Principles for the Foundation of Integrated Higher Cognition

Cognitive Diversity Higher cognition of humans occurs in a variety of forms, contexts, and facets. For example, humans can perform deductions, inductions, and abductions, they can solve problems in domains initially completely unknown to them, and they are able to retrieve relevant information, although there is a tremendous amount of related knowledge stored in their memories. Furthermore abilities like creativity, adaptation, learning, and reasoning with inconsistencies, by analogy, or by rough estimations are remarkable capacities of humans. In order to model such a variety of abilities computationally, researchers either develop complicated architectures with a large number of different modules (e.g. Wang, 2006; Newell, 1990), often presupposing sophisticated control mechanisms, or they try to reduce such cognitive manifolds to a few principles (e.g. Cassimatis, 2006; Forbus & Hinrichs, 2006). In the spirit of the latter approaches, we propose to reduce the enormous variety of higher cognitive abilities to analogical reasoning, dynamic updates of background knowledge, and neuro-symbolic integration.