Exploring Design Space For An Integrated Intelligent System

Understanding the trade-offs available in the design space of intelligent systems is a major unaddressed element in the study of Artificial Intelligence. In this paper we approach this problem in two ways. First, we discuss the development of our integrated robotic system in terms of its trajectory through design space. Second, we demonstrate the practical implications of architectural design decisions by using this system as an experimental platform for comparing behaviourally similar yet architecturally different systems. The results of this show that our system occupies a "sweet spot" in design space in terms of the cost of moving information between processing components

Varieties of evolved forms of consciousness, including mathematical consciousness

I shall introduce a complex, apparently unique, cross-disciplinary approach to understanding consciousness, especially ancient forms of mathematical consciousness, based on joint work with Jackie Chappell (Birmingham Biosciences) on the Meta-Configured Genome (MCG) theory. All known forms of consciousness (apart from recent very simple AI forms) are products of biological evolution, in some cases augmented by products of social, or technological evolution. Forms of consciousness differ between organisms with different sensory mechanisms, needs and abilities; and in complex animals can vary across different stages of development before and after birth or hatching or pupation, and before or after sexual and other kinds of maturity (or senility). Those forms can differ across individuals with different natural talents and environments, some with and some without fully functional sense organs or motor control functions (in humans: hearing, sight, touch, taste, smell, proprioception and other senses), along with mechanisms supporting meta-cognitive functions such as recollection, expectation, foreboding, error correction, and so forth, and varying forms of conscious control differing partly because of physical differences, such as conjoined twins sharing body parts. Forms of consciousness can also differ across individuals in different cultures with different shared theories, and social practices (e.g., art-forms, musical traditions, religions, etc.). There are many unanswered questions about such varieties of consciousness in products of biological evolution. Most of the details are completely ignored by most philosophers and scientists who focus only on a small subset of types of human consciousness—resulting in shallow theories. Immanuel Kant was deeper than most, though his insights, especially insights into mathematical consciousness tend to be ignored by recent philosophers and scientists, for bad reasons. This paper, partly inspired by Turing’s 1952 paper on chemistry-based morphogenesis, supporting William James’ observation that all known forms of consciousness must have been products of biological evolution in combination with other influences, attempts to provide (still tentative and incomplete) foundations for a proper study of the variety of biological and non-biological forms of consciousness, including the types of mathematical consciousness identified by Kant in 1781

Functionalism, revisionism, and qualia

From the editor's introduction: "Ron Chrisley and Aaron Sloman open Part I of this issue with their article “Functionalism, Revisionism, and Qualia.” Chrisley and Sloman discuss revisionism about qualia—the view that tries to navigate between naïve qualia realism and reductive eliminativism. The authors discuss the relevance of their approach to AI. They also relate to the works they view as following the main tenets of revisionism about qualia. This includes Gilbert Harman’s version of functionalism, discussed in much detail (including Harman’s article “Explaining the Explanatory Gap,” published in the spring 2007 issue of this newsletter) and also the psychomotoric approach to qualia by Kevin O’Regan.

FOR WORKSHOP: THE INCOMPUTABLE,

of virtual machinery with “physically indefinable ” functions What’s Meta-Morphogenesis? A partial answer: Evolution, individual development, learning, and cultural change producing new mechanisms of evolution, individual development, learning, and cultural chang

Towards a Design-Based Analysis of Emotional Episodes

he design-based approach is a methodology for investigating mechanisms capable of generating mental phenomena, whether introspectively or externally observed, and whether they occur in humans, other animals or robots. The study of designs satisfying requirements for autonomous agency can provide new deep theoretical insights at the information processing level of description of mental mechanisms. Designs for working systems (whether on paper or implemented on computers) can systematically explicate old explanatory concepts and generate new concepts that allow new and richer interpretations of human phenomena. To illustrate this, some aspects of human grief are analysed in terms of a particular information processing architecture being explored in our research group. We do not claim that this architecture is part of the causal structure of the human mind; rather, it represents an early stage in the iterative search for a deeper and more general architecture, capable of explaining more phenomena. However even the current early design provides an interpretative ground for some familiar phenomena, including characteristic features of certain emotional episodes, particularly the phenomenon of perturbance (a partial or total loss of control of attention). The paper attempts to expound and illustrate the design-based approach to cognitive science and philosophy, to demonstrate the potential effectiveness of the approach in generating interpretative possibilities, and to provide first steps towards an information processing account of `perturbant', emotional episodes

Evolution: The Computer Systems Engineer Designing Minds

What we have learnt in the last six or seven decades about virtual machinery, as a result of a great deal of science and technology, enables us to offer Darwin a new defence against critics who argued that only physical form, not mental capabilities and consciousness could be products of evolution by natural selection. The defence compares the mental phenomena mentioned by Darwin’s opponents with contents of virtual machinery in computing systems. Objects, states, events, and processes in virtual machinery which we have only recently learnt how to design and build, and could not even have been thought about in Darwin’s time, can interact with the physical machinery in which they are implemented, without being identical with their physical implementation, nor mere aggregates of physical structures and processes. The existence of various kinds of virtual machinery (including both “platform” virtual machines that can host other virtual machines, e.g. operating systems, and “application” virtual machines, e.g. spelling checkers, and computer games) depends on complex webs of causal connections involving hardware and software structures, events and processes, where the specification of such causal webs requires concepts that cannot be defined in terms of concepts of the physical sciences. That indefinability, plus the possibility of various kinds of self-monitoring within virtual machinery, seems to explain some of the allegedly mysterious and irreducible features of consciousness that motivated Darwin’s critics and also more recent philosophers criticising AI. There are consequences for philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and robotics

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