Tom Froese

This is my abstract for this year’s Ratna Ling conference on first-person methods.

Artificial Embodiment: An integrative methodology for a science of consciousness

Even today, 40 years after Bach-y-Rita’s seminal Nature paper on a tactile-visual sensory substitution (TVSS) system, no consensus can be reached on how best to interpret users’ verbal reports. Is the experience of using such sensory augmentation interfaces visual, tactile, cognitive, or something altogether new? The growing fascination with technological wizardry, i.e. the building of different and more advanced interfaces, is in itself unlikely to resolve such a foundational issue.

The lack of a principled methodology to make progress on this impasse can naturally be linked to another growing debate in the cognitive sciences, namely about the role of first- or second-person approaches for the scientific study of consciousness. The development and establishment of these approaches is encountering some difficulty in the face of a widespread skepticism inherited from the behaviorist tradition. In order for them to demonstrate their methodological validity it is especially important that they go beyond mere data collection, i.e. descriptions of experiential phenomena, and move into a more productive relationship with the rest of cognitive science.

Accordingly, we propose to address the distinct difficulties faced by phenomenological methodology and sensory augmentation research by relating these two growing areas of research in a mutually beneficial manner. The crucial step of moving beyond mere technological wizardry or data collection into a principled scientific research program is to link them together in terms of hypothesis generation and verification. We refer to this novel research program as Artificial Embodiment (AE). The basic methodology consists of four essential steps:
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Here is the title and extended abstract (or position paper) for the talk which I will be giving at the Workshop on Key Issues in Sensory Augmentation later this month.

Exploring Mind-As-It-Could-Be: From Artificial Life to Artificial Embodiment

Tom Froese
March 26, 2009

How should we investigate the qualitative aspects of being a living, cognitive and conscious agent? I want to argue that we are in the middle of another technologically-inspired development, one which can systematically complement the methodology of AL in this particular respect. I propose to call this emerging field Artificial Embodiment.

Under the label of Artificial Embodiment (AE) I understand a methodology that enables us to go beyond the study of embodiment-as-we-know-it, in order to access the domain of embodiment-as-it-could-be. More precisely, by building on the assumptions that the mind is embodied, and that by systematically changing our embodiment we can systematically change our experiential states, the aim of AE is to access a larger domain of mental phenomena, i.e. mind-as-it-could-be, so as to ground general theories of cognitive science and, of course, reap some technological benefits along the way.

Read the full position paper here.

I’ve been invited to give a talk for a seminar series at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL). The talk is scheduled to happen on the 19th of March at 14:00. Title and abstract below:

The role of engineering in recent cognitive science

For most of the history of cognitive science the practices of hardware engineering and scientific inquiry have been closely intertwined: designing and building robots was a central part of the field’s scientific process. By building robots according to how the mind (supposedly) works, engineering provided cognitive science with the opportunity to validate its hypotheses empirically, and to adjust its theories if substantial practical difficulties arose (e.g. the shift from symbolic A.I. to situated robotics). In this manner the engineered product was not only a tool for – but also itself a target of – scientific research.

Nevertheless, nowadays there is a larger split between these two practices. Robotics is mainly focused on practical applications, while its original scientific role has largely been replaced by software simulations. For if it is easier and cheaper to simulate the system than to construct it physically, and if this lack of physicality does not negatively impact on the scientific questions which need to be answered, then why not use a simulation model? Nevertheless, in one growing area of cognitive science, namely sensory augmentation research, the role of hardware engineering is indispensable. Here the design of appropriate physical interfaces and devices can help cognitive scientists to probe the underlying mechanisms of the human mind in ways that would otherwise be inaccessible.

We present recent work in this area based on the Enactive Torch, a collaborative project between the CCNR and Adam Spiers of BRL.

This will be a joint seminar between the E-Intentionality seminar series and the Life and Mind seminar series.

Life and Mind ‘As-It-Could-Be’: Technological Methodologies for a Science of Subjectivity

Tom Froese

4:30 p.m. Thursday, 22 January – Pevensey I 1A1

In this seminar I want to reflect on the role of recent technological developments, in particular the creation of artificial intelligence and sensory augmentation interfaces, in relation to the goal of gaining a better understanding of life and mind. I will argue that both forms of technology are indispensable if we want to obtain insights into the essential aspects of the phenomenon of subjectivity in terms of both its living (third-person) and lived (first-person) features.

Generally speaking, in order to determine the essential aspects of a particular phenomenon it is necessary to know its ranges of variability and conditions of break-down, namely those situations when it ceases to be the type of phenomenon it originally was and becomes something else. However, since the appropriate kind of variation is often hard to find in terms of factual cases, technology might be of help here. It has already been recognized, for example, that the field of artificial life can make a substantial contribution by mapping out the domain of life as-it-could-be (Langton).

But what about the first-person aspects of subjectivity? Here I will try to show that there are some essential similarities between the methods of artificial modelling and those that have been developed by the phenomenological tradition of first-person study. Moreover, I will argue that a similar technological supplementation of this first-person research might be possible, for example through the use of sensory augmentation interfaces. The starting point for this endeavour thus could be a systematic investigation of perception as-it-could-be.

All welcome!