Eric asked:

I am obsessed with this mind issue. Last answer was highly satisfactory. I began to read the
references you sent me. Thanks a lot. In this one I want to bore you with some novice theories about
mind, if you allow me.

I believe that mind works pretty much a Hierarchical Petri Net. In each level there is one statement,
that can be modeled with places and transitions.

Let "Is Eric Good?" be a question asked to me. Let this question in its context be defined with two
places and one transition, when I am subjected to this question.

In lower levels, I have multiple small nets in various levels and details connected to the concept
"Eric", as well as "Goodness".

"Eric hit me", "Eric's sister is Jane", "Eric went to college" etc. "Elephants are good", "Bad is not
Good", "Getting beaten is bad", etc.

These chunks are further linked to others like "Jane is a girl", "Jane is good".

I believe that man keeps his experiences in chunks like the ones above, very tiny nets with one or two
places and transitions. However when asked a question, or while making an exercise man gets into
these small chunks, decomposes each of these transitions and places, forms up new nets during run
time, and aggregates them to come at a conclusion which is also a tiny net.

Turning back to my example, I conclude that "Eric is Bad". When asked the question, I simply run
through the nets in the lower level, associate "Eric hit me" as "Something Bad" and conclude that
"Eric should also be bad".

Now what I do is not just finding a "path" in the mathematical sense. If it was so I could easily come
up with "Jane is Good" as an answer to the question. The process involves "path finding" but is much
more complex.

Anyways, I was thinking that this was a good beginning for a modeling effort about how mind works
and wanted to share it with you. I need to read more about this type of research.

Could you recommend me a couple of books/articles: 1) that looks at the issue through hierarchical
nets and graph theory, preferably Petri Nets. 2) that contains my theory about runtime graph
formation. 3) If people tried to explain this thing through graph theory and could not succeed please
let me know about that as well. I do not want to waste a life on this :)

============

I assume you know about this site, then: http://www.daimi.au.dk/PetriNets/.

But here's one general point. There are many, manyways to approach and to model the mind.
Various types of networks are one, of which Petri and graph theory are two categories. It may be that
they are formally identical. I will give you some other references below; you can find all the Petri stuff
you want at the above site. The danger, if you have not yet done much reading, is to take oneof
those as theway, and spend enormous amounts of time and energy at it. This is the danger of too
narrow an education in any field. IF your goal is to take the Petri Net and elaborate it, and see what
can be done with it, then, fine, go with that particular approach. IF your goal is to model or to think
about the mind, you will be taking one out of dozens of approaches and effectively saying that it is the
correct one. But it isn't, and here's why (and I'm sure many Petri people and others will disagree with
this): the brain is an analogsystem, not a digitalsystem. A computer is a digital system. Can a digital
system "model" an analog one? Yes, certainly. What does "model" mean? Now, there's the question.
I will not go into that here; suffice it to say that there is ongoingdebate on that point. Second, can a
digital system duplicate,functionally (obviously it could only be functionally), an analog system? This
is anotherquestion, notthe same as the last. If you want to createa mind in a computer (a digital
computer), you've got major problems, I think... indeed, I don't think it's possible. But you can model
one, up to a point. There's an important distinction here that many have missed.

So, what approaches should one take to a) modeland b) duplicatemind? But you see that these are
two different questions. Your approach above will not duplicate mind. But it might model it to a certain
extent.

For history (and good background) in modeling and networks:

Ashby, W. R. Design for a Brain: The Origin of Adaptive Behaviour.London: Chapman and Hall Ltd.,
1960.

Rosenblatt, F. Principles of Neurodynamics: Perceptrons and the Theory of Brain Mechanisms.
Washington, D.C.: Spartan Books, 1962.

Minsky, M., and S. Papert. Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry.Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 1969.

McCulloch, W. S. Embodiments of Mind.Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1970.

McClelland, J.L. Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition:
Psychological and Biological Models.Edited by J.A. Feldman, P.J. Hayes and D.E. Rumelhart. Vol. 2,
Computational Models of Cognition and Perception.Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986.

Rumelhart, D.E. Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition:
Foundations.Edited by J.A. Feldman, P.J. Hayes and D.E. Rumelhart. Vol. 1, Computational Models
of Cognition and Perception.Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986.

Cautions:

Dreyfus, H. L. What Computers Can't Do.Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1972.

Gurwitsch, A. The Field of Consciousness.Edited by A. van Kaam, Duquesne Studies: Psychological
Series. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1964.

Husserl, E. The Idea of Phenomenology.Translated by W. P. Alston and G. Nakhnikian. Fourth ed.
The Hague, Netherlands: Marinus Nijhoff, 1970.

Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception.Edited by Ted Honderich. 1st ed, International
Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.

Relatively early cognitive & modeling refs:

Allport, A. "Visual Attention." In Foundations of Cognitive Science,edited by M.I. Posner, 631-682.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989.

Deese, J. The Structure of Associations in Language and Thought.Baltimore, MD: The Johns
Hopkins Press, 1965.

Fodor, J. A., and Z. W. Pylyshyn. "Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis."
Cognition28 (1988): 3-72.

Gardner, H. The Mind's New Science.New York, NY: BasicBooks, 1985.

Gregory, R. "Perceptions as Hypotheses." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London
Series B, Biological Sciences290 (1980): 181-197.

Grossberg, S. "How Does a Brain Build a Cognitive Code?" Psychological Review87 (1980): 1-51.

Johnson, M. The Body in the Mind.Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Koffka, K. Principles of Gestalt Psychology.2nd ed. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.,
1963.

Mead, C. Analog Vlsi and Neural Systems.New York, NY: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1988.

Neisser, U. Cognitive PsychologyThe Century Psychology Series. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967.

Pollack, J.B. "Recursive Auto-Associative Memory: Devising Compositional Distributed
Representations." Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society,
Montreal.Cognitive Science Society 1988.

Posner, M.I., and S.J. Boies. "Components of Attention." Psychological Review78, no. 5 (1972):
391-408.

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Categories." Cognitive Psychology8, no. 3 (1976): 382-439.

Shallice, T. "Information-Processing Models of Consciousness: Possibilities and Problems." In
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???. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities.New York, NY:
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