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I teach and research at the University of Sussex and am affiliated with the Centre for Research for Cognitive Science aka. COGS. My research is broadly speaking on the interface between cognition, technology and consciousness. The starting point of this work is that the central problem of cognitive science is that of embodied subjectivity: how it is that flesh and blood creatures such as ourselves are capable of consciousness, self-understanding and can turn out minds into grasping the nature of the universe.
Questions of special interest to me are:
As would befit such a strongly interdisciplinary area of study. I have been a member of three research groups at Sussex the Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems Group and the Cognitive Linguistics Research Group and now my home is the PAICS (Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science) Research Group.
My DPhil work was focused on what I called - after 20th century philosopher and psychologist Lev Vygotsky - the internalisation of language. This work focused on trying to understand the profound implications both for human beings of learning a language and the likely cognitive implications of this momentous step. My take on this question is that we do not have - at least in any straightforward way - a language instinct but that we have profoundly plastic brains which are shaped by ecological, cognitive and technological niches that we inhabit. Mind(fulness) on this account is not the software of the brain but rather an emergent outcome of our biology, history and technology. It is fundamentally open-ended and must be studied contextually as we interact with our everyday worlds, and the cultural achievements of science and technology. (more here)
Since my DPhil work I am now focusing more on the role of technology (I view language as a form of technology) in the shape of human subjectivity. However I am attempting to place this against a broad background of the study of embodied cognition and embodied subjectivity, which takes in the question of what aspects of our mental lives depend on our embodiment, and what on how broader historical and technological embeddedness.
In the wider sense I work on the philosophy and history of cognitive science, cognitive modelling, theoretical psychology and am particularly interested in the epigenetic approach to the understanding of mind. Currently I am working on the historical, social and cognitive dimensions of agency. I am also doing some work social networking technologies and trying to use it as a prism to study the role of technology in constructing and transforming subjectivity. I am also very interested in robotic and simulated models of consciousness: I tend to think we are a long way from anything currently we might want to call conscious.
Generaly I can be contacted on +44 (0)1273 638317. However I am away from Sussex University and attempting to complete a book on cognitive technology and being human. I am in Lisbon until January 2011.
Until then it is better to contact be on robertc at cogs.susx.ac.uk . (This orthography is a probably futile attempt to ward off spam-bots, but replace 'at' with @ for human beings wishing to contact me. Apologies to any sentient robots out there but I'm still waiting to be convinced of your existence.)
In another capacity (outside of my university responsibilities) I also help run the Brighton Salon a monthly discussion forum based in Brighton. Check out the website and get in touch if you would like to attend.
NB: I am attempting to update and revamp this website (especially the teaching resources). Patience and forbearance is invited while this is happening.
Clowes, R., and Seth, A.K. (2008). Axioms, properties, and criteria: Roles for synthesis in the science of consciousness. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. 44:94-104 [pdf] (special issue on artificial consciousness).
Clowes, R. W., Torrance, S., & Chrisley, R. (2007). Machine Consciousness: Embodiment and Imagination (editorial introduction). Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14(7), 7-14.
Clowes, R. W. (2007). A Self-Regulation Model of Inner Speech and its Role in the Organisation of Human Conscious Experience. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14 (7), 59-71. (journal link)
Clowes, R. W. (2007). Semiotic symbols and the missing theory of thinking. Interaction Studies, 8 (1), 105-124.
Clowes, R. W. (2007). The complex vehicles of human thought and the role of scaffolding, internalisation and semiotics in human representation. Paper presented at the Adaptation and Representation, virtual platform @ www.interdisciplines.org. (HTML with commentaries)
Morse, A., Herrera, C., Clowes, R., Montebelli, A. & Ziemke, T., (Submitted) The Role of Robotic Modelling in Cognitive Science. New Ideas In Psychology
Torrance, S., Clowes, R., & Chrisley, R. (Eds.). (2007). Machine Consciousness: Embodiment and Imagination, Special Issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies (Vol. 14, Number 7).
