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Conclusions!

A general-purpose list of conclusions for
talks on the Meta-Morphogenesis project!

Many of the conclusions merely identify questions we need to answer
that we have not yet answered -- some of which have not even been
noticed by most researchers.

Aaron Sloman
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs

• We must abandon ideological wars (e.g. about enactive, embodied, dynamical, neural, situated, behaviour-based... etc. approaches) in AI/Cognitive Science/Robotics and cooperate more, especially in the hard task of identifying long term goals -- including scientific, engineering and philosophical goals.

• There is often talk of the 'failure' of some approach or theory combined with exhortation to switch to a new one (e.g. XXX has failed. Now join YYY). Often such exhortations are just a fad, based on ignorance of the range of unsolved problems in AI/Cognitive Science/Robotics/Linguistics/Philosophy....

  We need deeper and more comprehensive knowledge of what the problems are: what needs to be explained, what we cannot yet model, replicate, explain, or even list, e.g. huge, unnoticed gaps in our knowledge about:
  -- functions of vision (e.g. in online and offline intelligence).
  -- roles of proto-mathematical capabilities in children and other animals
  e.g. geometry, topology, ...
  -- how and why human language evolved, and what the pre-cursors were,
  -- -- Don't assume the only languages are external -- rich internal languages
  -- -- Probably came first.
  -- what varieties of affective states and processes can occur (motives, desires, pleasures, pains, hopes, fears, ambitions, regret, dismay, triumph, grief, jealousy, anger, compassion, loyalty to family, to friends, to school, to neighbours, to country, to ancestors, ... , being torn by conflict, delighted anticipation, apprehensive anticipation, anticipation full of dread...)
  -- what it is to find something funny,
  -- why and how the ability to find things funny evolved,
  -- what sorts of mechanisms make artistic enjoyment, artistic creativity, possible,
  -- which abilities develop when in children, and why.
  -- How cognition can be culture-dependent,
  -- what different species can and cannot do and why?
  ....

• We need to try more systematically to find out which animal abilities current AI/robotic/neural systems and models lack or fail to explain, and why: e.g. are the failures due to limitations of our concepts and tools, or limitations of empirical data, or limitations of our educational system...?

• We may be missing some important intermediate biological phenomena - perhaps a systematic survey of evolutionary and developmental trajectories involving information and information-processing would help. (HARD - missing data, invisible data, etc.)
  http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/meta-morphogenesis.html

• We may have to go back to the earliest forms of life on the planet, and precursors to find clues.

• We need a theory of construction kits for (... many things...) and need to understand better the kind of fundamental construction kit (FCK) provided by the physical universe - especially chemistry (Turing, 1952).
  http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/construction-kits.html

• It's clear that evolution produced a wide variety of construction kits in a wide variety of branching lineages. These must all ultimately be built from the FCK, so they are Derived Construction Kits (DCKs). We need to try to find out out or work out what sorts of DCKs have been or must have been produced by evolution, and how some of then changed the mechanisms of evolution. (Hence Meta-Morphogenesis.)

• There are both Concrete and Abstract construction kits -- the latter not produced by evolution though representations of them and instances of many of them were.

• Because products of Concrete construction kits occupy space time they can interact with one another and even form new composite construction kits that are often more tan the sum of their parts (qualitatively new phenomena).

• The existence of Construction Kits seems to be a far more realistic foundation for our semantic concepts of modality (what is and is not possible, or necessarily true) than possible world semantics. (Not discussed today.)

• Construction kits have mathematical properties, whose consequences determine what sorts of things can be built from them and what sorts cannot.

• We need to understand What sorts of construction kit support construction processes that create new sorts of construction kits that can build new machines and new kits with very different properties ... e.g. through natural selection and its products, in an on-going process: Meta-Morphogenesis.
  http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/meta-morphogenesis.html
  http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/construction-kits.html

• Could a universe composed of interacting Newtonian "point masses" support construction kits needed for life? What relevant powers do chemistry and quantum mechanisms add?

• What patterns of individual development of information-processing can occur in different species, including humans, elephants, cetaceans, crows, squirrels, octopuses, ... e.g. discovery of "toddler theorems" by young humans
  http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/toddler-theorems.html

• If, as some claim, sensory-motor morphology completely specifies and explains cognitive functions (information-processing capabilities?) how does that square with what humans born blind, deaf, blind and deaf, missing arms, missing legs, conjoined as twins, afflicted by thalidomide, with cerebral palsy, or seriously deprived by illness or injury while very young are able to achieve, e.g. Helen Keller (who lost sight and hearing very young), Alison Lapper, the artist and writer without arms, Esref Armagan, the painter born blind, Abigail and Brittany Hensel, the conjoined twins, and many others.

• A vast amount of behaviour involving information processing in humans, especially in early months and years happens out of sight, in mouths, initially controlling sucking, later used in many forms of play, exploration, manipulation of foods of various kinds, requiring different sorts of manipulation in the mouth, and increasingly after the first year or two in production of pre-cursors to speech, then speech itself, taking different forms in different cultures. (Similar points are relevant to many other animals with mouths, beaks, etc.) Theories of cognition emphasising embodiment and sensory motor morphology seem to imply that we'll never give robots human intelligence without giving them human-like mouths, lips, cheeks, tongues, mouth musculature, swallowing and breathing mechanisms, vocal mechanisms, etc.

• "Information" here is not Shannon's information, but Jane Austen's information, involving semantic contents of different kinds, especially control information.
  http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/austen-info.html

• How many varieties of information, uses of information, modes of representation of information, modes of transition of information, occur in nature; and which of them are required in intelligent machines?
  http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/09.html#905

• Mathematical structures underlie everything:
  http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/maths-foundations.html
  Why is it more useful to regard natural selection as a blind theorem prover than a blind watch-maker?

• What have we learnt about information processing systems in the last century or so that Darwin could not have known? Which of those discoveries or inventions is relevant to answering hard biological questions, e.g. questions about the nature of qualia, or the varieties of types of consciousness?

• Is it possible to discover how very complex information-processing systems work by systematically investigating and modelling the physical machinery used? Or will be first need a deeper understanding of what they are used for in living things?

• Are there related things we have not yet discovered that are relevant to answering the questions we have formulated about life, mind, intelligence, evolution, what human-made machines can do, etc.?

• What else would Alan Turing have done, if he had not died so young? Why was he so interested in chemistry?
  http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/11.html#1106d

• OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS NEED RADICAL REVISION....

Maintained by Aaron Sloman
School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham