Gordana Dodig Crnkovic

Chalmers University of Technology · Department of Computer Science and Engineering

At the time when the first models of cognitive architectures have been proposed, some forty years ago, understanding of cognition, embodiment and evolution was substantially different from today’s. So was the state of the art of information physics, information chemistry, bioinformatics, neuroinformatics, computational neuroscience, complexity theo...

This book gathers contributions from the fourth edition of the Conference on "Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence" (PT-AI), held on 27-28th of September 2021 at Chalmers University of Technology, in Gothenburg, Sweden. It covers topics at the interface between philosophy, cognitive science, ethics and computing. It discusses advanced t...

Cognition, historically considered uniquely human capacity, has been recently found to be the ability of all living organisms, from single cells and up. This study approaches cognition from an info-computational stance, in which structures in nature are seen as information, and processes (information dynamics) are seen as computation, from the pers...

The basic idea of natural computing is learning from nature. Naturalist framework provides info-computational architecture for cognizing agents, modelling living organisms as informational structures with computational dynamics. Intrinsic natural information processes can be used as natural ecosystem services to perform resource-efficient computati...

New social environments are emerging as spaces and places where work and life at home are no longer separate. Digital spaces and physical places have become intertwined: the 1st space is home, the 2nd is work, the 3rd is informal meeting places, while the 4th space represents different combinations of the previous ones. This paper describes the nee...

Fungal organisms can perceive the outer world in a way similar to what animals sense. Does that mean that they have full awareness of their environment and themselves? Is a fungus a conscious entity? In laboratory experiments we found that fungi produce patterns of electrical activity, similar to neurons. There are low and high frequency oscillatio...

Within the Computer Science community, many ethical issues have emerged as significant and critical concerns. Computer ethics is an academic field in its own right and there are unique ethical issues associated with information technology. It encompasses a range of issues and concerns including privacy and agency around personal information, Artifi...

This paper presents the highlights from the Boundaries of Disinformation workshop held at Chalmers University of Technology. It addresses the phenomenon of disinformation—its historical and current forms. Digitalization and hyperconnectivity have been identified as leading contemporary sources of disinformation. In the effort to counteract disinfor...

The theme of the conference, “Morphological Computing of Cognition and Intelligence” (MORCOM 2021), focused on the unconventional forms of computing, which bring the promise of more efficient intelligent and cognitive computing. The present editorial, written by the organizers of the conference, reports the ideas and goals of MORCOM 2021 and provid...

Recent comprehensive overview of 40 years of research in cognitive architectures, (Kotseruba and Tsotsos 2020), evaluates modelling of the core cognitive abilities in humans, but only marginally addresses biologically plausible approaches based on natural computation. This mini review presents a set of perspectives and approaches which have shaped...

Development of the intelligent autonomous robot technology presupposes its anticipated beneficial effect on the individuals and societies. In the case of such disruptive emergent technology, not only questions of how to build, but also why to build and with what consequences are important. The field of ethics of intelligent autonomous robotic cars...

The emerging contemporary natural philosophy provides a common ground for the integrative view of the natural, the artificial, and the human-social knowledge and practices. Learning process is central for acquiring, maintaining, and managing knowledge, both theoretical and practical. This paper explores the relationships between the present advance...

Machines and computers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and self-sustaining. As we integrate such technologies into our daily lives, questions concerning moral integrity and best practices arise. A changing world requires renegotiating our current set of standards. Without best practices to guide interaction and use with these complex machin...

Research on self-driving cars is transdisciplinary and its different aspects have attracted interest in general public debates as well as among specialists. To this day, ethical discourses are dominated by the Trolley Problem, a hypothetical ethical dilemma that is by construction unsolvable. It obfuscates much bigger real-world ethical challenges...

This is a short presentation by the Guest Editors of the series of Special Issues of the journal Philosophies under the common title “Contemporary Natural Philosophy and Philosophies” in which we present Part 2. The series will continue, and the call for contributions to the next Special Issue will appear shortly.

The emerging contemporary natural philosophy provides a common ground for the integrative view of the natural, the artificial, and the human-social knowledge and practices. Learning process is central for acquiring, maintaining, and managing knowledge, both theoretical and practical. This paper explores the relationships between the present advance...

