How humans solve the frame problem

Abstract

Both standard formulations of the frame problem and standard solutions implicitly assume that the re-identification of objects as persisting individuals between pre- and post-action contexts is unproblematic. In the case of human beings, this assumption is false: humans dedicate considerable cognitive resources to object re-identification. An analysis of both the phenomenology and neurocognitive implementation of object re-identification is used to show that in humans, all of the information architecturally available to solve the frame problem is in fact deployed for object re-identification. The frame problem is, therefore, equivalent to the object re-identification problem in the case of human problem solving.

Keywords::

• cognition
• perception
• categorisation
• object identification
• causal reasoning
• memory

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Eric Dietrich for almost 30 years of discussions around the frame problem.