Between Sense and Sensibility: Declarative narrativisation of mental models as a basis and benchmark for visuo-spatial cognition and computation focussed collaborative cognitive systems

What lies between `\emph{sensing}' and `\emph{sensibility}'? In other words, what kind of cognitive processes mediate sensing capability, and the formation of sensible impressions ---e.g., abstractions, analogies, hypotheses and theory formation, beliefs and their revision, argument formation--- in domain-specific problem solving, or in regular activities of everyday living, working and simply going around in the environment? How can knowledge and reasoning about such capabilities, as exhibited by humans in particular problem contexts, be used as a model and benchmark for the development of collaborative cognitive (interaction) systems concerned with human assistance, assurance, and empowerment? We pose these questions in the context of a range of assistive technologies concerned with \emph{visuo-spatial perception and cognition} tasks encompassing aspects such as commonsense, creativity, and the application of specialist domain knowledge and problem-solving thought processes. Assistive technologies being considered include: (a) human activity interpretation; (b) high-level cognitive rovotics; (c) people-centred creative design in domains such as architecture & digital media creation, and (d) qualitative analyses geographic information systems. Computational narratives not only provide a rich cognitive basis, but they also serve as a benchmark of functional performance in our development of computational cognitive assistance systems. We posit that computational narrativisation pertaining to space, actions, and change provides a useful model of \emph{visual} and \emph{spatio-temporal thinking} within a wide-range of problem-solving tasks and application areas where collaborative cognitive systems could serve an assistive and empowering function.Comment: 5 pages, research statement summarising recent publication

Evidence and plausibility in neighborhood structures

The intuitive notion of evidence has both semantic and syntactic features. In this paper, we develop an {\em evidence logic} for epistemic agents faced with possibly contradictory evidence from different sources. The logic is based on a neighborhood semantics, where a neighborhood $N$ indicates that the agent has reason to believe that the true state of the world lies in $N$. Further notions of relative plausibility between worlds and beliefs based on the latter ordering are then defined in terms of this evidence structure, yielding our intended models for evidence-based beliefs. In addition, we also consider a second more general flavor, where belief and plausibility are modeled using additional primitive relations, and we prove a representation theorem showing that each such general model is a $p$-morphic image of an intended one. This semantics invites a number of natural special cases, depending on how uniform we make the evidence sets, and how coherent their total structure. We give a structural study of the resulting `uniform' and `flat' models. Our main result are sound and complete axiomatizations for the logics of all four major model classes with respect to the modal language of evidence, belief and safe belief. We conclude with an outlook toward logics for the dynamics of changing evidence, and the resulting language extensions and connections with logics of plausibility change

A Defence of Cartesian Materialism

One of the principal tasks Dennett sets himself in "Consciousness Explained" is to demolish the Cartesian theatre model of phenomenal consciousness, which in its contemporary garb takes the form of Cartesian materialism: the idea that conscious experience is a process of presentation realized in the physical materials of the brain. The now standard response to Dennett is that, in focusing on Cartesian materialism, he attacks an impossibly naive account of consciousness held by no one currently working in cognitive science or the philosophy of mind. Our response is quite different. We believe that, once properly formulated, Cartesian materialism is no straw man. Rather, it is an attractive hypothesis about the relationship between the computational architecture of the brain and phenomenal consciousness, and hence one that is worthy of further exploration. Consequently, our primary aim in this paper is to defend Cartesian materialism from Dennett's assault. We do this by showing that Dennett's argument against this position is founded on an implicit assumption (about the relationship between phenomenal experience and information coding in the brain), which while valid in the context of classical cognitive science, is not forced on connectionism

Professor William Craig’s Criticisms of Critiques of Kalam Cosmological Arguments By Paul Davies, Stephen Hawking, and Adolf Grunbaum