Defining computation as information processing (information dynamics) with information as a relational property of data structures (the difference in one system that makes a difference in another system) makes it very suitable to use operator formulation, with similarities to category theory. The concept of the operator is exceedingly important in...

This paper addresses some of the major controversies underlying the theme of the IS4SI 2019 Berkeley summit: “Where is the I in AI and the meaning of Information?”. It analyzes the relationship between cognition and intelligence in the light of the difference between old, abstract and the new embodied, embedded, enactive computationalism. It is que...

This paper addresses some of the major controversies underlying the theme of the IS4SI 2019 Berkeley summit: “Where is the I in AI and the meaning of Information?”. It analyzes the relationship between cognition and intelligence in the light of the difference between old, abstract and the new embodied, embedded, enactive computationalism. It is que...

The concept of operator is exceedingly important in many areas as a tool of theoretical studies and practical applications. Here, we introduce the operator theory of computing, opening new opportunities for the exploration of computing devices, networks, and processes. In particular, the operator approach allows for the solving of many computing pr...

One of the imperative tasks of theoretical information studies is exploration of methods and techniques of presentation of information. In this article, we study the presentation of information in the following three books describing the results of the collaboration of researchers with the goal of defining the emergent filed of the Study of Informa...

The concept of operator is exceedingly important in many areas as a tool of theoretical studies and practical applications. Here, we introduce the operator theory of computing, opening new opportunities for the exploration of computing devices, networks, and processes. In particular, the operator approach allows for the solving of many computing pr...

One of the imperative tasks of theoretical information studies is exploration of methods and techniques of presentation of information. In this article, we study the presentation of information in the following three books describing the results of the collaboration of researchers with the goal of defining the emergent filed of the Study of Informa...

According to the currently dominant view, cognitive science is a study of mind and intelligence focused on computational models of knowledge in humans. It is described in terms of symbol manipulation over formal language. This approach is connected with a variety of unsolvable problems, as pointed out by Thagard. In this paper, I argue that the mai...

The leading theme of the 2019 Summit of International Society for the Study of Information held 2–6 June 2019 at The University of California at Berkeley was the question “Where is the I in AI and the meaning of Information?” The question addresses one of the central issues not only for scientific research and philosophical reflection, but also for...

The leading theme of the 2019 Summit of International Society for the Study of Information held 2–6 June 2019 at The University of California at Berkeley was the question “Where is the I in AI and the meaning of Information?” The question addresses one of the central issues not only for scientific research and philosophical reflection, but also for...

According to the currently dominant view, cognitive science is a study of mind and intelligence focused on computational models of knowledge in humans. It is described in terms of symbol manipulation over formal language. This approach is connected with a variety of unsolvable problems, as pointed out by Thagard. In this paper, I argue that the mai...

At present, artificial intelligence in the form of machine learning is making impressive progress, especially the field of deep learning (DL) [1]. Deep learning algorithms have been inspired from the beginning by nature, specifically by the human brain, in spite of our incomplete knowledge about its brain function. Learning from nature is a two-way...

In the theory of human communication, information is described as the trinity of aspects, or dimensions: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic, corresponding respectively to the form, the meaning, and the utility of information. The theory of information proposed by Shannon in 1948, often considered as “the” theory of information, is a purely statistic...

In this Editorial note, Guest Editors introduce the theme of the Special Issue of the journal Philosophies, titled Contemporary Natural Philosophy and Philosophies.

Cognitive science is considered to be the study of mind (consciousness and thought) and intelligence in humans. Under such definition variety of unsolved/unsolvable problems appear. This article argues for a broad understanding of cognition based on empirical results from i.a. natural sciences, self-organization, artificial intelligence and artific...

The intrinsic unfairness of the trolley problem comes from the assumption that lives of different people have different values. In this paper, techno-social arguments are used to show the infeasibility of the trolley problem when addressing the ethics of self-driving cars. We argue that different components can contribute to an “unfair” behaviour and...

