The meta-problem and the transfer of knowledge between theories of consciousness: a software engineer’s take

This contribution examines two radically different explanations of our phenomenal intuitions, one reductive and one strongly non-reductive, and identifies two germane ideas that could benefit many other theories of consciousness. Firstly, the ability of sophisticated agent architectures with a purely physical implementation to support certain functional forms of qualia or proto-qualia appears to entail the possibility of machine consciousness with qualia, not only for reductive theories but also for the nonreductive ones that regard consciousness as ubiquitous in Nature. Secondly, analysis of introspective psychological material seems to hint that, under the threshold of our ordinary waking awareness, there exist further ‘submerged’ or ‘subliminal’ layers of consciousness which constitute a hidden foundation and support and another source of our phenomenal intuitions. These ‘submerged’ layers might help explain certain puzzling phenomena concerning subliminal perception, such as the apparently ‘unconscious’ multisensory integration and learning of subliminal stimuli

Causal Analysis of an Agent-Based Model of Human Behaviour

This article investigates causal relationships leading to emergence in an agent-based model of human behaviour. A new method based on nonlinear structural causality is formulated and practically demonstrated. The method is based on the concept of acausal partitionof a model variable which quantifies the contribution of various factors to its numerical value. Causal partitions make it possible to judge the relative importance of contributing factors over crucial early periods in which the emergent behaviour of a system begins to form. They can also serve as the predictors of emergence. The time-evolution of their predictive power and its distribution among their components hint at the deeper causes of emergence and the possibilities to control it

Email Analysis and Information Extraction for Enterprise Benefit

In spite of rapid advances in multimedia and interactive technologies, enterprise users prefer to battle with email spam and overload rather than lose the benefits of communicating, collaborating and solving business tasks over email. Many aspects of email have significantly improved over time, but its overall integration with the enterprise environment remained practically the same. In this paper we describe and evaluate a light-weight approach to enterprise email communication analysis and information extraction. We provide several use cases exploiting the extracted information, such as the enrichment of emails with relevant contextual information, social network extraction and its subsequent search, creation of semantic objects as well as the relationship between email analysis and information extraction on one hand, and email protocols and email servers on the other. The proposed approach was partially tested on several small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and seems to be promising for enterprise interoperability and collaboration in SMEs that depend on emails to accomplish their daily business tasks

Causal Analysis of an Agent-Based Model of Human Behaviour

This article investigates causal relationships leading to emergence in an agent-based model of human behaviour. A new method based on nonlinear structural causality is formulated and practically demonstrated. The method is based on the concept of a causal partition of a model variable which quantifies the contribution of various factors to its numerical value. Causal partitions make it possible to judge the relative importance of contributing factors over crucial early periods in which the emergent behaviour of a system begins to form. They can also serve as the predictors of emergence. The time-evolution of their predictive power and its distribution among their components hint at the deeper causes of emergence and the possibilities to control it

A Novel Way of Using Simulations to Support Urban Security Operations

The growing importance of security operations in urban terrain has triggered many attempts to address the perceived gaps in the readiness of security forces for this type of combat. One way to tackle the problem is to employ simulation techniques. Simulations are widely used to support both mission rehearsal and mission analysis, but these two applications tend to be seen as distinctly separate. We argue that integrating them in a unified framework can bring significant benefits for end-users. We perform a structured walk-through of such a unified system, in which a novel approach to integration through the behaviour cloning enabled the system to capture the operational knowledge of security experts, which is often difficult to express verbally. This capability emerged as essential for the operation of the integrated system. We also illustrate how the interplay between the system components for the mission analysis and mission rehearsal is realized