"And if a bird can speak, who once was a dinosaur And a dog can dream; should it be implausible That a man might supervise The construction of light?" – Adrian Belew Yesterday I gave a keynote lecture at Beyond AI 2013: Aritficial Golem Intelligence , in Pilsen, Czech Republic. As I explained at the beginning of the talk, I adopted a broadcast (many topics covered lightly), rather than my usual narrowcast (a single topic covered in depth, with arguments!), strategy. My apologies for the sound: t...
Nov 14, 2013
Making Predictive Coding More Predictive, More Enactive Ron Chrisley, Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science & Dept of Informatics, University of Sussex, UK Presented at the 16th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness Corn Exchange, Brighton, July 3rd, 16:30-18:30: Concurrent Session 2. Abstract: Predictive coding (PC) architectures (e.g., Dayan, Hinton, Neal & Zemel, 1995; Rao & Ballard, 1999) have been recently proposed to explain various aspe...
Jul 04, 2012
IULM University, Milan, hosted a European Science Foundation Exploratory Workshop on "Neuroesthetics: When art and the brain collide" on the 24th and 25th of September, 2009. In my invited lecture, I departed significantly from my advertised title, instead using my time to introduce the audience to five strands in my research related to the intersection of neuroscience/cognitive science and art/creativity: Embodied creativity Enactive models of experience Synthetic phenomenology Interactive empi...
Oct 24, 2010
Helena de Preester using the Enactive Torch On Thursday the 26th and Friday the 27th of March, 2009, the e-sense project hosted the Key Issues in Sensory Augmentation Workshop at the University of Sussex. I was invited to speak at the workshop; my position statement (included below) serves as a good (if long) summary of my talk. Media: PodSlides: iPod-ready video (.mp4; 19.3 MB; 26 min 25 sec) Audio (.mp3; 11.7 MB; 25 min 21 sec) PowerPoint file (.ppt; 696 KB) Position statement (.pdf; 78 KB) Se...
Oct 24, 2010
As explained in the previous post, in August of 2010 I gave two lectures as part of the annual Summer School of the Swedish Graduate School in Cognitive Science (SweCog; see http://www.swecog.se/summerschool.shtml ). The previous post contains the first of these lectures; this is part two. Near the end I showed a movie as a kind of dynamical specification of the non-conceptual content of visual experience modeled by the SEER-3 robot. This movie is not included in the PodSlide file; those interes...
Sep 17, 2010
In August of 2010 I gave two lectures as part of the annual Summer School of the Swedish Graduate School in Cognitive Science (SweCog; see http://www.swecog.se/summerschool.shtml ). I was invited to speak on the topic "Cognition (or Consciousness) and Non-Conceptual Content", so I devoted the first lecture to getting clear on the nature of concepts. This allowed me to contrast conceptual content (which is, briefly: content that is articulable, recombinable, rational and deployable) with non-conc...
Sep 16, 2010
On November 13th, 2007, I gave a talk at a meeting of the Yale Divinity School Initiative in Religion, Science and Technology, entitled: "Naturalizing the Spiritual: Lessons from Cognitive Science". This recording includes introductions from both James van Pelt and Wendell Wallach, so the lecture itself doesn't start until about 6:30 into the recording. Also, I took far too long to get to the point, spending the first half of my time on a tutorial concerning the various means of naturalization (...
Apr 28, 2010
On November 11th, 2008, I gave a talk at the Royal Academy of Engineering as a part of the 2008 Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering. In the talk, entitled "Engineering For Conceptual Change: The Enactive Torch", I presented work done with Tom Froese at Sussex and Adam Spiers at Bristol. Abstract: In the Philosophy and Engineering community, there is general agreement that interaction between the two fields can be mutually beneficial. However, there are distinctive ways in which engineering ca...
Nov 12, 2008
Left to right: Igor Aleksander, Wendy Hall, Ron Chrisley, Nigel Shadbolt. Photo: unknown. On July 11th, 2007, I gave an invited lecture as part of a Royal Academy of Engineering seminar entitled: "AI and IT: Where Philosophy and Engineering Meet", itself a part of their Philosophy of Engineering series. I elaborated on ideas that I have only hinted at before in print, most notably at the end of the paper "Embodied Artificial Intelligence" (can't provide a link to it here or it will screw up my f...
