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Harnad (1994) Computation Is Just Interpretable Symbol Manipulation
Computation Is Just Interpretable Symbol Manipulation: Cognition Isn't http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad94.computa... Harnad, S. (1994) Computation Is Just Interpretable Symbol Manipulation: Cognition Isn't. Special Issue on "What Is Computation" Minds and Machines 4:379-390 [Also appears in French translation in "Penser l'Esprit: Des Sciences de la Cognition a une Philosophie Cognitive," V. Rialle & D. Fisette, Eds. Presses Universite de Grenoble. 1996] COMPUTATION IS JUST INTERPRETABLE SYMBOL MANIPULATION; COGNITION ISN'T Stevan Harnad Department of Psychology University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM email:[email protected] ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/ http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ gopher://gopher.princeton.edu/11/.libraries/.pujournals phone: +44 703 592582 fax: +44 703 594597 ABSTRACT: Computation is interpretable symbol manipulation. Symbols are objects that are manipulated on the basis of rules operating only on the symbols' shapes , which are arbitrary in relation to what they can be interpreted as meaning. Even if one accepts the Church/Turing Thesis that computation is unique, universal and very near omnipotent, not everything is a computer, because not everything can be given a systematic interpretation; and certainly everything can't be given every systematic interpretation. But even after computers and computation have been successfully distinguished from other kinds of things, mental states will not just be the implementations of the right symbol systems, because of the symbol grounding problem: The interpretation of a symbol system is not intrinsic to the system; it is projected onto it by the interpreter. -
Affective Sentience and Moral Protection
Rochester Institute of Technology RIT Scholar Works Articles Faculty & Staff Scholarship 1-9-2021 Affective sentience and moral protection Russell Powell Boston University Irina Mikhalevich Rochester Institute of Technology Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.rit.edu/article Recommended Citation Powell, Russell and Mikhalevich, Irina (2020) Affective sentience and moral protection. Animal Sentience 29(35). DOI: 10.51291/2377-7478.1668 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty & Staff Scholarship at RIT Scholar Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of RIT Scholar Works. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Animal Sentience 2020.397: Powell & Mikhalevich Response to Commentary on Invertebrate Minds Affective sentience and moral protection Response to Commentary on Mikhalevich & Powell on Invertebrate Minds Russell Powell Department of Philosophy, Boston University Irina Mikhalevich Department of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology Abstract: We have structured our response according to five questions arising from the commentaries: (i) What is sentience? (ii) Is sentience a necessary or sufficient condition for moral standing? (iii) What methods should guide comparative cognitive research in general, and specifically in studying invertebrates? (iv) How should we balance scientific uncertainty and moral risk? (v) What practical strategies can help reduce biases and morally dismissive attitudes toward invertebrates? Russell Powell, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Boston University, specializes in philosophical problems in evolutionary biology and bioethics. Website Irina Mikhalevich, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology, specializes in conceptual and methodological problems in comparative cognitive science and their implications for the treatment of nonhuman animals. -
The Oa-Jes Project
Vol 7, No 3 (2011)7 1 Vol 7, No 3 (2011) Table of Contents Events 1 News & Notices 2-3 Articles OPEN MINDS: An interview with members of the FinnOA working group 4-5 Turid Hedlund OPEN MINDS: An interview with Ian Watson, Bifröst University in Iceland 6-7 Solveig Thorsteinsdottir OPEN MINDS - Interviews with Lithuanian politicians and 8-14 famous researchers about Open Access Emilija Banionyte, Ausra Vaskeviciene, Gintare Tautkeviciene The Mega-journals are coming! 15-16 Jan Erik Frantsvåg Exploring Handheld Devices and Digital Learning: the iPad project 17-20 at Oslo University College Trude Eikebrokk, Bettina Grödem Knutsen, Jimi Thaule "Carrot or stick, incentives or mandates, or both" 21-24 Tania Ström We have won the argument about Open Access –now we have to 25-28 bring things together and make it work! Lars Björnshauge Events 2011:3 The 6th Munin conference 22-23 November posters, which resulted in contributions on various 2011 – Enhancing publications topics, within the issue of scientific publishing. The most important annual conference on scientific The day after the conference, Thursday 24. publishing in Norway, the Munin Conference, is November, the University of Tromsø will host a staged each year in November by the University of national open access workshop day, primarily for Tromsø Library. This year’s conference is scheduled to people working with open archives and open access take place Tuesday 22. and Wednesday 23. publishing in Norway. This may also become an November. A key theme this year is “enhancing annual event. publications”, meaning any kind of extra services surrounding the publishing of scientific articles. -
Minds Without Spines: Evolutionarily Inclusive Animal Ethics
