Cognitive architectures are... Leibnizian machines... designed to bring forth the feats of cognition, and built to allow us to enter... examine them,… - Joscha Bach

There are some animals like elephants that have larger brains than us and they don't seem to be smarter. ...Elephants seem to be autistic. They have very, very good motor control and they're really good with details, but really struggle to see the big picture. ...[Y]ou can make them recreate drawings stroke by stroke... but they cannot reproduce a still life... of a scene... Why is that? Maybe smarter elephants would meditate themselves out of existence because their brains are too large. So... that elephants that were not autistic, they didn't reproduce.

[W]e are in need of functionalist architectures. That is, we need to make explicit what entities we are going to research, what constitutes these entities conceptually, and how we may capture these concepts.

With this vector space you can do amazing things, [e.g.,] if you take the vector from king to queen, it's pretty much the same vector as between man and woman. ...[B]ecause [these concept spaces are] really a high dimension manifold, we can do interesting things like machine translation without understanding what it means, that is, without doing any proper mental representation that predicts the world. ...[T]his is [a] type of mental representation that is somewhat incomplete, but it captures the landscape that we share in a culture.