ABSTRACT
The papers in this book represent three very different approaches to understanding the mystery of human thought and memory: the approach of neuroscience and neuroscience-inspired models, the approach of cognitive psychology, and the approach of Artificial Intelligence (AI). All of these approaches are fundamentally mechanistic: They assume that intelligence can be understood, at some level, as the operation of a physical mechanism upon signals representing information. This information is accepted through various input transducers (senses), processed, and stored and ultimately results in signals to muscles and other output transducers. The assumption is that there is no magic here, nothing that is fundamentally beyond human understanding or physical law. Of course that is not to say that the processes of intelligence are simple or that a comprehensive understanding of them is close at hand.