Animal Sentience 2020.329: Mikhalevich & Powell on Invertebrate Minds Call for Commentary: Animal Sentience publishes Open Peer Commentary on all accepted target articles. Target articles are peer-reviewed. Commentaries are editorially reviewed. There are submitted commentaries as well as invited commentaries. Commentaries appear as soon as they have been reviewed, revised and accepted. Target article authors may respond to their commentaries individually or in a joint response to multiple commentaries. INSTRUCTIONS FOR COMMENTATORS Minds without spines: Evolutionarily inclusive animal ethics Irina Mikhalevich Department of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology Russell Powell Department of Philosophy, Boston University Abstract: Invertebrate animals are frequently lumped into a single category and denied welfare protections despite their considerable cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary diversity. Some ethical and policy inroads have been made for cephalopod molluscs and crustaceans, but the vast majority of arthropods, including the insects, remain excluded from moral consideration. We argue that this exclusion is unwarranted given the existing evidence. Anachronistic readings of evolution, which view invertebrates as lower in the scala naturae, continue to influence public policy and common morality. The assumption that small brains are unlikely to support cognition or sentience likewise persists, despite growing evidence that arthropods have converged on cognitive functions comparable to those found in vertebrates. The exclusion of invertebrates is also motivated by cognitive-affective biases that covertly influence moral judgment, as well as a flawed balancing of scientific uncertainty against moral risk. All these factors shape moral attitudes toward basal vertebrates too, but they are particularly acute in the arthropod context. Moral consistency dictates that the same standards of evidence and risk management that justify policy protections for vertebrates also support extending moral consideration to certain invertebrates. -
A Resonant Message: Aligning Scholar Values and Open Access Objectives in OA Policy Outreach to Faculty and Graduate Students
Please do not remove this page A Resonant Message: Aligning Scholar Values and Open Access Objectives in OA Policy Outreach to Faculty and Graduate Students Otto, Jane https://scholarship.libraries.rutgers.edu/discovery/delivery/01RUT_INST:ResearchRepository/12643424420004646?l#13643501240004646 Otto, J. (2016). A Resonant Message: Aligning Scholar Values and Open Access Objectives in OA Policy Outreach to Faculty and Graduate Students. In Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication (Vol. 4). Rutgers University. https://doi.org/10.7282/T3HT2RMZ This work is protected by copyright. You are free to use this resource, with proper attribution, for research and educational purposes. Other uses, such as reproduction or publication, may require the permission of the copyright holder. Downloaded On 2021/10/02 11:21:37 -0400 A RESONANT MESSAGE 1 A Resonant Message: Aligning Scholar Values and Open Access Objectives in OA Policy Outreach to Faculty and Graduate Students A RESONANT MESSAGE 2 Abstract INTRODUCTION. Faculty contribution to the institutional repository is a major limiting factor in the successful provision of open access to scholarship, and thus to the advancement of research productivity and progress. Many have alluded to outreach messages through studies examining faculty concerns that underlie their reluctance to contribute, but specific open access messages demonstrated to resonate most with faculty have not been discussed with sufficient granularity. Indeed, many faculty benefits and concerns are likely either unknown to the faculty themselves, or unspoken, so the literature’s record of faculty benefits and perceptions of open access remains incomplete at best. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM. At Rutgers University, we have developed a targeted message that both addresses these unspoken/unknown concerns and benefits and speaks to the promise and inevitability of open access in a changing scholarly communication landscape. -
DOING the RIGHT THING an Interview with Stevan Harnad (By
DOING THE RIGHT THING An Interview With Stevan Harnad (by Mark Bekoff, Psychology Today, January 2015) https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal-emotions/201501/doing-the-right-thing- interview-stevan-harnad MB: You’re Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences at University of Quebec in Montreal and Professor of Web Science at University of Southampton in the UK: What do you actually do? SH: I do research on how the brain learns and communicates categories. Categorization is a very general cognitive capacity. I think it covers most of cognition. It just means doing the right thing with the right kind of thing: Eat what’s edible; avoid predators; and call a spade a “spade” (because most of language is categorization too). http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/261725/ And how do you do research on how the brain learns and communicates categories? Do you study animals’ brains? No. I study how humans do it, I try to model the mechanism generating that capacity computationally, and I test for clues and correlates with brain imagery (event- related potentials). Of these three methods, the third – observing and measuring brain events – is actually the least informative. Is that just because you can’t get deep enough into the brain, and manipulate it? No, even if we could manipulate people’s brains any way we wanted, what the brain can do, as an organ, is anything and everything we can do. The brain does not wear its functioning on its sleeve, to be read off by observation and manipulation, like the heart, which just pumps blood, or the lungs, which just pump air. -
Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton, May 8, 1999
Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton, May 8, 1999 [This is a revised draft of comments on the ebiomed proposal, sent to Harold Varmus earlier.] The following are my comments on: http://www.nih.gov/welcome/director/ebiomed/ebiomed.htm This extremely welcome and important initiative is deserving of the strongest support. The following recommendations are made in the interests of strengthening the proposal by clarifying some crucial central aspects and modifying or eliminating some minor, weaker aspects. E-BIOMED: A PROPOSAL FOR ELECTRONIC PUBLICATION IN THE BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES Prologue The full potential of electronic communication has yet to be realized. The scientific community has made only sparing use thus far of the Internet as a means to publish scientific work and to distribute it widely and without significant barriers to access. This generally accurate assessment of the current failure to exploit the full potential of the Internet for scientific publication has one prominent and extremely relevant and important exception. It would be much more accurate as well as helpful to note this explicitly from the outset, as this notable exception is very likely to be the model for all the rest of the disciplines: Physics is the exception (and to some degree, mathematics). It is now both an empirical and a historical fact that well over half of the current physics (journal) literature is freely available online from the Los Alamos Archive and its 14 mirror archives worldwide, and is being used by perhaps 50,000 physicists a day. http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions It would be misleading in the extreme to describe this as "sparing use"! Instead, it should be acknowledged that this has been a revolutionary change in Physics, and if there were a way to extend it to the other sciences (and the other learned disciplines) then the full potential of electronic communication WOULD indeed be realized. -
The Symbol Grounding Problem
The Symbol Grounding Problem http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad90.sgproble... Harnad, S. (1990) The Symbol Grounding Problem. Physica D 42: 335-346. THE SYMBOL GROUNDING PROBLEM Stevan Harnad Department of Psychology Princeton University Princeton NJ 08544 [email protected] ABSTRACT: There has been much discussion recently about the scope and limits of purely symbolic models of the mind and about the proper role of connectionism in cognitive modeling. This paper describes the "symbol grounding problem": How can the semantic interpretation of a formal symbol system be made intrinsic to the system, rather than just parasitic on the meanings in our heads? How can the meanings of the meaningless symbol tokens, manipulated solely on the basis of their (arbitrary) shapes, be grounded in anything but other meaningless symbols? The problem is analogous to trying to learn Chinese from a Chinese/Chinese dictionary alone. A candidate solution is sketched: Symbolic representations must be grounded bottom-up in nonsymbolic representations of two kinds: (1) "iconic representations" , which are analogs of the proximal sensory projections of distal objects and events, and (2) "categorical representations" , which are learned and innate feature-detectors that pick out the invariant features of object and event categories from their sensory projections. Elementary symbols are the names of these object and event categories, assigned on the basis of their (nonsymbolic) categorical representations. Higher-order (3) "symbolic representations" , grounded in these elementary symbols, consist of symbol strings describing category membership relations (e.g., "An X is a Y that is Z"). Connectionism is one natural candidate for the mechanism that learns the invariant features underlying categorical representations, thereby connecting names to the proximal projections of the distal objects they stand for. -
Creating Institutional E-Print Repositories Stephen Pinfield
CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Nottingham ePrints Creating institutional e-print repositories Stephen Pinfield Published in: Serials, 15, 3, November 2002, pp. 261-264. This article aims to address three questions: • What are ‘institutional e-print repositories’? • Why create them? • How can they be created? What are institutional e-print repositories? ‘E-prints’ are electronic copies of research papers or similar research output. They might be ‘pre-prints’ (pre-refereed papers), ‘post-prints’ (post-refereed papers), conference papers, book chapters, reports, or related kinds of material. Online collections of such material are sometimes called e-print ‘archives’. The term ‘archive’ is however ambiguous. For many it implies a sophisticated system of the curation and preservation which may not necessarily be in place for e-prints. Some people therefore prefer to use the more neutral ‘repository’. E-print repositories are usually made freely available on the internet. The principle of so-called ‘open access’ is one supported by many advocates of e-prints1. The term ‘open’ in the context of e-prints does not always refer to access however. The Open Archives Initiative uses the term in a more technical way to indicate system interoperability2. The OAI has produced a protocol which allows archives to expose information about their contents on the internet in the form of structured metadata which can be automatically collected up and placed in searchable databases. Any e- print repository which is OAI-compliant can therefore be a part of an interoperable network of databases, the metadata from which can be easily searched by users. -
Stevan Harnad I Propose to Consider the Question, "Can Machines Think?"
