Concept
Physical symbol system
Overview
A physical symbol system (also called a formal system) takes physical patterns (symbols), combining them into structures (expressions) and manipulating them (using processes) to produce new expressions.
The physical symbol system hypothesis (PSSH) is a position in the philosophy of artificial intelligence formulated by Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon. They wrote:
"A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action."
This claim implies both that human thinking is a kind of symbol manipulation (because a symbol system is necessary for intelligence) and that machines can be intelligent (because a symbol system is sufficient for intelligence).
The idea has philosophical roots in Thomas Hobbes (who claimed reasoning was "nothing more than reckoning"), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (who attempted to create a logical calculus of all human ideas), David Hume (who thought perception could be reduced to "atomic impressions") and even Immanuel Kant (who analyzed all experience as controlled by formal rules). The latest version is called the computational theory of mind, associated with philosophers Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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However, practical rules of this kind are not called laws (like physical laws), but only precepts; because the will does not stand merely under the natural concept, but also under the concept of freedom, in relation to which its principles are called laws. These with their consequences alone constitute the second or practical part of Philosophy.
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Physical symbol system is; the author is tied to Physical symbol system in the knowledge graph.
We look here only to the necessity of the connection of events in a time-series as it is developed according to the physical law, whether the subject in which this development takes place is called automaton materiale when the mechanical being is moved by matter, or with Leibnitz spirituale when it is impelled by ideas; and if the freedom of our will were no other than the latter (say the psychological and…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason
States what Physical symbol system is; the author is tied to Physical symbol system in the knowledge graph.
The best possible sort of system into which to weave an object, mentally, is a _rational_ system, or what is called a 'science.' Place the thing in its pigeon-hole in a classificatory series; explain it logically by its causes, and deduce from it its necessary effects; find out of what natural law it is an instance,--and you then know it in the…
William James, Talks To Teachers On Psychology
States what Physical symbol system is.
Related ideas
- Artificial intelligence
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Philosophy
- Herbert A. Simon
- Immanuel Kant
- John Searle
- Cognitive revolution
- Psychology
- Denotation
- Allen Newell
- Thomas Hobbes
- Hans Moravec
- Thought
- Computational theory of mind
- Formal system
- Meaning (semiotics)
- Jerry Fodor
- George Lakoff
- Logic
- Cognitive science
- Consciousness
- Artificial general intelligence
- Chinese room
- Rodney Brooks