3 Reasons Why You Should Care About Category Theory
Category theory is a branch of mathematics which have been used to organize various regions of mathematics and related sciences from a radical “relation-first” point of view. Why consciousness researchers should care about category theory? " "There are (at least) 3 reasons:" "1 Everything is relational" "2 Everything is relation" "3 Relation is everything" "In this talk we explain the reasons above more concretely and introduce the ideas to utilize basic concepts in category theory for consciousness studies.
A Connectionist Account of Analogy-Making
Analogy-making is considered to be one of the cognitive processes which are hard to be accounted for in connectionist terms. A number of models have been proposed, but they are either tailed for specific analogical tasks or require complicated mechanisms which don’t fit into the mainstream connectionist modelling paradigm. In this talk I will present a new connectionist account of analogy-making based on the vector approach to representing symbols (VARS). This approach allows representing relational structures of varying complexity by numeric vectors with fixed dimensionality. I will also present a simple and computationally efficient mechanism of aligning VARS representations, which integrates both semantic similarity and structural constraints. The results of a series of simulations will demonstrate that VARS can account for basic analogical phenomena.