High-Level Perception, Representation, and Analogy A Critique.pdf

High-Level Perception, Representation, and Analogy: A Critique of Artificial Intelligence Methodology David J. Chalmers, Robert M. French, Douglas R. Hofstadter Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana 47408 CRCC Technical Report 49 — March 1991 E-mail addresses: dave@cogsci.indiana.edu french@cogsci.indiana.edu dughof@cogsci.indiana.edu To appear in Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence. High-Level Perception, Representation, and Analogy: A Critique of Artificial Intelligence Methodology Abstract High-level perception—the process of making sense of complex data at an abstract, conceptual level—is fundamental to human cognition. Through high-level perception, chaotic environmen- tal stimuli are organized into the mental representations that are used throughout cognitive pro- cessing. Much work in traditional artificial intelligence has ignored the process of high-level perception, by starting with hand-coded representations. In this paper, we argue that this dis- missal of perceptual processes leads to distorted models of human cognition. We examine some existing artificial-intelligence models—notably BACON, a model of scientific discovery, and the Structure-Mapping Engine, a model of analogical thought—and argue that these are flawed pre- cisely because they downplay the role of high-level perception. Further, we argue that perceptu- al processes cannot be separated from other cognitive processes even in principle, and therefore that traditional artificial-intelligence models cannot be defended by supposing the existence of a “representation module” that supplies