Mark Bishop

Why Computers Can't Feel Pain

The most cursory examination of the history of artificial intelligence highlights numerous egregious claims of its researchers, especially in relation to a populist form of ‘strong’ computationalism which holds that any suitably programmed computer instantiates genuine conscious mental states purely in virtue of carrying out a specific series of computations. The argument presented herein is a simple development of that originally presented in Putnam’s (Representation & Reality, Bradford Books, Cambridge in 1988) monograph, “Representation & Reality”, which if correct, has important implications for turing machine functionalism and the prospect of ‘conscious’ machines. In the paper, instead of seeking to develop Putnam’s claim that, “everything implements every finite state automata”, I will try to establish the weaker result that, “everything implements the specific machine Q on a particular input set (x)”. Then, equating Q (x) to any putative AI program, I will show that conceding the ‘strong AI’ thesis for Q (crediting it with mental states and consciousness) opens the door to a vicious form of panpsychism whereby all open systems, (e.g. grass, rocks etc.), must instantiate conscious experience and hence that disembodied minds lurk everywhere.

An investigation into the merger of stochastic diffusion search and particle swarm optimisation

This study reports early research aimed at applying the powerful resource allocation mechanism deployed in Stochastic Diffusion Search (SDS) [4] to the Particle Swarm Optimiser (PSO) metaheuristic [22], effectively merging the two swarm intelligence algorithms. The results reported herein suggest that the hybrid algorithm, exploiting information sharing between particles, has the potential to improve the optimisation capability of conventional PSOs.

Weak and Strong Computational Creativity

In the spirit of Searle’s definition of weak and strong artificial intelligence, this paper presents a discussion on weak computational creativity in swarm intelligence systems. It addresses the concepts of freedom and constraint and their impact on the creativity of the underlying systems. An analogy is drawn on mapping these two ‘prerequisites’ of creativity onto the two well-known phases of exploration and exploitation in swarm intelligence algorithms, followed by the visualisation of the behaviour of the swarms whose performance are evaluated in the context of arguments presented. The paper also discusses that the strong computational creativity is presented in ways emphasising that genuine creativity implies ‘genuine understanding’ and other cognitive states, along with autonomy—asserting that without ‘Strong Embodiment’, computational systems are not genuinely autonomous.