This probably won’t be of interest to anyone else. This is just a dumping ground for me to keep track of resources and ideas that look like they could be interesting.
Looking into cognitive architectures. Some are trying to replicate human thought (ACT-R, Sigma), others are just trying to use the human mind as a sort of inspiration for designing interesting or clever systems (eg SOAR)
The relevant links for each are:
ACT-R
http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/
There are tutorial units that can be downloaded from there
Sigma
USC actually seem to be doing a whole project called ‘virtual humans’, which includes Sigma, a refactoring of ACT-R. Also goes down to the neural level I think in places using SPAUN maybe? NEURONS
Apparently the ICT Virtual Human Toolkit is freely available.
https://ict.usc.edu/groups/virtual-humans/
SOAR
https://soar.eecs.umich.edu/
I will get into these, though they seem to be strangely devoid of evolutionarily-informed thinking, not sure yet. I think they tend to be looking for domain-general problem-solving architectures. I’m not sure if this is a strong decision to avoid domain-specificity or just an unquestioned assumption. I’ll keep an open mind on general vs specific, but they do seem to lean quite heavily towards general.
Youtube is a decent place to find videos on all of these, to supplement the information on their home pages etc.
Then there’s Rolls’ work – eg Emotion and Decision-Making Explained which goes down to the neural level but also looks at higher-level. EMOTIONS, NEURONS
My own approach I think is going to be a combination of bottom up, cognitive architecture kind of thing plus top down evolutionary theory a la robot to human.
Notes on Tooby and Cosmides papers from here https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/publist.htm
(Tag each one so I know what’s in them)
Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1992). The psychological foundations of culture. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford University Press. EVOPSYCH, CULTURE, SSSM, MULTIMODULAR
Books
I am a strange loop – Hofstadter CONSCIOUSNESS
Blind Watchmaker – Dawkins EVOLUTION
Selfish Gene – Dawkins EVOLUTION, EVOPSYCH