Aaron's personal details, below
I shall shortly be unable to modify this web site because of changing security
requirements at the University of Birmingham. A new, changeable,
copy will be created at a new web site that will be shown here later.
N.B. I am still doing research but I am formally retired and not available
for PhD supervision.
The research is slowed down by gradually worsening dementia (Altzheimer's) only
slightly alleviated by medication.
Unfortunately current medical science does not seem to be able to help much.
I have no research funds, I no longer travel, and I can only do online talks.
I cannot help Job applicants or PhD applicants
VERTEBRATE HATCHING, INSECT METAMORPHOSIS, AND EVOLUTIN OF
VARIETIES OF INTELLIGENCE
Sample of alternative possible titles:
Evolution and development of biological mechanisms of evolution and
development
How minds with brains evolved from brainless synapse-ancestors
The biochemical/biophysical (not neural) basis of natural forms of
intelligence
Varieties of informed control since earliest proto-life forms emerged on
planet Earth
Do synapses connect neurons, or do neurons connect synapses?
An attempt to understand evolution of various kinds of spatial intelligence
including forms of "implicit intelligence" involved in ancient biological
processes of evolution, gene expression, development, reproduction, etc.
---------------------
Previous work:
How do chemical processes in eggs produce hatchlings with the competences of the newly
hatched Avocets shown in this extract from the BBC Springwatch programme in June 2021.
https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/movies/avocets/avocet-hatchlings.mp4
--
And how do they assemble, in parallel, in a developing embryo in an egg,
all the many physiological substructures and mechanisms
each with multiple, intricate spatial and functional
relationships
with other substructures and mechanisms?
---
Notes for invited talks:
Wed 2nd June 2021 at Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker Colloquium, Tubingen
Talk to biochemical medical group in Singapore, Tues 21st June, 2022:
Both are now superseded by the Meta-Morphogenesis link above.
---------------------
Relevant new book by Philip Ball The Book Of Minds June 2022
Includes acknowledgement of work done here:
https://bigthink.com/thinking/the-book-of-minds/
---------------------
Impossible objects, vision, and mathematical cognition
If neural nets cannot discover, or even represent impossibility or necessity,
how do brains do it?
What is all that highly complex sub-neural chemistry for?
Will trying to understand hatching in (vertebrate) eggs give us
clues? ... Erwin Schrödinger on the Chemical Basis of Life (1944)
A related paper is under construction on the task of explaining how a genome
specifies not just structures but also control mechanisms, including ancient
spatial reasoning mechanisms capable of making ancient discoveries in geometry
and topology possible. This will complement the above paper summarising
Schrödinger's argument in What is life?(1944) about the importance
of quantum physics in explaining the amazing reliability of biological
reproduction, without which life as we know it would be impossible. I'll suggest
(tentatively) that without use of quantum physical mechanisms controlling
sub-neural molecular processes, mathematical discoveries in geometry and in
every day spatial reasoning would have been impossible.
...
"Today, thanks to the ingenious work of biologists, mainly of
geneticists, during the last thirty or forty years, enough is
known about the actual material structure of organisms and
about their functioning to state that, and to tell precisely why,
present-day physics and chemistry could not possibly account
for what happens in space and time within a living organism."
(Preface, page 4, What is life?)
Online video presentation of the idea of a Meta-Configured Genome
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/movies/meta-config
Sorry no interns or PhD Students ...
Being retired I can't be a main supervisor.
But I am happy to talk (remotely) to
students who are interested in the topics I work on.
2017: New online version of my 1962 Oxford DPhil Thesis
Knowing and Understanding
Relations between meaning and truth, meaning and
necessary truth, meaning and synthetic necessary truth
-----------------------------
New March-Sept 2017
Gaps Between Human and Artificial Mathematics
Added 12 Aug 2917: Web page and video for invited talk on
Why can't (current) machines reason like Euclid or even human toddlers?
