Engineering For Conceptual Change: The Enactive Torch

On November 11th, 2008, I gave a talk at the Royal Academy of Engineering as a part of the 2008 Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering. In the talk, entitled "Engineering For Conceptual Change: The Enactive Torch", I presented work done with Tom Froese at Sussex and Adam Spiers at Bristol.

Abstract: In the Philosophy and Engineering community, there is general agreement that interaction between the two fields can be mutually beneficial. However, there are distinctive ways in which engineering can play a crucial role in assisting the particular case of philosophy of mind, especially concerning our understanding of conscious experience and perception. The reciprocal design/use cycle of certain kinds of experience-augmenting technologies can facilitate the kind of conceptual advance that is necessary for progress toward a scientific account of consciousness, a kind of advance that is not possible to induce, it is argued, through traditional discursive, rhetorical and argumentative means. We present an example of engineering activity that plays this crucial role in informing philosophical research in the PAICS group at the University of Sussex: the design and use of a novel sensory substitution device (the Enactive Torch) as a means of inducing in the user new philosophical concepts of perceptual experience.

Media:

• PodSlides: iPod-ready video (.mp4; 23.6 MB; 22 min 38 sec)
  
• Audio (.mp3; 5.3 MB; 22 min 31 sec)
  
• PowerPoint file (.ppt; 1 MB)
  
• Extended abstract (.pdf; 496 kB)
  

Interactive Empiricism: The Philosopher in the Machine

On July 11th, 2007, I gave an invited lecture as part of a Royal Academy of Engineering seminar entitled: "AI and IT: Where Philosophy and Engineering Meet", itself a part of their Philosophy of Engineering series. I elaborated on ideas that I have only hinted at before in print, most notably at the end of the paper "Embodied Artificial Intelligence" (can't provide a link to it here or it will screw up my feed - ugh).

Abstract: Although an understanding of the importance of engineering for philosophy can be traced back at least as far as Giambattista Vico's slogan "Verum Ipsum Factum" ("what is made is what is true"), the landmark elaboration of this understanding in the context of artificial intelligence (AI) is Aaron Sloman's The Computer Revolution in Philosophy. Using the key findings of that work as a foundation, I will argue that in the field of AI, the mutual benefits of philosophy and engineering extend well beyond the general salutary interdependence of theory and practice. Interactive empiricism will be introduced as the claim that key breakthroughs in both building and philosophically understanding consciousness will result from the theorist/philosopher being an integrated causal component of the system being designed. Recent work in AI will be used to support this claim.

As it happens, I didn't mention Sloman's work in the talk at all, and barely mentioned Vico.

Pictured, from left to right: Igor Aleksander, Wendy Hall, Ron Chrisley, Nigel Shadbolt.

Media:

• PodSlides: iPod-ready video (.mp4; 26.7 MB; 34 min 04 sec)
  
• Audio (.mp3; 8.1 MB; 34 min 03 sec)
  
• PowerPoint file (.ppt; 2.0 MB)
  
• Flyer describing the seminar (.pdf; 136 kB)
  

New computationalism

This lecture, given at the University of Skövde on October 19th, 2006, is an extended version of one I gave in Laval in May ("In defense of transparent computationalism"). The main additions are examples of how the transparent reading of computationalism can save it from some standard anti-computationalist arguments (Gödelian, externalist, dynamical, Chinese room), and mention of the work of Bill Bigge at Sussex as an illustration of how Strong AI might be possible, even if computationalism is false.

I botched an example in the talk, but rectified matters during discussion. The question I meant to ask was "Is the nth sitting-down person's answer to this question not "yes"?", where the only permitted responses are "yes" and not answering. As a standing up person, I can answer this question correctly for all n, while no sitting-down person can (they must not answer when considering their own case).

Media:

• PodSlides: iPod-ready video (.mp4; 36.5 MB; 43 min 21 sec)
  
• Audio (.mp3; 10.0 MB; 43 min 21 sec)
  
• PowerPoint file (.ppt; 2.1 MB)
  

"After Philosophy": Introduction (part 2)

See the description of Part 1.

