Creative Agents
This site was created by, and is maintained by Selmer Bringsjord, Director of RPI's Minds & Machines Program. Copyright 1997, Selmer Bringsjord.
We are changing that -- quickly. We are building genuinely creative agents that will be of interest to not only researchers within AI and Cog Sci, but also to companies who would be able to profit from the deployment of such agents amongst their workforces. Our first two specimens are BRUTUS.1 and MONA-LISA. (That's a picture of the "real-life" Brutus at the top of this file, on the left. The portrait of Abe on the right was created by MONA-LISA.)
We are not only building creative agents; we are also studying creative agents of the human variety. So we are looking for answers to the deeper scientific and philosophic questions that go hand-in-hand with our engineering. For example:
James Fahey. Minds make things happen in a very special way. When "things happen," they change over time. When we "make" things happen, we cause them to happen. The "very special way" in which minds cause change is bound up with consciousness. Unlike stones and thermometers, we think that minds act in accord with what they think, feel and perceive. But just what is this consciousness and how does it cause change over time?
The search for the true nature of mind is the overriding focus of the emerging discipline of Cognitive Science. Two broad currents of thought have begun to crystalize. Reductivists of various stripes argue that appropriate accounts of mind or consciousness will show that it is "nothing but" some "more basic" feature of the world -- perhaps the aggregate of certain "brain states," or, more abstractly, perhaps mind is "nothing but" the "computer program" that those "brain states" instantiate. Nonreductivists argue instead that there is some important sense in which mind is "irreducible." It cannot be analyzed as a neurophysiological aggregate nor in terms of a mere computer program and perhaps this is because mind is "more than" a mere aggregate of brain states. My own research involving Minds & Machines is an attempt to clarify and argue for a certain brand of nonreductivism called emergentism. Most recently, in "Emergentism: Dead Again?" Michael Zenzen and I argue that contemporary results in quantum physics support emergentism -- the view that the natures of some things are not completely derivative of the aggregate natures of the things that constitute or give rise to them. In "Causal Kinds and Multiple Realizability: A Dilemma for the Nonreductive Physicalist," I continue my defense of emergentism as the most supportable nonreductivist view of mind/consciousness.
Katherine H. Voegtle is an Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology at the College of St. Rose. Kathy has presented and published papers on cognitive processing of metaphors. She has developed and taught college level courses on creative thinking and problem solving in everyday life. Kathy is interested in metaphor as an aspect of creative language and thought and in the creative processes exhibited in everyday tasks. She is also continuing to explore ways to encourage creative thinking in both children and adults and ways to assess creative thinking.
David Ferrucci.
Selmer Bringsjord specializes in the logico-mathematical and philosophical foundations of artificial intelligence (AI), and, on the applied side, in the intersection of AI and creativity. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and the PhD in philosophy and logic from Brown University in 1987. Since then he has been on faculty at Rensselaer, where in the Departments of Philosophy, Psychology and Cognitive Science, and Computer Science, he teaches AI, logic, and philosophy of mind. His pedagogy is in large part computation-based: All of his courses make intensive use of the Web, and of courseware of various types (e.g., Hyperproof). The materials thereon for his courses Introduction to Logic and Computability and Logic are in particular demand; they are used by publishers of logic courseware (e.g., Cambridge University Press and Stanford's CSLI). Bringsjord was on Rensselaer's team that won the prestigious Hesburgh Award (1995) for excellence in undergraduate education (for technology-based interactive learning). He was also a Lilly Fellow in 1989, during which time he designed and implemented an electronic textbook for introducing cognitive and computer science. He is co-director, with David Porush, of the Autopoeisis Project, launched by a generous gift of $300,000 from the Luce Foundation and grants from IBM and Apple Computer. Bringsjord is author of the critically acclaimed What Robots Can \& Can't Be (1992, Kluwer; ISBN 0-7923-1662-2), which is concerned with the future of attempts to create robots that behave as humans. Two new technical books, Super-Minds, and Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity, are forthcoming this year (Kluwer Academic/Lawrence Erlbaum). The book Abortion: A Dialogue will also be published this Fall by Hackett. Dr. Bringsjord is also the author of a prescient novel Soft Wars (Penguin, 1991), and papers ranging in approach from the mathematical to the informal, and covering such areas as AI, logic, natural theology, and ethics. He has lectured and interviewed in person and on radio and television across the United States, and in England, France, Ireland, Australia, Germany, Thailand, Japan and Canada.
Ellen Esrock is an Associate Professor of Literature at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She teaches courses in twentieth century literature and visual art, psychology and literature, and theory/history of photography. Drawing on cognitive psychology and neuroscience, she has been exploring the felt experiences of image and word that are elicited in response to works of visual art and literature. Her concerns are with embodied consciousness as produced though multi-sensory forms of mental imagery and through the somatosensory system.
Selected publications:
David Porush is a professor of literature and science studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic. He has written widely in essays, books, and papers about the history and impact of cybernetcs and information science on culture and knowledge formation, about virtual reality, hypertext, and the future of technology, and about the comparative cognitive challenges of education in Hebrew and English. His book The Soft Machine (1985) was the first full-length study and prediction of the emergence of a cybernetic culture in postmodernism, translated and re-issued in a Japanese edition in 1991, with chapters translated and published in German and French. Porush is also co-PI in an ongoing AI project investigating story generation by computer, and developer of the GAMEWORLD AI system.
At Rensselaer, Porush initiated and administered a cross-disciplinary and cross-departmental undergraduate degree program, Electronic Media, Arts, and Communication (EMAC) and has helped develop the Minds & Machines Program. He is co-founder and former Executive Director of the Society for Literature and Science, former chair of the Literature and Science Section of the Modern Language Association, and has lectured nationally and internationally on cybernetics, virtual reality, and its impact on society. As Fulbright Researcher in the Department of Science Education at the Technion (1993-94), he initiated a new degree program in technical and scientific translation and communication, and conducted a postdoctoral seminar for faculty in the department on the cognition of education. Porush is currently working under Rensselaer's Pew Charitable Trust award for technological education to design a new course in cyberculture.
Porush is a co-PI and co-director of a new Center for Collaborative Research in Learning Technologies, proposed to the NSF for funding at $1.5m/yr for 3-5 years. The CCRLT brings together 20 professors from 14 disciplines, four schools and three universities to develop and assess coherent approaches to using the computer and multi media for education. in K-12, universities, distance learning and lifelong education.