The objective of the OSCAR Project is twofold. On the one hand, it is to construct a general theory of rational cognition. On the other hand, it is to construct an artificial rational agent (an "artilect") implementing that theory. This is a joint project in philosophy and AI.
This paper discusses the predicament of Oscar Pistorius. He is a Paralympic gold medallist who wishes to participate in the Olympics in Beijing in 2008. Following a brief introductory section, the paper discusses the arguments that could be, and have been, deployed against his participation in the Olympics, should he make the qualifying time for his chosen event (400m). The next section discusses a more hypothetical argument based upon a specific understanding of the fair opportunity rule. According to this, (...) there may be a case for allowing Pistorius to compete even if he should fail to make the official qualifying time. The final part of the paper reviews the situation at the time of writing and offers some assessment of the strategy of the IAAF in responding to it. It is argued below that the proper focus for assessment of Pistorius's eligibility to compete should not be on whether his blades lead to his having an unfair advantage over his competitors, but instead should focus on whether what he does counts as running. (shrink)
It seems fairly straightforward to describe what should and should not count as a disability into two separate and opposing categories. In this paper we will challenge this assumption and critically reflect on the narrow relations between the concepts of 'talent' and 'disability'. We further relate such matters of terminology and classification to issues of justice in what is conceived of as disability sport. Do current systems of classification do justice to the performances of disabled athletes? Is the organisation of (...) a just and fair competition similar for abled as it is for disabled sport? Two cases (of Francesco Lentini and Oscar Pistorius) will be explored to further illustrate the complexities of these questions, in particular when related to notions of normality and extraordinary performances. (shrink)
The “grand problem” of AI has always been to build artificial agents of human-level intelligence, capable of operating in environments of real-world complexity. OSCAR is a cognitive architecture for such agents, implemented in LISP. OSCAR is based on my extensive work in philosophy concerning both epistemology and rational decision making. This paper provides a detailed overview of OSCAR. The main conclusions are that such agents must be capablew of operating against a background of pervasive ignorance, because the (...) real world is too complex for them to know more than a small fraction of what is true. This is handled by giving the agent the power to reason defeasibily. The OSCAR system of defeasible reasoning is sketched. It is argued that if epistemic cognition must be defeasible, planning must also be done defeasibly, and the best way to do that is to reason defeasibly about plans. A sketch is given about how this might work. (shrink)
Oscar is going to be the first artificial person — at any rate, he is going to be the first artificial person to be built in Tucson's Philosophy Department. Oscar's creator, John Pollock, maintains that once Oscar is complete he will experience qualia, will be self-conscious, will have desires, fears, intentions, and a full range of mental states (Pollock 1989, pp. ix–x). In this paper I focus on what seems to me to be the most problematical of (...) these claims, viz., that Oscar will experience qualia. I argue that we have not been given sufficient reasons to believe this bold claim. I doubt that Oscar will enjoy qualitative conscious phenomena and I maintain that it will be like nothing to be Oscar. (shrink)
The “grand problem” of AI has always been to build artificial agents with human-like intelligence. That is the stuff of science fiction, but it is also the ultimate aspiration of AI. In retrospect, we can understand what a difficult problem this is, so since its inception AI has focused more on small manageable problems, with the hope that progress there will have useful implications for the grand problem. Now there is a resurgence of interest in tackling the grand problem head-on. (...) Perhaps AI has made enough progress on the little problems that we can fruitfully address the big problem. The objective is to build agents of human-level intelligence capable of operating in environments of real-world complexity. I will refer to these as GIAs — “generally intelligent agents”. OSCAR is a cognitive architecture for GIAs, implemented in LISP.1 OSCAR draws heavily on my work in philosophy concerning both epistemology (Pollock 1974, 1986, 1990, 1995, 1998, 2008b, 2008; Pollock and Cruz 1999; Pollock and Oved, 2005) and rational decision making (2005, 2006, 2006a). (shrink)
It seems fairly straightforward to describe what should and should not count as a disability into two separate and opposing categories. In this paper we will challenge this assumption and critically reflect on the narrow relations between the concepts of ?talent? and ?disability?. We further relate such matters of terminology and classification to issues of justice in what is conceived of as disability sport. Do current systems of classification do justice to the performances of disabled athletes? Is the organisation of (...) a just and fair competition similar for abled as it is for disabled sport? Two cases (of Francesco Lentini and Oscar Pistorius) will be explored to further illustrate the complexities of these questions, in particular when related to notions of normality and extraordinary performances. (shrink)
The objective of the OSCAR Project is twofold. On the one hand, it is to construct a general theory of rational cognition. On the other hand, it is to construct an artificial rational agent (an "artilect") implementing that theory. This is a joint project in philosophy and AI.
