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48CONJECTURE: Alongside the innate physical sucking reflex for obtaining milk to be digested, decomposed and used all over the body for growth, repair, and energy, there is a genetically determined information-sucking reflex, which seeks out, sucks in, and decomposes information, which is later recombined in many ways, growing the information-processing architecture and many diverse recombinable competences.
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130Prolegomena to a theory of communication and affectIn Andrew Ortony, Jon Slack & Oliviero Stock (eds.), Communication from an Artificial Intelligence Perspective: Theoretical and Applied Issues, Springer. 1992.As a step towards comprehensive computer models of communication, and effective human machine dialogue, some of the relationships between communication and affect are explored. An outline theory is presented of the architecture that makes various kinds of affective states possible, or even inevitable, in intelligent agents, along with some of the implications of this theory for various communicative processes. The model implies that human beings typically have many different, hierarchically orga…Read more
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77I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be …Read more
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188Towards 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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57I am populating this file from the bottom up. Later years are still empty. Try stuff in or before 1998 for a start. My Oxford DPhil Thesis (1962) is the oldest item available here
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240The emperor's real mind -- Review of Roger Penrose's The Emperor's new Mind: Concerning Computers Minds and the Laws of PhysicsArtificial Intelligence 56 (2-3): 355-396. 1992."The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose has received a great deal of both praise and criticism. This review discusses philosophical aspects of the book that form an attack on the "strong" AI thesis. Eight different versions of this thesis are distinguished, and sources of ambiguity diagnosed, including different requirements for relationships between program and behaviour. Excessively strong versions attacked by Penrose (and Searle) are not worth defending or attacking, whereas weaker versions…Read more
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57Some 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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177Emotions involve complex processes produced by interactions between motives, beliefs, percepts, etc. E.g. real or imagined fulfilment or violation of a motive, or triggering of a 'motive-generator', can disturb processes produced by other motives. To understand emotions, therefore, we need to understand motives and the types of processes they can produce. This leads to a study of the global architecture of a mind. Some constraints on the evolution of minds are disussed. Types of motives and the …Read more
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67Maybe they have been made, but I missed them because I don’t read and listen enough, as most of my energies are focused elsewhere. Apologies if this is all old hat. Don’t feel you have to read on. In case others are interested, I shall put this on my web site at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/˜axs/gov/ My main point is that it is just silly to talk so much about universities and top-up fees without putting universities in the context of a complete policy on post-school education. What I am offering is…Read more
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40Adjust the width of your browser window to make the lines the length you prefer. I do not presume to dictate line lengths for readers of what I write, as so many web site designers do (including the BBC). Feel free to adjust font size also.
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119This 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. Wh…Read more
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51and who has recently founded a company Numenta to develop 'a new type of computer memory system modeled after the human neocortex'. With science writer Sandra Blakeslee he wrote a book On Intelligence . I confess the book is still on my (very long) 'to be read' list, though I have read and heard quite a lot about it.
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146Architecture-based conceptions of mindIn Peter Gardenfors, Katarzyna Kijania-Placek & Jan Wolenski (eds.), In the Scope of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science (Vol II), Kluwer Academic Publishers. 2002.
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83At 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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59Adjust 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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271Machine consciousness: Response to commentariesInternational Journal of Machine Consciousness 2 (1): 75-116. 2010.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, attempti…Read more
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157The 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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164New Bodies for Sick Persons: Personal Identity without Physical ContinuityAnalysis 32 (2). 1971.
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62What 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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89This 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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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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379The 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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43Some thoughts arising out of the fact that the University of Birmingham has recently gone through a re-branding exercise led by its administrators responsible for marketing, who failed miserably in marketing the exercise to staff and students within the University, as a result of which there is an online 'Save the Crest' petition that has attracted so many supporters that it made the national news. (2005)
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92What kind of indirect process is visual perception?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3): 401-404. 1980.
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120How to turn an information processor into an understanderBehavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3): 447-448. 1980.
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48Semantics in an intelligent control systemPhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Physical Sciences and Engineering 349 43-58. 1994.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, …Read more
Birmingham, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
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