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What Can AI Learn from Psychology and When Can AI Neglect it?

An Ontogeny-Free Study on the Cognition of Numerosity

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Abstract

AI has a long tradition of borrowing insights from psychology. There is also a voice of embracing ontogenetic elements in AI since ontogenetically earlier developing subsystems look easier to be the target of computational modeling. But due to be the fundamental difference between natural organisms and digital computers on the hardware level, this analogy does not always hold. For instance, as reported (Carey The origin of concepts, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009a), (Carey in JP 106:220–254, 2009b) ontogeny about the development of the cognitive mechanism cannot be smoothly mapped onto an AI context, although many of her psychological/philosophical insights, especially the indispensability of a quasi-phenomenological interface for manipulating numerical concepts, could still be kept.

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Notes

  1. To be more precise, the successor function itself can only directly enlarge the vocabulary of ordinal numbers (the 1rd, 2nd, 3rd…) rather than that of cardinal numbers (1, 2, 3…). However, the enlargement of the former can also lead to that of the latter in the sense that the latter can be derived by ignoring the sequence of the set-members to be counted.

  2. Surely the number system to be taken is not necessarily decimal, which is related to the evolutionary accident that human beings have 5 fingers and 5 toes as a convenient tool for counting. Hence, a counting System the base of which is not 10 should also work, as far as it can provide the efficiency in representation; but this possibility will not be seriously addressed in this paper for the sake of brevity.

  3. Instance, the representation of an instance of a type is different from that of this type itself. More on this in Wang (2013: §6.2).

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Funding

This study was supported by National Natural Science Foundation (Grant Number: L2124040).

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  1. School of Philosophy, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Yingjin Xu

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Xu, Y. What Can AI Learn from Psychology and When Can AI Neglect it?. Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. 16, 495–513 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-023-00381-1

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