46,927 research outputs found
Vagueness and Introspection
Version of March 05, 2007. An extended abstract of the paper appeared in the Proceedings of the 2006 Prague Colloquium on "Reasoning about Vagueness and Uncertainty".We compare three strategies to model the notion of vague knowledge in epistemic logic. Williamson's margin for error semantics typically uses non-transitive Kripke structures, but invalidates the principle of positive introspection. On the contrary, Halpern's two-dimensional semantics preserves the introspection principle, but using more complex uncertainty relations that are transitive. We present a modification of the standard epistemic semantics, which validates introspection over one-dimensional non-transitive structures, and study its correspondence with Halpern's approach. While the semantics can be seen as the diagonalization of an explicit two-dimensional semantics, it affords a more intuitive representation of the uncertainty characteristic of vague knowledge. We examine the implications of the semantics concerning higher-order vagueness and the status of the non-transitivity of perceptual indiscriminability. We respond to a potential objection against our approach by giving a dynamic model of the way subjects with inexact knowledge make successive approximations of their margin of error
Providing Self-Aware Systems with Reflexivity
We propose a new type of self-aware systems inspired by ideas from
higher-order theories of consciousness. First, we discussed the crucial
distinction between introspection and reflexion. Then, we focus on
computational reflexion as a mechanism by which a computer program can inspect
its own code at every stage of the computation. Finally, we provide a formal
definition and a proof-of-concept implementation of computational reflexion,
viewed as an enriched form of program interpretation and a way to dynamically
"augment" a computational process.Comment: 12 pages plus bibliography, appendices with code description, code of
the proof-of-concept implementation, and examples of executio
Concepts, Introspection, and Phenomenal Consciousness: An Information-Theoretical Approach
This essay is a sustained information-theoretic attempt to bring new light on some of the perennial problems in the philosophy of mind surrounding phenomenal consciousness and introspection. Following Dretske (1981), we present and develop an informational psychosemantics as it applies to what we call <em>sensory concepts</em>, concepts that apply, roughly, to so-called secondary qualities of objects. We show that these concepts have a special informational character and semantic structure that closely tie them to the brain states realizing conscious qualitative experiences. We then develop an account of introspection which exploits this special nature of sensory concepts. The result is a new class of concepts, which, following recent terminology, we call <em>phenomenal concepts</em>: these concepts refer to phenomenal experience itself and are the vehicles used in introspection. On our account, the connection between sensory and phenomenal concepts is very tight: it consists in different semantic uses of the same cognitive structures underlying the sensory concepts, like RED. Contrary to widespread opinion, we show that information theory contains all the resources to satisfy internalist intuitions about phenomenal consciousness, while not offending externalist ones. A consequence of this account is that it explains and predicts the so-called conceivability arguments against physicalism on the basis of the special nature of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Thus we not only show why physicalism is not threatened by such arguments, but also demonstrate its strength in virtue of its ability to predict and explain away such arguments in a principled way. However, we take the main contribution of this work to be what it provides in addition to a response to those conceivability arguments, namely, a substantive account of the interface between sensory and conceptual systems and the mechanisms of introspection as based on the special nature of the information flow between them
The Method of Contrast and the Perception of Causality in Audition
The method of contrast is used within philosophy of perception in order to demonstrate that a specific property could be part of our perception. The method is based on two passages. I argue that the method succeeds in its task only if the intuition of the difference, which constitutes the core of the first passage, has two specific traits. The second passage of the method consists in the evaluation of the available explanations of this difference. Among the three outlined options, I will demonstrate that only in the third option â as we shall see, the case of the scenario that remains the same but is perceived in two different ways by the same perceiver â the intuition purports a difference that posses the necessary characteristics, namely being immediately evident and extremely complex and multifaceted, which determine its tensive nature. The application within auditory perception of this third option will generate two cases, a diachronic one and a synchronic one, which clearly show that we can auditorily perceive causality as a link between two sonorous episodes. The causal explanation is the only possible explanation among the many evaluated within the second passage of the method of contrast
Introspection without Judgment
The focus of this paper is introspection of phenomenal states, i.e. the distinctively first-personal method through which one can form beliefs about the phenomenology of oneâs current conscious mental states. I argue that two different kinds of phenomenal state introspection should be distinguished: one which involves recognizing and classifying the introspected phenomenal state as an instance of a certain experience type, and another which does not involve such classification. Whereas the former is potentially judgment-like, the latter is not. I call them, respectively, reflective introspection and primitive introspection. The purpose of this paper is to argue that primitive introspection is a psychologically real phenomenon. I first introduce the distinction and provide some preliminary motivation to accept it (§1). After some set-up considerations (§2), I present my central argument for the existence of a non-classificatory kind of introspective state (§3), what I call the âargument from phenomenal-concept acquisitionâ. Finally, I briefly present some reasons why my distinction may be important for various philosophical debates (§4)
