scholarly journals Can Machines Be Artists? A Deweyan Response in Theory and Practice

Arts ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Still ◽  
Mark d’Inverno
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Turing Test ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Whole Person ◽  
Machine Art ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Psychological View ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

To speak comfortably of the machine artist (as outlined in the call for papers for this Special Issue) makes key assumptions about what it is to be an artist. It assumes, for instance, that the experience of living as an artist, which includes the socialisation, hard work, single-mindedness, and focused energy of creative activity, is incidental rather than essential since these aspects are not comfortably applicable to machines. Instead, it supposes that what is essential is the artistic product, and it is the similarity of human and machine products that makes it possible to speak of machine artists. This definition of art in terms of products is supported by modern psychological theories of creativity, defined as the generation of novel ideas which give rise to valuable products. These ideas take place in the mind or brain, regarded as a closed system within whose workings the secret of creativity will eventually be revealed. This is the framework of what is widely referred to as “cognitivism”. This definition in terms of novel ideas and valuable products has been widely assumed by artificial intelligence (AI) and computational creativity (CC), and this has been backed up through a particular version of the Turing Test. In this, a machine can be said to be a creative artist if its products cannot be distinguished from human art. However, there is another psychological view of creativity, that of John Dewey, in which a lived experience of inquiry and focus is essential to being creative. In this theory, creativity is a function of the whole person interacting with the world, rather than originating in the brain. This makes creativity a Process rather than a Cognitivist framework. Of course, the brain is crucial in a Process theory, but as part of an open system which includes both body and environment. Developments in “machine art” have been seen as spectacular and are widely publicised. But there may be a danger that these will distract from what we take to be the most exciting prospect of all. This is the contribution of computer technology to stimulate, challenge, and provoke artistic practice of all forms.

Zombies and Dolls

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcello Massimini ◽  
Giulio Tononi
Keyword(s):  
Body Problem ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Turing Test ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

This chapter uses thought experiments and practical examples to introduce, in a very accessible way, the hard problem of consciousness. Soon, machines may behave like us to pass the Turing test and scientists may succeed in copying and simulating the inner workings of the brain. Will all this take us any closer to solving the mysteries of consciousness? The reader is taken to meet different kind of zombies, the philosophical, the digital, and the inner ones, to understand why many, scientists and philosophers alike, doubt that the mind–body problem will ever be solved.

From the Streets to the Stage: Disability and the Performing Arts

PMLA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 620-625 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie Sandahl
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Theater Studies ◽  
Suitable Site ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

Despite its newness, disability-theater studies is an incredibly rich area of inquiry that is exploding in artistic practice and scholarship. The university is a particularly suitable site for a meeting of disability and the theater; after all, we theater scholars think of our classrooms and productions as laboratories not only for showcasing knowledge but for producing, rehearsing, and revising it. As the theater scholar Jill Dolan points out, live performance, especially in the liberal arts setting, has the unique power to test, on bodies willing to try them, academic theories that are otherwise purely theoretical. The feedback loop that oscillates between theory and practice in theater studies is necessarily changed by the inclusion of disability perspectives in the classroom, research programs, and performance offerings. Interestingly, an underlying theme of disability perspectives is that the lived experience of disability is always already performative; indeed, many of us with disabilities understand our disabilities as performance, not exclusively in an aesthetic or theoretical sense, but as an actual mode of living in the world. Consider what the playwright and wheelchair user John Belluso told me in a recent interview: “Any time I get on a public bus, I feel like it's a moment of theater. I'm lifted, the stage is moving up, and I enter, and people are along the lines, and they're turning and looking, and I make my entrance. It's theater, and I have to perform. And I feel like we as disabled people are constantly onstage and we're constantly performing.” The perspective of disability as performance undergirds and permeates disability art and scholarship. Thus, my own development as a disability-theater scholar and artist frames my perception of how disability challenges both the practical and the theoretical aspects of theater studies and points to the role universities play in fostering further development of the field.

scholarly journals Turing++ Questions: A Test for the Science of (Human) Intelligence

AI Magazine ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomaso Poggio ◽  
Ethan Meyers
Keyword(s):  
Social Intelligence ◽  
Visual Recognition ◽  
Turing Test ◽  
Scientific Field ◽  
Human Intelligence ◽  
Intelligent Machines ◽  
Recognition Of Objects ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Widespread Interest

