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422Virtual machines and consciousnessJournal of Consciousness Studies 10 (4-5): 133-172. 2003.Replication or even modelling of consciousness in machines requires some clarifications and refinements of our concept of consciousness. Design of, construction of, and interaction with artificial systems can itself assist in this conceptual development. We start with the tentative hypothesis that although the word “consciousness” has no well-defined meaning, it is used to refer to aspects of human and animal informationprocessing. We then argue that we can enhance our understanding of what these as…Read more
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304Evolution: The Computer Systems Engineer Designing MindsAvant: 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
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23Interactions between philosophy and artificial intelligence: The role of intuition and non-logical reasoning in intelligenceArtificial Intelligence 2 (3-4): 209-225. 1971.
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21The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy, Science and Models of MindBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 30 (3): 302-304. 1978.
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8Acquiring a Self-Model to Enable Autonomous Recovery from Faults and IntrusionsJournal of Intelligent Systems 12 (1): 1-40. 2002.
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4Komentarze 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.
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141This 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
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131Tarski, Frege and the Liar ParadoxPhilosophy 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
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11DPhil Thesis Knowing and UnderstandingDissertation, 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
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25Some thoughts about league tables and public service organisationsAaron Sloman's Online Papers. 2007.The implication is that the majority of universities are inferior. A consequence of this is that whether such pronouncements are accurate or not they will influence decision-making in various quarters in such a way as to attract resources towards a small subset of the organisations, thereby amplifying differences that already exist, or, in some cases introducing real differences in quality where previously the alleged differences were spurious
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72It is often thought that there is one key design principle or at best a small set of design principles, underlying the success of biological organisms. Candidates include neural nets, ‘swarm intelligence’, evolutionary computation, dynamical systems, particular types of architecture or use of a powerful uniform learning mechanism, e.g. reinforcement learning. All of those support types of self-organising, self-modifying behaviours. But we are nowhere near understanding the full variety of powerf…Read more
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44The 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 …Read more
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32and 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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29Did Searle attack strong strong or weak strong AIIn A. G. Cohn and & R. J. Thomas (eds.), Artificial Intelligence and its Applications, John Wiley and Sons. 1986.John Searle's attack on the Strong AI thesis, and the published replies, are all based on a failure to distinguish two interpretations of that thesis, a strong one, which claims that the mere occurrence of certain process patterns will suffice for the occurrence of mental states, and a weak one which requires that the processes be produced in the right sort of way. Searle attacks strong strong AI, while most of his opponents defend weak strong AI. This paper explores some of Searle's concepts an…Read more
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71What are the aims of scienceRadical Philosophy 13 7-17. 1976.If we are to understand the nature of science, we must see it as an activity and achievement of the human mind alongside others, such as the achievements of children in learning to talk and to cope with people and other objects in their environment, and the achievements of non-scientists living in a rich and complex world which constantly poses problems to be solved. Looking at scientific knowledge as one form of human knowledge, scientific understanding as one form of human understanding, scien…Read more
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33In December 2005 I was invited by a well known researcher, Carrol Izard, on emotions to contribute to a discussion by answering a few questions as briefly as possible. He asked for 'one-liners', but I was not able to comply with that condition. However, the answers were short for me!
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58How Velmans' conscious experiences affected our brainsJournal of Consciousness Studies 9 (11): 58-62. 2002.Velmans’ paper raises three problems concerning mental causation: (1) How can consciousness affect the physical, given that the physical world appears causally closed? 10 (2) How can one be in conscious control of processes of which one is not consciously aware? (3) Conscious experiences appear to come too late to causally affect the processes to which they most obviously relate. In an appendix Velmans gives his reasons for refusing to resolve these problems through adopting the position (which …Read more
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73Transformations of Illocutionary ActsAnalysis 30 (2). 1969.Speech-Act analyses of words like 'good', 'true', 'know' and 'probable' were criticised by j.R. Searle in "speech acts". I have tried to show how his criticisms can be met by an analysis in terms of operators on speech acts which 'transform' them into other speech-Acts. I conclude, Not that speech-Act analyses are correct, But that they survive searle's criticism
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36RCLIB is a 2-D graphical interface package available as an addition to the Poplog software development system. "RC" stands for "Relative Coordinates": all the graphical commands are relative to a frame of reference, which can be changed without altering the commands, making it easy to draw the same thing in different parts of a display, using different sizes or orientations, and possibly stretched or sheared.
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101Prolegomena 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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100The irrelevance of Turing machines to artificial intelligenceIn Matthias Scheutz (ed.), Computationalism: New Directions, Mit Press. 2002.The common view that the notion of a Turing machine is directly relevant to AI is criticised. It is argued that computers are the result of a convergence of two strands of development with a long history: development of machines for automating various physical processes and machines for performing abstract operations on abstract entities, e.g. doing numerical calculations. Various aspects of these developments are analysed, along with their relevance to AI, and the similarities between computers…Read more
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33This is a partial record of correspondence with an intelligent journalist who was given the task, some time in 1998, of preparing an article on pride, as part of a series of articles on so-called 'seven deadly sins' for a scientific magazine. The journalist first asked me to explain how pride could be accommodated withing the framework of ideas being developed in the Cognition and Affect Project at the University of Birmingham.
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50Evolution produced many species whose members are pre-programmed with almost all the competences and knowledge they will ever need. Others appear to start with very little and learn what they need, but appearances can deceive. I conjecture that evolution produced powerful innate meta-knowledge about a class of environments containing 3- D structures and processes involving materials of many kinds. In humans and several other species these innate learning mechanisms seem initially to use explorat…Read more
Birmingham, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
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