(And many other intelligent animals)
https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/ijcai-2017-cog.html
(Includes recording of video presentation)
Architectures for Generality & Autonomy Workshop
(AGA 2017), 26th IJCAI
Melbourne, August 2017
(Disorganised) home page of Aaron Sloman
(Personal details below).
Retired, previously honorary, now emeritus professor in the School of Computer Science, mostly working
the Meta-Morphogenesis (Self-Informing Universe) project.
Those who are ignorant of philosophy are doomed to reinvent it .... badly.[*]
Those who are also ignorant of computation will make an even worse mess of
philosophy.
Those who know about computation will not necessarily avoid philosophical
errors!
[*]A deliberate misquotation of George Santayana, to whom I apologise -- and
give thanks!
See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana
This is a "low-tech" website built using html in a text editor, starting
early 1990s and modified occasionally.
USE CONTENTS LIST OR BROWSER SEARCH
(e.g. CTRL+F) OR google search TO FIND THINGS
WHAT'S MORE BLAMEWORTHY IN AN ATHLETE:
(a) trying to get help from drugs (as some do secretly)?
OR
(b) trying
to get help from their gods (as many do openly)?
Does the fact that the latter are deceived make them innocent? Compare buying
fake drugs!
Learn about
analytical atheism and the "Brights" organisation
APOLOGIES FOR MESS
This page badly needs reorganisation
My web pages started soon after the internet began, around 1992.
Available tools were very primitive for a long time, and later
I was too busy to do anything about reorganising the pages.
An attempt to get external funding to help reorganise it was unsuccessful.
So here it is (above and below), and
here
and
here
and
here
and
here
and
here
and
here
and
here
and
here.
Come to Birmingham as
students
or as
researchers
to help us investigate, model and design information processing
systems: in computers, in brains, in minds, in evolution, in
science, and in society -- to build as challenges, to entertain,
to help make the world a better place, and to help us understand
what we (humans) are.
[This is now out of date]
My Doings (since about 1960):
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/my-doings.html
(philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of
mathematics, evolution, cognitive science, artificial intelligence,
vision, robotics, education, mathematical development, causation,...)
When asked to comment on impact in a reference:
What should I write if asked to act as an academic
referee, and
the invitation requests me to assess the impact of the candidate's
work?
-
My expanded notes on this topic can be found here.
What follows is an older, simpler, response.
"I am not interested in impact, only quality of research, which does
not always correlate with impact, since the latter is often subject
to fashion and transient funding policies, etc. If you want a study
of impact you would do better to consult a social scientist.
Moreover high impact as measured by citations is often a consequence of making
mistakes that many other people comment on.
Many great research achievements could not possibly be assessed
for their impact until
many years later, in some cases long after the death of the researcher
(e.g.
Gregor Mendel).
I'll tell you what I think about the research quality: things like
the depth, difficulty, and importance of the questions addressed,
the originality, clarity, precision and explanatory power of the
theories developed, and how well they fit known facts, as far as I
can tell. If there are engineering products I may have some comments
on their contribution to research. I shall not be able to evaluate
their contribution to wealth or happiness."
Researchers and teachers should not allow themselves to be dictated
to by managers following the latest managerial fashions.
It never ceases to amaze me that neither senior academics in
universities, nor senior administrators in funding agencies, nor senior
politicians, can see the huge wastefulness in trying to make major
service organisations funded by the nation put substantial resources
into behaviour that is comparable to a group of monkeys all struggling
to be near the food at the top of a greasy pole.
Instead of contributing to all that wasted effort, they should be
cooperating to produce a national system of research and education that,
among other things, provides the best possible opportunities for all
young minds with academic potential to be stretched to their limits, and
(with international collaboration) pushes research frontiers in as many
directions as possible: for we never know where new knowledge gems lie
in wait.
If funds available nationally for research can't support all the
academics needed for teaching then there should be a higher proportion
of teaching oriented institutions (e.g. polytechnics), along with a
weighted, dynamically adjusted lottery for research funding, as
described here
NOTE ON SECURITY:
For various
reasons it is absolutely impossible to build
systems that can be guaranteed to be perfectly secure.
