Aaron Sloman

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 virtual machinery which we have only recently learnt how to design and build, and could not even have been thought about in Darwin’s time, can interact with the physical machinery in which they are implemented, without being identical with their physical implementation, nor mere aggregates of physical structures and processes. The existence of various kinds of virtual machinery (including both “platform” virtual machines that can host other virtual machines, e.g. operating systems, and “application” virtual machines, e.g. spelling checkers, and computer games) depends on complex webs of causal connections involving hardware and software structures, events and processes, where the specification of such causal webs requires concepts that cannot be defined in terms of concepts of the physical sciences. That indefinability, plus the possibility of various kinds of self-monitoring within virtual machinery, seems to explain some of the allegedly mysterious and irreducible features of consciousness that motivated Darwin’s critics and also more recent philosophers criticising AI. There are consequences for philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and robotics.

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 principle be said in it, with an extended vocabularly if necessary. Thus, in English we can talk about English expressions, what they denote, what they say, whether what they say is true or false, and so on: English contains its own metalanguage. This universality enables us to construct sentences which say of themselves that they are false, and by applying the law of excluded middle to them we easily derive a contradiction. Tarski concludes that ‘these antinomies seem to provide a proof that every language which is universal in the above sense, and for which the normal laws of logic hold, must be inconsistent’ . He then proposes to avoid such contradictions by the use of a hierarchy of languages such that statements about any one language can be made only in a different language at a higher level

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 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 (or false). This prepares the way for the second stage, which is an inquiry concerning the connection between meaning and necessary truth (between understanding and knowing apriori). 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". (The reasons for not discussing proper names and other singular definite referring expressions are given in Appendix I.)

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 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 recent theories of Damasio and others about the relationships between intelligence and emotions. (The paper was completed in haste for a deadline and I forgot to explain why Descartes was in the title. See Damasio 1994.).

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.)

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

This 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 may be used at different levels in an implementation hierarchy. This is contrasted with the way in the use of one form of representation (e.g. pictures) can be {\em controlled} using another (e.g. logic, or programs). Finally some questions are asked about the role of metrical information in biological visual systems.

This paper, along with the following paper by John McCarthy, introduces some of the topics to be discussed at the IJCAI95 event `A philosophical encounter: An interactive presentation of some of the key philosophical problems in AI and AI problems in philosophy.' Philosophy needs AI in order to make progress with many difficult questions about the nature of mind, and AI needs philosophy in order to help clarify goals, methods, and concepts and to help with several specific technical problems. Whilst philosophical attacks on AI continue to be welcomed by a significant subset of the general public, AI defenders need to learn how to avoid philosophically naive rebuttals

This paper rehearses some relatively old arguments about how any coherent notion of free will is not only compatible with but depends on determinism. However the mind-brain identity theory is attacked on the grounds that what makes a physical event an intended action A is that the agent interprets the physical phenomena as doing A. The paper should have referred to the monograph Intention by Elizabeth Anscombe, which discusses in detail the fact that the same physical event can have multiple descriptions, using different ontologies