The purpose of the Society for Machines and Mentality is to advance philosophical understanding of issues involving artificial intelligence, philosophy, and cognitive science.
The purpose of the Society for Machines and Mentality is to advance philosophical understanding of issues involving artificial intelligence, philosophy, and cognitive science.
The 2003 Annual Meeting will be held on December 28, 2003, from 5:15 to 7:15 pm in Washington, DC, USA.
The meeting is held in conjunction with the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. The location is the Washington Hilton. Our meeting is Group Session GV-7 and will convene in Georgetown Room East (Concourse).
The topic for the 2003 meeting is Philosophical Simulations: Communication and Prejudice. Two papers will be presented.
The Origins of Meaning:
Hints from Large Arrays of Neural Nets
(Group for Logic & Formal Semantics, Philosophy, SUNY Stony Brook)
Abstract: We want to know what meaning is and how it arises. As a step in that direction we build on a background of game-theoretic work regarding cooperation (Axelrod 1984, Nowak and Sigmund 1992, Grim, Mar, and St. Denis 1998), extending that work to the larger topic of communication. Here we use large spatialized arrays of agents, a set of arbitrary sounds, and an environment of wandering food sources and predators. We offer a series of simulations using local imitation, localized genetic algorithms, and finally locally interactive neural nets. The magic in all of these models is that something like meaning happens.
Prejudice Reduction in Artificial Societies:
A Computational Model for the Contact Hypothesis
(Rochester Institute of Technology and SUNY Stony Brook)
Abstract: There are a number of social psychological theories of the nature of prejudice, but only one major theory of prejudice reduction: the contact hypothesis. According to the contact hypothesis (Allport 1954), prejudice against members of one group by members of another is reduced with increased social contact between members of the two groups. This is a large-scale social psychological hypothesis, however, and there are practical and ethical objections to large-scale controlled tests in which relevant variables can be manipulated. Those obstacles also impede the search for deeper explanation: if increased contact does reduce prejudice, precisely how does it do so? We have found both a new type of confirmation for the contact hypothesis and hints toward deeper explanation using a simple game-theoretic artificial society.
The meeting will be chaired by Selmer Bringsjord (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute).
Society for Machines and Mentality <contact us>
