The Cognition and Affect Project

The ontology of a human-like mind: what sorts of states, properties, processes, capabilities can occur in various sorts of minds, e.g. What kinds of architectures can support biological and artificial agents with different kinds of intelligence? This requires a study of design space' and niche space' and their relationships, including the different sorts of trajectories possible in these spaces, e.g. for an individual, for a naturally evolving species, or for a system explicitly modified or repaired by an engineer. To what extent do humans and other agents have simple and uniform architectures, and to what extent do they have hybrid architectures, e.g. Is a human brain an unintelligibly complex morass of mechanisms, or is there sufficient modularity of design to enable us to attain at least a partial understanding of how we work?