How Can the Blind Men See the Elephant?

There is no denying the fact that AI's original aim of reproducing human-level intelligence has taken a back seat in favor of the development of practical and efficient systems for important but narrow domains under numerous umbrellas. While the importance of perception for intelligence is now well-understood, a major hurdle is to discover the appropriate representation and processes that can seamlessly support low-level perception and high-level cognition in a computational architecture. There is no shortage of cognitive architectures (see Samsonovich 2010 for a catalog), however, principled design is scarce. In this paper, we explicate our position and report on our ongoing investigations on representation and processes for developing an intelligent agent from first principles.