Prof Maggie Boden

Biography

She was the founding-Dean of Sussex University's School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, a pioneering centre for research into intelligence and the mechanisms underlying it -- in humans, other animals, or machines. The School's teaching and research involves an unusual combination of the humanities, science, and technology. Philosophy is studied within the School both as an undergraduate major and as a postgraduate (MA and DPhil) subject.

Professor Boden holds the following academic honours, by election:

• Fellow (and former Vice-President) of the British Academy -- and Chairman of their Philosophy Section until July 2002.
• Member of the Academia Europaea.
• Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
• Fellow of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI).
• Life Fellow of the UK's Society for Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour.
• Member of Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
• Former Vice-President (and Chairman of Council) of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

Outside Sussex, she has lectured widely, to both specialist and general audiences, in North and South America, Europe, India, the USSR, and the Pacific. She has also appeared on many radio/TV programmes, in UK and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into twenty foreign languages.

 She was awarded an OBE. in 2001 (for "services to cognitive science"), and besides her Cambridge ScD,  She has three honorary doctorates (from Bristol, Sussex, and the Open Universities).

Here is her own description of "What I Do":

This Is What I Do
I do lots of different things, as befitting the interdisciplinary atmosphere of COGS. All of them relate to my abiding interest (since I was a Sixth-Former) in the human mind: what it is, how it works, and how it relates to the brain and to evolution. All these questions straddle individual "disciplines."

The nature of purpose and intentions.
Human freedom differs from the relatively unvarying actions of non-human animals. It arises from the complex integration of cognition, motivation, and emotion in human personality. In abnormal personalities, freedom is limited in various ways.
See my Purposive Explanation In Psychology

How creativity is possible.
Creativity is an aspect of human freedom. It's possible to account for it in scientifically respectable terms. It's even possible, up to a point. to model the generation of creative ideas in computers.
See my The Creative Mind: Myths And Mechanisms

AI-models of mind
Both symbolic and connectionist AI can help us think clearly about what the mind is, what it does, and how. (That's true even when the AI-models fail to match the human reality.)
See my Artificial Intelligence And Natural Man, and also Computer Models Of Mind.

Biological aspects of psychology
Our minds evolved, and we can't understand how they work without realizing that. Some psychologists (e.g. Piaget) have stressed this for many years. Recently, the theme has been taken up in A-Life.
See my Piaget (esp 2nd edn.) and The Philosophy Of Artificial Life

Boden, Margaret A (2009) Life and mind. Minds and Machines, 19 (4). pp. 453-463. ISSN 09246495