Imperfect Cognitions

This cross-disciplinary symposium on the nature and implications of human and artificial autonomy was organised by  Anastasia Christakou  and held at the Henley Business School at the University of Reading on 8th May 2019. You can find a report on the first part of the workshop here . First talk in the second half of the workshop was by Daniel Dennett  (Tufts) and Keith Frankish  (Sheffield), exploring how we can build up to consciousness and autonomy. They endorsed an "engineering approach" to solving hard philosophical problems, such as the problem of consciousness, and asked: How can we get a drone to do interesting things? For instance, recognise things? We can start by supposing that it has sensors for recognising and responding to stimuli. There will also be a hierarchy of feature detectors and a suite of controllers who will take multiple inputs and vary outputs depending on their combination and strength. When it comes to action selection and co...

This cross-disciplinary symposium on the nature and implications of human and artificial autonomy was organised by Anastasia Christakou and held at the Henley Business School at the University of Reading on 8th May 2019. Josh Bongard (University of Vermont) opened the workshop presenting his research in robotics, where he and his team challenge the Cartesian assumption that body and brain are separate by simulating first, and creating then robots that have body plans adapting to changes in morphology. Bongard also addressed important questions about AI safety and AI ethics. Based on a recent publication on Machine Behaviour in Nature , he argued that we should treat machine behaviour in the same way as we treat animal behaviour, as something that evolves. Next Emma Borg (University of Reading) presented a paper on understanding agency in other people and in ourselves. She started comparing two accounts of how we explain and predict the agency of others, behaviour-re...

Thomas Ames (pictured above) is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Missouri-St. Louis  and has interests in epistemology, agency, and disorders of selfhood. In this post, he summarizes some of his current research into what role irrational emotions may play when making rational decisions, and what that may mean for the future of artificial intelligence. Quite a bit has been written on the role of emotion on the decision-making process. Using cases of traumatic brain injuries that have led to defects in both emotion and rational decision-making, several theories with a neurological framework have been proposed about why that may be. One such prominent theory, somatic marker hypothesis ( 1 , 2 ), introduced by Antonio Damasio (University of Southern California), posits that emotions play an integral neurological role in decision-making. This is because it was found that in cases of specific brain lesions which affect patients’ emotions, their abilit...

In this post I interview Richard Pettigrew  (in the picture above), who is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, and is leading a four year project entitled “ Epistemic Utility Theory: Foundations and Applications ”, also featuring Jason Konek, Ben Levinstein, Chris Burr and Pavel Janda. Ben Levinstein left the project in February to join the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford. Jason Konek left the project in August to take up a TT post at Kansas State University. They have been replaced by Patricia Rich (PhD, Carnegie Mellon) and Greg Gandenberger (PhD, Pitt; postdoc at LMU Munich). LB: When did you first become interested in the notion of epistemic utility ? What inspired you to explore its foundations and applications as part of an ERC-funded project? RP: It all started in my Masters year, when I read Jim Joyce's fantastic paper ' A Nonpragmatic Vindication of Probabilism ' (Philosophy of Science, 1998, 65 (4):575-603). In t...