Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the

This chapter addresses embodied social interaction inlif6 like agents. Embodiment is discussedf rom both arti cial intelligence and psychology viewpoints. Di#erent degreesof embodiment in biological, virtual and robotic agents are discussed, given the example of a bottomup, behavior-oriented, dynamic control of virtual robots. A `dancing with strangers' experiment shows how the same principles can be applied to physical robot-human interaction. We then discuss the issue of sociality which di#ers in di#erent academic communities with respect to which roles are attributed to genes, memes, and the individual embodied agent.

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

Is conceptual analysis required for reductive explanation? If there is no a priori entailment from microphysical truths to phenomenal truths, does reductive explanation of the phenomenal fail? We say yes (Chalmers 1996; Jackson 1994, 1998). Ned Block and Robert Stalnaker say no (Block and Stalnaker 1999).

... This article develops a systematic framework that addresses all of these questions. A careful analysis of computation and its relation to cognition suggests that the ambitions of artificial intelligence and the centrality of computation in cognitive science are justified.

This thesis is about common-sense psychology and its role in cognitive science. Put simply, the argument is that common-sense psychology is important because it offers clues to some complex problems in cognitive science, and because common-sense psychology has significant effects on our intuitions, both in science and on an everyday level. The thesis develops a theory of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology. Anthropomorphism, the natural human tendency to ascribe human characteristics (and especially human mental characteristics) to things that aren't human, is an important theme in the thesis. Anthropomorphism reveals an endemic anthropocentricity that deeply influences our thinking about other minds. The thesis then constructs a descriptive model of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology, and uses it to analyse two studies of the ascription of mental states. The first, BaronCohen et al.'s (1985) false belief test, shows how cognitive modelling can be used to compare dif...

It is plausible to think that simulation is perhaps the most important reasoning tool that we have for user modeling. This is behind what we mean when we say that a superlative fisherman can "think like a fish. " The fisherman decides where the fish must be by imagining where he would be in this river if he were a fish. Whether or not this idea is sound for fish and fisherman, 1 it certainly applies with a great deal of force to people reasoning about one another's attitudes, preferences, emotions, and choices. A friend tells me a story about problems she's been having with her car. She seems quite calm, but I say "You must be upset, " reasoning that if this happened to me, I would be upset. I go on, saying "You must realize your mechanic is lying to you " because her description of the problem indicates she knows as much about cars and mechanics as I do, and knowing what she has told me, I would infer that her mechanic is lying. This sort of other-modeling is the reasoning that makes the "golden rule " golden. What would be the moral point of doing unto others as you would have others do unto you if imagining what we ourselves would want were an unreliable way to gauge what others want? In a number of psycholinguistic investigations, Herbert Clark has demonstrated many ways in which conversation is informed by common ground. The following account of how conversants construct common ground is taken from Clark & Schober [4, pp. 257-158]. (Page numbers from the version in Arenas of Language Use.) The common ground between two people here, Alan and Barbara--can be divided conceptually into two parts. Their communal common ground represents all the knowl-edge, beliefs, and assumptions they take to be universally held in the communities to which they mutually believe they both belong. Their personal common ground rep-resents all the mutual knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions they have inferred from personal experience with each other. 1This is a by now classic topic in contemporary philosophy of mind and consciousness; see Nagel [18], and, for instance, Baars [1].

This paper examines the phenomenon of daydreaming: spontaneously recalling or imagining personal or vicarious experiences in the past or future. The following important roles of daydreaming in human cognition are postulated: plan preparation and rehearsal, learning from failures and successes, support for processes of creativity, emotion regulation, and motivation. A computational theory of daydreaming and its implementation as the program DAYDREAMER are presented. DAYDREAMER consists of 1) a scenario generator based on relaxed planning, 2) a dynamic episodic memory of experiences used by the scenario generator, 3) a collection of personal goals and control goals which guide the scenario generator, 4) an emotion component in which daydreams initiate, and are initiated by, emotional states arising from goal outcomes, and 5) domain knowledge of interpersonal relations and common everyday occurrences. The role of emotions and control goals in daydreaming is discussed. Four control goals commonly used in guiding daydreaming are presented: rationalization, failure/success reversal, revenge, and preparation. The role of episodic memory in daydreaming is considered, including how daydreamed information is incorporated into memory and later used. An initial version of DAYDREAMER which produces several daydreams (in English) is currently running.

Studi di Brescia in 2002, with a thesis on extensions to the DISCOPLAN system

Abstract. Modern consciousness studies are in a healthy state, with many progressive empirical programmes in cognitive science, neuroscience and related sciences, using relatively conventional third-person research methods. However not all the problems of consciousness can be resolved in this way. These problems may be grouped into problems that require empirical advance, those that require theoretical advance, and those that require a re-examination of some of our pre-theoretical assumptions. I give examples of these, and focus on two problems—what consciousness is, and what consciousness does—that require all three. In this, careful attention to conscious phenomenology and finding an appropriate way to relate first-person evidence to third-person evidence appears to be central to progress. But we may also need to reexamine what we take to be “natural facts ” about the world, and how we can know them. The same appears to be true for a trans-cultural understanding of consciousness that combines classical Indian phenomenological methods with the third-person methods of Western science.