Cognitive Mechanisms Of The Mind

Successes of information and cognitive science brought a growing understanding that mind is based on intelligent cognitive processes, which are not limited by language and logic only. A nice overview can be found in the excellent work of Jeff Hawkins "On Intelligence." This view is that thought is a set of informational processes in the brain, and such processes have the same rationale as any other systematic informational processes. Their specifics are determined by the ways of how brain stores, structures and process this information. Systematic approach allows representing them in a diagrammatic form that can be formalized and programmed. Semiotic approach allows for the universal representation of such diagrams. In our approach, logic is just a way of synthesis of such structures, which is a small but clearly visible top of the iceberg. However, most of the efforts were traditionally put into logics without paying much attention to the rest of the mechanisms that make the entire thought system working autonomously. Dynamic fuzzy logic is reviewed and its connections with semiotics are established. Dynamic fuzzy logic extends fuzzy logic in the direction of logic-processes, which include processes of fuzzification and defuzzification as parts of logic. This extension of fuzzy logic is inspired by processes in the brain-mind. The paper reviews basic cognitive mechanisms, including instinctual drives, emotional and conceptual mechanisms, perception, cognition, language, a model of interaction between language and cognition upon the new semiotic models. The model of interacting cognition and language is organized in an approximate hierarchy of mental representations from sensory percepts at the "bottom" to objects, contexts, situations, abstract concepts-representations, and to the most general representations at the "top" of mental hierarchy. Knowledge instinct and emotions are driving feedbacks for these representations. Interactions of bottom-up and top-down processes in such hierarchical semiotic representation are essential for modeling cognition. Dynamic fuzzy logic is analyzed as a fundamental mechanism of these processes. In this paper we are trying to formalize cognitive processes of the human mind using approaches above, and provide interfaces that could allow for their practical realization in software and hardware. Future research directions are discussed.