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55At the end of the seminar, I suggested that most researchers on language and its evolution (including Derek Bickerton I suspect, though I've only read snippets of his work), mistakenly ignore a host of other competences that are present in far more species.
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35Adjust the width of your browser window to make the lines the length you prefer. This web site does not attempt to impose restrictions on line length or font size.
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34THIS IS NOT AN OFFICIAL DOCUMENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM OR THE SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE. NEITHER THE UNIVERSITY NOR THE SCHOOL HAS ENDORSED THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED HERE.
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92Towards a design-based analysis of emotional episodesPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 3 (2): 101-126. 1996.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 explic…Read more
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85New Bodies for Sick Persons: Personal Identity without Physical ContinuityAnalysis 32 (2). 1971.
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139The irrelevance of Turing machines to AIIn Matthias Scheutz (ed.), Computationalism: New Directions, Mit Press. 2002.
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130Many debates about consciousness appear to be endless, in part because of conceptual confusions preventing clarity as to what the issues are and what does or does not count as evidence. This makes it hard to decide what should go into a machine if it is to be described as 'conscious'. Thus, triumphant demonstrations by some AI developers may be regarded by others as proving nothing of interest because the system does not satisfy *their* definitions or requirements specifications.
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13Must intelligent systems be scruffyIn J. E. Tiles, G. T. McKee & G. C. Dean (eds.), Evolving Knowledge in Natural Science and Artificial Intelligence, Pitman. pp. 17. 1990.
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25Towards a grammar of emotionsNew Universities Quarterly 36 (3): 230-238. 1982.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 inv olve rich cognitive structures and processes, i.e. computations. Anything which could long for its mother, would have to hav e some sort of representation of i…Read more
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41Beyond Turing equivalenceIn Peter Millican Andy Clark (ed.), Machines and Thought The Legacy of Alan Turing, Oxford University Press. pp. 1--179. 1996.What is the relation between intelligence and computation? Although the difficulty of defining `intelligence' is widely recognized, many are unaware that it is hard to give a satisfactory definition of `computational' if computation is supposed to provide a non-circular explanation for intelligent abilities. The only well-defined notion of `computation' is what can be generated by a Turing machine or a formally equivalent mechanism. This is not adequate for the key role in explaining the nature …Read more
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29What cognitive scientists need to know about virtual machinesIn N. A. Taatgen & H. van Rijn (eds.), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, . pp. 1210--1215. 2009.
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70How to turn an information processor into an understanderBehavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3): 447-448. 1980.
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52Some of the movies were produced using techniques and scripts suggested by Mike Lees at Nottingham University where he is using SimAgent on a project directed by Brian Logan
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50It is conjectured that humans and some other altricial species instead use innate mechanisms for decomposing situations into components that can be explicitly learnt about, and stored in such a way that the competence can be re-used in combination with other learnt competences, in perceiving novel situations and performing novel actions.
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26The document starts The overall goal proposed here is to construct physically instantiated systems that can perceive, understand, and interact with their environment - but also evolve in order to achieve human-like performance in activities requiring context-specific knowledge. I posted the following comment on 15 Feb 2006..
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3Reviews of: The Basic Laws of Arithmetic . By Gottleb Frege . Translated and edited, with an introduction, by Montgomery Furth . University of California Press and A Study of Frege . By Jeremy D. B. Walker . Basil Blackwell Oxford , 1965 (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 17 (3): 249-253. 1966.The profound influence of Frege's work on the development of formal logic and philosophy of mathematics is now well known. However, his philosophical writings, which, unlike his technical achievements, are still of more than historical interest, appear to be comparatively little known or ill-understood, at least by philosophers who are not primarily interested in the foundations of mathematics. This is a great pity, for Frege's thought is precise, penetrating, subtle and often relevant to philos…Read more
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35Predictive Policies: What makes some policies better than others?In Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, Blackwell-wiley. 1967.Response to "Predictive Policies" by R.S.McGowan Mr. McGowan has assumed that there is a clear distinction between inductive inferences and others, that we all know how to make the distinction, that we all agree that the inductive ones are somehow better or more reasonable than the alternatives, and I have criticised all of these assumptions. Further he hasformulated the philosophical problem of induction as the problem of showing why the inductive ones are better, and he has attempted to show t…Read more
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60This paper attempts to characterise a unifying overview of the practice of software engineers, AI designers, developers of evolutionary forms of computation, designers of adaptive systems, etc. The topic overlaps with theoretical biology, developmental psychology and perhaps some aspects of social theory. Just as much of theoretical computer science follows the lead of engineering intuitions and tries to formalise them, there are also some important emerging high level cross disciplinary ideas a…Read more
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