The University of Guelph has a Philosophy of Biology course and it was everything I was hoping it would be. Jointly taught by Dr. Stefan Linquist and Dr. Ryan Gregory, our focus on arguments surrounding epigenetics led many to agree there isn’t really a lot of new information. The book Extended heredity: a new understanding of inheritance and evolution turned out to be hilariously contradictory, as many of the concepts it presented can be easily explained by existing biological theories. I had an opportunity to receive feedback on ideas I have about Chalmers’ “bridging principles” and how biological processes produce subjective feelings. As I suspected, an incredible amount of work needs to be done to get these ideas together, but I have a direction now. The project is being placed on the back burner though and so is my attempt to work on consciousness at school. I’m not too worried, I’ll get to it later.
For now, I’m going to work on an argument for an upcoming need to reconsider our conception of robots and our relationships with them, particularly as they begin to resemble subjects rather than objects. There is a growing demand for robotic solutions within the realm of healthcare, suggesting certain functionality must be incorporated to achieve particular outcomes. Information processing related to social cues and contexts such as emotional expression will be important to uphold patient dignity and foster well-being. Investigating Kismet‘s architecture suggests cognition and emotion operate in tandem to orient agents toward goals and methods for obtaining them. The result of this functional setup, however, is it requires humans to treat Kismet like a biological organism, implying a weak sense of subjectivity. I’m also interested in considering objections to the subjectivity argument and reasons why our relationships with robots will remain relatively unchanged.
My original post on the philosophy of biology cited the entry from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which is authored Paul Griffiths. I learned earlier this term that Dr. Linquist studied under Dr. Griffiths, a fact that should not be surprising but is still quite exciting.
I’m looking forward to working on this project and the outcome of the feedback and learning, but I am going to get knocked down many levels over the next six months or so. I mean, that’s why I am here.
Works Cited
Bonduriansky, Russell, and Troy Day. Extended heredity: a new understanding of inheritance and evolution. Princeton University Press, 2018.