Abstract
In Chap. 15 philosophical (epistemological) approaches to issues of mind, cognition, knowledge, and human intelligence have been presented. In the first section of this chapter contemporary views concerning the essence of artificial intelligence are discussed. As one can easily notice these views result from epistemological assumptions.
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Notes
- 1.
Therefore, the reader is recommended to recall the considerations contained in Sect. 15.1.
- 2.
Usually it is assumed that Artificial Intelligence is a subfield of computer science. However, in this case we exclude from AI studies such important issues as, e.g., manipulation and locomotion performed by certain AI systems.
- 3.
In fact, we could say artificial mobility, since a robot is an artefact, i.e., an artificial object, which does not exists in nature, so its properties are also “artificial”. While we, as Homo sapiens do not object a term robot mobility, in case of a term computer intelligence we prefer to add artificial. Of course, somebody could say that in this case a term artificial means imperfect. In the author’s opinion, it is not a good interpretation. Does the reader think that some day we construct a mobile robot, which can dance Odette in Swan Lake like Sylvie Guillem?.
- 4.
Let us notice that this view is consistent with the philosophical views of T. Hobbes and G.W. Leibniz, which have been presented in Chap. 15.
- 5.
An assumption of computationalists about the symbolic form of information processed by intelligent systems triggered a discussion with followers of connectionism in the 1980s and 1990s (cf. Sect. 3.1).
- 6.
We have introduced the issue of inadequate language in Chap. 15, presenting the views of William of Ockham and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Analytical behaviorism has been introduced on the basis of the views of the Vienna Circle.
- 7.
John Jamieson Carswell Smart—a professor of philosophy at the University of Adelaide and Monash University (Australia). His work concerns metaphysics, theory of mind, philosophy of science, and political philosophy.
- 8.
Ullin T. Place—a professor at the University of Adelaide and the University of Leeds. His work concerns the philosophy of mind and psychology. According to his will, his brain is located in a display case at the University of Adelaide with the message: Did this brain contain the consciousness of U.T. Place?
- 9.
David Malet Armstrong—a professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney, Stanford University, and Yale University. His work concerns theory of mind and metaphysics.
- 10.
Donald Herbert Davidson—a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley and also other prestigious universities (Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Oxford). He significantly influenced philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language. He was known as an indefatigable man who had a variety of interests, such as playing piano, flying aircraft, and mountain climbing.
- 11.
We say that a set of properties M supervene on a set of properties B if and only if any two beings which are indistinguishable w.r.t. the set B are also indistinguishable w.r.t. the set M.
- 12.
Jaegwon Kim—a professor of philosophy at Brown University, Cornell University, and the University of Notre Dame. His work concerns philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphysics.
- 13.
John Randolph Lucas—a professor of philosophy of Merton College, University of Oxford, elected as a Fellow of the British Academy. He is known for a variety of research interests, including philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, business ethics, physics, and political philosophy.
- 14.
Emil Leon Post—a professor of logic and mathematics at the City University of New York (CUNY). His pioneering work concerns fundamental areas of computer science such as computability theory and formal language theory.
- 15.
Roger Penrose—a professor of the University of Oxford, mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. In 1988 he was awarded the Wolf Prize (together with Stephen Hawking) for a contribution to cosmology.
- 16.
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus—a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His work concerns phenomenological and existentialist philosophy, and philosophical foundations of AI.
- 17.
Let us notice that H. Dreyfus formulated this argument when the study of neural networks was beyond the research mainstream in AI.
- 18.
Dreyfus represents here the phenomenological point of view, which has been introduced in Sect. 15.1. Especially this relates to the work of Martin Heidegger.
- 19.
Hilary Whitehall Putnam—a professor of philosophy at Harvard University. He is known for a variety of research interests, including philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of science and mathematics, and computer science (the Davis-Putnam algorithm). A student of H. Reichenbach, R. Carnap, and W.V.O. Quine. Due to his scientific achievements, he has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy, and he was the President of American Philosophical Association.
- 20.
Analogously to the way we have defined transducers in Chap. 8.
- 21.
At the end of the twentieth century H. Putnam weakened his orthodox version of functionalism and in 1994 he published a paper “Why Functionalism Didn’t Work”. Nevertheless, new theories (e.g., psychofunctionalism represented by Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn) were developed on the basis of his early model.
- 22.
This thesis was formulated by H. Putnam in the late 1960s as an argument against type-identity theory. It is called multiple realizability.
- 23.
Since the Turing machine is an automaton of the greatest computational power (cf. Appendix E).
- 24.
The concept of intentionality has been introduced in Sect. 15.1, when the views of Franz Brentano have been presented.
- 25.
For example, a computer program is such a set of instructions.
- 26.
In other words, a computer does not want to translate a story, does not doubt whether it has translated a story properly, is not curious to know how a story ends, etc.
- 27.
Daniel Clement Dennett III—a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. His work concerns philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. He was a student of G. Ryle and W.V.O. Quine.
- 28.
For example, if a fish moves its fins, then it swims; if a thermometer senses that it is too cold, then a thermostat turns up the heat.
- 29.
Of course, according to Searle, Dennett does not make a distinction between as-if intentionality and intrinsic intentionality.
- 30.
Patricia Smith Churchland—a professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego and University of Manitoba. Her work concerns philosophy of mind, neurophilosophy, and medical ethics.
- 31.
Paul M. Churchland—a professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego and University of Manitoba. His work concerns philosophy of mind, neurophilosophy, and epistemology.
- 32.
Hans Moravec—a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. In 1980 he constructed a TV-equipped robot at Stanford University. He was a co-founder of Seegrid Corporation, which is a company developing autonomous robots.
- 33.
Raymond “Ray” Kurzweil—an inventor and a futurist. A specialist in computer recognition of characters and speech.
- 34.
Axioms are propositions that are assumed to be true.
- 35.
Concepts related to deductive reasoning are contained in Appendix F.2.
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Flasiński, M. (2016). Prospects of Artificial Intelligence. In: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40022-8_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40022-8_17
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