Aaron Sloman- Three degrees. See http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs
- Honorary Professor of Artficial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (Retired) at University of Birmingham
Aaron Sloman
- Three degrees. See http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs
- Honorary Professor of Artficial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (Retired) at University of Birmingham
Trying to understand how biological evolution produced ancient mathematicians and other intelligent animals. See website
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Introduction
@#@#FREE VERSIONS OF ALL MY PUBLICATIONS CAN BE FOUND ON MY WEB PAGES#@#@
I DON'T RESPOND TO REQUESTS POSTED ON RESEARCHGATE. Use email address easily found on MY HOME PAGE https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs
I am retired (no jobs available) but do full time research at cs.bham.ac.uk in several disciplines, including philosophy, AI, cognitive science, biology, robotics, philosophy of maths, Meta-Morphogenesis. E.g. How can eggs produce intelligent hatchlings that don't have to learn to walk, feed etc
Current institution
Current position
- Honorary Professor of Artficial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (Retired)
Additional affiliations
July 1991 - March 2020
Position
- Professor
Description
- Officially Retired but doing full time research. More details at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/. I don't reply to requests without an email address. DON'T USE THIS SITE TO REQUEST PAPERS. USE DIRECT EMAIL. All relevant information about me can be found via my web site. I don't duplicate it here.
Publications
Publications (255)
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) ar...
Despite AI’s enormous practical successes, some researchers focus on its potential as science and philosophy: providing answers to ancient questions about what minds are, how they work, how multiple varieties of minds can be produced by biological evolution, including minds at different stages of evolution, and different stages of development in in...
Simple Summary
Partial report on Meta-Morphogenesis project: Evolved geometrical reasoning.
Abstract
This paper poses, discusses, but does not definitively answer, the following questions: What sorts of reasoning machinery could the ancient mathematicians, and other intelligent animals, be using for spatial reasoning, before the discovery of moder...
This paper develops, in sections I-III, the virtual machine architecture approach to explaining certain features of consciousness first proposed in (Sloman and Chrisley 2003) and elaborated in (Chrisley and Sloman 2016), in which particular qualitative aspects of experiences (qualia) are proposed to be particular kinds of properties of components o...
This is part of the Turing-inspired Meta-Morphogenesis project, which aims to identify transitions in information-processing since the earliest proto-organisms, in order to provide new understanding of varieties of biological intelligence, including the mathematical intelligence that produced Euclid’s Elements. (Explaining evolution of mathematicia...
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...
In my research I meander through various disciplines, using fragments of AI that I regard as relevant, willing to learn from anyone whose ideas contribute. This makes me unfit to write the history of European collaboration on some area of AI research as originally intended for this collection. However, by interpreting the topic rather loosely, I ca...
The approach Clark labels “action-oriented predictive processing” treats all cognition as part of a system of on-line control. This ignores other important aspects of animal, human, and robot intelligence. He contrasts it with an alleged “mainstream” approach that also ignores the depth and variety of AI/Robotic research. I don't think the theory p...
Faced with a vast, dynamic environment, some animals and robots of-ten need to acquire and segregate information about objects. The form of their internal representation depends on how the information is utilised. Sometimes it should be compressed and abstracted from the original, often complex, sensory information, so it can be efficiently stored...
Words and phrases referring to information are now used in many scientific and non- scientific academic disciplines and in many forms of engineering. This chapter suggests that this is a result of increasingly wide-spread, though often implicit, acknowledgement that besides matter and energy the universe contains information (including information...
How Virtual Machinery can bridge the "Explanatory Gap" in natural and artificial systems. Helping Darwin: How to think about evolution of consciousness.
Or, How could evolution (or anything else) get ghosts into machines?
Presented at SAB2010 11th International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behaviour, August 2010, Clos Luce, France,
and at...
There are many ways of teaching philosophy. A standard way is to ensure that students know what various philosophers have thought and written. This course is too short for that. So I shall aim mainly to try to ensure that students learn two main kinds of things.
Some AI researchers aim to make useful machines, including robots. Others aim to understand general principles of information-processing machines with various kinds of intelligence, whether natural or artificial, including humans and human-like systems. They primarily address scientific and philosophical questions rather than practical goals. Howev...
Many people interact with a collection of man-made virtual machines (VMs) every day without reflecting on what that im- plies about options open to biological evolution, and the im- plications for relations between mind and body. This tutorial position paper introduces some of the roles different sorts of running VMs (e.g. single function VMs, "pla...
