Computational Formalisms and Phenomenology
Trackchair
- Igor Aleksander
Abstract
Phenomenology is a philosophy based on the way the world seems rather than the ontological position of what there is in reality and how we know it. Founded in the philosophy of Brentano, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology became a starting point for philosophy in the first half of the 20th Century. Currently, phenomenology is the study of systems K which have a ’point of view’ in non-symbolic and non-linguistic representations of the way the world seems and how system K seems within this world.
Most current formal methods in computation relate to philosophy through logic that attempts to explore computable truths of the way things are in the world - that is, ontology. However, most of the critiques of the last 50 years of AI (e.g. Dreyfus, Weizenbaum and Searle) are based on the lack of phenomenology in computational models (no sense of ’self’, no sense of ’intentionality’). However, things are changing, and computer scientists are beginning to ask what would it be to for computational systems to work in a phenomenological way [e.g. Aleksander & Morton (2007), Chrisley & Parthmore (2007)]. In other words, formalizations are appearing where the state of a system is represented by a depiction of the state of the world.
In this track, we invite contributions both for and against the phenomenological approach. However a wide range of contributions will be considered. We suggest a few topics, but will consider the widest possible set of approaches.
- Historical views of phenomenology,
- The phenomenology of perception,
- Phenomenology as seen by specific philosophers,
- Depictive systems,
- Representations of self and self in a world,
- Phenomenology in machine consciousness,
- Phenomenal and Access consciousness,
- Non conceptual content of experience,
- Phenomenology as a virtual phenomenon,
- What is grounding? The dangers of ungrounded representations,
- The future of phenomenology in computation.
Igor Aleksander, Helen Morton: Phenomenology and digital neural architectures. Neural Networks 20(9): 932-937 (2007) Chrisley, R. and Parthemore, J. (2007), ’Synthetic Phenomenology: Exploiting Embodiment to Specify the Non-Conceptual Content of Visual Experience’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 14(7), pp. 44-58.