So researchers in the field must make clear to politicians,
purchasers, research funders, and the general public that whatever
systems they use, there is always a risk of security failure and all
decisions to use such systems must take account of that risk, and
the consequences and costs of security failure.
In some cases it may be better not to go ahead with a project whose
success depends on a guarantee of perfect security, but to do
something less ambitious -- e.g. aim for something less uniform, or
less integrated.
It is clear that there were members of the previous government who
failed to understand these points. (One consequence is the
NHS IT
fiasco)
I don't know whether the current
coalition includes people who do understand the issues.
GOOGLE SEARCH
Since much of my stuff is disorganised it may be easiest to find
things using Google. Search either the school site or the world.
(Thanks to Dave Parker for help.)
EMAIL A.Sloman[AT]bham.ac.uk
I have no clerical help, am swamped with email and am very
disorganised. So I often plan to respond 'later' to a message, but
never get around to it. If you think I have forgotten to reply to a
message you sent me, feel free to send a reminder.
Last Updated:
... ... 5 Dec 2011; ... 2012; ; ... 2013; ... 2014; ... 2015; ... 2016;
... 2018; ... 2019; ... 6 Sep 2020; 15 Oct 2020
Email: "a.sloman[AT]bham.ac.uk"
Please use email, not paper.
Paper wastes my time and usually gets lost in piles of
papers (I have no secretarial assistance).
PLEASE DO NOT SEND ME HTML EMAIL: SEND PLAIN TEXT ONLY.
Find out how to fix your mailer settings.
Instead of sending unsolicited documents as attachments,
please, if possible,
merely send me a URL that specifies where I can fetch the document ---
if I want to. (This does not apply to requested attachments.)
Picture
by Teoman Irmak
Made Fellow of
WIF
in
2004??
(Not sure what that implies, or why I was chosen.
Note added 2007: Asking a question about whether the WIF
is a hoax in my 'Short CV'
resulted in my being informed that I am no
longer a Fellow. That was later rescinded.)
I use only unix/linux
systems on my desktop and laptop computers. PCs running
windows do not allow me to work as I wish. Some of the reasons are explained in
the files mentioned below. I suspect Apple machines would be better but I have
always disliked Apple's design decisions when I tried using Macs.
WHY DO WINDOWS USERS PUT UP WITH IT?:
I have now moved this rant into a separate file
here.
For some hunches about what Microsoft may be doing see the last
section of
this
file.
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:
Instead we should understand that we are talking about a complex system
with many concurrently active parts that work together more or less
harmoniously most of the time but can sometimes come into conflict.
These parts are organised in an information-processing architecture
that maps onto brain mechanisms in complex, indirect ways that are not
well understood.
So we should ask questions like this if we wish to do
deep science:
CONJECTURE
SOME PRELIMINARIES AND PERMISSIONS
PERMISSION
Anyone in the universe has my permission to use freely any information
about me on this web site or any web site created by me (subject to
obvious restrictions regarding identity theft and use of information for
criminal purposes). There are some universities in the UK that have
apparently been advised by lawyers (who make their living by trying to
prevent themselves from being sued for giving less than totally
pessimistic advice?) that if they don't get written permission to do
what everyone around the world is already doing freely they may get into
legal difficulties. So we all end up wasting yet more time asking and
giving permission, on paper even in the 21st century, whilst
universities elsewhere in the world just get on with the job instead.
Because administrators in UK Universities do not understand risk
management there is now a huge amount of waste caused by giving undue
weight to over-cautions recommendations of people who do not understand
requirements for doing excellent teaching and research, but do know how
to read legal documents in the most pessimistic possible way.
Is anyone costing all the waste of tax-payers' money that results
from all these pessimistic legalistic restrictive practices?
There has been public criticism of the waste caused by risk-averse
schools,
but for some reason nobody has criticised universities for making similar
same mistakes, slavishly following advice from auditors who are not interested
in teaching or research.