Clowes, R. W., Chrisley, R., & Torrance, S. (2006). Proceedings of the Symposium on Integrative Approaches to Machine Consciousness, AISB-06. Bristol: University of Bristol. (PDF)
Chrisley, R., Clowes, R. W., & Torrance, S. (2005). Next-generation approaches to machine consciousness. In R. Chrisley, R. W. Clowes & S. Torrance (Eds.), Proceedings of the AISB05 Symposium on Next Generation approaches to Machine Consciousness: Imagination, Development, Intersubjectivity, and Embodiment. (also available as Cognitive Science Research Paper 574 ftp://ftp.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/pub/reports/csrp/csrp574.pdf )
Rumble, A., & Clowes, R. W. (2008, 13-15 November). Apprehending our Disembodiment: an Examination of Metzinger's analysis of Cotard's Syndrome. Poster presented at the Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Disorders and Coherence of the Embodied Self International Conference, Heidelberg.
Cowley, S. J., & Clowes, R. W. (2008). Distributed language: consensus and connotations. Introduction to the session on language at the Workshop on Enactive approaches to Social Cognition, Battle, UK.
Clowes, R. W. (2008, 26th June). A Sensorimotor Contingency View of Agency. Paper presented at the Philosophy of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology: Graduate and Post-Doctoral Conference, Edinburgh.
Clowes, R. W. (2008, 19 June). Distributed Thinking and Internalisation. Paper presented at Distributed Thinking: A Symposium., University of Hertfordshire, UK.
Clowes, R. W., Herrera, C., McGinnity, M., & Ziemke, T. (2007). How words become cognitive. Paper presented at the Language and Robots, Aveiro, Portugal. (PDF)
Herrera, C., Clowes, R. W., McGinnity, M., & Ziemke, T. (2007). Robots that inhabit the human world. Poster presented at the Language and Robots, Aveiro, Portugal. (PDF)
Clowes, R. W. (2007, 10th-12th May). Transparency and agency in inner speech. Paper presented at the Language dynamics and the phenomenology of individual experience, (Agder University College), Grimstad, Norway.
Clowes, R. W. (2006). The Problem of Inner Speech and its relation to the Organization of Conscious Experience: a Self-Regulation Model. In R. W. Clowes, S. Torrance & R. Chrisley (Eds.), Proceedings of AISB06 Symposium on Integrative Approaches to Machine Consciousness. (PDF - but this conference paper is an early version of my recent paper for JCS)
Clowes, R. W. (May 2006). Beyond Situated Action: Language Internalisation and The Constitution Of An Inner World. Paper presented at the Symposium On Language, Communication & Cognition, Portsmouth / Sussex.
Clowes, R. W. and A. Morse (2005). "Scaffolding Cognition with Words." Accepted draft for the 5th International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics. (PDF)
Clowes, R. W. (2003). Simulating the Regulation of Activity by Symbolic Systems. Evolvability & Interaction Symposium, Queen Mary University of London, University of Hertfordshire Computer Science Technical Report No. 393.
Clowes, R. W. (2003). The developmental perspective on sensorimotor accounts of language. Paper presented at the Presented at Seventh CEP Annual Conference: Enactive Consciousness: Perception, Intersubjectivity and Empathy.
Clowes, R. W. (2003). Action Oriented Adaptive Language Games. Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics, Boston, Lund University Cognitive Studies.
Clowes, R. W. (2008, August). The Dialectic of Wearing an iPod. The Spiked Review of Books(16).
[ ... some more to follow ...]
Clowes, R. W. (2002 Autumn). Review of 'A Mind so Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness'. AISB Quarterly(110), 8 - 10.
In 2006 I was on the organising committee and responsible for local organisation of: Integrative Approaches to Machine Consciousness: an AISB symposium as part of the AISB'06 convention, Adaptation in Artificial and Biological Systems.
In 2005 I was involved in the organisation of the following conferences:
Next Generation approaches to Machine Consciousness: Imagination, Development, Intersubjectivity, and Embodiment. (12 - 13 April 2005) with Steve Torrance and Ron Chrisley.
