Ouroboros Model
The Ouroboros Model, building on the work of Otto Selz as the main starting point, is entered on a cognitive architecture claiming to shed light on very different and manifold features of efficient (not only human) cognition
The OM emphazises an iterative self-steered and autocatlythic process-view and features only two basic build blocks:
- Memory organized in (non-strict) hierarchies of schemata as foundation for all cognition
- A cyclic monitoring / control procedure („consumption analysis“) directing short term attention, memorisation, and delivering a general emotional signal derived from detected discrepancies between activated schemata and available current input
Self-consistently, only after sketching a wide-reaching anticipation, details are filled in. Amongst others, the following themes are claimed to be addressed by the Ouroboros Model and wait for further scrutiny (in rather arbitrary order with links to papers in the publication list as of summer 2024, #134 – #162)
- All rational and emotional cognition and feeling, scope and some limitations (#134,#135,#142,#162 and basically all the other papers, too)
- Anticipations are central (#152)
- Akrasia (see image below, in preparation)
- Beauty (#134)
- Concept formation (#143)
- Consciousness (#145)
- Emergence (#162)
- Emotion (#136,#146)
- Ethics (#154,#158,#161)
- Free Will (#162, in preparation)
- Language as one upshot (#151)
- Large Language Models, LLMs, current limitations (#159,#162)
- LLMs, recommendations for improvements (#159)
- Memory organization, biological implementation (#153)
- Negation is tricky (#162, in preparation)
- Negative Imperative (#154,#158,#161)
- (Self-)Consistency is most essential (#148)
- Self-Reflection is almost unavoidable for an agent counting as intelligent (#145,#149)
- Sketching an outline is the first step (#162)
- Sleep is necessary for all known real intelligent beeings (#160)
- Stupidity is attributed and common (#149)
- Working of the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (consistency curation) (#155)
- Working of the Cerebellum (general purpose interpolator) (#150)
- Working of the Hippocampus (augmented index) (#147,#153)
- The icon in its center shows a painting of the ouroboros in an alchemistic manuscript (“Alchimistische Handschrift 1550“, Universitätsbibliothek Basel, Sign. Mscr. L IV 1, scan “uc172.jpg”) and a first layout/sketch as presented as a „A Skeleton for a Mind“ in 2005 (#135)
- Just one claim concerning the indivisible interaction between rational thought and emotion:
