[RECORDED] Talk by Prof. Aaron Sloman - Recently hatched ideas about hatching and intelligence: Using very low energy physics and chemistry at "normal" temperatures in egg-laying vertebrates
Note from the speaker:
In a memory lapse during the talk, the speaker mentioned the date of Eddington's observation of the solar eclipse as 2021. It actually occurred in 1919.
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Title: Recently hatched ideas about hatching and intelligence: Using very low energy physics and chemistry at "normal" temperatures in egg-laying vertebrates
Speaker: Prof. Aaron Sloman, Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, School of Computer Science University of Birmingham, UK
Abstract: This talk is an attempt to explain how a collection of apparently unrelated topics have deep connections that are not widely recognized. The separate topics address problems in philosophy of mind, philosophy of mathematics, biological evolution, developmental biology and psychology, and various aspects of biochemistry that are relevant to biological evolution, reproduction, development, forms of spatial cognition used in reproductive processes in many species, and in ancient discoveries by humans, in geometry and topology. As a result, philosophy of mathematics takes on a new life as part of philosophy of biology.
About Speaker: Prof Sloman is Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at Birmingham University, working on artificial intelligence and cognitive science. He has published widely on philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. After a degree in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Cape Town he went to Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship and received a Phil in philosophy on Kantian thoughts on the nature of mathematical knowledge as non- empirical and non-analytic ('Knowing and Understanding"). Having taught at Universities of Hull, he then set up the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the Univ of Sussex when he published the influential "The Computer Revolution in Philosophy. Philosophy science and models of mind" among several other papers on philosophy and Al. He has devoted a lot of his efforts into developing new kinds of teaching materials for students learning Al and cognitive science. In 1991, he took up a research chair in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, where he started and continues a cognition and affect project. He is a Fellow of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behavior and European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence. 2018 he became a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. In 2020 the American Philosophical Association (APA) awarded him the K.Jon Barwise Prize "for significant and sustained contributions to areas relevant to philosophy and computing"