This is one of a number of proposals being discussed in the framework of the UK ‘Grand Challenges ’ initiative of the UK computing research committee (UKCRC). For more information see
virtual machine, virtual machine functionalism. A machine is a complex enduring entity with parts that interact causally with one another as they change their properties and relationships. Most machines are also embedded in a complex environment with which they interact. A virtual machine (VM)
An earlier position paper made a number of claims about requirements for vision systems that matched functionality of advanced biological vision sys-tems, including human vision systems. It was suggested that most vision research ignored important requirements for vision to support action. Since then our understanding of those requirements has been...
Research on algorithms and representations once dominated AI. Recently the importance of architectures has been acknowledged, but researchers have different objectives, presuppositions and conceptual frameworks, and this can lead to confused terminology, argumentation at cross purposes, re-invention of wheels and fragmentation of the research. We p...
This position-paper argues that we still have much to learn from the information process- ing systems produced by biological evolution since many of their capabilities are vastly superior to competing artificial systems. The first information-processing systems were produced (directly or indirectly) by biological evolution, but not for the purposes...
This paper, combining the standpoints of philosophy and Artificial Intelligence with theoretical psychology, summarises several decades of investigation by the author of the variety of functions of vision in humans and other animals, pointing out that biological evolution has solved many more problems than are normally noticed. For example, the bio...
Imagine a situation in which you had to design a physical agent that could collect information from its environment, then store and process that information to help it respond appropriately to novel situations. What kinds of information should it attend to? How should the information be represented so as to allow efficient use and re-use? What kind...
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 ment...
Author comments Rick Grush’s statements about emulation and embodied approach to representation. He proposes his modification of Grush’s definition of emulation, criticizing notion of “standing in for”. He defends of notion of representation. He claims that radical embodied theories are not applicable to all cognition.
We can now show in principle how evolution could have produced the "mysterious" aspects of consciousness if, like engineers in the last six or seven decades, it had to solve increasingly complex problems of representation and control by producing systems with increasingly abstract, but effective, mechanisms, including self-observation capabilities,...
This paper extends three decades of work arguing that researchers who discuss consciousness should not restrict themselves only to (adult) human minds, but should study (and attempt to model) many kinds of minds, natural and artificial, thereby contributing to our understanding of the space containing all of them. We need to study what they do or c...
This paper is an attempt to summarise and justify critical comments I have been making over several decades about research on consciousness by philosophers, scientists and others. This includes (a) explaining why the concept of "phenomenal consciousness" (P-C) is semantically flawed and unsuitable as a target for scientific research or machine mode...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Animal Cognition(AC) share a common goal: to study learning and causal understanding. However, the perspectives are completely different: while AC studies intelligent systems present in nature, AI tries to to build them almost from scratch. It is proposed here that both visions are complementary and should interact...
The CoSy project was setup under the assumption that the visionary FP6 objective
“To construct physically instantiated ... systems that can perceive, understand ... and interact with their environment, and
evolve in order to achieve human-like performance in activities requiring context-(situation and task) specific knowledge”
is far beyond the s...
The study of architectures to support intelligent behaviour is certainly the broadest, and arguably one of the most ill-defined
enterprises in AI and Cognitive Science. The basic scientific question we seek to answer is: “What are the trade-offs between
the different ways that intelligent systems might be structured?” These trade-offs depend in lar...
This chapter reports work done mostly by one member of the team – a philosopher with substantial AI programming experience,
whose primary interests were in the very long term goals of the project, summarised in Chapter 1, including the goal of shedding
light on problems solved by biological evolution, and who was not directly involved in the coding...
Research in CoSy was scenario driven. Two scenarios were created, the Play- Mate and the Explorer. One of the integration
goals of the project was to build integrated systems that addressed the tasks in these two scenarios. This chapter concerns
the integrated system for the PlayMate scenario.
Producing a system that meets plausible requirements for Artificial Companions (AC.s), without arbitrary restrictions, will involve solving a great many problems that are currently beyond the state of the art in Artificial Intelligence (AI); including problems that would arise in the design of robotic Companions helping an owner by performing pract...
There is much work in AI that is inspired by natural intelligence, whether in humans, other animals or evolutionary processes. In most of that work the main aim is to solve some practical problem, whether the design of useful robots, planning/scheduling systems, natural language interfaces, medical diagnosis systems or others. Since the beginning o...
What will it be like to admit Artificial Companions into our society? How will they change our relations with each other? How important will they be in the emotional and practical lives of their owners – since we know that people became emotionally dependent even on simple devices like the Tamagotchi? How much social life might they have in contact...
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 p...
Some issues concerning requirements for architectures, mechanisms, ontologies and forms of representation in intelligent human-like
or animal-like robots are discussed. The tautology that a robot that acts and perceives in the world must be embodied is often
combined with false premises, such as the premiss that a particular type of body is a requi...
IMachines in the Ghost:
deas developed by the author over the last 35 years, about relations between the study of natural minds and the design of artificial minds, and the requirements for both sorts of minds, are summarised. The most important point is that natural minds are information-processing virtual machines produced by evolution. Much detai...
This paper complements McCarthy’s “The well designed child”, in part by putting it in a broader context, the space of possible well designed progeny, and in part by relating design features to development of mathematical competence. I first moved into AI in an attempt to understand myself, especially hoping to understand how I could do mathematics....
A child, or young human-like robot of the future, needs to develop an information-processing architecture, forms of representation, and mechanisms to support perceiving, manipulating, and thinking about the world, especially perceiving and thinking about actual and possible structures and processes in a 3-D environment. The mechanisms for extending...
Marvin Lee Minsky, a founder of the field of artificial intelligence and professor at MIT, celebrated his 80th birthday on August 9, 2007. This article seizes an opportune time to honor Marvin and his contributions and influence in artificial intelligence, science, and beyond. The article provides readers with some personal insights of Minsky from...
My favourite leading question when teaching Philosophy of Mind is `Could a goldfish long for its mother?'This introduces the philosophical technique of `conceptual analysis', essential for the study of mind (Sloman 1978, ch. 4). By analysing what we mean by `A longs for B', and similar descriptions of emotional states we see that they involve rich...
Jablonka & Lamb (J&L) refer only implicitly to aspects of cognitive competence that preceded both evolution of human language and language learning in children. These aspects are important for evolution and development but need to be understood using the design-stance, which the book adopts only for molecular and genetic processes, not for behaviou...
We present integration mechanisms for combining het- erogeneous components in a situated information pro- cessing system, illustrated by a cognitive robot able to collaborate with a human and display some understand- ing of its surroundings. These mechanisms include an architectural schema that encourages parallel and incre- mental information proc...
The full variety of powerful information-processing mechanisms 'discovered' by evolution has not yet been re-discovered by scientists and engineers. By attending closely to the diversity of biological phenomena, we may gain new insights into (a) how evolution happens, (b) what sorts of mechanisms, forms of representation, types of learning and deve...
In this paper we propose an empirical method for the comparison of architectures designed to produce similar behaviour from an intelligent system. The approach is based on the exploration of design space using similar designs that all satisfy the same requirements in niche space. An example of a possible application of this method is given using a...
There is still much to learn about the variety of types of learning and development in nature and the genetic and epigenetic mechanisms responsible for that variety. This paper is one of a collection exploring ideas about how to characterise that variety and what AI researchers, including robot designers, can learn from it. This requires us to unde...
This paper extends three decades of work arguing that instead of focusing only on (adult) human minds, we should study many kinds of minds, natural and artificial, and try to under- stand the space containing all of them, by studying what they do, how they do it, and how the natural ones can be emulated in synthetic minds. That requires: (a) unders...
Technical Report COSY-DP-0702, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Nov 2007. Unpublished discussion paper
I first heard about AI in 1969 from Max Clowes, then an AI vision researcher, when I was a philosophy lecturer at Sussex University
(with a background in mathematics and physics). Gradually I came to realise that the best way to make progress in most areas
of philosophy (e.g. philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of s...
Since the 1970s AI as a science has progressively fragmented into many activities that are very narrowly focused. It is not clear that work done within these fragments can be combined in the design of a human-like integrated system-long held as one of the goals of AI as science. A strategy is proposed for reintegrating AI based around a backward-ch...
This paper discusses our views on the future of the field of cognitive architectures, and how the scien-tific questions that define it should be addressed. We also report on a set of requirements, and a related architecture design, that we are currently investigating as part of the CoSy project.
This symposium is inspired by UKCRC Research Grand Challenge 5: Architecture of Brain and Mind. The aim is to provoke unified discussion of long term research goals in AI, Cognitive Science, and re- lated disciplines, especially goals concerned with giving computers a useful and general subset of human capabilities, implemented in a biologically in...
Animals and robots perceiving and acting in a world require an ontology that accommodates entities, processes, states of affairs, etc., in their environment. If the perceived environment includes information-processing systems, the ontology should reflect that. Scientists studying such systems need an ontology that includes the first-order ontology...
This chapter examines the architectural basis of affective states and processes in robots. It shows how 'architecture-based' concepts can extend and refine folk-psychology concepts in ways that make them more useful both for expressing scientific questions and theories, and for specifying engineering objectives. It recommends the CogAff schema as a...
