Understanding causation: the practicalities
Speaker:
Jackie Chappell
Abstract:
This presentation will cover two main themes, building on the
philosophical distinction between Humean and Kantian causation
presented in Aaron Sloman's talk. First, how did evolution equip
organisms to interact with and make sense of the dynamic, noisy,
complex and variable world outside their bodies? I will argue that
evolution has produced a range of strategies, from mostly 'pre-
configured' at one extreme to 'meta-configured' at the other,
depending on the requirements and constraints imposed by the
organism's life history, ontogeny and so on. Second, if evolution has
produced a range of strategies for coping with causation, how can we
recognise them? Which species should we be focussing on if we are
interested in studying a meta-configured competences or a Kantian
understanding of causation? How can we provide empirical evidence to
distinguish between the different models of the understanding of
causation in non-human animals or pre-linguistic humans (or for that
matter, adult, linguistic humans)? These are deep and difficult
questions to answer, and I doubt that I will be able to draw any
definitive conclusions, but I hope to stimulate discussion and point
out a number of promising directions for research.
Altricial self-organising information-processing systems
Proceedings IJCAI'05
Aaron Sloman and Jackie Chappell
Natural and artificial meta-configured altricial information-processing systems
To appear in Int Journ for Unconventional Computing
Jackie Chappell and Aaron Sloman
Computational Cognitive Epigenetics
To appear in Behavioral and Brain Sciences
(Commentary on Jablonka and Lamb: Evolution in four dimension)
Aaron Sloman and Jackie Chappell
