Tom Froese

I’ve just been notified that the paper on different notions of autonomy, which Eduardo, Nathaniel and me have recently written together, has been accepted for this year’s European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL). This means that I will be spending some time in Lisbon, Portugal during September 10-14, 2007.

The reference of the paper will be:

Froese, T., Virgo, N. & Izquierdo, E. (2007), “Autonomy: a review and a reappraisal”, in: Proc. of the 9th Euro. Conf. on Artificial Life, Springer Verlag

I’m going to give an updated, revised and hopefully improved version of my recent Life and Mind seminar on Tuesday, May 15 to the ICEA group here in Skövde, Sweden. I will try to focus on the question whether autopoiesis is necessary, sufficient, or perhaps neither, for consciousness, while paying special attention to the fact that these two phenomena exist in distinct and non-intersecting domains.

I’ve just been informed that my submission to this year’s Toward a Science of Consciousness (TSC2007), entitled “Machine Consciousness: An enactive analysis of the state of the art”, has been accepted as a poster presentation. This means that I will be spending some time in Budapest, Hungary, this year around July 23 to 26.

I will be leading the discussion for a Life and Mind seminar at the University of Sussex tomorrow. Announcement and abstract below:

The third Life and Mind seminar of the summer term will be held tomorrow, Wednesday the 2nd of May, at 16:00 in room Pev1 1A01 (note room and time change). Tom will be leading a discussion on:

Is autopoiesis necessary for consciousness?

A living system can be distinguished in two non-intersecting phenomenal domains, namely 1) as a collection of components and their relationships (i.e. its physiology) in the constitutive domain, and 2) as a unity and its relationships to other unities (i.e. its behavior) in the behavioral domain.

There is general agreement in the autopoietic tradition that consciousness is a relational phenomenon that pertains to the behavioral domain. However, this creates a potential tension with the claim that autopoiesis in the constitutive domain (i.e. metabolic self-production) is a necessary condition for consciousness.

I propose that one way to resolve this issue is by distinguishing between phenomenal and behavioral consciousness, even though this opens up the theoretical possibility of philosophical “zombies”.

All welcome.