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422Virtual machines and consciousnessJournal of Consciousness Studies 10 (4-5): 133-172. 2003.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-defined meaning, it is used to refer to aspects of human and animal informationprocessing. We then argue that we can enhance our understanding of what these as…Read more
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304Evolution: The Computer Systems Engineer Designing MindsAvant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 2 (2): 45-69. 2011.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 virtua…Read more
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23Interactions between philosophy and artificial intelligence: The role of intuition and non-logical reasoning in intelligenceArtificial Intelligence 2 (3-4): 209-225. 1971.
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21The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy, Science and Models of MindBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 30 (3): 302-304. 1978.
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8Acquiring a Self-Model to Enable Autonomous Recovery from Faults and IntrusionsJournal of Intelligent Systems 12 (1): 1-40. 2002.
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4Komentarze do „Emulującego wywiadu… z Rickiem Grushem”Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 2 (2): 141-151. 2011.[Przekład] 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.
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141This paper aims to replace deep sounding unanswerable, time-wasting pseudo- questions which are often posed in the context of attacking some version of the strong AI thesis, with deep, discovery-driving, real questions about the nature and content of internal states of intelligent agents of various kinds. In particular the question
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131Tarski, Frege and the Liar ParadoxPhilosophy 46 (176): 133-. 1971.A.1. Some philosophers, including Tarski and Russell, have concluded from a study of various versions of the Liar Paradox ‘that there must be a hierarchy of languages, and that the words “true” and “false”, as applied to statements in any given language, are themselves words belonging to a language of higher order’. In his famous essay on truth Tarski claimed that ‘colloquial’ language is inconsistent as a result of its property of ‘universality’: that is, whatever can be said at all can in prin…Read more
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11DPhil Thesis Knowing and UnderstandingDissertation, Oxford. 1962.The aim of the thesis is to show that there are some synthetic necessary truths, or that synthetic apriori knowledge is possible. This is really a pretext for an investigation into the general connection between meaning and truth, or between understanding and knowing, which, as pointed out in the preface, is really the first stage in a more general enquiry concerning meaning. (Not all kinds of meaning are concerned with truth.) After the preliminaries (chapter one), in which the problem is state…Read more
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27Artificial intelligence and empirical psychologyBehavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (1): 115-116. 1978.
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38Since 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-chaining analysis to produce a roadmap with partially ordered milestones, based on detailed scenarios, that everyone can agree are worth achieving, ev…Read more
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64How can a virtual machine X be implemented in a physical machine Y? We know the answer as far as compilers, editors, theorem-provers, operating systems are concerned, at least insofar as we know how to produce these implemented virtual machines, and no mysteries are involved. This paper is about extrapolating from that knowledge to the implementation of minds in brains. By linking the philosopher's concept of supervenience to the engineer's concept of implementation, we can illuminate both. In p…Read more
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51Response to the CommentariesPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 3 (2): 137-137. 1996.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to the CommentariesIan Wright, Aaron Sloman, and Luc BeaudoinWe are very grateful for the care with which the commentators have read our paper, and the sympathy with which they treated what we acknowledged to be at best a preliminary attempt to make sense of a range of phenomena involving grief and other emotions in terms of our draft architecture. We are fortunate to have commentators that are so much in sympathy with what …Read more
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116The primacy of non-communicative languageIn M. MacCafferty & Kurt Gray (eds.), The Analysis of Meaning: Informatics 5, Proceedings ASLIB/BCS Conference, Aslib. 1979.
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46We look at how the ability to experience grows as an architecture grows itself along with growing the ontology used to experience, understand and act in the environment.
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38Review of: Lakatos, Ed, Problems in the Philosophy of Mathematics (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 19 (2): 171-173. 1968.This is the first volume of the Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science held in London in 1965, and contains revised versions of the nine papers presented in the Philosophy of Mathematics Section, together with comments by participants in the discussions, and replies. (The papers on Inductive Logic and Philosophy of Science will be published in two separate volumes.) In a short review it is not possible to give much more than an outline of the contents.
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37What most people seem not to have noticed is that there's another kind of obesity, a sort of ' mental obesity' which may be causing as much harm to the nation's health -- its mental and intellectual health
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41This paper discusses some of the requirements for the control architecture of an intelligent human-like agent with multiple independent dynamically changing motives in a dynamically changing only partly predictable world. The architecture proposed includes a combination of reactive, deliberative and meta-management mechanisms along with one or more global ``alarm'' systems. The engineering design requirements are discussed in relation our evolutionary history, evidence of brain function and rece…Read more
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415Most philosophers appear to have ignored the distinction between the broad concept of Virtual Machine Functionalism (VMF) described in Sloman&Chrisley (2003) and the better known version of functionalism referred to there as Atomic State Functionalism (ASF), which is often given as an explanation of what Functionalism is, e.g. in Block (1995). One of the main differences is that ASF encourages talk of supervenience of states and properties, whereas VMF requires supervenience of machines that are…Read more
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241The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy, Science, and Models of MindHarvester Press. 1978.Extract from Hofstadter's revew in Bulletin of American Mathematical Society : http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1980-02-02/S0273-0979-1980-14752-7/S0273-0979-1980-14752-7.pdf "Aaron Sloman is a man who is convinced that most philosophers and many other students of mind are in dire need of being convinced that there has been a revolution in that field happening right under their noses, and that they had better quickly inform themselves. The revolution is called "Artificial Intelligence" (Al)-and …Read more
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36Some old problems going back to Immanuel Kant about the nature of mathematical knowledge can be addressed in a new way by asking what sorts of developmental changes in a human child make it possible for the child to become a mathematician
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109What sort of architecture is required for a human-like agent?In Ramakrishna K. Rao (ed.), Foundations of Rational Agency, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1996.This paper is about how to give human-like powers to complete agents. For this the most important design choice concerns the overall architecture. Questions regarding detailed mechanisms, forms of representations, inference capabilities, knowledge etc. are best addressed in the context of a global architecture in which different design decisions need to be linked. Such a design would assemble various kinds of functionality into a complete coherent working system, in which there are many concurre…Read more
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31This paper offers a short and biased overview of the history of discussion and controversy about the role of different forms of representation in intelligent agents. It repeats and extends some of the criticisms of the `logicist' approach to AI that I first made in 1971, while also defending logic for its power and generality. It identifies some common confusions regarding the role of visual or diagrammatic reasoning including confusions based on the fact that different forms of representation m…Read more
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