This paper, an expanded version of a talk on love given to a literary society, attempts to analyse some of the architectural requirements for an agent which is capable of having primary, secondary and tertiary emotions, including being infatuated or in love. It elaborates on work done previously in the Birmingham Cognition and Affect group, describing our proposed three level architecture (with reactive, deliberative and metamanagement layers), showing how different sorts of emotions relate to those layers. Some of the relationships between emotional states involving partial loss of control of attention (e.g. emotional states involved in being in love) and other states which involve dispositions (e.g. attitudes such as loving) are discussed and related to the architecture. The work of poets and playwrights can be shown to involve an implicit commitment to the hypothesis that minds are (at least) information processing engines. Besides loving, many other familiar states and process...

This research was funded in part through fellowships from the Litton and Intel Corporations. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the sponsors.

this document. 9.5.2 A comparison of CUE and libido

There are evolutionary trajectories in two different but related spaces, design space and niche space. Co-evolution occurs in parallel trajectories in both spaces, with complex feedback loops linking them. As the design of one species evolves, that changes the niche for others and vice versa. In general there will never be a unique answer to the question: does this change lead to higher fitness? Rather there will be tradeoffs: the new variant is better in some respects and worse in others. Where large numbers of mutually interdependent species (designs) are co-evolving, understanding the dynamics can be very difficult. If intelligent organisms manipulate some of the mechanisms, e.g. by mate selection or by breeding other animals or their own kind, the situation gets even more complicated. It may be possible to show how some aspects of the evolution of human minds are explained by all these mechanisms.

This paper 1 attempts to characterise a unifying overview of the practice of software engineers, AI designers, developers of evolutionary forms of computation, designers of adaptive systems, etc. The topic overlaps with theoretical biology, developmental psychology and perhaps some aspects of social theory. Just as much of theoretical computer science follows the lead of engineering intuitions and tries to formalise them, there are also some important emerging high level cross disciplinary ideas about natural information processing architectures and evolutionary mechanisms and that can perhaps be unified and formalised in the future. 1

The search for neural correlates of consciousness (or NCCs) is arguably the cornerstone in the recent resurgence of the science of consciousness. The search poses many difficult empirical problems, but it seems to be tractable in principle, and some ingenious studies in recent years have led to considerable progress. A number of proposals have been put forward

Neural correlates of perceptual awareness, until very recently an elusive quarry, are now almost commonplace findings. This article first describes a variety of neural correlates of perceptual awareness based on fMRI, ERPs, and single-unit recordings. It is then argued that our quest should ultimately focus not on mere correlates of awareness, but rather on the neural events that are both necessary and sufficient for perceptual awareness. Indeed, preliminary evidence suggests that although many of the neural correlates already reported may be necessary for the corresponding state of awareness, it is unlikely that they are sufficient for it. The final section considers three hypotheses concerning the possible sufficiency conditions

We describe an emerging field, that of nonclassical computability and nonclassical computing machinery. According to the nonclassicist, the set of well-defined computations is not exhausted by the computations that can be carried out by a Turing machine. We provide an overview of the field and a philosophical defence of its foundations.

Abstract (Long) When cognitive scientists apply computational theory to the problem of phenomenal consciousness, as many of them have been doing recently, there are two fundamentally distinct approaches available. Either consciousness is to be explained in terms of the nature of the representational vehicles the brain deploys; or it is to be explained in terms of the computational processes defined over these vehicles. We call versions of these two approaches vehicle and process theories of consciousness, respectively. However, while there may be space for vehicle theories of consciousness in cognitive science, they are relatively rare. This is because of the influence exerted, on the one hand, by a large body of research which purports to show that the explicit representation of information in the brain and conscious experience are dissociable, and on the other, by the classical computational theory of mind – the theory that takes human cognition to be a species of symbol manipulation. But two recent developments in cognitive science combine to suggest that a reappraisal of this situation is in order. First, a number of theorists have recently been highly critical of the experimental methodologies employed in the dissociation studies – so critical, in fact, it’s no longer reasonable to assume that the dissociability of conscious experience and explicit representation has been adequately demonstrated. Second, classicism, as a theory of human cognition, is no longer as dominant in

Consciousness fits uneasily into our conception of the natural world. On the most common conception of nature, the natural world is the physical world. But on the most common conception of consciousness, it is not easy to see how it could be part of the physical world. So it seems that to find a place for consciousness within the natural order, we must