Subject: PP5 & Beliefs, Desires, Intentions From: "William J. Rapaport" Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:33:58 -0400 (EDT) A few of you decided that Pro's characterization of cognition as involving the abilities to see, hear, taste, touch, and have beliefs, desires, and intentions makes it impossible for computers to be cognitive, on the grounds that computers can't see, hear, taste, touch, or have beliefs, desires, or intentions. I beg to differ ;-) Computer vision is taught in CSE 473; Profs. Scott and Corso do research in that area. Speech-recognition software can hear. Mechanical-engineering Prof. Kesavadas works on computers that can feel by touch (used in surgery!): http://www.vrlab.buffalo.edu/research.html I don't know about tasting or smelling, but surely there are machines that can do those kinds of chemical analyses. As for belief, see my paper: Rapaport, William J. (1986), "Logical Foundations for Belief Representation", Cognitive Science 10: 371-422. http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/Papers/log.fdns.bel.rep.pdf And as for "beliefs, desires, and intentions", also called "BDI" architecture (pronounced "beady eye" :-), one of our former Ph.D. students did research on that: Deepak Kumar. The SNePS BDI architecture. Decision Support Systems, 16, 1 (January) 3-19, 1996. http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/sneps/Bibliography/kum96.pdf