As an envisaged future of transportation, self-driving cars are being discussed from various perspectives, including social, economical, engineering, computer science, design, and ethics. On the one hand, self-driving cars present new engineering problems that are being gradually successfully solved. On the other hand, social and ethical problems a...

As an envisaged future of transportation, self-driving cars are being discussed from various perspectives, including social, economical, engineering, computer science, design, and ethics. On the one hand, self-driving cars present new engineering problems that are being gradually successfully solved. On the other hand, social and ethical problems a...

This paper presents a theoretical study of the binary oppositions underlying the mechanisms of natural computation understood as dynamical processes on natural information morphologies. Of special interest are the oppositions of discrete vs. continuous, structure vs. process, and differentiation vs. integration. The framework used is that of comput...

Habits and rituals play a fundamental role in human life [1] and are worthy to be considered also because they represent a form of embodied knowledge. According to Dubray [2], habits can be studied in general, but also with the focus on their physiological, psychological, ethical, pedagogical, philosophical and theological aspects. [...]

http://www.mdpi.com/2504-3900/1/3/185/pdf

What is reality for an agent? What is minimal cognition? How does the morphology of a cognitive agent affect cognition? These are still open questions among scientists and philosophers. In this chapter we propose the idea of info-computational nature as a framework for answering those questions. Within the info-computational framework, information...

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=2ahUKEwjk2qDEqarfAhXB3SwKHTjGB1wQFjAAegQICRAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mdpi.com%2F2504-3900%2F1%2F3%2F275%2Fpdf-vor&usg=AOvVaw10Au-KHWCVqDocaEWK_g8t

Information Science evolved in the last few decades from peripheral studies of other disciplines which used the concept of information with a more or less common-sense meaning, to a fully-fledged discipline with a growing toolkit of concepts and methods of inquiry. This does not mean that the concept of information acquired a unique definition acro...

This article presents our introductory work on Information Taxonomy, that is extended in an article for the following forthcoming book: https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/11191

In this chapter, different notions of allostasis (the process of achieving stability through change) as they apply to adaptive behavior are presented. The authors discuss how notions of allostasis can be usefully applied to Cybernetics-based homeostatic systems. Particular emphasis is placed upon affective states – motivational and emotional – and,...

In this chapter, different notions of allostasis (the process of achieving stability through change ) as they apply to adaptive behavior are presented. The authors discuss how notions of allostasis can be usefully applied to Cybernetics-based homeostatic systems. Particular emphasis is placed upon affective states - motivational and emotional - and...

Computational models and tools provide increasingly solid foundations for the study of cognition and model-based reasoning, with knowledge generation in different types of cognizing agents, from the simplest ones like bacteria to the complex human distributed cognition. After the introduction of the computational turn, we proceed to models of compu...

This book enriches our views on representation and deepens our understanding of its different aspects. It arises out of several years of dialog between the editors and the authors, an interdisciplinary team of highly experienced researchers, and it reflects the best contemporary view of representation and reality in humans, other living beings, and...

[EN] The glossariumBITri, planned as a central activity for the interdisciplinary study of information, developed by BITrum group in cooperation with the University of Santa Elena (Ecuador), essentially aims at serving as a tool for the clarification of concepts, theories and problems concerning information. Intending to embrace the most relevant p...

This paper connects information with computation and cognition via concept of agents that appear at variety of levels of organization of physical/chemical/cognitive systems – from elementary particles to atoms, molecules, life-like chemical systems, to cognitive systems starting with living cells, up to organisms and ecologies. In order to obtain t...

Similar to oil that acted as a basic raw material and key driving force of industrial society, information acts as a raw material and principal mover of knowledge society in the knowledge production, propagation and application. New developments in information processing and information communication technologies allow increasingly complex and accu...

Decision process is often based on multi-faceted and mutually opposing criteria. In order to provide rigorous techniques for problem structuring and criteria aggregation used for classification and ranking of alternatives, Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) has been used as a method to achieve architectural decisions. Even though it has alr...

This paper presents a view of nature as a network of infocomputational agents organized in a dynamical hierarchy of levels. It provides a framework for unification of currently disparate understandings of natural, formal, technical, behavioral and social phenomena based on information as a structure, differences in one system that cause the differe...

