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98 Biomimetics: Biologically Inspired Technologies

— for starting and ending the sentence), the language module composes one or more grammatical
sentences that describe the object and its attributes.
The number of sentences is determined by a meaning content critic subsystem (not shown in
Figure 3.12) which stops sentence generation when all of the distinctive, excited, sentence summary
lexicon symbols have been ‘‘used’’ in one or more of the generated sentences.
This sketch illustrates the monkey-see/monkey-do principle of cognition: there is never any
complicated algorithm or software; no deeply principled system of rules or mathematical con-
straints; just confabulation and consensus building. It is a lot like that famous cartoon where
scientists are working at a blackboard, attempting, unsuccessfully, to connect up a set of facts on
the left with a desired conclusion on the right via a complicated scientific argument spanning the
gap between them. In frustration, one of the scientists erases a band in the middle of the argument
and puts in a box (equipped with input and output arrows) labeled ‘‘And Then a Miracle Occurs.’’
THAT is the nature of cognition.

3.6 DISCUSSION
This chapter has reviewed a ‘‘unified theory of cognition’’ which purports to explain all aspects of
this vast subject with one type of knowledge and one information processing operation. The hope is
that this discussion has convinced you that this approach to cognition is worthy of more extensive
investigation. Only after language, sound, and vision systems such as those described here have
been built, and widely evaluated and criticized, will a sense begin to emerge that the mechanization
of cognition is truly possible. I am hopeful that the arguments and discussion presented here are
sufficiently compelling to make such a research program sensible.

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