Making Time: Temporality and Artificial Systems
Satellite workshop for the ALIFE 2024 conference
Overview
Recent advances in cognitive and biological research have deepened our understanding on many subjects, while forcing us to re-examine others that had for a long time been considered too conceptually tangled to be of relevance to practical advances in day-to-day scientific research.
Among such issues, the subjective experience of the present (“present-time consciousness”) and its relation to adaptive processes is one where – despite there still being much work to be done – the cognitive and life sciences appear to be seeing a gradual conceptual convergence.
The goal of this two-part workshop is to encourage the Artificial Life community to capitalise on this rare trend towards conceptual re-alignment with substantive progress towards practical and implementable output, by drawing together its multiple research directions.
Workshop Topics
The first half of the workshop pulls together recent work on present-time consciousness from a cognitive, neurobiological, and phenomenological perspective. We intend to address developments of post-Husserlian models of the experience of the present as constituted by the perpetual unfolding of protentive and retentive dynamics, within the context of empirical evidence regarding their possible biological bases
The second half considers approaches to simulating and engineering artificial agents endowed with such temporality:
Whereas phenomenological accounts of temporality were traditionally considered anathema to computational, discretised approaches, current alternatives (such as computational phenomenology) demand a re-examination of this assumption. From here, we will address the question of whether a successful model of some kind could serve as either a necessary or sufficient step towards the actual creation of artificial systems that can be literally said to possess a temporal inner dimension of the sort at stake.
Keynote speakers
Call for Abstracts
Relevant topics to this workshop include, but are not limited to:
Biologically-inspired (theoretical or implementational) models of temporality
The traditional phenomenological conceptualisation of present-time consciousness as fundamentally non-discretisable, and challenges thereto.
Philosophical developments building upon core temporal concepts.
Research on computational (neuro-)phenomenology and time.
Active inference perspectives on dynamical and representational aspects of time experience and perception of time
Abstract formalization of temporality-related properties or models (e.g. hierarchically nested processes, imbrication of multiple time-scales, integration of predictive/anticipatory elements, etc.)
Artificial implementations, models, sketches, prospects and theoretical discussion on the practicability of computational time-continuity.
We welcome original work for discussion, such as planned or ongoing experimental research, theoretical proposals, and summaries of previous publications.
Please submit abstracts to: makingtime.alife2024@gmail.com
Important Dates
Abstract submission deadline: May 31, 2024
Notification of acceptance: June 15, 2024
Workshop date: Tuesday, July 23, 2024
Organizers and Contact
Adam Rostowski (a.rostowski@sussex.ac.uk), Department of Informatics, University of Sussex
Fernando Rodriguez Vergara (f.rodriguez-vergara@sussex.ac.uk), AI Research Group, University of Sussex
Program
TBA
Venue
THE IT UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN
Rued Langgaards Vej 7
2300 København S
Denmark