DISCLAIMER
This is a personal document
and should not be assumed to reflect the views of
The University of Birmingham
or
The School of Computer Science
though of course there is considerable overlap, especially with the
latter. I am glad to be in a university that respects academic freedom.
(Should this be called my 'blog' ???)
Experimental twittering
.
Why don't people who preach and teach suicide bombing lead by
example?
At a time when far more knowledge than ever before needs to be
acquired before anyone can either contribute to extending
knowledge or effectively deploying knowledge, our previous
government (Labour) tried (a) to reduce the length of many
university degree courses to two years and (b) to increase the
proportion of people attending university courses to 50%, at a time
when university courses need to be more intellectually challenging
than ever before in the history of mankind.
Instead of this madness we need a joined up education policy taking
account both of the diversity of employment opportunities in our
world and the diversity of human talents, providing multiple
post-school educational trajectories along with well-designed
slipways for people who start on a track that is not suited to
their capabilities and interests.
Is anyone
listening?
I was Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, but am
now formally retired, though still doing full time research while
tolerated by my School.
In accordance with UK academic practice my job ended in September
2002, i.e. at the end of the academic year in which
I turned 65. However I was re-employed on a temporary
nominal contract which ended in September 2005, while I
continued to work full time mainly as a researcher,
helping with some management and a little teaching.
My original appointment here in 1991
was primarily a research appointment, though I helped
with teaching related to the development of new undergraduate and
postgraduate degrees in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science,
including helping to plan the new undergraduate degrees combining AI
with Psychology, Mathematics, Computer Science, or Arts subjects.
I formally retired as an employee of the university in September 2005,
but continue to do research almost full time, helping my department with
occasional undergraduate lectures and some admin.
An overview of some of my main research interests can be found
in my list of 'doings' over the years
and here.
My work includes cross-disciplinary research on the analysis of evolvable
virtual-machine information-processing architectures for human-like
minds (avoiding the objections to most varieties of "functionalism").
In particular I try to show that many of our ordinary mental concepts,
e.g. "consciousness", "emotion", "belief", "desire", "intention",
"intelligence", and other cognitive and affective concepts are partly
confused `cluster concepts' which can be clarified and refined (not
eliminated) if we think of them as implicitly referring to an
architecture which supports a variety of types of states and processes.
Getting clear about ways of extending and improving the concepts, and
avoiding endless disputes at cross purposes, requires investigating
architectures capable of explaining many kinds of normal adult human
capabilities and comparing them with other architectures, e.g. for
new-born infants, many kinds of animals, and many possible kinds of
robots and software agents. This leads to an analysis of
neighbourhoods in `design space' and `niche space' and ways in which
the evolution of human minds (and other animal minds) can be analysed in
terms of interacting trajectories in these two spaces.
In particular there are many more detailed ideas, some of which are
being developed within the
CoSy
Project.
Papers expounding these ideas are also being produced within the
Cognition and Affect Project. Our software
tools supporting our research and teaching are mentioned in the next
section.
This directory
contains the bulk of my publications, along with
related publications by colleagues and
students.
Recently, however, I have also started putting things in
the CoSy papers directory.
A three year project funded by the Leverhulme foundation on
Evolvable virtual information processing architectures for
human-like minds started in October 1999, and ended
in 2003.
Details are available
at
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/lev/.
The 4 year EC-funded CoSy project started in September 2004
Details are available at
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cosy/
Free open source goodies
I use Linux for all my work.
There's a growing variety of free versions suited to different kinds of
individuals and organisations with different needs, for commercial users
there are commercial versions with professional support available. Two
myths spread by vendors of proprietary software about
free software are the myth that it cannot be used to make money,
refuted by the success of
Red Hat and
others, and the myth that the
licensing is a source of serious problems.
