Think about it.

I do wonder sometimes whether there is something scientific in the way some people have learned to control their emotions, thoughts, and feelings.  Through a variety of means and differing practices, people around the world in various times have discovered and implemented ways of controlling the way things flow in, out, grow, fester, develop, or deteriorate in their mind.


It truly is a fascinating ability, and one that would be well served to consider adding to one's own repertoire of skills and practices.  After all, who here doesn't want the ability to control their very thoughts, to filter what needs to be considered at a particular time, to control the way the mind tosses and turns things like a restless sleeper?


Let's meditate on that.

It comes to border on tired cliche so often, that when people grow up, the only thing that really changes is how expensive their toys are.  Of course, size changes as well (we prefer real cars over hot wheels, watching real men beat on each other as opposed to letting our action figures and imagination's run away, etc...), but point is, beyond superficial changes, adults and kids aren't all that distanced from each other.

There is also another idea that has a little bit of traction in my mind: that there are some things that kids are just better at than adults.  Plasticity of a youthful mind allows those of a younger age to (allegedly) pick up new lessons and techniques quicker than there more aged and supposedly "wiser" counterparts.  Language, for instance, is a popular example of this.

While many of these points have been in the past made pessimistically, I tend to view this fact in a slightly different light.
What's wrong with being immature?
One of the things that I came to question here was the proposition that somebody was "mature for their age."  It came off disturbingly like posturing, acting in an meretricious manner to create an air where one was somehow more "advanced" than those who were, inferred from the above quote, considered somehow less mature.
What's wrong with being a kid sometimes?
As far as I could tell, truly mature people had no need to say it, the just knew it, and it showed in their actions.  What's more, they also knew that there was nothing wrong with being a kid.

After all, it takes a little bit of foresight to realize that someday, we all wish we could be kids again.

And now time for something completely unacademic!
Well, at least unrelated to my primary research goals...
So, as some of you know, the NHL playoffs are upon us...and that I am a hockey fan...well, more so a hockey player.
Anyways, it is the season for octopus' (or is it octopi?), late nights staying up for overtime sudden death marathon sessions of big men and sticks hitting and sweating and...
Okay, now I'm all hot and bothered.
But you get the point.  The playoffs are here.  My picks?
Most likely team to disappoint: San Jose Sharks (...history's on their side)
Most likely player to disappoint: Alex Ovechkin (teams are just gonna focus on him...which means I think Backstrom's gonna have a good post season)
Most surprising team: Ottawa Senators.  I got a feeling they're gonna take down the Pens.
Most surprising player: Pekka Rinne.  While I don't see the Preds beating the Blackhawks, he's gonna make a name for himself.
Eastern Conference Champs: Buffalo Sabres
Western Conference Champs: Chicago Blackhawks
Stanley Cup Champs: Buffalo Sabres.  Goaltending, as it always is, is the difference this time of year.  And the disparities between the Sabres and the Blackhawks in this department are too great to overcome.  No contest.

A thought occurred to me a while ago...
Consider HAL 9000 from that one famous movie from Stanley Kubrick I can't seem to remember the title of (was it 2000? was it 2001?).  In it, the spaceship's onboard AI computer goes awry, displaying behavior that was disturbingly mislead, and as close to attacking the ship's denizens without actually striking them down.  Ultimately, HAL is shut down in response ("What are you doing Dave?"). 
So anyways, I was considering just how can we, as AI researchers, code morality into a machine.  At the same time, were HAL's actions immoral?  Do you think HAL had any direct notion of morals at all?
So I came up with a couple ideas...
1) The main cause of evil is ignorance.
2) We cannot/should not encode morality into our artificial intelligence entities.
Of course, I would need to expand these greatly, as these ideas as they are are incomplete and probably ill-formed.  I'll be brainstorming.

My general point is, is that I think we can learn a lot about the way we approach ethics, how it is developed in society's, and how an innate sense of morality is born in humans by studying the way we could instill it in an artificially intelligent entity, and how we would then treat such an entity born of our own mental image.

Hey all.
So recently a thought occurred to me.  What I and many others are interested in developing are cognitive architectures.  Why do we call them architectures?
I suppose it's because these architectures are supposed to be models that underlie cognition.  That is to say, an architecture forms the structure of cognition at the human level of intelligence.
The ideal is that these architectures are in some way models that are representative of the way humans actually process and respond to the environment and dynamic situations, but whether our models are adequate representations is a question that we've wrangled with for centuries.
So given that we are making "structures of cognition," that we call "architectures," does that make us architects?
Perhaps not in the traditional sense that we're making buildings with an eye towards aesthetics, but in a new sense, that we're making minds with an eye towards functionality.
However, I believe that what we do is as much an art as it is a science.  I think about this in the form of modules.  Modules form an integral part of cognitive architectures, each module specialized to a particular process (spatial reasoning, temporal reasoning, etc...).  However, which modules exist to form human level cognition is also a very difficult question, and one I suspect has no easy answers.  On top of that, there are many ways to implement a module, defining how each interact with each other, and what kinds of information hiding occur between modules.
With so much variability in views on the modularity of mind, it's a wonder we're able to come up with any functional architecture at all.  It's at this point that I believe we cease to be simply philosophers, computers scientists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, etc.., and we become artists as well.  Each architecture we use defines our style, our signature.  Just as architect Frank Gehry's work has a flow and tone all its own, each architecture we build has a feel and build unique to itself, as defined by its creator.  Each purpose we dedicate the architecture to is essentially the development of a new building.  These buildings carry the style and signature of the author, the architecture upon which it was defined, and it is now made concrete for a particular purpose, be it an art gallery, an office building, or a hotel.
Cognitive Architecture development at some point is no longer just a science, but an art as well.