Evolvable Biologically Plausible Visual Architectures

Much work in AI is fragmented, partly because the subject is so huge that it is difficult for anyone to think about all of it. Even within sub-fields, such as language, reasoning, and vision, there is fragmentation, as the subsub -fields are rich enough to keep people busy all their lives. However, there is a risk that results of isolated research will be unsuitable for future integration, e.g. in models of complete organisms, or human like robots. This paper offers a framework for thinking about the many components of visual systems and how they relate to the whole organism or machine. The viewpoint is biologically inspired, using conjectured evolutionary history as a guide to some of the features of the architecture. It may also be useful both for modelling animal vision and designing robots with similar capabilities. An online slide presentation based on this paper is available as talk 8 here: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/misc/talks/ Talk 7, on visual reasoning, is also relevant.

The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy, Science and Models of Mind

The book presented deep important connections between Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy, based partly on an argument that both philosophy and science are primarily concerned with identifying and explaining possibilities contrary to a common view that science is primarily concerned with laws. The book attempted to show in principle how the construction, testing and debugging of complex computational models, explaining possibilities in a new way, can illuminate a collection of deep philosophical problems, e.g. about the nature of mind, the nature of representation, the nature of mathematical discovery. However it did not claim that this could be done easily or that the problems would be solved soon. 40 years later many of them have still not been solved, including explaining how biological brains made possible the deep mathematical discoveries made millennia ago, long before the development of modern logic, often wrongly assumed to provide foundations for all of mathematics. Later work on these ideas includes the author's Meta-Morphogenesis project, inspired by Alan Turing's work: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/meta-morphogenesis.html Originally published in 1978 by Harvester Press, this went out of print. An electronic version was created from a scanned in copy and then extensively edited with corrections, addtional text, and notes, available online as html or pdf, intermittently updated. This pdf version was created on 2019/07/09