Aaron Sloman

This is a reply to commentaries on my article "An Alternative to Working on Machine Consciousness". Reading the commentaries caused me to write a lengthy background tutorial paper explaining some of the assumptions that were taken for granted in the target article, and pointing out various confusions regarding the notion of consciousness, including many related to its polymorphism, taken for granted in the target article. This response to commentaries builds on that background material, attempting to address the main questions, objections and misunderstandings found in the responses, several of which were a result of my own brevity and lack of clarity in the original target article, now remedied, I hope by the background article [Sloman, 2010b].

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 concurrent, partly independent, partly mutually supportive, partly potentially incompatible processes, addressing a multitude of issues on different time scales, including asynchronous, concurrent, motive generators. Designing human like agents is part of the more general problem of understanding design space, niche space and their interrelations, for, in the abstract, there is no one optimal design, as biological diversity on earth shows.

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 Sloman attempts to impart to others the "enlighten- ment" which he clearly regrets not having experienced earlier himself. Being somewhat of a convert, Sloman is a zealous campaigner for his point of view. Now a Reader in Cognitive Science at Sussex, he began his academic career in more orthodox philosophy and, by exposure to linguistics and AI, came to feel that all approaches to mind which ignore AI are missing the boat. I agree with him, and I am glad that he has written this provocative book. The tone of Sloman's book can be gotten across by this quotation (p. 5): "I am prepared to go so far as to say that within a few years, if there remain any philosophers who are not familiar with some of the main developments in artificial intelligence, it will be fair to accuse them of professional incom- petence, and that to teach courses in philosophy of mind, epistemology, aesthetics, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, ethics, metaphysics, and other main areas of philosophy, without discussing the relevant aspects of artificial intelligence will be as irresponsible as giving a degree course in physics which includes no quantum theory." (The author now regrets the extreme polemical tone of the book.)

Much research on intelligent systems has concentrated on low level mechanisms or sub-systems of restricted functionality. We need to understand how to put all the pieces together in an *architecture* for a complete agent with its own mind, driven by its own desires. A mind is a self-modifying control system, with a hierarchy of levels of control, and a different hierarchy of levels of implementation. AI needs to explore alternative control architectures and their implications for human, animal, and artificial minds. Only within the framework of a theory of actual and possible architectures can we solve old problems about the concept of mind and causal roles of desires, beliefs, intentions, etc. The high level ``virtual machine'' architecture is more useful for this than detailed mechanisms. E.g. the difference between connectionist and symbolic implementations is of relatively minor importance. A good theory provides both explanations and a framework for systematically generating concepts of possible states and processes. Lacking this, philosophers cannot provide good analyses of concepts, psychologists and biologists cannot specify what they are trying to explain or explain it, and psychotherapists and educationalists are left groping with ill-understood problems. The paper sketches some requirements for such architectures, and analyses an idea shared between engineers and philosophers: the concept of ``semantic information''.

This paper for a conference on computing in education included an extract from my 1978 book "The computer revolution in philosophy": Another book on how computers are going to change our lives? Yes, but this is more about computing than about computers, and it is more about how our thoughts may be changed than about how housework and factory chores will be taken over ... Thoughts can be changed in many ways. The invention of painting and drawing permitted new thoughts in the processes of creating and interpreting pictures. The invention of speaking and writing also permitted profound extensions of our abilities to think and communicate. Computing is a bit like the invention of paper (a new medium of expression) and the invention of writing (new symbolisms to be embedded in the medium) combined. But the writing is more important than the paper.... (The Preface) ..

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 we have written.The comments of Castelfranchi and Miceli draw attention to a problem that we expect many readers to bring up, namely that there is a notion of “information processing” that cannot carry the explanatory weight that we attach to our information processing architecture. We believe that there is a concept of “information processing” such as is used by engineers who design software systems to perform such tasks as controlling an aircraft. We claim that within an appropriate system architecture, information processing states can have all the causal powers that we require for states like pain, pleasure, and the like. However this is not obvious, and defending this claim will have to await another occasion.Lloyd helpfully illustrates the relevance of our proposed architecture even to the effects of imagining the death of a loved one. He also makes the useful observation that second-order states can arise when a person who is suffering because events violate some important motivator, discovers that nothing can be done about the cause of the suffering, and then suffers even more because of feeling helpless in that situation. We acknowledge that these are phenomena that the architecture will have to accommodate, and accept the challenge to demonstrate this in due course.We believe that there is enough commonality between the commentators and ourselves to support our view that the research community is on the verge of an important new breakthrough in the study of mind, in which philosophers, psychologists, therapists, brain scientists, and AI researchers can collaborate fruitfully, and from which profound practical and theoretical consequences will follow.Related ArticlesFeature Article: Towards a Design-Based Analysis of Emotional EpisodesCommentary: Commentary by LloydCommentary: Commentary by Miceli and CastelfranchiCommentary: Commentary by BodenResponse: Response to the CommentariesCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press...

