Showing posts with label Aaron Sloman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aaron Sloman. Show all posts

Artificial Intelligence - Who Is Aaron Sloman?

 




Aaron Sloman (1936–) is a renowned artificial intelligence and cognitive science philosopher.

He is a global expert in the evolution of biological information processing, an area of study that seeks to understand how animal species have acquired cognitive levels that surpass technology.

He's been debating if evolution was the first blind mathematician and whether weaver birds are actually capable of recursion in recent years (dividing a problem into parts to conquer it).

His present Meta-Morphogenesis Project is based on an idea by Alan Turing (1912–1954), who claimed that although computers could do mathematical brilliance, only brains could perform mathematical intuition.

According to Sloman, not every aspect of the cosmos, including the human brain, can be represented in a sufficiently massive digital computer because of this.

This assertion clearly contradicts digital physics, which claims that the universe may be characterized as a simulation running on a sufficiently big and fast general-purpose computer that calculates the cosmos's development.

Sloman proposes that the universe has developed its own biological building kits for creating and deriving other—different and more sophisticated—construction kits, similar to how scientists have evolved, accumulated, and applied increasingly complex mathematical knowledge via mathematics.

He refers to this concept as the Self-Informing Universe, and suggests that scientists build a multi-membrane Super-Turing machine that runs on subneural biological chemistry.

Sloman was born to Jewish Lithuanian immigrants in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

At the University of Cape Town, he got a bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Physics.

He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and earned his PhD in philosophy from Oxford University, where he defended Immanuel Kant's mathematical concepts.

He saw that artificial intelligence had promise as the way forward in philosophical understanding of the mind as a visiting scholar at Edinburgh University in the early 1970s.

He said that using Kant's recommendations as a starting point, a workable robotic toy baby could be created, which would eventually develop in intellect and become a mathematician on par with Archimedes or Zeno.

He was one of the first scholars to refute John McCarthy's claim that a computer program capable of operating intelligently in the real world must use structured, logic-based ideas.

Sloman was one of the founding members of the University of Sussex School of Cognitive and Computer Sciences.

There, he collaborated with Margaret Boden and Max Clowes to advance artificial intelligence instruction and research.

This effort resulted in the commercialization of the widely used Poplog AI teaching system.

Sloman's The Computer Revolution in Philosophy (1978) is famous for being one of the first to recognize that metaphors from the realm of computers (for example, the brain as a data storage device and thinking as a collection of tools) will dramatically alter how we think about ourselves.

The epilogue of the book contains observations on the near impossibility of AI sparking the Singularity and the likelihood of a human Society for the Liberation of Robots to address possible future brutal treatment of intelligent machines.

Sloman held the Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science chair in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham until his formal retirement in 2002.

He is a member of the Alan Turing Institute and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.


~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

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You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.



See also: 


Superintelligence; Turing, Alan.


References & Further Reading:


Sloman, Aaron. 1962. “Knowing and Understanding: Relations Between Meaning and Truth, Meaning and Necessary Truth, Meaning and Synthetic Necessary Truth.” D. Phil., Oxford University.

Sloman, Aaron. 1971. “Interactions between Philosophy and AI: The Role of Intuition and Non-Logical Reasoning in Intelligence.” Artificial Intelligence 2: 209–25.

Sloman, Aaron. 1978. The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy, Science, and Models of Mind. Terrace, Hassocks, Sussex, UK: Harvester Press.

Sloman, Aaron. 1990. “Notes on Consciousness.” AISB Quarterly 72: 8–14.

Sloman, Aaron. 2018. “Can Digital Computers Support Ancient Mathematical Conscious￾ness?” Information 9, no. 5: 111.



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