It is a long journey - Cognitive Science to Cognitive Computing - old theories are still very profound

In late 80's - more precisely 1988-91 -  I spent quite a bit time to read and (trying to) understand the "science of cognition' - chasing questions like - what is "knowledge"? ....  what is "reasoning"?...    the puzzles of language, learning, memory, inference, problem solving, philosophy of life, human mind, etc., etc. This was the time when I had a free hand to pursue research on topics of my interest and was bold enough to propose a "Center for Cognitive Science"  together with a thinker researcher colleague Dr.  B. N. Nair at Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Trivandrum, India.

In fact, it is very amusing that I stumbled on a hand-written journal in which I was noting down important points from some of the books and articles I read at that time (photocopying was expensive then in India  !!!).  When I browsed through them again after 25 years - a time when cognitive computing is hot and fashionable - I see very valuable nuggets in the very old references starting from Aristotle. I may share some of those here intermittently.

Among different topics from my old journal, one thing that looked profound is a definition of knowledge from "Sankhya" Philosophy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya)

"Knowledge is finding association about things. It is pigeon-holing one experience with the already existing fund of experience and this is one the great proofs of the fact that you can not have any knowledge until you have already a fund of knowledge in existence. There must be a store at hand to which to refer a new impression. Suppose a child is born into this world without such a fund, it would be impossible for that child ever to get any knowledge. Therefore, the child must have been in a state in which he/she had a fund and so, knowledge is eternally increasing"

Very thought provoking!!!  Need to digest it more even after I am reading these notes from many years ago!

What is Learning?

How do we define "learning"?  What makes one claim that he/she has learnt something new? What is a measure of learning? It is not IQ metric. It is not the level of diploma/degree or certifications. In some academic sense, it may appear to be the ability to remember and reproduce a fact, passing a test, being eligible of a diploma/degree. However, most of the learning happens outside the class rooms of academic institutions. According to "manu" (that's me!), there can be different manifestations of learning such as:
- ability to recognize the problem, its class, and relevant attributes
- ability to answer questions related to the topic
- ability to solve a problem that he/she couldn't do beforehand
- improvement in the performance of solving a problem
- interpreting fact(s)/data in different ways based on different contexts
- ability to analyze and establish/contradict the truth of a matter

Although the above can be (a partial set of) different facets of learning, it is even more complex to come up with a proper yard stick to measure the level of learning.

May be the "ability to establish/contradict the truth of the matter or proposition or statement" sums  up the "level of learnedness" .  need to ponder more on this .....