Aug 06, 2007
This lecture, given at the University of Skövde on October 19th, 2006, is an extended version of one I gave in Laval in May ( "In defense of transparent computationalism" ). The main additions are examples of how the transparent reading of computationalism can save it from some standard anti-computationalist arguments (Gödelian, externalist, dynamical, Chinese room), and mention of the work of Bill Bigge at Sussex as an illustration of how Strong AI might be possible, even if computationalism is...
Nov 05, 2006
See the description of Part 1 . Media: PodSlides: iPod-ready video (.mp4; 43.7 MB; 31 min 08 sec) Audio (.mp3; 7.2 MB; 31 min 03 sec) PowerPoint file (.ppt; 72 KB)...
Oct 18, 2006
The first e* post of the new academic year is a first in another sense. Previously, all my postings here have been research lectures, about my own work. This post is of a lecture I gave on October 17th, 2006 as part of a Theoretical Philosophy course on the pioneering Consciousness Studies Program at the University of Skövde, Sweden. That is, it is a teaching lecture (that I have been giving for a few years), aimed at third-year undergraduate students on a course primarily on Modern European (re...
Oct 18, 2006
I am not officially a member of the Department of Philosophy at Sussex (I'm in the Department of Informatics and am the Director of COGS), so the fact that I was invited to speak at the Philosophy Department's Away Day on June 13th is evidence of the fact that the "HUMS Philosophers" and "COGS Philosophers" at Sussex maintain a good working relationship. I didn't want to talk on a very COGSy topic, so I chose to speak on what I take to be a solution to a paradox that Sorensen formulated in 1986....
Jul 02, 2006
Last Friday (June 23rd), as part of the 10th meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in Oxford, Igor Aleksander, Murray Shanhan and I jointly offered a tutorial on machine consciousness. I started with a discussion of general philosophical issues, the approach of Aaron Sloman and myself, and Pentti Hakonen's model. Igor Aleksander followed with a description of his axiomatic approach, a demo of his system in action, and a quick survey of the work Franklin and Baars, ...
Jun 29, 2006
A few hours ago I spoke at the second University of Sussex creativity workshop, "Evolving Views of Creativity". Speaking near the end of the day, my role was to synthesize what had been said, in aid of developing a consensus on what we at Sussex mean by creativity. For these reasons, this lecture will be of most interest to people at Sussex, but others may get something out of it as well. My main point is that creativity can be seen as the result of maintaining a fruitful tension between: Self a...
May 31, 2006
Given April 7th 2006 in Tucson at Toward a Science of Consciousness 2006 , this is really two talks in one. My attendance at the conference was made possible in part by grant OCG43170 from the British Academy; I am grateful for their support. Abstract : In a recent paper (Bishop 2002), Bishop argues against computational explanations of consciousness by confronting them with a dilemma. On a non-causal or weakly causal construal of computation, familiar arguments from Putnam and Searle reveal com...
May 23, 2006
This talk, given on May 5th 2006 in Laval, France at the International Conference on Computers and Philosophy , was originally to be based on a paper I wrote in 1999, but ended up diverging from it substantially. Abstract of the original 1999 paper: "A distinction is made between two senses of the claim “cognition is computation”. One sense, the opaque reading, takes computation to be whatever is described by our current computational theory and claims that cognition is best understood in terms ...
May 22, 2006
This is a lecture I gave at Goldsmiths College in London on May 16th 2006 as part of a Workshop on Computational Models of Creativity in the Arts . In the talk, I give the nine axioms that constitute my approach to creating systems that exhibit creativity. The axioms are: Axiom 1: If you make your robot pleasure-seeking, and make creativity pleasurable, you'll make your robot creative Axiom 2: To be a good creator, it helps to be an appreciator Axiom 3: Let the robot experience output in the rea...
May 22, 2006