Several high level methodological debates among AI researchers, linguists, psychologists and philosophers, appear to be endless, e.g. about the need for and nature of representations, about the role of symbolic processes, about embodiment, about situatedness, about whether symbol-grounding is needed, and about whether a robot needs any knowledge at...
To build a machine that has “common sense ” was once a principal goal in the field of artificial intelligence. But most researchers in recent years have retreated from that ambitious aim. Instead, each developed some special technique that could deal with some class of problem well, but does poorly at almost everything else. We are convinced, howev...
Sooner or later attempts will be made to design systems capable of dealing with a steady flow of sensor data and messages, where actions have to be selected on the basis of multiple, not necessarily consistent, motives, and where new information may require substantial reevaluation of plans and strategies, including suspension of current actions. W...
This paper is a sequel to my invited contribution to PPSN2000. It attempts to identify and analyse a collection of issues implicitly taken for granted in the earlier paper and in a great deal of literature which assumes that biological organisms do information processing. Normally it is assumed that we all understand intuitively what it means for s...
Introduction Nearly thirty years ago (partly inspired by writings of John Holt, Ivan Illich and Seymour Papert) I had a vision of computing as the basis for a new kind of "liberal education" expressed thus in (Sloman 1978) Another book on how computers are going to change our lives? Yes, but this is more about computing than about computers, and it...
This is a set of notes relating to an invited talk at the cross-disciplinary workshop on Architectures for Modeling Emotion at the AAAI Spring Symposium at Stanford University in March 2004. The organisers of the workshop note that work on emotions "is often carried out in an ad hoc manner", and hope to remedy this by focusing on two themes (a) val...
Much discussion of emotions and related topics is riddled with confusion because the key words are used with different meanings by different authors. For instance, some fail to distinguish the concept of "emotion" from the more general concept of "affect" which covers other things besides emotions, including moods, attitudes, desires, preferences,...
AI researchers have long dreamed of building systems with human-like 'common sense', the mental skills that most ordinary people share. But all attempts to do so have run into the problem that any given item of knowledge, technique for representing knowledge, method for doing reasoning, or architecture for arranging agents only applies in some situ...
Research on algorithms and representations once dominated AI. Recently the importance of architectures has been acknowledged, but researchers have different objectives, presuppositions and conceptual frameworks, and this can lead to confused terminology, argumentation at cross purposes, re-invention of wheels and fragmentation of the research. We p...
Replication or even modelling of consciousness in machines requires some clarifications and refinements of our concept of consciousness. Design of, construction of, and interaction with artificial systems can itself assist in this conceptual development. We start with the tentative hypothesis that although the word 'consciousness' has no well-defin...
This `dual-aspect' approach is a popular tactic for resolving the mind--body problem, but it has some well-known problems, and it is unfortunate Velmans doesn't reply to these standard objections. For example, a frequently discussed issue in connection with theories of mental causation is the problem of overdetermination (see, e.g., Unger, 1977; Pe...
(2) How can one be in conscious control of processes of which one is not consciously aware? (3) Conscious experiences appear to come too late to causally affect the processes to which they most obviously relate. In an appendix Velmans gives his reasons for refusing to resolve these problems through adopting the position (which he labels 'physicalis...
Research on algorithms and representations once dominated AI. Recently the importance of architectures has been acknowledged, but researchers have different objectives, presuppositions and conceptual frameworks, and this, can lead to confused terminology, argumentation at cross purposes, re-invention of wheels and fragmentation of the research. We...
In this paper we discuss some of the relations between cognition and emotion as exemplified by a particular type of agent architecture, the CogAff agent architecture. We outline a strategy for analysing cognitive and emotional states of agents along with the processes they can support, which effectively views cognitive and emotional states as archi...
This paper is concerned with some methodological and philosophical problems related both to the longterm objective of building human-like robots (like those `in the movies') and short- and medium-term objectives of building robots with capabilities of more or less intelligent animals. In particular, we claim that organisms are information-processin...
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...
In this paper, we explore reflective architectures which enable an autonomous system to build a model of its own operation and use this model for the purpose of survival (including anomaly-detection and self-repair) in a hostile environment. The simplest way to introduce reflection is to add a reflective layer or meta-level which monitors and prote...
Intrusions may sometimes involve the insertion of hostile code in an intrusion-detection system, causing it to "lie", for example by giving a ood of false-positives. To address this problem we consider an intrusion detection system as a reflective layer in an autonomous system which is able to observe the whole system's internal behaviour and take...
