THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM
SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
SOME OF AARON SLOMAN'S RECENT PAPERS

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My most recent complete papers can usually be found somewhere near the top of the Cognition and Affect project paper index: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/

Less polished papers in various stages of incompleteness

Is the notion of a Turing machine relevant to AI?

This includes a discussion of what makes computers relevant to AI.

What is AI?

An ovierview of AI for school careers advisers, and for school leavers trying to decide whether to do a degree course in AI.

Types of research in Computing Science, Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence.

A paper prepared following discussions of how to evaluate research proposals. It distinguishes four main types of research.
  1. The study of what is possible
    Including both mathematical and less rigorous forms of theorising.
  2. The study of existing (naturally occurring) information processing systems
    E.g. animals, societies, brains, minds, ....
  3. Research involving creation of new useful information processing systems
    I.e. research directly related to engineering applications.
  4. The creation and evaluation of tools, formalisms and techniques to support all these activities.

Varieties of self-awareness in organisms


A posting to the psyche-b group. I claim that discussions of "self" and "self-awareness" are confused by a failure to notice the variety of examples in organisms.

Some notes on combinatorial search and how (not?) to tame it.

CONTENTS:
-- WHAT IS COMBINATORIAL SEARCH?
-- COMBINATORIAL AND NON-COMBINATORIAL SPACES
-- SETS OF RELATED COMBINATORIAL SPACES
-- HOW (NOT?) TO TAME COMBINATORIAL SEARCH
-- -- (1) Direct the search towards the required solution
-- -- (2) Find ways to transform a search space into a smaller one,
-- -- (3) Find a new powerful form of representation,
etc., etc.

My kind of qualia

Part of a letter sent to Pat Hayes on Dec 16 1999
When I told Dennett a few years ago not only that I had qualia, but also the germ of a theory to explain how they would inevitably occur within the architecture of a certain sort of information processing virtual machine, he was a bit upset and responded by saying that he wished I would not call them "qualia". ....

I think that what I call qualia are the very things that first got philosophers referring to these internal, non-physical, components of our experience (though some referred to them as "sense data", "raw feels" etc.).

Supervenience and Implementation

This draft, evolving, paper is in part about the relation between mind and brain, and in part about the more general question of how high level abstract kinds of structures, processes and mechanisms can depend for the existence on lower level, more concrete kinds. Philosophers often refer to the relation between levels as "supervenience" (e.g. asking whether mental states and processes are supervenient on brain processes). Engineers tend to discuss the relation in terms of "implementation" (e.g. asking which sorts of physical mechanisms could implement certain kinds of perceptual processes). The paper is about how to link these notions, which I believe, come to the same thing, in a certain class of cases.

Classical Physics and Mind

Part of an ongoing discussion with Henry Stapp about whether mental phenomena could exist in a world based on classical physics only. Raises questions about the nature of emergence, and requirements for an adequate theory of mind.

Evolving ontologies for minds

Article Posted 23 Oct 1999 to comp.ai.philosophy: on why some animals need an ontology which includes mental states of other animals (beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, etc.)

I argue that having and using an ontology in which the environment contains other agents with mental as well as physical states and processes is a natural and common biological phenomenon, for some types of organisms.

In the very simplest organisms behaviours are produced by bundles of reactive connections between sensory stimuli and motor signals.

In describing and explaining the behaviour of such an animal we may say that it detects the presence of food and moves towards it. But we are not implying that the animal has anything like the concept of food, edible objects or even eating: it's just useful for us to describe it that way. In that sense we say that plants may seek light, moisture, etc.

What is it like to be a rock?

A semi-serious discussion (Jan 1996) of the sorts of topics raised by Nagel's paper "What is it like to be a bat?".

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 `What is it like to be an X?' is often thought to identify a type of phenomenon for which no physical conditions can be sufficient, and which cannot be replicated in computer-based agents. This paper tries to separate out (a) aspects of the question that are important and provide part of the objective characterisation of the states, or capabilities of an agent, and which help to define the ontology that is to be implemented in modelling such an agent, from (b) aspects that are incoherent.

The paper supports a philosophical position that is anti-reductionist without being dualist or mystical.

More on varieties of classical mechanics.

An earlier (may 1997) discussion with Henry Stapp and Pat Hayes. I propose that there are two versions of classical mechanics: one with and one without the presumption of infinite precision in physical states. I call them IPCM (infinite precision classical mechanics) and RPCM (reduced precision classical mechanics).

I don't think anyone has explored the latter, though I think it has some very interesting properties, including some aspects of quantum mechanics, i.e. built in indeterminacy, yet in some contexts (e.g. a bagatelle) having quantised outcomes of experiments.

OLDER PAPERS AND SLIDES

Slides prepared for the OUP/Prospect Debate "Are Brains Computers", at LSE, London Nov 19th 1998. In two formats PDF and postscript

Slides prepared for the Digital Biota 2 conference in Cambridge, Sept 1998. in two formats: PDF and postscript

The ``Semantics'' of Evolution: Trajectories and Trade-offs in Design Space and Niche Space.
Invited talk for IBERAMIA-98 Lisbon, October 1998

Damasio, Descartes, Alarms and Meta-management
Invited contribution to symposium on Cognitive Agents at IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics San Diego, Oct 1988

What's an AI toolkit for?
Presented at AAAI-98 Workshop on Software Tools for Developing Agents, July 1998.

Slides for a talk on how machines can love, as part of a series on literature an technology at the Royal Festival fall, London in February 1998. (See http://www.sbc.org.uk/literate.htm )

A longer paper expanding those slides on love.

Architectures for Natural and Artificial Intelligent Systems: A proposal for a multi-disciplinary project.

Architectures and types of consciousnes (Oct 1997), Abstract for a talk presented at Tucson III --Towards a Science of Consciousness in MAY 1998.

The relationship between AI and Alife, (July 1997)

Comments also invited on the following draft papers. The first two are fairly short, the third one very long (60 pages) and still growing.

Supervenience and Implementation: Virtual and Physical Machines

The evolution of what? (A DRAFT paper on the evolution of consciousness -- likely to be updated).

There's more of my stuff on consciousness posted to usenet and email lists in the misc/ sub-directory.
It includes discussions on various issues concerning consciousness, what it is like to be a rock, philosophy of science, relationships between design space and niche space, the problem of combinatorics in intelligent search, and many other related topics.

Most of my recent research papers are in the Cognition and Affect Project Directory http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/

Maintained by Aaron Sloman. Last updated: 1 May 2000