The American Philosophical Association is pleased to announce that Aaron Sloman (University of Birmingham, UK) has been selected by the APA committee on philosophy and computers as the winner of the 2020 Barwise Prize.
Sloman identifies himself primarily as a philosopher, though most of his followers and professional influence has been so far in computer science and AI. His main influence is on two points: 1) That naturalistic account of consciousness, and of the human mind, is not just computational but depends on various bio-chemical and physical specificities of the human brain. This is an important critical point towards the program of informationalism (the idea that conscious thinking is just computing). 2) Criticism of the idea that human brains are the best computers and that machine consciousness needs to follow humanoid cognitive architecture.
Since switching from mathematics to philosophy as a graduate student in 1959, Sloman has been attempting to explain what’s true in Kant’s analysis of mathematical knowledge: locating mathematical discovery in an ever broader and deeper biological context, originating with ancient chemistry-based information-processing shared with many species, but continually enriched and diversified through multiple evolutionary transitions using increasingly sophisticated evolved construction-kits for building both physical components and control-systems for using them, and also building new multi-layer construction-kits arising from increasingly sophisticated genomic mechanisms using multi-layer gene-expression, where later layers use parameters acquired during earlier interactions with the environment. Some parameters are products of ancestors’ or other species’ interactions with their environments. This project continually expands to incorporate ideas from other disciplines, including building software tools to explore the ideas (e.g., the SimAgent construction kit). There is now a deep need for better educational systems to prepare new young researchers to contribute. Like the previous Barwise award winner, Margaret Boden, Sloman helped develop the world’s first academic program in Cognitive Science, at Sussex University, where they were colleagues for 27 years, from 1964.
