Aaron Sloman

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

[Przekład] To, czego w ciągu ostatnich sześciu lub siedmiu tego nauczyliśmy się na temat wirtualnej maszynerii w wyniku dużego postępu nauki i techniki, umożliwia nam zaoferowanie stanowisku darwinowskiemu nowej obrony przeciw krytykom, którzy twierdzili, że jedynie forma fizyczna – a nie zdolności umysłowe czy świadomość – może być produktem ewolucji poprzez dobór naturalny. Obrona ta porównuje zjawiska umysłowe, wspominane przez przeciwników Darwina, z treściami maszynerii wirtualnej w systemach obliczeniowych. Obiekty, stany, zdarzenia i procesy w owej maszynerii, które dopiero od niedawna umiemy projektować i konstruować, a które nie mogły być nawet przedmiotem rozmyślań w czasach Darwina, mogą współdziałać z maszynerią fizyczną, w której są zaimplementowane, nie będąc identycznymi ze swoją fizyczną implementacją, ani też nie będąc jedynie agregatami fizycznych struktur i procesów. Istnienie różnych rodzajów maszynerii wirtualnej (w tym zarówno „platformowych” maszyn wirtualnych, mogących hostować inne takie maszyny, na przykład systemy operacyjne, jak i „aplikacyjnych” maszyn wirtualnych, na przykład korektorów pisowni i gier komputerowych) zależy od skomplikowanych sieci połączeń przyczynowych związanych ze strukturami hardware’u i software’u, zdarzeniami i procesami, gdzie specyfikacja takich sieci przyczynowych wymaga konceptów, które nie mogą być zdefiniowane w kategoriach konceptów nauk fizycznych. Ta niedefiniowalność, a także możliwość zachodzenia różnych rodzajów automonitorowania w maszynerii wirtualnej, wydaje się wyjaśniać niektóre z rzekomo tajemniczych i nieredukowalnych cech świadomości, które motywowały krytyków Darwina, a także bardziej współczesnych filozofów, krytykujących sztuczną inteligencję. Wynikają z tego konsekwencje dla filozofii, psychologii, neurobiologii i robotyki

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

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.

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).

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.

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) ..

This paper extends three decades of work arguing that researchers who discuss consciousness should not restrict themselves only to (adult) human minds, but should study (and attempt to model) many kinds of minds, natural and artificial, thereby contributing to our understanding of the space containing all of them. We need to study what they do or can do, how they can do it, and how the natural ones can be emulated in synthetic minds. That requires: (a) understanding sets of requirements that are met by different sorts of minds, i.e. the niches that they occupy, (b) understanding the space of possible designs, and (c) understanding complex and varied relationships between requirements and designs. Attempts to model or explain any particular phenomenon, such as vision, emotion, learning, language use, or consciousness lead to muddle and confusion unless they are placed in that broader context. A methodology for making progress is summarised and a novel requirement proposed for a theory of how human minds work: the theory should support a single generic design for a learning, developing system that, in addition to meeting familiar requirements, should be capable of developing different and opposed philosophical viewpoints about consciousness, and the so-called hard problem. In other words, we need a common explanation for the mental machinations of mysterians, materialists, functionalists, identity theorists, and those who regard all such theories as attempting to answer incoherent questions. No designs proposed so far come close.

When scientists discuss experimental observations, they often, unfortunately, use language that evolved for informal discourse among people engaged in every day social interaction, like this: What does the infant/child/adult/chimp/crow (etc) perceive/understand/learn/intend (etc)? What is he/she/it conscious of? What does he/she/it experience/enjoy/desire? What is he/she/it attending to? Similar comments can be made about the terminology used in many philosophical discussions about minds, cognition, language, and the relationships between evolution and learning.

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 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.