The neurons of the cortex are organized in clusters, each containing 50 to 10,000 neurons. Theneurons of each cluster are connected primarily to other neurons in the same cluster. Edelman(1988) has proposed that it makes sense to think of connections between clusters, not justindividual neurons, as being reinforced or inhibited; and he has backed…
We have not yet discussed the possibility that analogies might be justified by analogy.Obviously, analogy as a general mode of thought cannot be justified by analogy; that would becircular reasoning. But, just as particular analogies can be justified by inductive or deductivebackground knowledge, so can particular analogies be justified by analogical backgroundknowledge. In some…
Induction and analogy are obviously closely related. In induction one assumes the future willbe similar to the past, and tries to guess which of a set of past patterns will continue into thefuture. In analogy one assumes that similar entities will have similar patterns, and directs patternrecognition on this basis. The difference is that…
Analogy is far more powerful than transitive reasoning; nonetheless, according to the presentanalysis it is nothing more than a subtler way of manipulating the pattern distance. I willintroduce three forms of analogical reasoning — structural analogy, modeling, and contextualanalogy — and propose a unified structure for analogical reasoning which encompasses all ofthem. It is…
Induction, as we have analyzed it, requires a store of patterns on which to operate. We havenot said how these patterns are to be obtained. Any general global optimization algorithm couldbe applied to the problem of recognizing patterns in an environment. But pattern recognition is adifficult problem, and a mind needs rapid, reasonably accurate…