LOGICAL OPENNESS IN COGNITIVE MODELS 1. THE PHYSICS OF COGNITIVE PROCESSES

The Symbolic Approach to AI and the cognitivist models are well represented by the Newell and Simon Physical Symbolic Sys-tem (Newell [1990]). It is essentially based on a “boxes and arrows” representation, diagrams providing a representation both of the sys-tem knowledge and its environment in terms of “information flow”. Although providing precious suggestions to computational episte-mology, such approach showed to be limited in a way that can be summarized by the peculiar kind of relationship linking cognitivism, “strong ” IA and classical Physics. As everybody knows in Newton-Laplace Physics the energetic behaviors are fixed by Maxwell-Boltzmann Statistics, they are of two kinds: Systems conserving information, characterized by conservation of energy which expressed as the invariance of a Hamiltonian function according to a deterministic scheme; Systems dissipating information, where the entropy increasing is detected, which is the sign of the growing distribution amplitude among the energetic levels and whose asymptotic “destiny ” is pre-dictable. It is clear that such kind of Physics is unsatisfying to exhaustively describe mental processes. In particular, in cognitive models it i