Media:

• PodSlides: iPod-ready video (.mp4; 43.7 MB; 31 min 08 sec)
  
• Audio (.mp3; 7.2 MB; 31 min 03 sec)
  
• PowerPoint file (.ppt; 72 KB)
  

"After Philosophy": Introduction (part 1)

The first e* post of the new academic year is a first in another sense. Previously, all my postings here have been research lectures, about my own work. This post is of a lecture I gave on October 17th, 2006 as part of a Theoretical Philosophy course on the pioneering Consciousness Studies Program at the University of Skövde, Sweden. That is, it is a teaching lecture (that I have been giving for a few years), aimed at third-year undergraduate students on a course primarily on Modern European (read "Continental") Philosophy. As such, it is not primarily my own work. However, given my rather skewed and limited knowledge of this area, proper scholars of this kind of philosophy will probably see more of me in this lecture than they see of the work of Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Habermas, Ricoeur, etc.

The lecture is almost entirely based on the Introduction chapter of After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, edited by Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy, and so they deserve credit for most of the ideas presented. My contributions consist primarily in giving examples, and an extended, perhaps laboured, Bernstein-influenced musicological metaphor, that can be summarized in the slogan: "Kant is the Mahler of Philosophy".

This lecture makes poor use of the PodSlide format, going through only 6 slides in 40 minutes. It is actually only the first part of the lecture; part two, which is shorter, will be posted soon.

Media:

• PodSlides: iPod-ready video (.mp4; 67.1 MB; 40 min 17 sec)
  
• Audio (.mp3; 9.3 MB; 40 min 12 sec)
  
• PowerPoint file (.ppt; 72 KB)
  

Epistemic blindspot sets: A resolution of Sorensen's strengthened paradox of the surprise examination

I am not officially a member of the Department of Philosophy at Sussex (I'm in the Department of Informatics and am the Director of COGS), so the fact that I was invited to speak at the Philosophy Department's Away Day on June 13th is evidence of the fact that the "HUMS Philosophers" and "COGS Philosophers" at Sussex maintain a good working relationship. I didn't want to talk on a very COGSy topic, so I chose to speak on what I take to be a solution to a paradox that Sorensen formulated in 1986. Sorensen presented it as a strengthened version of the paradox of the surprise examination, and claimed that neither his solution, nor any other purported solution to the usual version of that paradox, solves the strengthened version. The strengthened version is a generalisation of Kavka's toxin puzzle to multiple instances of the cycle of offer-intention-consumption of the toxin. My solution is to take Sorensen's notion of an epistemic blindspot and generalise it to the case of an epistemic blindspot set. I then show that the premises and conclusion of the reasoning of the subject of Sorensen's paradox form an epistemic blindspot set, which implies that that reasoning is not epistemically consistent, and therefore cannot confer knowledge, thus resolving the paradox.

Unfortunately, the audio recording levels were too high, so there is a lot of distortion; you may find this to be too irritating for the podcast to be listenable. Also, instead of a PowerPoint file of slides, there is a two-page PDF handout.

References:

• R. A. Sorensen, A strengthened prediction paradox, Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1986), 504-513.
  
• R. A. Sorensen, Conditional blindspots and the knowledge squeeze: a solution to the prediction paradox, Australasian J. Phil. 62 (1984), 126-135.
  

Media:

• PodSlides:iPod-ready video (.mp4; 31.2 MB; 24 min 14 sec)
  
• audio (.mp3; 11.1 MB; 24 min 13 sec)
  
• handout (.pdf; 60 KB)
  

Machine models of consciousness: An ASSC tutorial (part 1)

Last Friday (June 23rd), as part of the 10th meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in Oxford, Igor Aleksander, Murray Shanhan and I jointly offered a tutorial on machine consciousness. I started with a discussion of general philosophical issues, the approach of Aaron Sloman and myself, and Pentti Hakonen's model. Igor Aleksander followed with a description of his axiomatic approach, a demo of his system in action, and a quick survey of the work Franklin and Baars, and Krichmar and Edelman. Murray Shanahan took the third hour with a description of his own approach, showing how it unifies the Global Workspace approach of Baars with the Simulation Hypothesis approach of Cotterill and Hesslow. He also described Holland's approach, showing the latest videos of his spooky robot Cronos.

Some general information about the tutorial can be found at http://www.assc10.org.uk/workshops.html#A1.

Media:

• PodSlides:iPod-ready video (.mp4; 40.5 MB; 47 min 25 sec)
  
• audio (.mp3; 21.7 MB; 47 min 26 sec)
  
• Powerpoint file (.ppt; 280 KB)
  
• "Virtual Machines and Consciousness" (.pdf; 232 KB), a paper by Aaron Sloman and myself from the Journal of Consciousness Studies, that is the basis of the second part of my presentation.