Representation and Reality: Humans, Animals and Machines

Workshop organized by

Raffaela Giovagnoli
(Pontifical Lateran University, Vatican)

You can download here the poster

Our workshop could be considered as the continuation of a part of the symposium “Computing Nature” organized by Gordana Dodig – Crnkovic and Raffaela Giovagnoli in the AISB/IACAP World Congress 2012 and “Representation: Humans, Animals and Machines” in the AISB50 Convention at Goldsmith 2015. We would like to offer a further occasion to discuss the problem of “representation” in humans, other animals and machines. It is closely related to the question what capacities can be plausibly computed and what are the most promising approaches that try to solve the problem.

Call for papers

The following interesting topics related to the problem of representation are welcome:

• The point of view of connectionism and dynamical systems (Scheutz, Clark, Juarrero, Kaneko and Tsuda, O’Brien, Horgan, Trenholme) namely the different proposals about the possibility to rule out representation.
• A plausible strategy to analyze the problem of representation from a philosophical perspective implies the comparison between human and machine capacities and skills. Searle presented an interesting theory of representation based on the mind’s capacities to represent objects and to the linguistic capacities to extend the representation to social entities. For machine representation current results in AI and cognitive robotics are of interest.
• Evolutionary aspects of the development of increasingly complex capacities in (embodied, embedded) living organisms to process information in the interaction with the environment and as a consequence develop new morphological structures – morphogenesis, meta-morphogenesis.

Abstracts should be sent to:

raffa.giovagnoli@tiscali.it 

Keynote Speakers

Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic
Chalmers University of Technology and Gothenburg University, Gothenburg, Sweden

Gianfranco Basti
Pontifical Lateran University, Vatican City
"A dual representation theory of quantum Systems and its ontological consequences"

Contributing Speakers

Florent Franchette, INSA, Lyon, France , The possibility of superminds. A response to Bringsjord's argument on infinitary logic

Raffaela Giovagnoli, Pontifical Lateran University, Vatican City,The relevance of language for the problem of representation

Marcos Lopes and Paulo Santos University of São Paulo, Brazil and FEI University Center, São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil, Supervaluation semantics for modeling spatial representations in humans and robots

Venelina Penkova Pencheva and Vasil Dinev Penchev, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", Sofia, Bulgaria and Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria, Representation and Reality by Language

David Zarebski, IHPST, University Panthéon-Sorbonne, France ,Internal inconsistencies: how can an information system ontology be both realistic and common-sense friendly?