Broad Views of Cognition and Their Historic Consequences in Cognitive Modeling

1 Broad Views of Cognition and Their Historic Consequences in Cognitive Modeling 

Using Turing Oracles in Cognitive Models of Problem-Solving 

Dualism is the primary contender for this area. Dualism is the idea that the mind and the body are not equivalent—that there exists at least some part of human cognition that is beyond what is describable by physics or using physical entities. It holds that a reduction of the mind to brain physics does not capture the entirety of what the mind is doing. It also says that there is a causal element being left out—that the mind, while not itself entirely physical, participates in the causal chain of human action. In other words, it is not a purely passive element but has a causal role (Heart, 1994). 

Historically, aspects of cognition that were considered to be part of the nonphysical mind were left unmodeled by dualists. By contrast, the goal of physicalism is to force all phenomena into explicitly physical models, a process not easily accomplished. 

To begin with, defining physicalism and dualism are not easy tasks. For a dualist to say that there is more than one mode of causation, at least one of those modes needs to be clearly and explicitly described. Similarly, if a physicalist says that all causes are physical, such a statement is meaningless without a solid definition of what counts as physical and what does not (Stoljar, 2009). 

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