Events

Science Talk: What is consciousness?

Science Talk: What is consciousness?
Wednesday 7 December
6.30–8pm
Eastside Projects

What we think we know about consciousness has led to many philosophical and scientific problems about what it is, how it can exist in a physical universe, and how biological evolution could have produced it. But is there a unique “it” or are there many varieties of consciousness? Aaron Sloman is a philosopher and researcher on artificial intelligence and cognitive science. He will explore how some of the problems arise from conceptual confusions, and how things we have learnt in the last 60 years or so about complex information processing systems including lots of so-called interacting virtual machines can give us new conceptual tools for understand what we, and other organisms, are, what it is to be conscious, and what sorts of consciousness we can expect in future machines.

Aaron Sloman held the Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, and before that a chair with the same title at the University of Sussex. He is now working with biologist Jackie Chappell on the evolution of intelligence and is Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at Birmingham.

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/shortcv.html

http://bham.academia.edu/AaronSloman