For a free open source alternative to Microsoft Office see
http://www.openoffice.org, and
instead of Internet Explorer and MS mail systems, try Mozilla
http://www.mozilla.org/, which has
improved beyond all recognition in the last few years, for browsing,
email, composing html pages, etc., or try
firefox
whose popularity as a fast, extendable, secure browser has grown at an
amazing rate.
The associated free open source email client is
thunderbird. For a
free open source calendar tool try
Mozilla calendar or sunbird.
Actually I don't use either the proprietary or the open source WYSIWYG
tools when preparing my quirky slide presentations, for reasons
explained
here.
Chinese Halloween with Intel and Linux: Is this True?
POPLOG AND SIMAGENT TOOLKIT
The Poplog system used for our teaching and research used to be an
expensive commercial product, but is now available free of charge, along
with many utilities, teaching packages and our SimAgent toolkit.
This page
provides links to various newspaper and journal reports on our work
(e.g. on how machines can have emotions) and some which were broadcast
on radio or television.
EVENTS AT INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONF ON AI (IJCAI):
1971, 1981, 1985, 1995, 2001, 2005
Following on from discussions at a
CPHC
conference in Manchester in 2001 on whether
there should be a UK strategy for research in CS and related disciplines
I wrote a draft paper outlining five different types of research
goals requiring different (but overlapping) evaluation criteria. It is
in this file, including comments and modifications from others:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/cs-research.html
Comments and criticisms welcome.
WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?
In June 1998 I was involved in a conference for careers advisers in UK
schools, talking about what AI is. The notes I prepared for attendees
are available at:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/aiforschools.html
This includes an attempt to explain what Artificial Intelligence is
(both its scientific and its engineering aspects) and also a list of
UK universities at which I believe it is possible to obtain a degree in
AI or Cognitive Science. It will be updated from time to time.
I was on a panel set up by the Quality Assurance Agency for UK
Universities, to produce a "benchmarking" document to guide assessors of
university degrees in computing. I produced a document attempting to
characterise AI for that panel. It can be found here:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/courses/ai.html
A major source of information about AI is provided at the web site of
the American Association for Artificial Intelligence
www.aaai.org/aitopics.
See also the survey:
"AI's greatest trends and controversies", edited by Haym Hirsh
amd Marti A. Hearst, in
IEEE Intelligent Systems and their applications,
Jan/Feb 2000 pp 8--17,
available online at
http://www.computer.org/intelligent/ex2000/pdf/x1008.pdf
The Natural Computation
group in this School has a home page, concerned with various kinds of
mainly biologically inspired techniques.
Ben Sloman (1967 - 2002),
photographed here in 1997
died of cancer on 2nd February 2002 shortly after moving from HP
Research Labs to help start up
Elixent, his
most important achievement.
A tribute to him used to be on the Elixent web site. The
web site has disappeared since Elixent was bought by
Matsushita Electric (Panasonic). Brian Williams kindly drew my
attention to an archived version
here.
This work, and everything else on my website, is licensed under a
Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
If you use or comment on my ideas please include a URL if possible, so
that readers can see the original, or the latest version.
This file is maintained by
Aaron Sloman
Email: A.Sloman AT bham.ac.uk
Note to advertisers: please do not send me copies of your bulk unsolicited
email, including junk mail advertising sites offering free sex and pornography,
financial offers (bogus or otherwise), health treatments (bogus or otherwise),
special offers of food, vacations, computing equipment, conferences all over the
world totally unrelated to my work, or anything else. You are wasting your time
if you do. As a matter of principle, I NEVER buy anything advertised by bulk
unsolicited email, and I report spammers to service providers.
Here are some
anti-spam sites.
http://www.cauce.org/
http://spam.abuse.net/spam/
Reading Email Headers (tutorial) FAQ and
tutorial on spam
![[Picture 2020]](pics/aaron-sloman-2020.jpg)
Oct 2020
Drawing
by
Vadim Kulikov
at a Summer School in
Edinburgh, August 2015.
Creative Commons License
May no longer be valid after recent changes. Will try to fix when I get
time.)
