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Functionalism, revisionism, and qualia
No full textFrom the editor's introduction: "Ron Chrisley and Aaron Sloman open Part I of this issue with their article “Functionalism, Revisionism, and Qualia.” Chrisley and Sloman discuss revisionism about qualia—the view that tries to navigate between naïve qualia realism and reductive eliminativism. The authors discuss the relevance of their approach to AI. They also relate to the works they view as following the main tenets of revisionism about qualia. This includes Gilbert Harman’s version of functionalism, discussed in much detail (including Harman’s article “Explaining the Explanatory Gap,” published in the spring 2007 issue of this newsletter) and also the psychomotoric approach to qualia by Kevin O’Regan.
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Functionalism, revisionism, and qualia
No full textFrom the editor's introduction: "Ron Chrisley and Aaron Sloman open Part I of this issue with their article “Functionalism, Revisionism, and Qualia.” Chrisley and Sloman discuss revisionism about qualia—the view that tries to navigate between naïve qualia realism and reductive eliminativism. The authors discuss the relevance of their approach to AI. They also relate to the works they view as following the main tenets of revisionism about qualia. This includes Gilbert Harman’s version of functionalism, discussed in much detail (including Harman’s article “Explaining the Explanatory Gap,” published in the spring 2007 issue of this newsletter) and also the psychomotoric approach to qualia by Kevin O’Regan.
Commentary on “An alternative to working on machine consciousness”, by Aaron Sloman
No full textA commentary on a current paper by Aaron Sloman where he argues that in order to make progress in AI, consciousness (and other such unclear concepts of common-sense regarding the mind), "should be replaced by more precise and varied architecture-based concepts better suited to specify what needs to be explained by scientific theories". This original vision of philosophical inquiry as the mapping out of 'design-spaces' for a contested concept seeks to achieve a holistic, synthetic understanding of what possibilities such spaces embody and how different parameters might structure them in nomic and highly inter-connected ways. It therefore does not reduce to either "relations of ideas" or "matters of fact" in Hume's famous dichotomy. It is also shown to be in interesting ways the exact opposite of the current vogue for 'experimental philosophy'
Architectural and Representational Requirements for Seeing Processes, Proto-affordances and Affordances
Get PDFThis paper, combining the standpoints of philosophy and
Artificial Intelligence with theoretical psychology, summarises several
decades of investigation by the author of the variety of functions of vision
in humans and other animals, pointing out that biological evolution has
solved many more problems than are normally noticed. For example, the
biological functions of human and animal vision are closely related to the
ability of humans to do mathematics, including discovering and proving
theorems in geometry, topology and arithmetic. Many of the phenomena
discovered by psychologists and neuroscientists require sophisticated controlled
laboratory settings and specialised measuring equipment, whereas
the functions of vision reported here mostly require only careful attention
to a wide range of everyday competences that easily go unnoticed. Currently
available computer models and neural theories are very far from
explaining those functions, so progress in explaining how vision works
is more in need of new proposals for explanatory mechanisms than new
laboratory data. Systematically formulating the requirements for such
mechanisms is not easy. If we start by analysing familiar competences,
that can suggest new experiments to clarify precise forms of these competences,
how they develop within individuals, which other species have
them, and how performance varies according to conditions. This will
help to constrain requirements for models purporting to explain how the
competences work. For example, Gibson’s theory of affordances needs
a number of extensions, including allowing affordances to be composed
in several ways from lower level proto-affordances. The paper ends with
speculations regarding the need for new kinds of information-processing
machinery to account for the phenomena
ABSTRACT INTERACTIONS BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: The Role of Intuition and Non-Logical Reasoning in Intelligence
No full textwriting it, the author has acquired a keener appreciation of the gap between formulating such ideas and embodying them in
From animals to robots and back reflections on hard problems in the study of cognition: a collection in honour of Aaron Sloman
No full textCognitive Science is a discipline that brings together research in natural and artificial systems and this is clearly reflected in the diverse contributions to From Animals to Robots and Back: Reflections on Hard Problems in the Study of Cognition. In tribute to Aaron Sloman and his pioneering work in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, the editors have collected a unique collection of cross-disciplinary papers that include work on: · intelligent robotics; · philosophy of cognitive science; · emotional research · computational vision; · comparative psychology; and · human-computer interaction. Key themes such as the importance of taking an architectural view in approaching cognition, run through the text. Drawing on the expertize of leading international researchers, contemporary debates in the study of natural and artificial cognition are addressed from complementary and contrasting perspectives with key issues being outlined at various levels of abstraction. From Animals to Robots and Back: Reflections on Hard Problems in the Study of Cognition, will give readers with backgrounds in the study of both natural and artificial cognition an important window on the state of the art in cognitive systems research
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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