•  524
    Evolution: The Computer Systems Engineer Designing Minds
    Avant: 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
  •  1
    The well-designed young mathematician
    Artificial Intelligence 172 (18): 2015-2034. 2008.
  •  13
    The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy, Science and Models of Mind
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 30 (3): 302-304. 1978.
  •  6
    Acquiring a Self-Model to Enable Autonomous Recovery from Faults and Intrusions
    with C. M. Kennedy
    Journal of Intelligent Systems 12 (1): 1-40. 2002.
  • Reviews (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 19 (2): 171-173. 1968.
  •  1
    Reviews (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 21 (2): 208-211. 1970.
  • Reviews (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 17 (3): 249-253. 1966.
  •  29
    Komentarze 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.
  •  134
    This 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
  •  148
    Tarski, Frege and the Liar Paradox
    Philosophy 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
  •  10
    DPhil Thesis Knowing and Understanding
    Dissertation, 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
  •  37
    Deep and shallow simulations
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (4): 548-548. 1981.
  •  74
    Towards a design-based analysis of emotional episodes
    with Ian Wright and Luc P. Beaudoin
    Philosophy, 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
  •  25
    Towards a grammar of emotions
    New Universities Quarterly 36 (3): 230-238. 1982.
    My favourite leading question when teaching Philosophy of Mind is ‘Could a goldfish long for its mother?’ This introduces the philosophical technique of ‘conceptual analysis’, essential for the study of mind (Sloman 1978, ch. 4). By analysing what we mean by ‘A longs for B’, and similar descriptions of emotional states we see that they inv olve rich cognitive structures and processes, i.e. computations. Anything which could long for its mother, would have to hav e some sort of representation of i…Read more
  •  32
    Beyond Turing equivalence
    In Peter Millican Andy Clark (ed.), Machines and Thought The Legacy of Alan Turing, Oxford University Press. pp. 1--179. 1996.
    What is the relation between intelligence and computation? Although the difficulty of defining `intelligence' is widely recognized, many are unaware that it is hard to give a satisfactory definition of `computational' if computation is supposed to provide a non-circular explanation for intelligent abilities. The only well-defined notion of `computation' is what can be generated by a Turing machine or a formally equivalent mechanism. This is not adequate for the key role in explaining the nature …Read more
  •  127
    Many debates about consciousness appear to be endless, in part because of conceptual confusions preventing clarity as to what the issues are and what does or does not count as evidence. This makes it hard to decide what should go into a machine if it is to be described as 'conscious'. Thus, triumphant demonstrations by some AI developers may be regarded by others as proving nothing of interest because the system does not satisfy *their* definitions or requirements specifications.
  •  52
    Some of the movies were produced using techniques and scripts suggested by Mike Lees at Nottingham University where he is using SimAgent on a project directed by Brian Logan
  •  50
    It is conjectured that humans and some other altricial species instead use innate mechanisms for decomposing situations into components that can be explicitly learnt about, and stored in such a way that the competence can be re-used in combination with other learnt competences, in perceiving novel situations and performing novel actions.
  •  61
    How to turn an information processor into an understander
    with Monica Croucher
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3): 447-448. 1980.
  •  3
    The profound influence of Frege's work on the development of formal logic and philosophy of mathematics is now well known. However, his philosophical writings, which, unlike his technical achievements, are still of more than historical interest, appear to be comparatively little known or ill-understood, at least by philosophers who are not primarily interested in the foundations of mathematics. This is a great pity, for Frege's thought is precise, penetrating, subtle and often relevant to philos…Read more
  •  33
    Response to "Predictive Policies" by R.S.McGowan Mr. McGowan has assumed that there is a clear distinction between inductive inferences and others, that we all know how to make the distinction, that we all agree that the inductive ones are somehow better or more reasonable than the alternatives, and I have criticised all of these assumptions. Further he hasformulated the philosophical problem of induction as the problem of showing why the inductive ones are better, and he has attempted to show t…Read more
  •  52
    This paper attempts to characterise a unifying overview of the practice of software engineers, AI designers, developers of evolutionary forms of computation, designers of adaptive systems, etc. The topic overlaps with theoretical biology, developmental psychology and perhaps some aspects of social theory. Just as much of theoretical computer science follows the lead of engineering intuitions and tries to formalise them, there are also some important emerging high level cross disciplinary ideas a…Read more
  •  26
    The document starts The overall goal proposed here is to construct physically instantiated systems that can perceive, understand, and interact with their environment - but also evolve in order to achieve human-like performance in activities requiring context-specific knowledge. I posted the following comment on 15 Feb 2006..
  •  17
    Danto on space research and epistemology
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 14 (1-4): 174-181. 1971.
  •  26
    The Mind as a Control System
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 34 69-110. 1993.
    This is not a scholarly research paper, but a ‘position paper’ outlining an approach to the study of mind which has been gradually evolving since about 1969 when I first become acquainted with work in Artificial Intelligence through Max Clowes. I shall try to show why it is more fruitful to construe the mind as a control system than as a computational system.