updated 2021-03-22: I’ve finally added the video for this talk, above.

Here are some notes about a guest lecture I will give in Dr. Angelica Lim’s course on Affective Computing (Dpt of Computer Science) at SFU on 2020-07-16. (Twitter handle)

I aim to inspire students about the importance, enjoyability and challenges of trying to understand entire minds of autonomous agents, using an integrative design-oriented approach. I will present several interesting problems and functions that call for such an understanding, and focus mainly on mental perturbance.

The lecture is partly based on a paper by myself, Monika Pudlo & Sylwia Hyniewska that is ‘in press’:

Mental perturbance: An integrative design-oriented concept for understanding repetitive thought, emotions and related phenomena involving a loss of control of
executive functions

that paper is partly based on our 2017 AISB paper.

Some relevant readings

Here are some relevant readings — much more than is realistic for a week.

Autonomous agency, emotion and perturbance 

• Perturbance: Unifying Research on Emotion, Intrusive Mentation and Other Psychological Phenomena with AI (Presented at AISB-2017)
• Constructive and Unconstructive Repetitive Thought attempts to describe RT in atheoretical terms (so psychology). But can we understand phenomena atheoretically? In physics, can light, even its measure, be understood atheoretically? But it’s an important paper.
• Towards a Design-Based Analysis of Emotional Episodes (1996 article; but still quite relevant. There’s an interesting analysis of grief, covering romantic grief.)
• Fifty Years after Herbert Simon’s Landmark Contribution to Emotion Research: “Motivational and Emotional Controls of Cognition” (1967)
• Goal Processing in Autonomous Agents (Ph.D. thesis):  An integrative design-oriented approach to autonomous agents (before the term IDO was coined)
• On The Relationship-building Proclivities of Human Nature – CogZest (“Emotions”)

Research Methods and programmes

• A (draft) manifesto for Integrative Design-oriented (IDO) research on autonomous agents – CogZest.
• Humean vs. Kantian Approaches to Kantian Mechanisms (Human Mind) 
• Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust by Gary F. Marcus.
• In Best Laid Schemes: The Psychology of the Emotions, Keith Oatley argued that great fiction is an important source for the psychology of emotions. I would argue more generally that research on autonomous agency needs not only to be empirically tested, but tested against great fiction.

Application to sleep onset and insomnolence

• Towards an integrative design-oriented theory of sleep-onset and insomnolence from which a new cognitive treatment for insomnolence (serial diverse kinesthetic imagining, a form of cognitive shuffling) is proposed for experimentally testing this | Summit. This applies IDO and perturbance to insomnia.

Books on ‘limerence’ (perturbant romantic love)

There’s no shortage of stories about limerence. My favorite these days is Les Liaisons dangereuses (French book). If your French is up to the challenge, go for the original French version. Otherwise, there are English translations, such as Dangerous Liaisons. There’s a great film adaptation: Dangerous Liaisons (but I strongly recommend reading the novel before watching the film.)

Non-fiction: Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love by Dorothy Tennov (book)

IDO applied to learning

• My first book,  Cognitive Productivity: Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective applies an IDO approach to understanding expert learning in adults.