Jon Doyle
On Mechanisation of Thought Processes
This talk describes how traditional mechanical concepts of force, inertia, and work provide a new language for analyzing thinking and for characterizing realistic notions of rationality. I first sketch a natural extension of the axioms of modern rational mechanics to discrete and hybrid mechanical systems in which some kinds of minds exhibit actual, non-metaphorical mental forces and mental inertia. I then illustrate the ideas by identifying forces and masses entering into a simple kind of reasoning agent, and by sketching how mechanical work in such systems provides a measure of mental effort.
Biography
Jon Doyle is an AAAI Fellow and SAS Institute Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. He held earlier positions at Stanford, CMU, and MIT after receiving his PhD from MIT in 1980, and served as co-chair of KR in 1994. His work has made contributions to reason maintenance, nonmontonic logics, reasoned deliberation, reflective agents, belief revision, preferences, rational decision making, and other aspects of knowledge representation and reasoning. His current work studies the mathematical and mechanical foundations of rationality and reasoning.