Applying Global Workspace Theory to the Frame Problem
Murray Shanahan and Bernard Baars
Abstract
The subject of this article is the frame problem, as conceived by certain
cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind, notably Fodor for whom it
stands as a fundamental obstacle to progress in cognitive science. The challenge
is to explain the capacity of so-called informationally unencapsulated cognitive
processes to deal effectively with information from potentially any cognitive
domain without the burden of having to explicitly sift the relevant from
the irrelevant. The paper advocates a global workspace architecture, with
its ability to manage massively parallel resources in the context of a serial
thread of computation, as an answer to this challenge. Analogical reasoning
is given particular attention, since it exemplifies informational unencapsulation
in its most extreme form. Because global workspace theory also purports to
account for the distinction between conscious and unconscious information
processing, the paper advances the tentative conclusion that consciousness
may go hand-in-hand with a solution to the frame problem in the biological
brain.