Steve Torrance - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Steve Torrance

for Computing and Philosophy) merged their annual symposia/conferences to form the AISB/IACAP Wor... more for Computing and Philosophy) merged their annual symposia/conferences to form the AISB/IACAP World Congress. The congress took place 2–6 July 2012 at the University of Birmingham, UK. The Congress was inspired by a desire to honour Alan Turing, and by the broad and deep significance of Turing’s work to AI, the philosophical ramifications of computing, and philosophy and computing more generally. The Congress was one of the events forming the Alan Turing Year. The Congress consisted mainly of a number of collocated Symposia on specific research areas, together with six invited Plenary Talks. All papers other than the Plenaries were given within Symposia. This format is perfect for encouraging new dialogue and collaboration both within and between research areas. This volume forms the proceedings of one of the component symposia. We are most grateful to the organizers of the Symposium for their hard work in creating it, attracting papers, doing the necessary reviewing, defining an ex...

Should we be thinking of extending the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights to include future... more Should we be thinking of extending the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights to include future humanoid robots? And should any such list of rights be accompanied by a list of duties incumbent on such robots (including, of course, their duty to respect human ...

Metascience, Mar 1, 1996

School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences Cognitive Science (BS) Cognitive Science is the study of ... more School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences Cognitive Science (BS) Cognitive Science is the study of complex information processing in humans and machines and includes the multidisciplinary study of biological and artificial systems. Important components of cognitive science include areas of research such as: cognitive-neuroscience, brain-imaging studies of perceptual and cognitive processing, situated cognition, Human-Computer-Interactions (HCI), computational modeling, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The field of cognitive science draws from diverse approaches to understanding complex information processing, including research from experimental psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, mathematics, and engineering. The Cognitive Science program in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at UT Dallas consists of three concentration areas: (1) Psychology/HCI, (2) Cognitive-Neuroscience, and (3) AI/Computational Modeling. Cognitive Science Majors select the majority of their upper-division coursework from 2 of these 3 concentration areas in order to generate multidisciplinary areas of focus. In addition to providing a sound preparation for graduate work in Cognitive Science and related areas, the Cognitive Science major is an ideal choice for students pursuing careers that combine interests in neuroscience, cognition, mathematics, and computer science. There are exciting career prospects in both industry and academics for the Cognitive Science major. Cognitive-Neuroscience Careers. Students whose focus area is cognitive-neuroscience will be well prepared for the pursuit of graduate degrees and careers associated with: medicine, clinical neuropsychology, brain-imaging technology, intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring, and evaluation of bionic/prosthetic technology (e.g., cochlear implants and artificial limbs). Students interested in Cognitive-Neuroscience career opportunities typically choose their core coursework from both the specialization areas of Psychology/HCI and Neuroscience.

Ablex Pub. Corp. eBooks, 1992

This volume brings together a collection of papers covering a wide range of topics in computer an... more This volume brings together a collection of papers covering a wide range of topics in computer and cognitive science. Topics included are: the foundational relevance of logic to computer science, with particular reference to tense logic, constructive logic, and Horn clause logic; logic as the theoretical underpinnings of the engineering discipline of expert systems; a discussion of the evolution of computational linguistics into functionally distinct task levels; and current issues in the implementation of speech act theory. There are contributions to current debates within cognitive science, including PDP-based models of cognition; explanation-based learning as applied to game playing strategies; and the significance of the "4-card" selection task for the mental reality of logic.

This paper examines some important philosophical issues arising out of artificial intelligence, a... more This paper examines some important philosophical issues arising out of artificial intelligence, as presented in two major texts: Dennett's ‘Brainstorms: philosophical essays on mind and psychology’ and Hofstadter's ‘Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid’. Central to Dennett's writing is the notion of an intentional system—an abstract, mentalistic specification which may be applied to humans and computational systems alike in order to predict and explain their behaviour. Reasons for doubting that such an account can be applied to all kinds of mental states are reviewed. Hofstadter's work has many themes. A central one is Godel's proof of the incompleteness of mathematical systems. It has been claimed that Godel's proof shows that the human mind can never be encapsulated in any one given formal system and that therefore pure computational accounts of cognition must fail. This criticism is rebutted.

Philosophy Now, Aug 14, 2009

AI & society, Mar 24, 2007

Abstract In what ways should we include future humanoid robots, and other kinds of artificial age... more Abstract In what ways should we include future humanoid robots, and other kinds of artificial agents, in our moral universe? We consider the Organic view, which maintains that artificial humanoid agents, based on current computational technol-ogies, could not count as full-blooded ...

Constructivist Foundations, 2016

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2007

Correspondence: Centre for Research in Cognitive Science, Department of Infor-matics, University ... more Correspondence: Centre for Research in Cognitive Science, Department of Infor-matics, University of Sussex, Falmer, Sussex BN1 9QH. stevet@sussex.ac.uk ... [1] This of course echoes Searle's famous (1980) distinction between 'weak' and 'strong' AI. ... Copyright (c) Imprint ...

While the recent special issue of JCS on machine consciousness (Volume

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2007

This issue presents a second group of papers on the theme of "Enactive Experience" (the first was... more This issue presents a second group of papers on the theme of "Enactive Experience" (the first was published in Volume 4, no. 4, December 2005). All the contributors to these two issues have (with one exception) been contributors to one or more of a series of meetings on Enaction and Consciousness, which were held in the UK between 2003 and 2005. These meetings were sponsored by a Research Seminars award made by British Psychological Society (BPS) to Steve Torrance, Max Velmans and John Pickering. Meetings took place in Oxford (summer 2003), in Brighton (spring 2004) and London (summer 2005). The broad goal of this series of meetings was to explore the ways in which the enactive framework of Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson et al. could enrich our understanding of consciousness, particularly perceptual awareness and intersubjectivity. As editor of the two themed issues, I would like to thank the BPS for their support for the original meetings, and colleagues at the University of Sussex and elsewhere for help in the compilation of this second volume. In particular I thank Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Tom Froese and Marek McGann for their help with the present issue. I would also like to express my warm gratitude to Shaun Gallagher, for his editorial support.

Retour page d'accueil Chercher, sur, Tous les supports. Retour page d'accueil, Plus de ... more Retour page d'accueil Chercher, sur, Tous les supports. Retour page d'accueil, Plus de 1.622.000 de titres à notre catalogue ! Notice. ...

Artificial intelligence for society, 1986

... Author, Steve Torrance, Univ. of Sussex, Brighton, UK. Publisher, John Wiley & Sons, ... more ... Author, Steve Torrance, Univ. of Sussex, Brighton, UK. Publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York, NY, USA. ... General Terms: Human Factors. Collaborative Colleagues: Steve Torrance: colleagues. The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. ...

What light do current developments in computing shed on philosophical and psychological understan... more What light do current developments in computing shed on philosophical and psychological understanding of the human mind. A group of authors from philosophy, artificial intelligence, linguistics, psychology, and computing provide answers in one of the first texts to bring together a ...

Robots and non-embodied artificial agents are playing increasingly prominent roles in human socie... more Robots and non-embodied artificial agents are playing increasingly prominent roles in human society. One group of application areas concerns medical treatment and care and personal and social support: treatment and care for people in hospitals, care homes and private houses and other domestic contexts – areas where artificial agents will be doing the jobs of people working in close proximity to many individuals, often the most vulnerable members of the population. Artificial agents in these applications would be fulfilling functions that routinely require interactive and affective sensitivity in human professionals, practical knowledge of many different kinds, and general ethical insight, autonomy and responsibility. Such agents, and associated smart technologies would be deployed to provide support for people who are in fragile states of health, or who have physical or cognitive disabilities of various kinds, who are very young or very old, etc. The professions involved have well-d...

AI & SOCIETY

Improvisation is ubiquitous in life. It deserves, we suggest, to occupy a more central role in co... more Improvisation is ubiquitous in life. It deserves, we suggest, to occupy a more central role in cognitive science. In the current paper, we take the case of jazz improvisation as a rich model domain from which to explore the nature of improvisation and expertise more generally. We explore the activity of the jazz improviser against the theoretical backdrop of Dreyfus's account of expertise as well as of enactivist and 4E accounts of cognition and action. We argue that enactivist and 4E accounts provide a rich source of insights on improvisation that go beyond Dreyfus's notion of skilled coping, for example, through the central enactivist notion of "sense-making". At the same time, however, we see improvisation also as suggesting an extension of enactivist theory. We see expert improvisers, in music and in life, as walking on a path of open-ended expansion of their mindful experiential relation with their doing. At the heart of an improviser's expertise (and of day-today living), we propose, lies a form of "higher-level inner sense-making" that spontaneously creates novel forms of agentive goal-directedness in the moment. Our account thus supplants Dreyfus's idea of the ego-less absorbed expert by that of a mindful (i.e. present in the moment) improviser enacting spontaneous expressions of herself, in music or in life.

Readers of this Journal are used to considering questions to do with consciousness and subjectivi... more Readers of this Journal are used to considering questions to do with consciousness and subjectivity in humans and other natural creatures. However it is instructive to devote some attention to the realm of artificial subjectivity-as a bare possibility, even if not as a likelihood in the near future. Following the first special issue of this journal on the topic of machine consciousness (Holland, 2003) there has been a lot of further interest in the topic: a topic which covers, not just the development of consciousness and subjectivity in machines, but also the use of machine models-computer software, robots, and so onto help shed light on consciousness as a wider phenomenon. The latter pursuit seems a valuable extension to the use of computer models more broadly in cognitive science. The former goal-hubristic and ethically dubious as some might see it-raises intriguing theoretical and philosophical puzzles. The two research strands, although logically separable, are harder to disentangle in practice, as will be seen in the contributions below. We will not rehearse here the early history of the field of machine consciousness (MC) as it is ably articulated both by Holland in his introduction to the 2003 JCS volume, and in a paper in this issue co-authored by one of its founding practitioners (Aleksander & Morton). Suffice it to say that most of the papers included here were first presented at one of two recent two-day workshops on Machine Consciousness that were held in Hatfield (Chrisley et al., 2005), and Bristol (Clowes et al., 2006). With one exception, all the principal authors here spoke at one or both of these workshops, both of which were sessions in annual conventions of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB).