ECAL2007 Deadline Extensions

Dear all,
In response to many requests received by the OC, we are glad to announce that the deadline for paper submissions to ECAL2007 was extended to the 16th of April.
You are all very much welcome to Lisbon!
All the best,
Fernando
–
Fernando Almeida e Costa
ECAL2007 Chair
www.ecal2007.org
www.ecal2007.org/venue.htm

Modelling Autonomy Workshop – San Sebastian

A few of us went to the “Modelling Autonomy” workshop in San Sebastian last week. I think it is fair to say that it was a huge success and that everyone involved had a great time! Many thanks to Kepa, Xabier, and Alvaro, as well as everyone else who was helping out, for doing such [...]

Autopoiesis and consciousness

I’ve recently had an e-mail exchange with Hugo Urrestarazu, an old student of Maturana’s, on the topic of the relation between autopoiesis and consciousness. I thought that his response to my questions might be of interest to everyone with respect to this week’s seminar discussion by Steve so I posted it here in slightly edited [...]

Seminar #15: Consciousness as a target for the artificial sciences

The next Life and Mind seminar will be on Wednesday, the 14th of March, at 15:00 in room ARUN 404A. Steve Torrance will be leading a discussion on:
Consciousness as a target for the artificial sciences.
The topic of this talk is: The realizability of Artificial Consciousness. The basic message is: It’s a long way off. No [...]

Thoughts on processes

Tom, Eduardo and I are working on a paper on autonomy, hopefully to be presented at ECAL. We wanted a definition of autonomy that would be something along the lines of “homeostasis of a recursive network of processes” or “homeostasis of relations between processes” that could be applied to both real living systems and [...]