I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/turing.html To appear in: Epstein, Robert & Peters, Grace (Eds.) The Turing Test Sourcebook: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer. Kluwer. ________________________________________________________________________ The Annotation Game: On Turing (1950) on Computing, Machinery, and Intelligence. Stevan Harnad I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" (Turing 1950) Turing starts on an equivocation. We know now that what he will go on to consider is not whether or not machines can think, but whether or not machines can do what thinkers like us can do -- and if so, how. Doing is performance capacity, empirically observable. Thinking (or cognition) is an internal state, its correlates empirically observable as neural activity (if we only knew which neural activity corresponds to thinking!) and its associated quality introspectively observable as our own mental state when we are thinking. Turing's proposal will turn out to have nothing to do with either observing neural states or introspecting mental states, but only with generating performance capacity (intelligence?) indistinguishable from that of thinkers like us. This should begin with definitions of... "machine" and "think"... [A] statistical survey such as a Gallup poll [would be] absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another... in relatively unambiguous words. 1 of 28 11/09/06 12:57 I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/turing.html "Machine" will never be adequately defined in Turing's paper, although (what will eventually be known as) the "Turing Machine," the abstract description of a computer, will be. -
Metadata for Harvesting: the Open Archives Initiative, and How to Find Things on the Web', the Electronic Library, Vol
Citation for published version: Hunter, P & Guy, M 2004, 'Metadata for Harvesting: The Open Archives Initiative, and how to find things on the Web', The Electronic Library, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 168-174. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470410533434 DOI: 10.1108/02640470410533434 Publication date: 2004 Document Version Peer reviewed version Link to publication http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/02640470410533434 University of Bath Alternative formats If you require this document in an alternative format, please contact: [email protected] General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 02. Oct. 2021 Metadata for Harvesting: the Open Archives Initiative, and how to find things on the Web. Philip Hunter and Marieke Guy. Abstract The OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting offers the prospect of resource discovery tools far beyond what is currently available to users of the Web via standard search engines. This article illustrates how existing information about available resources can be repurposed fairly easily and cheaply using standard tools. However the publishing of this information throws up a number of practical and philosophical questions which have to be addressed by projects and institutions. Keywords Open Archives Initiative, Metadata, Harvesting, Resource Discovery, ePrints, Dublin Core. -
Crowd-Sourced Peer Review: Substitute Or Supplement for the Current Outdated System?
Crowd-Sourced Peer Review: Substitute or supplement for the current outdated system? blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/08/21/crowd-sourced-peer-review-substitute-or-supplement/ 8/21/2014 The problem with peer review today is that there is so much research being produced that there are not enough experts with enough time to peer-review it all. As we look to address this problem, issues of standards and hierarchy remain unsolved. Stevan Harnad wonders whether crowd-sourced peer review could match, exceed, or come close to the benchmark of the current system. He predicts crowdsourcing will indeed be able to provide a supplement to the classical system, hopefully improving efficiency and accuracy, but not a substitute for it. If, as rumoured, Google builds a platform for depositing un-refereed research papers for “peer- reviewing” via crowd-sourcing, can this create a substitute for classical peer-review or will it merely supplement classical peer review with crowd-sourcing? In classical peer review, an expert (presumably qualified, and definitely answerable), an “action editor,” chooses experts (presumably qualified and definitely answerable), “referees,” to evaluate a submitted research paper in terms of correctness, quality, reliability, validity, originality, importance and relevance in order to determine whether it meets the standards of a journal with an established track-record for correctness, reliability, originality, quality, novelty, importance and relevance in a certain field. In each field there is usually a well-known hierarchy of journals, hence a hierarchy of peer-review standards, from the most rigorous and selective journals at the top all the way down to what is sometimes close to a vanity press at the bottom.