It is becoming increasingly clear that there is an infinite number of definitions of intelligence. Machines that are intelligent in different narrow ways have been built since the 50s. We are entering now a golden age for the engineering of intelligence and the development of many different kinds of intelligent machines. At the same time there is a widespread interest among scientists in understanding a specific and well defined form of intelligence, that is human intelligence. For this reason we propose a stronger version of the original Turing test. In particular, we describe here an open-ended set of Turing++ Questions that we are developing at the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines at MIT — that is questions about an image. Questions may range from what is there to who is there, what is this person doing, what is this girl thinking about this boy and so on.  The plural in questions is to emphasize that there are many different intelligent abilities in humans that have to be characterized, and possibly replicated in a machine, from basic visual recognition of objects, to the identification of faces, to gauge emotions, to social intelligence, to language and much more. The term Turing++ is to emphasize that our goal is understanding human intelligence at all Marr’s levels — from the level of the computations to the level of the underlying circuits. Answers to the Turing++ Questions should thus be given in terms of models that match human behavior and human physiology — the mind and the brain. These requirements are thus well beyond the original Turing test. A whole scientific field that we call the science of (human) intelligence is required to make progress in answering our Turing++ Questions. It is connected to neuroscience and to the engineering of intelligence but also separate from both of them.

Untangling Employee Loyalty: A Psychological Contract Perspective

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Hart ◽  
Jeffery A. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Contract ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Employee Loyalty ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Cognitive Dimensions

ABSTRACT:Although business ethicists have theorized frequently about the virtues and vices of employee loyalty, the concept of loyalty remains loosely defined. In this article, we argue that viewing loyalty as a cognitive phenomenon—an attitude that resides in the mind of the individual—helps to clarify definitional inconsistencies, provides a finer-grained analysis of the concept, and sheds additional light on the ethical implications of loyalty in organizations. Specifically, we adopt the psychological contract perspective to analyze loyalty's cognitive dimensions, and treat loyalty as an individual-level construction of perceived reciprocal obligations. Based upon this perspective, we present a three-tiered framework of loyalty that provides a psychologically informed definition of the concept, specifies the variety of obligation types that loyalty can imply, and anticipates the potential for asymmetrical loyalty configurations between employers and employees. We use the framework to articulate moral issues associated with both symmetrical and asymmetrical loyalty configurations and discuss the implications of the framework for theory and practice.

scholarly journals Attitude as an Expressible Info-Operational Reaction to a Perceived/Purposed Object/Objective

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
External Information ◽  
Psychological Concept ◽  
The Social ◽  
Controversial Problem ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

The definition of the psychological concept of attitude is still a controversial problem, and the scholars have not yet reached a consensus on this important issue. The attitude is defined in various ways, as a mental and emotional “construct” not directly detectable, or as a “psychological tendency expressed by evaluating a particular entity”. However, as attitude is an achievement of the mind during the exploration of reality, it is naturally to approach first of all the nature of mind and the relation with the cognition processes from the informational perspective. Therefore, in this paper it is investigated the concept of attitude from a completely new point of view, starting from the informational nature of consciousness. It is shown that the informational structure of consciousness can be fully described by the activity of seven distinct cognitive centers and the attitude can be defined actually as an informational reactive output with respect to an object/objective either perceived or mentally proposed. The attitude is thus the result of a decisional info-processing of an input internal or external information, expressible by the specific informational center managed by the brain associated with this activity, defined suggestively as I want. It is shown that attitude is consequently a function of all other six centers, which intervene in the decisional process as decisional criteria or as priority contributing components, and these centers can become dominant or inactive. In agreement with some previous studies and with the neuro-connections of specific regions of the brain, it is shown that emotions contribute to attitude, but also the personal state, the inherited predispositions, the social interactions, the life experience and the trust in the objective, if this is a proposed project. Associated with the attitude, behavior is different, depending on all cognitive centers.

Ontology II: From World–Brain Relation to Consciousness

2018 ◽  
pp. 269-314
Author(s):  
Georg Northoff
Keyword(s):  
Body Problem ◽  
Structural Realism ◽  
The World ◽  
World Brain ◽  
The One ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Physical Features ◽  
The Brain

How can we account for the existence and reality of consciousness and mental features in general? The present chapter complements the previous one by shifting the focus from the ontological determination of the brain to consciousness. I characterized the brain’s existence and reality by world-brain relation for which I presupposed relation and structure as basic units of existence and reality. This entails structural realism, that is, ontic structural realism (OSR). I now apply the definition of the brain by world-brain relation and OSR to consciousness. The main point is that I extend the spatiotemporal definition of world-brain relation to consciousness, that is, its phenomenal features as distinguished from neuronal (and physical) features (while leaving out other features of consciousness like cognitive features; chapter 7). Specifically, I argue that the world-brain relation provides the necessary non-sufficient ontological condition of possible consciousness, the “ontological predisposition of consciousness” (OPC) as I say. The world-brain relation is characterized by spatiotemporal structure with relational time and space which makes possible “upward spatiotemporal entailment” of consciousness. Accordingly, consciousness is entailed spatiotemporally by world-brain relation; this, in turn, makes possible necessary (rather than contingent) a posteriori ontological connection between brain and consciousness on the basis of their commonly underlying and shared world-brain relation. Importantly, this makes superfluous the introduction of the concept of mind to account for necessary connection of mental features to their underlying ontological basis. Therefore, I suggest replacing the concept of mind by the one of world-brain relation. This entails that the mind-body problem becomes superfluous and can be replaced by what I describe as “world-brain problem”.

scholarly journals Healing: Toward a practical definition and clinical understanding

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Burley ◽  
Mary Jane McDowell
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Healing Process ◽  
Family Relationship ◽  
Multidisciplinary Care ◽  
Diagnostic Process ◽  
Goals Of Medicine ◽  
Working Definition ◽  
Whole Person ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Experience Of Illness

Healing is included as one of the fundamental goals of medicine.  It is a term frequently used in health care but often poorly defined and misunderstood. The purpose of this workshop is to address this problem and will be interactive and discussion driven. We will briefly present a 'working definition' of the concept which will include an outline of the 'realms' of healing work from the diagnostic process through to management and treatment.  We will use a case based introduction as a way of demonstrating our understanding of what the healing process entails. We will offer a number of alternate definitions of the term and examine the phenomenology of “lived experience” of illness using the work of Merleau-Ponty, Toombs, Cavel and Cassell and others.  Existential issues which lead to the “brokenness” experienced through illness and suffering will be explored. We will open and facilitate a discussion of aspects and methods of healing with the goal being a clear and, to some degree, operationalised understanding of the concept(s) which we hope will be clinically useful and demonstrate the path(s) to “wholeness”.  Areas which might be explored in the workshop will include the phenomenology of illness and suffering, the use of the clinician/patient/family relationship as the healing vehicle, intersubjectivity and empathy, the importance of narrative, collaborative and multidisciplinary care, the need to combine objective, empirical (evidence based) knowledge and subjective first person (experiential) knowledge to understand the lived experience of suffering and illness and the methodology of Person Centered and whole person care.

Definition and the Mind–Body Problem

2019 ◽  
pp. 4-11
Author(s):  
Alan J. McComas
Keyword(s):  
Body Problem ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Working Definition ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

This chapter is concerned with definition and the monism–dualism debate. It first deals with two major issues—a definition of consciousness and the mind–brain problem. The former is simply stated as “consciousness is an organism’s awareness of itself.” After arriving at a clear working definition, the chapter turns to the mind–brain problem. It pays particular attention to the monism–dualism debate, the former of which argues that there is only one unifying reality. From here, the chapter jump-starts a discussion on consciousness as an epiphenomenon of brain activity, ultimately with a conclusion in favor of epiphenomenalism, in the sense that the mind is a product of the working of the brain.

scholarly journals Why to Study the Brain

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Ruggero Micheletto
Keyword(s):  
Computer Algorithm ◽  
Computational Process ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
The Universe

The brain is the ultimate computational machine in the universe. Despite what was thought about the brain decades and centuries ago, now it is well understood that the brain is a calculator, a machine that does computational things. In other words the brain is something that takes information in its input, elaborates it and then spit-out some result in form of information or actions. Many centuries ago, the brain was the location of the mind. The mind was considered like a mysterious entity where our thought, our consciousness and our feeling resided. The definition of mind of course is still valid today, in some sense. What has changed is the fact that now we know that the mind is the results of a computational process. A very, complex process, presumably a stochastic one, but as far as we know, something that we can define as a computer “algorithm” is running inside our brains. Data are processes in a way that is not yet completely clear, and the result is our entire behavior, our thoughts our actions and our perception of reality

scholarly journals The Mind-Mapping approach (MMA): A culture and language "free" technique

1993 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline M. Leaf ◽  
Isobel C. Uys ◽  
Brenda Louw
Keyword(s):  
Mind Mapping ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Universal Principles ◽  
Mapping Approach ◽  
Head Injured ◽  
Whole Person ◽  
Closed Head ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Culture And Language

Although the roots of the Mind-Mapping approach (MMA) reach back into the depths of psychology, it is our growing understanding of the human brain, how it functions, what affects it, how we can assist it - which has become the real foundation for the model discussed in this paper. By finding ways of creating environments that are brain compatible - or rather - brain enhancing, we can begin to serve the whole person in all his dimensions. In this paper the need for language and culture "free" therapeutic techniques will be discussed. Reference is made to the author's research where the MMA was used very successfully with a closed head injured (CHI) client in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique. The problem of CHI is also discussed. In addition, a brief theoretical review of the brain as it pertains to the concept of the MMA is offered. In the conclusion, it is suggested that global techniques such as the MMA, which are based on fundamental and universal principles, are the route to finding language and culture "free" techniques.

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