The Architecture of Mind as a Network of Networks of Natural Computational Processes Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg 41296, Sweden; E-Mail: dodig@chalmers.se; Tel.: +46-73-662-0511 Abstract: In discussions regarding models of cognition, the very mention of “computationalism” often i...

This paper presents taxonomy of models of computation. It includes Existential (Physical, Abstract and Cognitive), Organizational, Temporal, Representational, Domain/Data, Operational, Process-oriented and Level-based taxonomy. It is connected to more general notion of natural computation, intrinsic to physical systems, and particularly to cognitiv...

A treatment of emotion as a means of meta-optimisation in cognitive systems is presented, drawing upon research in neuroscience and reinforcement learning. In particular, emotion is motivated and explained against the background of the free-energy principle and the Bayesian brain hypothesis, from the perspective of appraisal theory. Various implica...

Novel approaches in theory and practice of unified modeling of the computer and the computed in order to create self-managing adaptive computations, also parallel calls for new computing models to address distributed, interactive, concurrent dynamic processes are driving a new approach to distributed computing system design. ASDS workshop addresses...

As a global community we are facing number of existential challenges like global warming, deficit of basic commodities, environmental degradation and other threats to life on earth, as well as possible unintended consequences of AI, nano-technology, biotechnology, and similar. Among world-wide responses to those challenges the framework programme f...

Future progress of new information processing devices capable of dealing with problems such as big data, Internet of things, semantic web, cognitive robotics, neuroinformatics and similar, depends on the adequate and efficient models of computation. We argue that defining computation as information transformation, and given that there is no informa...

Fresco, Nir, Physical Computation And Cognitive Science. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer, 2014, Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, Vol. 12, XXII, 229, 83,29 €. According to the author, the objective of this book is to establish a clearer understanding of computation in cognitive science, and to argue for the fundamental r...

The aim of this paper is to propose a general infocomputational model of cognition that can be applied to living organisms from the level of a single celĺs cognition to the level of groups of increasingly complex organisms with social, distributed cognition. We defend the project of new cognitivism, which unlike the old one acknowledges the central...

Abstract. Informational Structural Realism, ISR (Floridi 2008) describes the reality as a complex informational structure for an epistemic agent interacting with the universe by the exchange of data as constraining affordances. In conjunction with Naturalist Computationalism - the view that the dynamics of the nature can be understood as computatio...

This article presents a naturalist approach to cognition understood as a network of info-computational, autopoietic processes in living systems. It provides a conceptual framework for the unified view of cognition as evolved from the simplest to the most complex organisms, based on new empirical and theoretical results. It addresses three fundament...

Talking about models of cognition, the very mention of “computationalism” often incites reactions against Turing machine model of the brain and perceived determinism of the computational model. Neither of those two objections affects models based on natural computation or computing nature where model of computation is broader than deterministic sym...

The historical development has lead to the decay of Natural Philosophy which until 19th century included all of our knowledge about the physical world into the growing multitude of specialized sciences. The focus on the in-depth enquiry disentangled from its broad context lead to the problem of loss of common world-view and impossibility of communi...

Some intriguing questions such as: What is reality for an agent? How does reality of a bacterium differ from a reality of a human brain? Do we need representation in order to understand reality? are still widely debated. Starting with the presentation of the computing nature as an info-computational framework, where information is defined as a stru...

>Context • At present, we lack a common understanding of both the process of cognition in living organisms and the construction of knowledge in embodied, embedded cognizing agents in general, including future artifactual cognitive agents under development, such as cognitive robots and softbots. > Purpose • This paper aims to show how the info-compu...

This is an answer to the commentaries on my target article "Info-computational Constructivism and Cognition", for Constructivist Foundations. The variety of commentaries has shown that IC impacts on many disciplines, from physics to biology, to cognitive science, to ethics. Given its young age, IC still needs to fill in many gaps, some of which wer...

> Context • At present, we lack a common understanding of both the process of cognition in living organisms and the construction of knowledge in embodied, embedded cognizing agents in general, including future artifactual cogni-tive agents under development, such as cognitive robots and softbots. > Purpose • This paper aims to show how the info-com...