Cognitive Architecture, Concepts, and Introspection: An Information-Theoretic Solution to the Problem of Phenomenal Consciousness
This essay is a sustained attempt to bring new light to some of the perennial problems in philosophy of mind surrounding phenomenal consciousness and introspection through developing an account of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Building on the information-theoretic framework of Dretske (1981), we present an informational psychosemantics as it applies to what we call sensory concepts, concepts that apply, roughly, to so-called secondary qualities of objects. We show that these concepts have a special informational character and semantic structure that closely tie them to the brain states realizing conscious qualitative experiences. We then develop an account of introspection which exploits this special nature of sensory concepts. The result is a new class of concepts, which, following recent terminology, we call phenomenal concepts: these concepts refer to phenomenal experience itself and are the vehicles used in introspection. On our account, the connection between sensory and phenomenal concepts is very tight: it consists in different semantic uses of the same cognitive structures underlying the sensory concepts, such as the concept of red. Contrary to widespread opinion, we show that information theory contains all the resources to satisfy internalist intuitions about phenomenal consciousness, while not offending externalist ones. A consequence of this account is that it explains and predicts the so-called conceivability arguments against physicalism on the basis of the special nature of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Thus we not only show why physicalism is not threatened by such arguments, but also demonstrate its strength in virtue of its ability to predict and explain away such arguments in a principled way. However, we take the main contribution of this work to be what it provides in addition to a response to those conceivability arguments, namely, a substantive account of the interface between sensory and conceptual systems and the mechanisms of introspection as based on the special nature of the information flow between them
There Is an âUnconscious,â but It May Well Be Conscious
Depth psychology finds empirical validation today in a variety of observations that suggest the presence of causally effective mental processes outside conscious experience. I submit that this is due to misinterpretation of the observations: the subset of consciousness called âmeta-consciousnessâ in the literature is often mistaken for consciousness proper, thereby artificially creating space for an âunconscious.â The implied hypothesis is that all mental processes may in fact be conscious, the appearance of unconsciousness arising from our dependence on self-reflective introspection for gauging awareness. After re-interpreting the empirical data according to a philosophically rigorous definition of consciousness, I show that two well-known phenomena corroborate this hypothesis: (a) experiences that, despite being conscious, arenât re-represented during introspection; and (b) dissociated experiences inaccessible to the executive ego. If consciousness is inherent to all mentation, it may be fundamental in nature, as opposed to a product of particular types of brain function
Online Robot Introspection via Wrench-based Action Grammars
Robotic failure is all too common in unstructured robot tasks. Despite
well-designed controllers, robots often fail due to unexpected events. How do
robots measure unexpected events? Many do not. Most robots are driven by the
sense-plan act paradigm, however more recently robots are undergoing a
sense-plan-act-verify paradigm. In this work, we present a principled
methodology to bootstrap online robot introspection for contact tasks. In
effect, we are trying to enable the robot to answer the question: what did I
do? Is my behavior as expected or not? To this end, we analyze noisy wrench
data and postulate that the latter inherently contains patterns that can be
effectively represented by a vocabulary. The vocabulary is generated by
segmenting and encoding the data. When the wrench information represents a
sequence of sub-tasks, we can think of the vocabulary forming a sentence (set
of words with grammar rules) for a given sub-task; allowing the latter to be
uniquely represented. The grammar, which can also include unexpected events,
was classified in offline and online scenarios as well as for simulated and
real robot experiments. Multiclass Support Vector Machines (SVMs) were used
offline, while online probabilistic SVMs were are used to give temporal
confidence to the introspection result. The contribution of our work is the
presentation of a generalizable online semantic scheme that enables a robot to
understand its high-level state whether nominal or abnormal. It is shown to
work in offline and online scenarios for a particularly challenging contact
task: snap assemblies. We perform the snap assembly in one-arm simulated and
real one-arm experiments and a simulated two-arm experiment. This verification
mechanism can be used by high-level planners or reasoning systems to enable
intelligent failure recovery or determine the next most optima manipulation
skill to be used.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1609.0494
Explaining the Intuition of Revelation
This commentary focuses on explaining the intuition of revelation, an issue that Chalmers (2018) raises in his paper. I first sketch how the truth of revelation provides an explanation for the intuition of revelation, and then assess a physicalist proposal to explain the intuition that appeals to Derk Pereboomâs (2011, 2016, 2019) qualitative inaccuracy hypothesis
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