Along with John Sung I organised a theme session on Making Sense of Embodiment at:
Clowes, R. W. (2008, 23 October). Agentive Content and Some Other Dimensions of Experience. Paper presented at the E-Intentionality Seminar.
Clowes, R. W. (2007, Wednesday 5th Dec). The Distributed View of Language: What Kind of Language Capabilities does A Robot Need? Paper presented at the Life and Mind Seminar Series.
Clowes, R. W. (2007, 19 April). Transparency and Agency in Inner Speech. Paper presented at the E-Intentionality Seminar Series.
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(Currently updating more to follow)
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Clowes, R. W. (2003, 4th Dec). The social construction of folk psychology (or propositional attitudes as cognitive technology). Paper presented at the E-Intentionality Seminar Series.
Working at COGS (and more laterly in COGS in the Department of Informatics) over the last several years has allowed me to pursue teaching in intersecting areas of my research in a way which would likely be impossible at other Universities. For that privilege I am extremely indebted to Sussex. In 2004 I held the temporary post of Lecturer in Cognitive Science; I have been doing similar teaching ever since.
I am currently (2008 - 2009) running the following undergraduate courses:
In recent years (2003 / 2004) I ran two courses: Philosophy of Psychology and Philosophical Issues in Cognitive Science 1 and 2 (third year courses). I was also a tutor on two courses for the Psychology department: Language. Thinking and Memory and Approaches to Psychology which other than the research methods part, is the whole first year of the psychology degree. It has introductory components on social psychology, personality psychology, developmental psychology, neuro-psychology and cognitive psychology.
I have been teaching designing and running courses for Sussex University since around 2002 in the then School of Cognitive and Computer Sciences. The first course which I lectured on and developed and designed (latterly in collaboration with Martin Langham) was Thinking Skills for Cognitive Scientists. This course took an interdisciplinary approach; through the prisms of Psychology, AI, Philosophy and Linguistics to the relationships between reason, science and the human mind. Since then I have taught several psychology courses although the mainstay of my teaching has focused on the philosophy of cognitive science (see above). In 2008 I am also helping out with a guest lecture on Geraldine Fitzpatrick's Cognitive Ergonomics Course.
I am currently updating teaching pages (Nov/Dec 2008) - please check back in a short while for updated information or email me.
In the academic year (2004 / 2005) I taught all of the core components of the Philosophy of Cognitive Science Masters Course:
Since then I have been occasionally teaching Phil of Cog Sci II (run now by Ron Chrisley) and have continued to teach the option. Information on current versions of these courses as taught by Ron can be found at Phil of Cog Sci I & Phil of Cog Sci II.
This course runs in a slighlty different form each year. For some guide reading please contact me. The actual intended reading for this course will be published shortly.
In recent years I have also overseen several Masters projects.
Previous versions of the above courses were taught by Ron Chrisley, Andy Clark, Steve Torrance and Giovanna Colombetti and in developing my versions of these courses I've benefited greatly from their previous work. Thanks to them all and to Mike Beaton with whom I had very useful discussion on the development of Phil Cog Sci I. Also I am grateful to the students who forced me to revise my thinking on many things.
My major research interest revolves around the interdisciplinary attempt to examine the foundations of the deeply enculturated minds that human beings have and their functioning as both natural and social systems. I am especially interested in understanding language as a cognitive as well as communicative system; in the way, that our ability to use language and other cultural tools confers higher cognitive abilities on human beings which allow the continued restructuring of our behaviour and cognition. Although my interests in the implications of these ideas are wide, my primary research interest - on which I am completing my DPhil (due September this year) - is on how this human capacity for 'deep enculturation' is developmentally established. The general outlook I take owes a great deal to the early twentieth century psychologist and philosopher Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky attempted to understand what he called higher cognitive functions through the way that intersubjective activity was internalised to form intra-subjective cognitive function. In particular Vygotsky understood the internalisation of language as the principle means by which higher cognitive functions are established.