This article presents a naturalist approach to cognition understood as a network of info-computational, autopoietic processes in living systems. It provides a conceptual framework for the unified view of cognition as evolved from the simplest to the most complex organisms, based on new empirical and theoretical results. It addresses three fundament...

This paper addresses the open question formulated as: Which levels of abstraction are appropriate in the synthetic modelling of life and cognition? within the framework of info-computational constructivism, treating natural phenomena as computational processes on informational structures. At present we lack the common understanding of the processes...

Alan Turing’s pioneering work on computability, and his ideas on morphological computing support Andrew Hodges’ view of Turing as a natural philosopher. Turing’s natural philosophy differs importantly from Galileo’s view that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics (The Assayer, 1623). Computing is more than a language used to...

http://www.pt-ai.org/2013/programme PT-AI St Antony's College, Oxford, 20.09.2013

The notion of computation is historically developing just like other fundamental nations, depending on both the development of related theory and on practical applications. Instead of providing a definite, once-and-for-all definition, we analyze the notion of computation and argue that we are far from complete understanding of what computation is a...

http://www.springer.com/engineering/computational+intelligence+and+complexity/book/978-3-642-37224-7

This book is about nature considered as the totality of physical existence, the universe and our present day attempts to understand it. If we see the universe as a networks of networks of computational processes of many different levels of organization, we can learn from different sciences the processing of interacting elementary particles.

We need much better understanding of information processing and comp u- tation as its pri mary form . Future progress of new computational devices capable of dealing with problems of big data, internet of things, semantic web, co g nitive robotics and neuroinformatics depends on the adequate models of computation. In this article w e first present...

http://www.idt.mdh.se/~gdc/work/Gordana-RethinkingKnowledge-2013-08-04.pdf

Morphological computing emerged recently as an approach in robotics aimed at saving robots computational and other resources by utilizing physical properties of the robotic body to automatically produce and control behavior. The idea is that the morphology of an agent (a living organism or a machine) constrains its possible interactions with the en...

The development of models of computation induces the development of technology and natural sciences and vice versa. Current state of the art of technology and sciences, especially networks of concurrent processes such as Internet or biological and sociological systems, calls for new computational models. It is necessary to extend classical Turing m...

The framework is proposed where matter can be seen as related to energy in a way structure relates to process and information relates to computation. In this scheme matter corresponds to a structure, which corresponds to information. Energy corresponds to the ability to carry out a process, which corresponds to computation. The relationship between...

In this special issue we present a selection of papers from the Symposium on Natural/Unconventional Computing and its Philosophical Significance, held during the AISB/IACAP 2012 World Congress in Birmingham (UK). This article is an editorial, introducing the special issue of the journal with the selected papers and the research program of Natural/U...

What can we hope for from studies of information related to energy/matter (as it appears for us in space/time)? Information is a concept known for its ambiguity in both common, everyday use and in its specific technical applications throughout different fields of research and technology. However, most people are unaware that matter/energy today is...

In this paper, we analyze axiomatic and constructive issues of unconventional computations from a methodological and philosophical point of view. We explain how the new models of algorithms and unconventional computations change the algorithmic universe, making it open and allowing increased flexibility and expressive power that augment creativity....

This text presents the research field of natural/unconventional computing as it appears in the book COMPUTING NATURE. The articles discussed consist a selection of works from the Symposium on Natural Computing at AISB-IACAP (British Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour and The International Association fo...

In this paper we analyze methodological and philosophical implications of algorithmic aspects of unconventional computation. At first, we describe how the classical algorithmic universe developed and analyze why it became closed in the conventional approach to computation. Then we explain how new models of algorithms turned the classical closed alg...

Alan Turing's pioneering work on computability, and his ideas on morphological computing support Andrew Hodges' view of Turing as a natural philosopher. Turing's natural philosophy differs importantly from Galileo's view that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics (The Assayer, 1623). Computing is more than a language of natur...

In this paper, we analyze axiomatic issues of unconventional computations from a methodological and philosophical point of view. We explain how the new models of algorithms changed the algorithmic universe, making it open and allowing increased flexibility and creativity. However, the greater power of new types of algorithms also brought the greate...