When moral or religious teachings have public and political effects, analysis usually focuses on the message, but attention to the manner in which the teachings are communicated is equally important in understanding their power to influence the course of events. Oscar Romero's particular style of moral discourse was remarkably effective for three reasons: First, his moral reasoning resonated with Salvadoran identity. It was intelligible within those reigning assumptions about national history and territory that could actually move a public to (...) action. Second, his moral judgments were timely. Romero sought to discern what was possible for the Salvadoran public at a given moment. Third, Romero had integrity as a public figure. He lived in such a way that his life, and especially his death, became an exemplary embodiment of the larger religious narrative that both grounded his ethics and gave meaning to the nation. (shrink)
Proceedings of the 2008 AAAI Spring Symposium on Architectures for Intelligent Theory-Based Agents. “OSCAR is a fully implemented architecture for a cognitive agent, based largely on the author’s work in philosophy concerning epistemology and practical cognition. The seminal idea is that a generally intelligent agent must be able to function in an environment in which it is ignorant of most matters of fact. The architecture incorporates a general-purpose defeasible reasoner, built on top of an efficient natural deduction reasoner for (...) first-order logic. It is based upon a detailed theory about how the various aspects of epistemic and practical cognition should interact, and many of the details are driven by theoretical results concerning defeasible reasoning.”. (shrink)
OSCAR is a fully implemented architecture for a cognitive agent, based largely on the author’s work in philosophy concerning epistemology and practical cognition. The seminal idea is that a generally intelligent agent must be able to function in an environment in which it is ignorant of most matters of fact. The architecture incorporates a general-purpose defeasible reasoner, built on top of an efficient natural deduction reasoner for first-order logic. It is based upon a detailed theory about how the various (...) aspects of epistemic and practical cognition should interact, and many of the details are driven by theoretical results concerning defeasible reasoning. The architecture is easily extensible by changing the set of inference schemes supplied to the reasoner. Existing inference schemes handle many kinds of epistemic cognition, including reasoning from perceptual input, causal reasoning and the frame problem, and reasoning defeasibly about probabilities. Work is underway to implement a system of defeasible decisiontheoretic planning. (shrink)
Resenha do livro de Bauchwitz, Oscar Federico. A caminho do silêncio: a filosofia de Escoto Eriúgena . Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 2003. 130 páginas. [Coleçáo Metafísica, n. 1].