Vygotsky's ideas still seem to some ahead of their time but my particular concern is read them through into contemporary cognitive science. In particular to the discussion which has grown up around what has been called extended cognition and the extended mind. This approach attempts to explain some of the complexity of activities that human beings are capable of participating in as being best understood not by ascribing them simply to faculties of the biological brain, or even our natural embodiment - as undoubtedly important as these are- but as developed and sustained in tandem with a vast array of external representational systems and other tools. Cognition then is not merely something that happens in brains, but brains, plus an array of external technologies and cultural systems.
Theoretical work in this area has been pioneered in recent years by amongst others Andy Clark, Merlin Donald, Richard Gregory, and applied research broadly in line with this idea has been carried out by Edwin Hutchins and David Kirsch. A popular introduction to this idea and its implications can be found in Andy Clark's book
, Richard Gregory, and applied research broadly in line with this idea has been carried out by Edwin Hutchins and David Kirsch. A popular introduction to this idea and its implications can be found in Andy Clark's book Natural Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence (2003).
A persistent trend in contemporary cognitive science is the attempt to ascribe more and more features of human cognition to hard-wired genetic modular systems. This approach can be seen in part to grow out of a certain mood of evolutionary psychology which sees the explanation of the particular human cognitive profile as being fixed in the Pleistocene period, when our hunter-gatherer ancestors roamed the Savannahs of Africa. Arguments to this effect can be found in the work of Stephen Pinker particularly in his books How the mind works (1997) and The Blank Slate (2002) .
And yet, one of the central features of human cognition is the ability to incorporate new abilities developed in cultural time. As I see it, one of the most important questions for cognitive science today is to try and understand the nature of our unprecedented cognitive openness and abilities to incorporate cultural and technical artefacts as new substrates of our extended cognitive profiles. We need to grasp how the human mind is not just identical to the biological brain but is formed of the activities of our brains, bodies and the various cultural and technological substrates in which they are embedded. Theoretical approaches that share this type of approach are distributed cognition, the extended mind, activity theory, situated action and a variety of other approaches that may be thought of as nouvelle approaches to cognitive science. Part of my research has focused upon the significant beneath the surfaces of these related but often quite different trains of thought.
The philosopher Andy Clark (who was here at Sussex and on my research committee) has argued that a proper understanding of our minds requires not overly identifying its capacities with biological brains, but our brains plus this panoply of external (although sometimes internalised) technologically and socially created support structures. Clark has called language the ultimate artefact, and part of meaning I take it he wants to convey by this is that language although not itself a natural system is deeply involved in our cognitive world at many levels.
Although much recent theoretical research has refocused on the idea that language does play an important part in cognition (a couple of the more important references are below), a view that has not always been the case in cognitive science, there is little agreement about the nature of the role it does play. Is language an external prop that changes the computational space that our brains inhabit (Clark's view), a system that installs a serial processing machine on our parallel hardware (Dennett's view), a system for facilitating inter-modular communication (Carruthers' view) or a system for installing a compositional symbolic architecture (Deacon's view)?
Although it is heartening to see much new research in this area it is still perhaps at too early a stage to make a decision about which of these approaches seem more on track. This is largely due to a paucity of our understanding of what a cognitive architecture that makes use of language might look like.
My research focuses on the ways in which human language may be understood as a special case of extended cognition and what this would therefore entail for human cognitive architecture. Although I have an active interest in the wide variety of philosophical and conceptual issues that these questions touch upon the concrete focus of my research is in looking at how simulations might be used in developing a better understanding of how cognition can be extended by symbolic means.
The main focus of my current research has therefore been into how to better understand, and build models of linguaform cognitive architectures. In particular I am attempting to build models of the development of language like systems in multi-agent environments that treat language-use as another sort of practical activity.
Carruthers, P. (2002). "The Cognitive Function of Language." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25(6),
Clark, A. (1998). Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation. Language and Thought. Interdisciplary Themes. P. Carruthers and J. Boucher. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 162 - 183, to name
Deacon, T. W. (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the human brain, The Penguin Press, Penguin Book Ltd.