Test domains for AI can have a deep impact on research. The polyflap domain is proposed for testing complex AI theories about architectures, mechanisms and forms of representation involved in features of human and animal intelligence that evolved to enable perception, action, and learning in diverse environments containing things that we can perceive and manipulate, and many complex processes involving objects that differ in shape, materials, causal properties, and relations to one another. We need a test environment that is rich enough to provide some of that variety of structures, processes and affordances, yet simple enough to be within reach of robotics research in the not too distant future.

Most 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 arbitrarily complex networks of causally interacting (virtual, but real) processes, possibly operating on different time-scales, examples of which include many different procesess usually running concurrently on a modern computer performing various tasks concerned with handling interfaces to physical devices, managing the file system, dealing with security, providing tools, entertainments, and games, and possibly processing research data. Another example of VMF would be the kind of functionalism involved in a large collection of possibly changing socio-economic structures and processes interacting in a complex community, and yet another is illustrated by the kind of virtual machinery involved in the many levels of visual processing of information about spatial structures, processes, and relationships (including percepts of moving shadows, reflections, highlights, optical-flow patterns and changing affordances) as you walk through a crowded car-park on a sunny day: generating a whole zoo of interacting qualia. (Forget solitary red patches, or experiences thereof.) Perhaps VMF should be re-labelled "Virtual MachinERY Functionalism" because the word 'machinery' more readily suggests something complex with interacting parts. VMF is concerned with virtual machines that are made up of interacting concurrently active (but not necessarily synchronised) chunks of virtual machinery which not only interact with one another and with their physical substrates (which may be partly shared, and also frequently modified by garbage collection, metabolism, or whatever) but can also concurrently interact with and refer to various things in the immediate and remote environment (via sensory/motor channels, and possible future technologies also). I.e. virtual machinery can include mechanisms that create and manipulate semantic content, not only syntactic structures or bit patterns as digital virtual machines do. Please note: Click on the title above or the link below to read the paper. I prefer to keep all my papers freely accessible on my web site so that I can correct mistakes and add improvements. http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/vm-functionalism.html This is now part of the Meta-Morphogenesis project: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/meta-morphogenesis.html

This paper distinguishes two versions of Ryle's notion of 'logical geography'. Logical geography: The network of relationships between current uses of a collection of concepts. (Probably what Ryle meant by the term.) Logical topography Features of the portion of reality, or types of portions of reality, related to a given set of concepts, where the reality may be capable of being divided up in different ways using different networks of relationships between concepts. Studying/analysing logical topography includes evaluating the alternative divisions in terms of the theories or applications that are supported by the different sets of concepts, or perhaps some other uses of the concepts. On re-reading Appendices III and IV of my Oxford DPhil thesis "Knowing and Understanding Relations between meaning and truth, meaning and necessary truth, meaning and synthetic necessary truth",, online here, I found to my surprise that several of the topics discussed below had been discussed in those two Appendices, and that the distinction between logical topography and logical geography was made in Appendix IV, discussing conceptual analysis, even though I did not use these words

Updates Open Letter to my MP: Lynne Jones Why large IT development projects are problematic The mathematics of searching for a design Richard Feynman wrote: Getting requirements right from the start is impossible Are problems unique to IT projects? Physical constraints Implications for Government policy What can be done? Some suggested prerequisites: requirements for openness A precedent for this proposal: The internet How the internet grew Implications for government policy Are some projects exceptions? Concluding Comment NOTE: Related comment.

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 behavioural and symbolic processes. Design-based analyses reveal more routes from genome to behaviour than J&L seem to have considered. This both points to gaps in our understanding of evolution and epigenetic processes and may lead to possible ways of filling the gaps

This document explains, from the viewpoint of a philosopher/scientist atheist, why intelligent design should be taught alongside standard evolutionary theory. I have been very disappointed by things I have read by scientists recommending suppression of this topic, and even in one case arguing that the worst arguments in favour of ID should be collected together and refuted, which is a prescription for scientific dishonesty. An honest attack would present the best arguments, as cogently as possible, before exposing their flaws.

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. After the preliminaries, in which the problem is stated and some methodological remarks made, the investigation proceeds in two stages. First there is a detailed inquiry into the manner in which the meanings or functions of words occurring in a statement help to determine the conditions in which that statement would be true. This prepares the way for the second stage, which is an inquiry concerning the connection between meaning and necessary truth. The first stage occupies Part Two of the thesis, the second stage Part Three. In all this, only a restricted class of statements is discussed, namely those which contain nothing but logical words and descriptive words, such as "Not all round tables are scarlet" and "Every three-sided figure is three-angled".

This position paper presents the beginnings of a general theory of representations starting from the notion that an intelligent agent is essentially a control system with multiple control states, many of which contain information (both factual and non-factual), albeit not necessarily in a propositional form. The paper attempts to give a general characterisation of the notion of the syntax of an information store, in terms of types of variation the relevant mechanisms can cope with. Similarly concepts of semantics pragmatics and inference are generalised to apply to information-bearing sub-states in control systems. A number of common but incorrect notions about representation are criticised (such as that pictures are in some way isomorphic with what they represent).