Carlos Barth

I’m a philosopher of mind, AI and cognitive sciences. Currently I’m a post-doc researcher at FAJE (Jesuit Faculty of Philosophy and Theology) in Brazil. I hold a MA and a PhD in Philosophy of Cognition and Artificial Intelligence from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG).

I’m a member of the REDD research group (Democracy and Disinformation Studies Network) and the Cognition, Language, Enactivism and Affection (CLEA) research group.

My current research interests are philosophy of mind, science (particularly AI and cognitive sciences), epistemology, computation and ethics (specially privacy and AI).

Before digging into philosophy, I was a software developer and server administrator (working mostly with infosec) for about 17 years. Nowadays, I remain active as a FOSS enthusiast who loves contributing open-source projects with both code, beta testing and feedback. That’s why you’ll find Dev stuff here as well.

Philosophy stuff
- Publications
Dev Stuff
Posts
Contact

Philosophy stuff

Publications

2019 - O “Frame problem”: a sensibilidade ao contexto como um desafio para as teorias representacionais da mente - This is my Masters dissertation about the frame problem of Artificial Intelligence. The core claim of this work is that the problem (conceived as a problem about relevance) is neither computational nor representational in nature. It plagues every contemporary explanatory framework. In particular, one does not simply get rid of the frame problem by (e.g.) adopting a 4EA perspective. [PT]
2020 - É possível evitar vieses algorítmicos? - In this paper I argue that the problem of algorithmic bias should not be handled as a technical issue. There’s no such thing as a bias free AI model or system. What we have are sets of desirable and undesirable biases, and populating these sets should be done through public debates, rather than “technical” indoors decision. [PT]
2023 - Representação e cognição situada: uma proposta conciliadora para as guerras representacionais - With Felipe Carvalho. Here we argue for a conception of structural representations grounded in isomorphism as an alternative for linguistic representations grounded in causal correlation. We show that this conception can satisfy requirements such as Ramsey’s job description challenge and avoid the so called Hard problem of content and remain compatible with 4E cognition. We also argue that deciding whether a given cognitive capacity or performance is representational is a matter of empirical research on a case by case basis. We should avoid claiming that representations are broadly necessary/irrelevant when selecting our favorite time. [PT]
2024 - Representational cognitive pluralism: towards a cognitive science of relevance sensitivity - This is my PhD’s dissertation. I try to account for the relevance sensitivity presented in a core human cognitive capacities, which is commonsense. Roughly, that’s the capacity to zero in on what’s relevant within an open-ended set of contexts in a non circular way (after all, what’s relevant is context dependent). The key idea is that relevance sensitivity is a kind of cognitive technology (a cognitive gadget, as Cecilia Heyes would put it) that relies heavily on culturally established elements. [EN]

Dev stuff

.vimrc - You can learn a lot about VIM by looking at other people’s vimrc. This is the one I use for academic writing.

Posts

Random thoughts and (hopefully) interesting stuff about philosophy, artificial intelligence, software development, information security and whatever comes to mind. I have tons of material from the last two decades to publish here, but I’ll do it only as allowed by my (scarce) free time.

10 Mar 2024 - SMALL TIP: Setting terminal emulator in XFCE without xfce4-settings - Yes, I did that, and here I’ll try to show you how I have handled usual caveats.

Contact

You can reach me by e-mail. In case you’re one of those privacy/security freaks (like me), here’s my PGP public-key and its fingerprint:

E-mail PGP 3703 B0D6 22FF 6A52 FE04 F60A 0BCF CD2A EC25 4F41