Aaron Sloman
University of Birmingham
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Aaron Sloman, Emeritus Professor at the University of Birmingham, is one of the deepest thinkers on what it means for a mind to be a machine. His 1978 book The Computer Revolution in Philosophy argued, before the terms existed, that philosophy of mind should treat mental phenomena as virtual machine states, organized patterns of processing running on physical substrates. His CogAff architecture schema and the related H-CogAff model organize cognition into perceptual, central, and reactive layers with varying degrees of deliberation and metacommutation, a framework his collaborators, including Ron Chrisley at Sussex, extended toward machine consciousness. His 1978 book and his current papers remain available through his Birmingham page.
Sloman’s distinctive move is the claim that virtual machine functionalism sidesteps the stalemate over whether consciousness is physical. A running virtual machine is fully physical and fully organizational at once, and questions about experience become questions about which virtual machine types support which capabilities, questions that differ across biological and artificial implementations. His later work stresses developmental trajectories, arguing that human-like minds require layered architectures grown through interactions a current AI does not undergo, the position this site’s functionalist emergentism builds on.
For this site’s substrate independence thesis, Sloman supplies the load-bearing concept. Substrate independence is coherent because organization can be abstractly specified and multiply implemented, and virtual machines are how that abstraction earns its keep.
Known for. Virtual machine functionalism, the CogAff architecture schema, The Computer Revolution in Philosophy, developmental approaches to machine minds
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Aaron Sloman is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.