Kalam cosmological arguments have recently been the subject of criticisms, at least inter alia, by physicists---Paul Davies, Stephen Hawking---and philosophers of science---Adolf Grunbaum. In a series of recent articles, William Craig has attempted to show that these criticisms are “superficial, iII-conceived, and based on misunderstanding.” I argue that, while some of the discussion of Davies and Hawking is not philosophically sophisticated, the points raised by Davies, Hawking and Grunbaum do suffice to undermine the dialectical efficacy of kalam cosmological arguments

The Kantian Grounding of Einstein’s Worldview: (I) The Early Influence of Kant’s System of Perspectives

Recent perspectival interpretations of Kant suggest a way of relating his epistemology to empirical science that makes it plausible to regard Einstein’stheory of relativity as having a Kantian grounding. This first of two articles exploring this topic focuses on how the foregoing hypothesis accounts for variousresonances between Kant’s philosophy and Einstein’s science. The great attention young Einstein paid to Kant in his early intellectual development demonstrates the plausibility of this hypothesis, while certain features of Einstein’s cultural-political context account for his reluctance to acknowledge Kant’s influence, even though contemporary philosophers who regarded themselves as Kantians urged him to do so. The sequel argues that this Kantian grounding probably had a formative influence not only on Einstein’s discovery of the theory of relativity and his view of the nature of science, but also on his quasi-mystical, religious disposition

Narrative based Postdictive Reasoning for Cognitive Robotics

Making sense of incomplete and conflicting narrative knowledge in the presence of abnormalities, unobservable processes, and other real world considerations is a challenge and crucial requirement for cognitive robotics systems. An added challenge, even when suitably specialised action languages and reasoning systems exist, is practical integration and application within large-scale robot control frameworks. In the backdrop of an autonomous wheelchair robot control task, we report on application-driven work to realise postdiction triggered abnormality detection and re-planning for real-time robot control: (a) Narrative-based knowledge about the environment is obtained via a larger smart environment framework; and (b) abnormalities are postdicted from stable-models of an answer-set program corresponding to the robot's epistemic model. The overall reasoning is performed in the context of an approximate epistemic action theory based planner implemented via a translation to answer-set programming.Comment: Commonsense Reasoning Symposium, Ayia Napa, Cyprus, 201

Consensus Emerging from the Bottom-up: the Role of Cognitive Variables in Opinion Dynamics

The study of opinions $-$ e.g., their formation and change, and their effects on our society $-$ by means of theoretical and numerical models has been one of the main goals of sociophysics until now, but it is one of the defining topics addressed by social psychology and complexity science. Despite the flourishing of different models and theories, several key questions still remain unanswered. The aim of this paper is to provide a cognitively grounded computational model of opinions in which they are described as mental representations and defined in terms of distinctive mental features. We also define how these representations change dynamically through different processes, describing the interplay between mental and social dynamics of opinions. We present two versions of the model, one with discrete opinions (voter model-like), and one with continuous ones (Deffuant-like). By means of numerical simulations, we compare the behaviour of our cognitive model with the classical sociophysical models, and we identify interesting differences in the dynamics of consensus for each of the models considered.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure

Leibnizian Bodies: Phenomena, Aggregates of Monads, or Both?

I propose a straightforward reconciliation of Leibniz’s conception of bodies as aggregates of simple substances (i.e., monads) with his doctrine that bodies are the phenomena of perceivers, without in the process saddling him with any equivocations. The reconciliation relies on the familiar idea that in Leibniz’s idiolect, an aggregate of Fs is that which immediately presupposes those Fs, or in other words, has those Fs as immediate requisites. But I take this idea in a new direction. Taking notice of the fact that Leibniz speaks of three respects in which one thing may immediately presuppose others--i.e., with respect to its being, its existence, and its reality--I argue that a phenomenon having its being in one perceiving substance (monad) can plausibly be understood to presuppose other perceiving substances (monads) in two of these respects. Accordingly, good sense can be made of both the claim that a phenomenon in one monad is an aggregate of other monads (in Leibniz’s technical sense of 'aggregate') and the (equivalent) claim that the latter monads are constituents of the phenomenon (in his technical sense of 'constituent'). So understood, the two conceptions of body are perfectly compatible, just as Leibniz seems to think