Most existing literature on reflective architectures is concerned with language interpreters and object-oriented programming methods. In contrast, there is little work on reflective architectures which enable an autonomous system to have these types of access to its own operation for the purpose of survival in a hostile environment. Using the princ...
In a hostile environment, an autonomous cognitive system requires a reflective capability to detect problems in its own operation and recover from them without external intervention. We present an architecture in which reflection is distributed so that components mutually observe and protect each other, and where the system has a distributed model...
An abstract is not available.
It is argued that our ordinary concepts of mind are both implicitly based on architec- tural presuppositions and also cluster concepts. By showing that different information processing architectures support different classes of possible concepts, and that cluster concepts have inherent indeterminacy that can be reduced in different ways for differe...
Bridging Eastern and Western Perspectives on Consciousness; Mental Causation: Facing up to Ontological Subjectivity; The Seductions of Materialism and the Pleasures of Dualism; The Diffident Physicalist Speaks Out; It's Time to Move on from Philosophy to Science; Scientific Rules of the Game and the Mind/Body: A critique based on the theory of meas...
Clearly we can solve problems by thinking about them. Sometimes we have the impression that in doing so we use words, at other times diagrams or images. Often we use both. What is going on when we use mental diagrams or images? This question is addressed in relation to the more general multipronged question: what are representations, what are they...
In this paper we present Minimal Polynomial Logic (MPL), a generalisation of classical propositional logic which allows truth values in the continuous interval [0, 1] and in which propositions are represented by multi-variate polynomials with integer coefficients.
The truth values in MPL are suited to represent the probability of an assertion being...
SIM AGENT is a toolkit that arose out of a project concerned with designing an architecture for an autonomous agent with human-like capabilities.
Introduction Affective states (such as emotions, motivations, desires, pleasures, pains, attitudes, preferences, moods, values, etc.) and their relations to agent architectures have been receiving increasing attention in AI and Cognitive Science. Detailed analyses of these subspecies of affect should include descriptions of their functional roles i...
The common view that the notion of a Turing machine is directly relevant to AI is criticised. It is argued that computers are the result of a convergence of two strands of development with a long history: development of machines for automating various physical processes and machines for performing abstract operations on abstract entities, e.g. doin...
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...
In the last decade and a half, the amount of work on affect in general and emotion in particular has grown, in empirical psychology, cognitive science and AI, both for scientific purposes and for the purpose of designing synthetic characters, e.g. in games and entertainments. Such work understandably starts from concepts of ordinary language (e.g....
this article among some old files recently and thought it would be useful to make it available online, at least for people who remember Max, and perhaps others. I have added a few footnotes, putting the text in the context of subsequent developments.
Clearly we can solve problems by thinking about them. Sometimes we have the impression that in doing so we use words, at other times diagrams or images. Often we use both. What is going on when we use mental diagrams or images? This question is addressed in relation to the more general multi-pronged question: what are representations, what are they...
This book is a definitive reference source for the growing, increasingly more important, and interdisciplinary field of computational cognitive modeling, that is, computational psychology. It combines breadth of coverage with definitive statements by leading scientists in this field. Research in computational cognitive modeling explores the essence...
There are evolutionary trajectories in two different but related spaces, design space and niche space. Co-evolution occurs in parallel trajectories in both spaces, with complex feedback loops linking them. As the design of one species evolves, that changes the niche for others and vice versa. In general there will never be a unique answer to the qu...
In this paper we present HTR, a hybrid trainable rule-based system. The key features of the system include: the heterogeneous integration of multiple control regimes, rule induction and refinement mechanisms, easy and concise specification of knowledge, treatment and support for uncertainty. All these features are obtained thanks to the introductio...
Introduction Our project combines empirical, philosophical and computational theories and approaches, aiming (eventually) to explain many human, animal and robot phenomena, e.g. varieties of motivation, emotions, perceptual functions, reasoning, learning, and varieties of consciousness. We regard intuitive concepts of mentality as "cluster" concept...
Questions
Questions (5)
Why won't it let me add categories it has not heard of? Science grows! Why does it force users to go through its horrible clunky request system instead of letting them send me a request with their email included? Researchgate is so awful that I now hardly ever log into it. Some people who try to communicate with me through researchgate are wasting their time: their requests are never noticed by me. Yes I know it's free. It would have to be FAR better before I'd be willing to pay for it.
This stupid system needs to be better designed.
I totally refuse to upload papers that I may later improve or correct. Researchgate should recognize this possibility and stop nagging me to upload my papers.
I don't want enquiries from researchate users that I can answer ONLY via researchgate. I want to receive them as ordinary email to which I can reply directly from my normal email reader.
