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Orlin Vakarelov
The Cognitive Agent


Abstract

In this project I investigate what minimal conditions can allow a system to be regarded as a cognitive agent, i.e. what the subject of cognitive science is. An agent is a highly organized complex system which has intrinsic goals (in its minimal sense, persistence within viability boundary) and whose dynamical organization supports an informational description. Every agent, it follows, is informationally deprived. This deprivation raises a design problem: How can the organization begin to overcome this informational limitation?  I claim that cognition is the general strategy for resolving this design problem. More precisely, I define cognition as follows:
Cognition is the set of the mechanisms/organizational constraints of an autonomous agent that allow lowering of the conditional information entropy of selected important informational sources in the environment on the control structure of the agent, so that the agent can improve the selection of actions to produce successful behavior in light of its information gathering and carrying limitations.

I suggest that standard cognitive capacities — learning, memory, feature detection, representation, reasoning, etc. — can be viewed as special cases of this general strategy.

Biography

Orlin Vakarelov is currently (since 2003) in the doctoral program of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. Previously, he has earned a MS in Logic and Computation from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as an MA in Philosophy and BSc in Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of Toronto. Orlin Vakarelov has interests in the philosophy of cognitive science, examining the role of cognition in biological and artificial systems. Particularly, he investigates how cognition emerges in physical and biological system, what defines cognition, and what general cognitive capacities allow advanced cognitive systems to engage in practices such as science or mathematics. Previously, Orlin Vakarelov has worked in area of mathematical logic, category theory and automated proof generation in natural deductive systems, as well as applications to the philosophy of mathematics. He has been involved in the Oscar project, lead by Prof. John Pollack at the U of A, for the implantation a general purpose defeasible reasoned, as well as in the APROS project, lead by Prof. Wilfried Sieg at CMU, implementing an automated theorem prover in natural deduction.



 

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