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INCOMPLETE MESSY FIRST DRAFT

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This is
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/sloman-twitter.html

It presents some of my Twitter postings on 8th January 2022 related to sub-topics in The Meta-Morphogenesis Project.
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/meta-morphogenesis.html
Alternative title: The Self-Informing Universe

Was Alan Turing thinking about this before he died, only two
years after publishing his 1952 paper on Morphogenesis? [*]

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

KEY QUESTION
How can a cloud of dust give birth to a planet
full of living things as diverse as life on Earth?
Including great ancient mathematicians, e.g. Euclid, Archimedes, Zeno, etc.
and highly intelligent nonhumans, e.g. squirrels, elephants, crows, ...

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TWEETS (@aaronsloman)
Posted late night 7th-8th January 2021.
To my surprise, within minutes the first two tweets caused quite a stir, so I went on adding three more, increasing depth -- triggering more responses.

Although it wasn't a major flood of responses. the number and generally favourable content mostly from people I had never met, really surprised me.
Some asked for more information and background. Below is a rapidly assembled sample of papers providing context. Many are in need of improvement.

I may add more information here about the (Turing-inspired) Meta-Morphogenesis project later.

[1] 11:27 PM 7 Jan 2022
Great engineering advances came from (mathematical) insight into structural relations, constraints and necessary consequences: not collection of statistics and computation of probabilities. They could NOT have been produced by even the most sophisticated multi-level neural nets.

[2] 11:39 PM 7 Jan 2022
Earliest great engineering advances were made by biological evolution repeatedly combining great discoveries in new ways, abstracting from details to extend generality, eg powerfully used in hugely varied ways within eggs, producing amazingly intricate machines, ready for action.

[3] 12:19 AM 8 Jan 2022
Can physicists' discoveries in large, very high energy, reactors shed any light on far more complex and intricate, highly complex, highly parallel, but extremely compact, sub-microscopic, "ordinary" temperature, assembly processes in eggs producing birds, reptiles, etc?

[4] 12:47 AM 8 Jan 2022
Earliest forms of consciousness were NOT what philosophers neuroscientists and psychologists now discuss but multiple ancient forms of self-monitoring, self-assembly, self-control, self-modification in the earliest biological organisms, gradually evolving into more complex forms.

[5] 2:43 AM 8 Jan 2022
I think the sciences of mind (including philosophy of mind) all need a major re-boot, taking into account vast tracts of biology and biochemistry that are generally ignored by philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists and AI researchers! Also most philosophers of physics!

NOTE
A later version of this document will include a lot more information about evolution of more complex forms of control that evolved at different times, including both:
(a) Different forms of control required during the construction of physical body parts in a growing embryo using internal sensors and effectors
(b) Different forms of control that evolved for producing external behaviours requiring both additional external sensors and effectors and also additional control mechanisms for building those external mechanisms.
(c) Different forms of control that require communication and collaboration between different individuals of the same species.
(d) Different forms of control for behaviours involving members of other species, including food (e.g. organisms consumed) and predators/consumers to be avoided.

A key assumption is that the processes of constructing and assembling various physiological sub-structures repeatedly required evolution of new layers of intelligence required for internal processes.

Additional requirements for internal information processing and control evolved as internal invaders of various kinds were encountered, e.g. development of an immune system and anti-biotic functions.

Implications for various aspects of consciousness on various scales will be added, including a suggestion that as the internal assembly control tasks became more complex because organisms became more complex in their physiology, and behaviours, some of the evolved mechanisms could also be deployed for sensing and controlling external objects: i.e. some forms of inner directed consciousness were later used for externally directed consciousness.

(It seems that nothing is one-way in biology.)

See also (work in progress):
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/sloman-morcom.html
Currently being revised/extended to better reflect the above new tweets and related work in progress!

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A few background papers
Some, but not all, also have PDF verions.
(Not in a significant order.)

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/meta-morphogenesis.html
Introduction overview on the Turing-inspired Meta-morphogenesis project.

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/austen-info.html
Jane Austen's concept of information -- Not Claude Shannon's

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/kant-maths.html
Key Aspects of Immanuel Kant's Philosophy of Mathematics
Ignored by most psychologists, neuroscientists and AI researchers
studying mathematical competences.

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/architecture-based-motivation.html
Architecture-based motivation (ABM)
vs
Reward-based motivation (RBM)

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/construction-kits.html
Evolved construction-kits
(Including meta-construction-kits -- for creating construction kits.)

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/movies/meta-config
Introduction to the Meta-configured genome (work with Jackie Chappell, school of Biosciences)

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/toddler-theorems.html
Toddler theorems

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/compositionality.html
Biologically Evolved Forms of Compositionality
Structural relations and constraints
vs Statistical correlations and probabilities

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/schrodinger-life.html
What is Life?
Erwin Schrödinger on the Chemical Basis of Life (1944)
Extracts and commentary (needs to be revised and extended).

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/impossible.html
Some (Possibly) New Considerations Regarding Impossible Objects
(A mish-mash of examples)

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/rubber-bands.html
IMPOSSIBLE RUBBER BANDITRY
What can't you do with rubber bands?

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/emotions-affect.html
Papers and presentations on affect, in the
Birmingham Cognition and Affect Project
started here in 1991, building on earlier work
at Sussex University.

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/creativity.html
The Creative Universe

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/chewing-test.html
The Chewing Test for Intelligence

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/kant-maths.html Key Aspects of
Immanuel Kant's Philosophy of Mathematics
Ignored by most psychologists, neuroscientists and AI researchers
studying mathematical competences.

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The above is a messy first draft collection of tasters providing background to the twitter posts at the top. I may try later to rationalise this collection.

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INSTALLED:
Installed: 8 Jan 2022
Last updated: 14 Mar 2022

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