Stuart Russell [14] describes rational agents as --œthose that do the right thing--�. The problem of designing a rational agent then becomes the problem of figuring out what the right thing is. There are two approaches to the latter problem, depending upon the kind of agent we want to build. On the one hand, anthropomorphic agents are those that can help human beings rather directly in their intellectual endeavors. These endeavors consist of decision making and data processing. An agent that (...) can help humans in these enterprises must make decisions and draw conclusions that are rational by human standards of rationality. Anthropomorphic agents can be contrasted with goal-oriented agents --” those that can carry out certain narrowly-defined tasks in the world. Here the objective is to get the job done, and it makes little difference how the agent achieves its design goal. (shrink)
This essay uses the recently published expanded record of the Queensberry libel trial to revisit the relationship between the 'literary' and 'sexual' dimensions of the Wilde scandal. The defence was guided by an integrated conception of the links between the two that shaped both the public responses and the legal proceedings, including the criminal prosecution. The conflict between moral literalism and aesthetic indeterminacy not only informed the legal determination of sexual guilt but also was inflected by social class in ways (...) that contributed to the construction of male homosexuality and of the 'literary'. (shrink)
In spite of the considerable literature nowadays existing on the issue of the moral exclusion of nonhuman animals, there is still work to be done concerning the characterization of the conceptual framework with which this question can be appraised. This paper intends to tackle this task. It starts by defining speciesism as the unjustified disadvantageous consideration or treatment of those who are not classified as belonging to a certain species. It then clarifies some common misunderstandings concerning what this means. Next, (...) it rejects the idea that there are different kinds of speciesism. Such an idea may result from confusion because there are (1) different ways in which speciesism can be defended; and (2) different speciesist positions, that is, different positions that assume speciesism among their premises. Depending on whether or not these views assume other criteria for moral consideration apart from speciesism, they can be combined or simple speciesist positions. But speciesism remains in all cases the same idea. Finally, the paper examines the concept of anthropocentrism, the disadvantageous treatment or consideration of those who are not members of the human species. This notion must be conceptually distinguished from speciesism and from misothery (aversion to nonhuman animals). Anthropocentrism is shown to be refuted because it either commits a petitio principia fallacy or it falls prey to two arguments: the argument from species overlap (widely but misleadingly known as “argument from marginal cases”) and the argument from relevance. This rebuttal identifies anthropocentrism as a speciesist view. (shrink)
One argument for the thirder position on the Sleeping Beauty problem rests on direct inference from objective probabilities. In this paper, I consider a particularly clear version of this argument by John Pollock and his colleagues (The Oscar Seminar 2008). I argue that such a direct inference is defeated by the fact that Beauty has an equally good reason to conclude on the basis of direct inference that the probability of heads is 1/2. Hence, neither thirders nor halfers can (...) find direct support in an appeal to objective probabilities. (shrink)
: I begin by asking, What is the underlying dynamic of comedy, its generic intention? I answer by testing each of several classic theories (plus two popular cliches) against a single, brief scene in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Each of the first six sections subjects that scene to one of seven theories, in each case singling out an idea that seems convincing and discarding other ideas that do not. Illogical Logic explains the various means by which (...) the structure of a comedy reduces the characters to absurdity, thereby generating a Catharsis of wish and fear, analogous to Aristotle's tragic catharsis of pity and fear. (shrink)
Intriguing, and occasionally unsettling, In Defense of Sin is a refreshingly frank exploration of some real facts of life. Portmann gathers an on-target collection of great writers on transgressions large and small. Read about defenses for promiscuity, greed, deceit, gossip, lust, breaking the golden rule, and more--and use this unusual guide to decide for yourself if sin has a place in our contemporary, and virtually unshockable, society. Provocative and illuminating, this book may change how you think about sin, morality, and (...) what's right. Contributors include Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, Anthony Ellis, Jane English, Ludwig Feuerbach, Sigmund Freud, Bernard Mandeville, Jerome Neu, Friedrich Nietzsche, David Novitz, Joyce Carol Oates, David A.J. Richards, Seneca, Jonathan Swift, Richard Wasserstrom, and Oscar Wilde. (shrink)
This article tries to define what discrimination is and to understand in particular detail its most important instances: those in which the satisfaction of interests is at stake. These cases of discrimination will be characterized in terms of deprivations of benefits. In order to describe and classify them we need to consider three different factors: the benefits of which discriminatees are deprived, the criteria according to which such benefits are denied or granted, and the justification that such deprivation of benefits (...) may have (or lack). This definition intends to present discrimination as a concept that may be useful not only to examine certain social phenomena, but also, more widely, to ethical theory in general. (shrink)
The central questions in this study are: (1) What does Kant consider the essence of the dispute between Rationalists and Realist Empiricists which he titles the “Second Conflict of the Transcendental Ideas?” (2) Why does he believe it supports such wider aims of the Critical Philosophy as: (a) showing the impossibility of a Transcendental Realist explanation of the spatiotemporal world, which amounts to an indirect proof of Transcendental Idealism (A 506/B 534); (b) being the only means for detecting the transcendental (...) illusion which leads to Transcendental Realism and convincing us to give it up (CPrR II, 1; CJ § 57, remark 2 (KpV, AA 05: II, 1; KU, AA 05: 344)); (c) demonstrating the defeat of theoretical reason in its highest aim – the systematization of knowledge under one concept (being) – thus turning us toward practical reason as the only venue where reason's demand for the unconditioned can be satisfied (B XXI; A 464/B 492)? (shrink)
He then argues that (1), (2) and (3) constitute an inconsistent triad as follows (1991, p. 15): Suppose (1) that Oscar knows a priori that he is thinking that water is wet. Then by (2), Oscar can simply deduce E, using premisses that are knowable a priori, including the premiss that he is thinking that water is wet. Since Oscar can deduce E from premisses that are knowable a priori, Oscar can know E itself a priori. (...) But this contradicts (3), the assumption that E cannot be known a priori. Hence (1), (2), and (3) are inconsistent. McKinsey’s conclusion is that ‘anti-individualism is inconsistent with privileged access’ (ibid.). (shrink)
"Cult of ugliness," Ezra Pound’s phrase, powerfully summarizes the ways in which modernists such as Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and T. E. Hulme—the self-styled "Men of 1914"—responded to the "horrid or sordid or disgusting" conditions of modernity by radically changing aesthetic theory and literary practice. Only the representation of "ugliness," they protested, would produce the new, truly "beautiful" work of art. They dissociated the beautiful from its traditional embodiment in female beauty, and from its association with Walter Pater (...) and Oscar Wilde. Their cultivation of ugliness displaced misogyny and homophobia. Higgins takes in texts such as John Ruskin’s art criticism, Eliot’s literary journalism, Lewis’s pro-fascism pamphlets, and the poetry of Pound, Conrad Aiken, and Langston Hughes. She demonstrates that even vigorous champions of beauty were committed to aesthetic practices that disempowered female figures in order to articulate new truths of male artistic mastery. (shrink)
In 2007, Oscar Pistorius, a South African sprinter, was training and competing in preparation for the 2008 Beijing Olympic trials. Having had double transtibial amputations when he was eleven months old, Pistorius runs on technologically advanced prosthetics known as "Cheetah" legs. In January 2008, the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) ruled him ineligible for IAAF competitions (including the Olympics) on the grounds that these carbon-fiber blade prosthetics were technical devices that gave him an advantage over other able-bodied sprinters. (...) Pistorius appealed this ruling with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which eventually issued a ruling revoking the IAAF's decision. In the text .. (shrink)
From Odysseus' seduction by the song of the Sirens to Oscar Moore's 1991 novel A Matter of Life and Sex , whose protagonist courts death through sex and dies of AIDS, the frustrated relationship between death and desire has fixated the Western imagination. Philosophers have grappled with it and poets have told of its beauty and pain. In this strikingly original work, cultural critic Jonathan Dollimore once again demonstrates his remarkable ability to take on the complex and reveal its (...) relevance with eloquence and grace. Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture is a rich testament to our ubiquitous preoccupation with the tangled web of death and desire. In these pages we find nuanced analysis that blends Plato with Shelley, Hölderlin with Foucault. Dollimore, a gifted thinker, is not content to summarize these texts from afar; instead, he weaves a thread through each to tell the magnificent story of the making of the modern individual. An immensely important book, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture is a challenge to the way we understand desire, sexuality, and the very notion of identity. (shrink)
Externalism holds that the content of our utterances and thoughts are determined partly by the environment. Here, I offer an argument which suggests that externalism is incompatible with a natural view about ontological commitment--namely, the Quinean view that such commitments are fixed by the range of the variables in your theory. The idea in brief is that if Oscar mistakenly believes that water = XYZ, the externalist ontologically commits Oscar to two waterish kinds, whereas the Quinean commits him (...) to one such kind (albeit a metaphysically impossible kind). The penultimate section addresses a variety of objections to the argument. (shrink)
Informed by the critical humanisms of Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, and Paul Gilroy, the authors argue for an orientation to teaching and learning that troubles the continuing effects of dehumanizing race logic. Reflecting on Paul Haggis's Oscar award winning film Crash from 2004, they suggest that the metaphor of racial 'crashing' captures what happens when we act out from experiences of racial injury instead of being touched by it. They propose a psychoanalytic pedagogy of emotions as a method for (...) reading representation beyond the limits of detached rational critique. Learning from the affect of racial injury as it is made manifest in representation, they suggest, is an important ethical starting point for generating new insights into what it might mean to live within and beyond contemporary legacies of racial hatred. (shrink)
Humans often intervene in the wild for anthropocentric or environmental reasons. An example of such interventions is the reintroduction of wolves in places where they no longer live in order to create what has been called an “ecology of fear”, which is being currently discussed in places such as Scotland. In the first part of this paper I discuss the reasons for this measure and argue that they are not compatible with a nonspeciesist approach. Then, I claim that if we (...) abandon a speciesist viewpoint we should change completely the way in which we should intervene in nature. Rather than intervening for environmental or anthropocentric reasons, we should do it in order to reduce the harms that nonhuman animals suffer. This conflicts significantly with some fundamental environmental ideals whose defence is not compatible with the consideration of the interests of nonhuman animals. (shrink)
The Mind-Body problem is the problem of saying how a person’s mental states and events relate to his bodily ones. How does Oscar’s believing that water is cold relate to the states of his body? Is it itself a bodily state, perhaps a state of his brain or nervous system? If not, does it nonetheless depend on such states? Or is his believing that water is cold independent of his bodily states? And, crucially, what are the notions of dependence (...) and independence at issue here? (shrink)
Darwin's art collection : the prints, drawings, and photographs Darwin collected in the 1860s and 70s -- Illustrations and illusion : strategies Darwin used in illustrating his books -- Art, experience, and observation : Darwin's knowledge of art history and use of illustration in his books -- Darwin and the passions : how passion manuals informed Darwin's research -- Photography and evolution meet : connections between photography and biology in the 1860s -- Method to their madness : how photography in (...) mental hospitals influenced Darwin -- Laughing and crying : Darwin's quest for pictures of expressive babies -- Darwin's eyes and ears : the artists who guided Darwin's search for pictures -- Darwin's art photographer : Oscar Rejlander, Darwin's favorite photographer -- Rejlander's performances : posing for Darwin's pictures -- Alice, eugenics, and the spirit world : the aftermath of Darwin's experiments. (shrink)
Abstract: This article considers how the formal structure of metaphysical thought is displayed in Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest . One frequent aim of metaphysics is to understand the world as a whole. We cannot gain such a global vantage point without separating ourselves from all the particular meanings things have for us within the world. But we start within the world, and so can only proceed on the basis of those particular meanings. Consequently we can only separate (...) ourselves from them if they work to cancel themselves in favor of the global understanding. When the separate range of meanings is established, however, it and the world it aims to understand no longer have any meaning for each other. Metaphysics therefore succeeds by establishing and canceling its relevant meaning, all at once. This self-canceling moment or process of thought constitutes a grasp of the world as a whole. It also allows different understandings of reality as a whole to recognize and so enter into dialogue with each other. The climactic moments of The Importance of Being Earnest are structured as a map of this insight-granting process of the self-cancellation of a global range of meanings. That is, they express the formal structure of metaphysical thought. (shrink)
In the future systems of ambient intelligence will include decision support systems that will automate the process of discrimination among people that seek entry into environments and to engage in search of the opportunities that are available there. This article argues that these systems must be subject to active and continuous assessment and regulation because of the ways in which they are likely to contribute to economic and social inequality. This regulatory constraint must involve limitations on the collection and use (...) of information about individuals and groups. The article explores a variety of rationales or justifications for establishing these limits. It emphasizes the unintended consequences that flow from the use of these systems as the most compelling rationale. (shrink)
People have long noticed that speculative markets, though created for other purposes, also do a great job of aggregating relevant information. In fact, it is hard to find information not embodied by such market prices. This is, in part, because anyone who finds such neglected information can profit by trading on it, thereby reducing the neglect.1 So far, speculative markets have done well in every known head-to-head field comparison with other forecasting institutions. Orange juice futures improved on National Weather Service (...) forecasts,2 horse race markets beat horse race experts,3 Oscar markets beat columnist forecasts,4 gas-demand markets beat gas-demand experts,5 stock markets beat the official NASA panel at fingering the guilty company in the Challenger accident,6 election markets beat national opinion polls,7 and corporate sales markets beat official corporate forecasts.8 Recently, some have considered creating new markets specifically to take.. (shrink)
Some evolutionary psychologists contend that the best way to discover the functions of our present psychological systems is by appealing to the notion of functional mesh, that is, the assumed tight fit between a trait's design and the adaptive problem it is supposed to solve. In this paper, I argue that there exist theoretical considerations and empirical evidence that undermine this assumption of optimal design. Instead, I suggest that cognitive systems are constrained by what I call bounded functionality. This proposal (...) makes use of Jacob's (1977) notion of evolution as a bricoleur and Simon's (1981) idea that problems can have ``satisficing'' solutions. Functional mesh will thus be shown to neglect constraints that are necessary to explain the evolution of psychological mechanisms. (shrink)
Pollock describes an exciting theory of rationality and its partial implementation in OSCAR, a computer system whose descendants will literally be persons.
A rational agent (artificial or otherwise) residing in a complex changing environment must gather information perceptually, update that information as the world changes, and combine that information with causal information to reason about the changing world. Using the system of defeasible reasoning that is incorporated into the OSCAR architecture for rational agents, a set of reasonschemas is proposed for enabling an agent to perform some of the requisite reasoning. Along the way, solutions are proposed for the Frame Problem, the (...) Qualification Problem, and the Ramification Problem. The principles and reasoning described have all been implemented in OSCAR. (shrink)
It is difficult to see how one can support the continuum between rules and similarity, as Pothos proposes. A similarity theory could dispense with the rules end of the continuum. The only thing that we need is one (or more than one) theory of similarity that goes beyond the stimulus-carrying information and behavioristic restrictions that have usually been attributed to similarity theories.
With Carl Gegenbaur and Ernst Haeckel, inspiredby Darwin and the cell theory, comparativeanatomy and embryology became established andflourished in Jena. This tradition wascontinued and developed further with new ideasand methods devised by some of Haeckelsstudents. This first period of innovative workin evolutionary morphology was followed byperiods of crisis and even a disintegration ofthe discipline in the early twentieth century.This stagnation was caused by a lack ofinterest among morphologists in Mendeliangenetics, and uncertainty about the mechanismsof evolution. Idealistic morphology was stillinfluental in (...) Germany, which prevented a fullappreciation of the importance of Darwinstheory of natural selection for comparativemorphology. Evolutionary morphology andembryology failed to contribute significantlyto the modern synthesis of evolutionarybiology, thereby probably delaying theintegration of developmental biology intomodern evolutionary biology. However, Haeckelsstudent Oscar Hertwig, as well as Victor Franzand Alexej N. Sewertzoff from a youngergeneration, all tried to forge their ownsynthetic approaches in which (inspired byHaeckels work) embryology played an importantrole. Important for all three researchers wereattempts to refine, and sometimes redefine, thebiogenetic law, and to find new scientificexplanations for it (and for the manyexceptions to it). Their research was latermore or less forgotten, and had littleinfluence on the architects of the modernsynthesis. As the relationship betweenevolutionary and developmental biology is nowagain rising in importance in the form ofEvo-Devo, we would like to draw attention tohow this earlier research tradition grappledwith similar questions to those now on theagenda, albeit from sometimes quite differentperspectives. (shrink)
The Lottery Paradox has been thought to provide a reductio argument against probabilistic accounts of inductive inference. As a result, much work in artificial intelligence has concentrated on qualitative methods of inference, including default logics, which are intended to model some varieties of inductive inference. It has recently been shown that the paradox can be generated within qualitative default logics. However, John Pollock's qualitative system of defeasible inference (named OSCAR), does avoid the Lottery Paradox by incorporating a rule (...) designed specifically for that purpose. I shall argue that Pollock's system instead succumbs to a worse disease: it fails to allow for induction at all (a disease sometimes known as "Conjunctivitis'). (shrink)
chapter 7. How DNA became an important molecule: Controversies at the origins of molecular biology Eleonora Cresto José María Gil Contributors Author index ...
