Aaron Sloman
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs
(School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK)
Below are links to our presentations at the workshop,
and related documents.
The main (but not sole) emphasis of the workshop was on tool use.
Since intelligent tool use involves understanding causation,
we were asked to start off
the workshop programme
by giving two presentations (available below) on causation with
reference to the altricial/precocial distinction. Expanded versions
of our slide presentations are below (PDF). We are joint authors of
both, though only the presenter is shown for each.
After the workshop, we extracted some of our slides to form a
separate document - item 3 below, still
incomplete.
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Aaron Sloman:
Evolution of two ways
of understanding causation:
Humean and Kantian.
(PDF),
Abstract
(HTML)
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Jackie Chappell:
Understanding causation: the practicalities
--
Screen version with hyperlinks (PDF)
--
Print version without hyperlinks (PDF)
-- Abstract
(HTML)
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Causal competences of many kinds
(Not presented at workshop)
After the workshop we separated out and expanded a part of the first
set of slides, on what might be meant by 'understanding causation',
arguing that attempting to produce a definitive operational test for
whether an animal or child does or does not understand causation is
misguided, since such understanding has several different facets
which do not necessarily all co-occur.
So there are different kinds of causal understanding with different
information-processing requirements.
An incomplete draft version is here:
Causal Competences Of Many Kinds(PDF)
NOTE: it turns out that Steven Sloman's book
Causal models: How people think about the world and its alternatives
described here
is relevant to this, especially
chapter 12.
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Some previous papers and presentations referenced
in our slides
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COSY-TR-0501: Altricial self-organising
information-processing systems
April 2005 GC7 Workshop, York
Also in
AISB Quarterly, 121, Summer 2005, pp. 5--7,
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COSY-TR-0502: The Altricial-Precocial
Spectrum for Robots
IJCAI 2005, Edinburgh.
pp 1187--1192.
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Jackie Chappell and Aaron Sloman,
(2007)
Natural and artificial meta-configured altricial
information-processing systems, in
International Journal of Unconventional Computing,
Vol 3, No 3, pp. 211--239,
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/07.html#717
(In a special issue of the journal.)
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COSY-TR-0703 (PDF and HTML):
Computational Cognitive Epigenetics
Commentary on Jablonka and Lamb: Evolution in Four
Dimensions,
to appear in
Behavioral and Brain Sciences Journal 2007
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'Ontology extension' in evolution and in development, in animals and
machines.
Presentation given in Birmingham (Oct 2006) and in Edinburgh (Dec
2006).
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Some related papers and presentations (including more recent
ones)
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https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/meta-configured-genome.html
Ongoing work on the Meta-Configured genome theory.
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http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/construction-kits.html
The theory of evolved construction-kits, produced and used by biological
evolution and its products.
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Presentations
in the context of the Cognition and Affect project
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Papers and
presentations related to the CoSy robotic project
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CoSy
Meeting of Minds Workshop, Paris 16-18 Sept 2007,
where people studying insect, primate and human cognition met and
talked with members of the CoSy team.
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Presentations
and other material provided after the Paris Workshop.
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A New Approach to Philosophy of Mathematics:
Design a young explorer, able to discover "toddler theorems"
This presentation illustrates some connections between Kant's
philosophy of mathematics and the ability of children, possibly some
other animals, and perhaps future robots to learn things about the
word empirically, then acquire an understanding that they have a
mathematical necessity and can therefore be used with confidence to
work out what to do or what will happen in novel situations.
This is also closely connected with the Kantian conception of
causation presented in our talks.
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More recent work investigates requirements for mechanisms in eggs to be able to
produce complete functioning organisms, which can not only move around, but can
also seek, find and consume food without having to learn to do so, e.g. the
newly hatched avocets in this 35 Second clip from BBC Springwatch June 2021:
https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/movies/avocets/avocet-hatchlings.mp4
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Papers and presentations on the evolution of primate
capabilities
Since the summer of 2008 we have been collaborating with
Susannah
Thorpe.
on the cognitive challenges involved in arboreal locomotion
by Sumatran orangutans. She has provided some illustrative
presentations and papers as background for the material presented
here.
Maintained by
Aaron Sloman
School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham
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