Current issues in Computing and Philosophy (3/4)

 Part 3 – Mind and World Knowing, Thinking, and Representing  

• Formalizing the ‘No Information Without Data Representation’ Principle BY Patrick Allo  

• The Computer as Cognitive Artifact and Simulator of Worlds BY Philip Brey   
  • There are two philosophical relationships (functional and phenomenal relationships) between humans and computers that make up a cognitive device and an ambient role (91):  
    • Functional: ordinary functions of computers  
      • For example, word processor  
    • Phenomenal: way in which computers transform our experience of an interaction with our environment or world  
      • For example, video games (as video games would be a result from the computer taking on an ambient role)   

• Cognitive artifact is something which extends human cognition (AKA taking in what the human inputs into the computer and gives out data) (96) 

• The Panic Room on Synthetic Emotions BY Jordi Vallverdu, and David Casacuberta  
  • Creating a bottom up approach for an A.I. to create an emotion appropriate to the situation  
    • For example, feeling fear to detect a dangerous event and reacting to it 
  • According to classical western and eastern philosophical traditions; a quote that sums up how emotions are regarded as would be: “the heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing” (103). That quote relates to instincts, or “gut feelings” which upon motivation creates an impulse that is not based on evidence or facts to prove why the case is as it is   
    • Regardless, emotions are important because: 
      • Emotions gave rise to consciousness (104) 
      • Emotions are basic regulators of human activity…They are the basis of many peoples interaction with the world: through pain, pleasure , hunger, or fear … which act like homeostatic controls over our actions (103)   
  • How this article succeeds in showing how they are able to achieve their purpose would be to create the panic room (TPR) which has 2 stages: 
    • A computer simulation to see possibilities of an approach before creating a prototype  
    • Creation of The Panic Room (TPR) 
  • As a result, TPR (a machine in of itself) could distinguish between dangerous and innocent situations using emotions  

• Representation In Digital Systems BY Vincent C . Muller  
  • The purpose of this essay is to show how cognition can be a computational manipulation of representations (116) 
    • From my understanding Mueller is trying to explain that machines aren’t truly intelligent but because of what their able to represent can seem intelligent to us humans (120). Miller writes the level of syntactic description can be identified with the help of representational function without prompts that there is somehow a semantic or representational level in the machine the Turing machine computes but its computations mean nothing to the computer. Only we derive meaning from the symbols 
      • For example, operations over natural numbers 
  • Three types of perceptions (119):  
    • Physical 
      • For example, a rock placed on the table 
    • Syntactical 
      • For example, instructing someone to move a rock an inch to the left placed on the table 
    • Symbolic 
      • AKA a syntactical representation; For example, saying that rock represents a value of one  

• Information Knowledge and Confirmation Holism BY Steve McKinlay  

• Phenomenal Consciousness Sensory Motor Contingencies and the Constitution of Objects by Bastian Fischer and Daniel Weiller   
  • The purpose of this essay is to show how a sensory motor perspective […] gives the machine an instinctual drive to grab data as opposed to other stimuli that they might register  
  • The designer or programmer of an artificial intelligent agent should […] implement the ability of an automatic object [although] not explicitly and [additionally allow] the artificial agent to recognize the exact objects (135) 
  • The programmer shouldn’t program their biases into the machine, rather the machine should have its own free will to make decisions instead of being told on what to do  
  • The solution is for the machine to grab the measurements of what they’re seeing and giving it a random name in its own language (141) which then becomes a value of some variable in object (141)