Dennett, D. C. (1994). The Role of Language in Intelligence. What is Intelligence. D. C. Dennett. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
In 1994 Daniel Dennett commented "In Artificial Intelligence … even the most ambitiously realistic systems -- such as SOAR, the star of Allen Newell's Unified Theories of Cognition (1990) -- are described without so much as a hint about which features, if any, are dependent on the system's having acquired a natural language with which to supplement its natural representational facilities." Despite a significant re-orientation in recent years toward behaviour based robotics - a radically different ways of conceiving of the task of building cognitive architectures - this lacuna has more or less remained. I'm particularly interested in what a behaviour based language architecture might look like.
One approach to this work has been pursued called the Adaptive Language Games framework has been pursued by Luc Steels and his collaborators at Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel where some of the most interesting current work is going on into the evolution of language. This work has opened up a new field of research into the grounding of language of multi-agent systems.
My approach was also strongly influenced my approach in this area is being pursued by Angelo Cangelosi and Stevan Harnad, who use multi-agent system simulations, to explore questions of the grounding of symbols and how these might be used to share categorical knowledge.
However my work looks at how symbolic systems might be grounded not just in perceptual activity, but also in action.
My own approach to the subject has developed out of a critical engagement with this work, although instead of focusing on the question of symbol-grounding, I'm instead looking at the question of mediation of action by symbols. Basically the research is focused on how symbolic systems come to mediate goal directed activities. Ultimately I believe a proper understanding of the former cannot be achieved without a good understanding of the latter.
An excellent resource for papers on this kind of work can be found at Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography.
More details and findings of my work in this area will be available on this page shortly although details of the general approach can be found in some recent conference related publications.
In the academic years 2003 to 2005 I organised the COGS seminar series. This has at times been an 'interesting' job due to the change of COGS from a school, to a research centre and ensuing upheaval. And yet, it has also been tremendously rewarding partly because of the kind help from many others in identifying speakers that may be of interest to the cognitive science community, and of course the very high level of speakers we have had both from within and beyond the research centre.
From 2004 to 2006 I programmed a series of COGS symposia for the Centre of Research in Cognitive Science at University of Sussex
Symposium on Language, Communication & Cognition, May 2006. Sussex, England.
On March 14-15, 2005 I co-organised a COGS Interdisciplinary Symposium symposium on Art, Embodiment and the Body.http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cogs/1-4-3.html
In 2004 I helped organise the first Cogs Symposium on Enactive Perception.
I was also on the organisation committee for
New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics Conference (1st UK CLC), October 2005. Sussex, England
And co-organised with John Sung
The current talks are up on the COGS website.
| Time / Place | Paper / Poster Title | Conference / Event | ||
| E-Intentionality
Research Group
Here are the slides for this recent research in progress talk |
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| October 8 -10 2003
Queen Mary University of London |
Simulating the Regulation of Activity by Symbolic Systems | EPSRC Symposium on | ||
| August 4-5, 2003
Boston |
Action Oriented Adaptive Language Games |
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| Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th June 2003
St Anne's College, Oxford |
THE DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE ON SENSORIMOTOR ACCOUNTS OF LANGUAGE | SEVENTH CEP ANNUAL
CONFERENCE Enactive Consciousness: Perception, Intersubjectivity and Empathy |
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| 20 June 2003
Sussex University |
What Vygotsky might say to Glenberg about higher cognitive functions. Investigations into the embodiment of language | E-Intentionality Research Group | ||
| 10 Jan 2003 Sussex University |
General Theories of Cognition: Situated Action or Activity Theory? | E-Intentionality Research Group |
I am a member of the Cognitive Science Society and the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour.
For those looking to build Neural Net Systems in Java there is a very good free resource which I have used in my simulations. Check out theJoone site. There is also a useful resource which is available for those interested in multi-agent simulation of symbol grounding, created by Paul Vogt, which can be found at http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~paulv/tutorial-evolang5.html . Hopes to make the simulation software from my own DPhil are probably permanently on hold unless someone else wants to put some work into this.
For those interesting in learning to program computers and would like a more conceptual presentation, as well as free downloadable books try Bruce Eckel's website. His book on the patterns approach - and publishing model - are especially interesting.
