Searching for Spirit.

Searching for Truth about Mind and Morality.

Where IS your mind? Is your mind located somewhere in your brain? Does your brain create your mind? If the answer to these questions is yes, the belief held by many religions that there is life after death is false. If the answer to these questions is yes, then morality is a product of the functioning of a brain, and the belief that there is an absolute morality is false.

Searching for Spirit is a quest to discover the true nature of both mind and morality written by C.R. Lind.

• More information at: http://www.searchingforspirit.org/

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Microsoft have recently launched the RoboChamps simulation robotics competition and portal.

The Robochamps.com portal supports the league competitions with training, access to software, and community features. Robochamps is based on simulation, therefore you don't need any real robotics hardware in order to compete. The idea is that you can start programming robots simply using the Microsoft Developer Studio 2008 and Visual Studio.

As the competition is based on MRDS 2008 and its simulation capabilities you can use any .NET language to program your simulated robot. The good thing is that you could use exactly the same code to control a real physical robot. Anyhow, the great advantage of this software simulated competition is that you are provided with rich simulation environments. Usually, it is really hard to build an scenario like that in the real world, so using these simulation environment allow us to test and train our robot controllers in nearly real world situations. Imagine controlling your rescue robot in a city that has just suffer a natural dissaster or a terrorist attack, or let your autonomous car drive under intense traffic conditions... or the much more relaxing exploration of the surface of Mars. These are some of the challenges proposed in RoboChamps.

Each challenge consist of a 3D simulation environment, a robots, a chanllenge scenario, and a set of rules for completing the scenario. Also, a referee service will monitor your control service, ensuring that the rules are followed, and determining your score and submitting it to RoboChamps.com.

The available RoboChamp challenges are:

• AMAZED CHALLENGE:  Use your sensors to avoid traps and other surprises as you navigate the twists and turns of Amazed.
  
  

• MARS ROVER: CHALLENGE: Next Stop, Mars! Navigate the terrain of the red planet and collect data for analysis back on Earth.
  
  
• URBAN CHALLENGE: Do you hate driving downtown? What if you could program a car to do the driving itself? Now you can.
  
  
• SEARCH & RESCUE CHALLENGE: Ready to be a hero? Scour thought the post-disaster rubble to find and rescue survivors in this challenge.
  
  
• SUMO CHALLENGE: Two robots. One ring. It's sumo time! Outmaneuver your opponent and push it out of the ring to reign victorious.
  
  
• TOURNAMENT: Are you the best of the best? Take to the field with your robot and your best code to compete head to head against fellow leaguers.
  
  

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Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 CTP April Available

Yesterday (9th April 2008) Microsoft Robotics group announced the first Community Technical Preview (CTP) of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008. This platform in the thrid version of the formerly named Microsoft Robotics Studio programming platform. The new Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 (RDS 08) is expected to improve the runtime performance up to 300 percent. As explained by Tandy Trower, General Manager of the Robotics Group, at the RoboBusiness conference in Pittsburgh RDS 08 is based on a more synchronous and distributed approach to programming.

As reported by Henrik F Nielsen in the MSRS MSDN Forums, key new features and improvements (in relation to current Robotics Studio 1.5 released version) are:

- Improved security model with support for Message Level Authorization using Role-based access control allowing to fine-grained control of who can access services and how.

- Support for LINQ queries in DSSP subscriptions enabling applications to create complex queries that can be executed close to the data source instead of requiring moving data across the network

- Support for creating applications that run on multiple DSS nodes using Visual Programming Language and DSS Manifest Editor. This makes it much simpler to create applications that run across nodes, either on the same machine or across the network. When an application containing multiple nodes is to be started, VPL creates individual deploy packages for each node and fires them up across the network.

- Support for record and playback functionality in Visual Simulation Environment enabling it to record the position and orientation of each entity and save that information to a file which later can be replayed.

- Support for storing simulation media resources such as texture maps, bitmaps, and mesh files directly as part of the CLR assemblies in the form of embedded resources rather than as external files.

- New Simulation floor plan editor which allows the user to put together walls, doors, windows, etc. to represent the interior of a room, house, or other building.

 I expect to test it in the next few days, so I'll come up with some comments and feedback on these new version.

Relared Links:

• Robotics Developer Studio 2008 April CTP Download
• New features and improvements list
• Conscious-Robots.com Robotics Studio Pages
• Conscious-Robots.com Robotics Studio Forum

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Higher Order Theories of Consciousness take a common account for consciousness based on higher-order representations of conscious states. For the sake of clarity and as a preliminary explanation we could just say that Higher Order Theories (HOT) try to model consciousness as a higher-order thought about a thought.

As always, the most controversial dimension of consciousness to be explained is the phenomenal or subjective experience (Qualia). i.e., the famous what-is-it-like-ness as described by Nagel (1974) in terms of what would it be like to be a bat. Higher Order Theories try to explain phenomenal consciousness in terms of higher order representations. Then, we have the access dimension, which is a much more comfortable concept in terms of computability. From the point of view of accessibility, we can say that there are some mental states that happen to be accessible to consciousness, which means that we are actually aware of these states.

Higher Order Theories of consciousness can be framed within cognitive science as the focus on the cognitive level of description in order to explain phenomenal consciousness. In other words, HOT theories reject the idea of (phenomenal) consciousness being a fundamental property of the mind's substrate. Instead, they consider certain representation processes as the source of consciousness production. Concretely, those representations which are higher order thoughts or beliefs of a mental state.

The usual way to differentiate between conscious and unconscious mental states is to consider that the first are those of which we are aware. According to Higher Order Theories, this is to say that conscious states are those that are the object of some sort of higher representation.

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Feelix Growing (FEEL, Interact, eXpress: a Global appRoach to develOpment With INterdisciplinary Grounding) is a project funded by the European Commission under contract FP6 IST-045169. It was launched in December 2006 and it is planned to end by May 2010. Project budget is 2.5 million Euro.

The members of the consortium are the University of hertfordshire, the French National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS), the Neurocybernetics Team (ETIS), the Learning Algoriths and Systems Laboratory at EPFL, University of Portsmouth, ICCS at the University of Athens, Entertainment Robotics, and Aldebaran Robotics.

The overall goal of the project is to advance the field of socially situated robots, achieving realistic robotics platforms that can be trully integrated in real everyday life environments.

• Feelix Growing Homepage: http://www.feelix-growing.org

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MindPapers - A Bibliography of the Philosophy of Mind and the Science of Consciousness

MindPapers is a bibliography of work in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of cognitive science, and the science of consciousness. It consists of more than 18000 entries and is divided in 8 parts each of which is further divided by topic and subtopic. Both online and offline material is included, with links wherever possible. Also a search facility is available.

MindPapers has been compiled by David Chalmers (Editor) & David Bourget (Assistant Editor), at the Australian National University.

The main 8 parts are:

Part 1: Philosophy of Consciousness
Part 2: Intentionality
Part 3: Perception
Part 4: Metaphysics of Mind
Part 5: Miscellaneous Philosophy of Mind
Part 6: Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence
Part 7: Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Part 8: Science of Consciousness

• MindPapers Web site: http://consc.net/mindpapers/

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