Slide presentation on Varieties of Consciousness.
Talk 9 here:
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/misc/talks/#talk9

The slides are available in
This table of contents may be slightly out of date.
The presentations are in postscript and PDF.
Last updated: 11 Nov 2001


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CONTENTS of presentation
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1: Oxford Consciousness Society Wed 24th October 2001
   Birmingham CS/AI Seminar Thurs 8th Oct 2001

2: Some questions: Let's have a vote!

3: Advertisement

4: The Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant
    John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887)
    http://www.wvu.edu/"lawfac/jelkins/lp-2001/saxe.html
        (Several pages)

5: SUGGESTION

6: Blind men describing consciousness

7: ...continued

8: ...continued

9: Exercise for students:
Find examples in philosophical and scientific
literature of authors making those statements.

10: We need to find a way to step outside the
narrow debating arenas to get a bigger picture.

11: Revising the parable

12: Partial diagnosis (1)

13: Partial diagnosis (2)

14: Partial diagnosis (3)

15: Partial diagnosis(4)

16: Partial diagnosis (5)

17: Partial diagnosis (6)

18: Summary diagnosis

19: A golden rule for studying consciousness:

20: Instead of gazing at our internal navels

21: And more importantly

22: Of course we can use introspection

23: How can you see eyes as happy or sad?

24: Another example

25: Necker Cube and Duck-rabbit

26: Is this seeing, or only inferring?

27: Seeing mental states

28: So the experience of seeing
has hidden richness.

29: E.g. how exactly do you experience
an empty space?

30: So introspective analysis
of experience can be useful

31: Beyond introspection

32: So let's start again

33: So let's start again... continued

34: Virtual vs physical machines

35: How to think about non-physical levels in reality

36: Evolution of
information processing virtual machines

37: Organisms process information

38: Acting or selecting requires information

39: Resist the urge to ask for a definition of #information#

40: Things you can do with information

41: What an organism or machine can do with
    information depends on its architecture

42: An architecture includes

43: There's No Unique Correct Architecture

44: Intentionality and semantics

45: We need a better view of the space of possibilities

46: A simple (insect-like) architecture

47: Features of reactive organisms

48: #Consciousness# in reactive organisms

49: Give REACTIVE DEMO

50: Sometimes the ability to plan is useful

51: Give DELIBERATIVE DEMO

52: Deliberative mechanisms

53: Evolutionary pressures on perceptual and
    action mechanisms for deliberative agents

54: Multi-window perception and action

55: The pressure towards self-knowledge,
    self-evaluation and self-control

56: Later, meta-management (reflection) evolved

57: Further steps to a human-like architecture

58: More layers of abstraction in perception and action,
    and global alarm mechanisms

59: Some Implications

60: Implications continued ....

61: How to explain qualia

62: Table qualia

63: A new kind of explanation?

64: Multiple elephants

65: Families of architecture-based mental concepts

66: New questions supplant old ones

67: Biological changes are mostly discontinuous

68: Mechanisms need an architecture

69: Evolution, the great philosopher/designer

70: Towards an architecture schema

71: Superimposing the divisions:

The COGAFF Schema

72: COGAFF extended -- with ``alarm mechanisms''

73: Cogaff is a schema not an architecture:

a sort of `grammar' for architectures

74: CogAff and consciousness

75: Characterising the layers

76: Architectural change in an individual

77: An example sub-category: Omega architectures

78: Another sub-category:
Subsumption architectures (R.Brooks)

79: SUMMARY

80: Different sorts of functionalism

81: A complex, long term research programme

82: Is something missing?

83: Robots with qualia

84: Solution/Dissolution to philosophical
     puzzles about consciousness

85: It is important to distinguish two questions

86: Is something left out?

87: The causation problem: Epiphenomenalism

88: Falsifiability? Irrelevant.

89:  This talk presented only a subset of the
      concepts and theories we have been developing

90: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS