Steve is visiting senior research fellow in the Centre for Cognitive Science (COGS) at the University of Sussex. He is also emeritus professor of cognitive science at Middlesex University, having retired from full-time teaching in 2006. His background discipline is philosophy, and his doctoral research (Oxford, 1977) was on the logical structure of moral judgment. Since the mid 1980s his main research and teaching has been in the philosophy of AI and related areas. His current research interests include artificial ethics, artificial and natural consciousness, technology ethics, and enactive approaches to cognitive science. From 2011 he has been an ethics consultant to the European Commission.
Robots and non-embodied artificial agents are playing increasingly prominent roles in human socie... more Robots and non-embodied artificial agents are playing increasingly prominent roles in human society. One group of application areas concerns medical treatment and care and personal and social support: treatment and care for people in hospitals, care homes and private houses and other domestic contexts – areas where artificial agents will be doing the jobs of people working in close proximity to many individuals, often the most vulnerable members of the population. Artificial agents in these applications would be fulfilling functions that routinely require interactive and affective sensitivity in human professionals, practical knowledge of many different kinds, and general ethical insight, autonomy and responsibility. Such agents, and associated smart technologies would be deployed to provide support for people who are in fragile states of health, or who have physical or cognitive disabilities of various kinds, who are very young or very old, etc. The professions involved have well-d...
This volume brings together a collection of papers covering a wide range of topics in computer an... more This volume brings together a collection of papers covering a wide range of topics in computer and cognitive science. Topics included are: the foundational relevance of logic to computer science, with particular reference to tense logic, constructive logic, and Horn clause logic; logic as the theoretical underpinnings of the engineering discipline of expert systems; a discussion of the evolution of computational linguistics into functionally distinct task levels; and current issues in the implementation of speech act theory. There are contributions to current debates within cognitive science, including PDP-based models of cognition; explanation-based learning as applied to game playing strategies; and the significance of the "4-card" selection task for the mental reality of logic.
Doing it and meaning it And the relationship between the two Marek McGann and Steve Torrance Cent... more Doing it and meaning it And the relationship between the two Marek McGann and Steve Torrance Centre for Research in Cognitive Science (COGS), University of Sussex/DBS School of Arts, Dublin/School of Health & Social Sciences, Middlesex University A number of related ...
This paper examines some important philosophical issues arising out of artificial intelligence, a... more This paper examines some important philosophical issues arising out of artificial intelligence, as presented in two major texts: Dennett's ‘Brainstorms: philosophical essays on mind and psychology’ and Hofstadter's ‘Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid’. Central to Dennett's writing is the notion of an intentional system—an abstract, mentalistic specification which may be applied to humans and computational systems alike in order to predict and explain their behaviour. Reasons for doubting that such an account can be applied to all kinds of mental states are reviewed. Hofstadter's work has many themes. A central one is Godel's proof of the incompleteness of mathematical systems. It has been claimed that Godel's proof shows that the human mind can never be encapsulated in any one given formal system and that therefore pure computational accounts of cognition must fail. This criticism is rebutted.
Robots and non-embodied artificial agents are playing increasingly prominent roles in human socie... more Robots and non-embodied artificial agents are playing increasingly prominent roles in human society. One group of application areas concerns medical treatment and care and personal and social support: treatment and care for people in hospitals, care homes and private houses and other domestic contexts – areas where artificial agents will be doing the jobs of people working in close proximity to many individuals, often the most vulnerable members of the population. Artificial agents in these applications would be fulfilling functions that routinely require interactive and affective sensitivity in human professionals, practical knowledge of many different kinds, and general ethical insight, autonomy and responsibility. Such agents, and associated smart technologies would be deployed to provide support for people who are in fragile states of health, or who have physical or cognitive disabilities of various kinds, who are very young or very old, etc. The professions involved have well-d...
This volume brings together a collection of papers covering a wide range of topics in computer an... more This volume brings together a collection of papers covering a wide range of topics in computer and cognitive science. Topics included are: the foundational relevance of logic to computer science, with particular reference to tense logic, constructive logic, and Horn clause logic; logic as the theoretical underpinnings of the engineering discipline of expert systems; a discussion of the evolution of computational linguistics into functionally distinct task levels; and current issues in the implementation of speech act theory. There are contributions to current debates within cognitive science, including PDP-based models of cognition; explanation-based learning as applied to game playing strategies; and the significance of the "4-card" selection task for the mental reality of logic.
Doing it and meaning it And the relationship between the two Marek McGann and Steve Torrance Cent... more Doing it and meaning it And the relationship between the two Marek McGann and Steve Torrance Centre for Research in Cognitive Science (COGS), University of Sussex/DBS School of Arts, Dublin/School of Health & Social Sciences, Middlesex University A number of related ...
This paper examines some important philosophical issues arising out of artificial intelligence, a... more This paper examines some important philosophical issues arising out of artificial intelligence, as presented in two major texts: Dennett's ‘Brainstorms: philosophical essays on mind and psychology’ and Hofstadter's ‘Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid’. Central to Dennett's writing is the notion of an intentional system—an abstract, mentalistic specification which may be applied to humans and computational systems alike in order to predict and explain their behaviour. Reasons for doubting that such an account can be applied to all kinds of mental states are reviewed. Hofstadter's work has many themes. A central one is Godel's proof of the incompleteness of mathematical systems. It has been claimed that Godel's proof shows that the human mind can never be encapsulated in any one given formal system and that therefore pure computational accounts of cognition must fail. This criticism is rebutted.
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