rise to mind and therefore cannot provide adequate accounts of mind/brain; and (c) that CCS and AI, because they succumb to the same formal limits that apply to computation and algorithms, cannot account for certain types of mental processes which fall outside the class of what can be computed. 2 With regard to (a), the strongest expression of this objection to CCS and AI has come from Searle and his Chinese Room Argument (Searle, 1980). The best reply to the actual Chinese Room scenario is the Korean Professor Argument (Rapaport, 1988) which identiies a weakness in the Chinese Room scenario (the person in the room understands the instructions to be followed) before re-describing the scenario in a form acceptable to CCS and AI. 3 More generally, though, AI addresses this problem through a form of`Systems reply': intelligence, awareness and consciousness arise from computational processes and interactions between these processes. Whether these processes are mental, physical or behavioural is irrelevant, in that the system as a whole moves through various states, where the next state of the system is determined by the current state of the system and any input it receives. The stress here is on functionality and cognitive architecture (Putnam, 1967; Fodor and Pylyshyn, 1988): The states a system goes through are representational states, and a cognitive architecture is an architecture of representational states which involves the precise nature of the representations and …