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959Some strangeness in the proportion, or how to stop worrying and learn to love the mechanistic forces of darknessPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (3): 349-352. 2008.Understanding humans requires viewing them as mechanisms of some sort, since understanding anything requires seeing it as a mechanism. It is science’s job to reveal mechanisms. But science reveals much more than that: it also reveals enduring mystery—strangeness in the proportion. Concentrating just on the scientific side of Selinger’s and Engström’s call for a moratorium on cyborg discourse, I argue that this strangeness prevents cyborg discourse from diminishing us.
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31Throwing the conscious baby out with the Cartesian bath waterBehavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (2): 202-203. 1992.
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47Review of "The Death of Philosophy: Reference and Self-Reference in Contemporary Thought" (review)Essays in Philosophy 13 (2): 605-610. 2012.
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11It does so: Review of The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology (review)AI Magazine 22 (4): 141-144. 2001.Objections to AI and computational cognitive science are myriad. Accordingly, there are many different reasons for these attacks. But all of them come down to one simple observation: humans seem a lot smarter that computers -- not just smarter as in Einstein was smarter than I, or I am smarter than a chimpanzee, but more like I am smarter than a pencil sharpener. To many, computation seems like the wrong paradigm for studying the mind. (Actually, I think there are deeper and darker reasons why A…Read more
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409A Connecticut Yalie in King Descartes' CourtNewsletter of Cognitive Science Society (Now Defunct). 2002.What is consciousness? Of course, each of us knows, privately, what consciousness is. And we each think, for basically irresistible reasons, that all other conscious humans by and large have experiences like ours. So we conclude that we all know what consciousness is. It's the felt experiences of our lives. But that is not the answer we, as cognitive scientists, seek in asking our question. We all want to know what physical process consciousness is and why it produces this very strange, almost m…Read more
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1185Discrete thoughts: Why cognition must use discrete representationsMind and Language 18 (1): 95-119. 2003.Advocates of dynamic systems have suggested that higher mental processes are based on continuous representations. In order to evaluate this claim, we first define the concept of representation, and rigorously distinguish between discrete representations and continuous representations. We also explore two important bases of representational content. Then, we present seven arguments that discrete representations are necessary for any system that must discriminate between two or more states. It…Read more
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684It Does So: Review of Jerry Fodor, The Mind Doesn't Work That Way (review)AI Magazine 22 (4): 121-24. 2001.Objections to AI and computational cognitive science are myriad. Accordingly, there are many different reasons for these attacks. But all of them come down to one simple observation: humans seem a lot smarter that computers -- not just smarter as in Einstein was smarter than I, or I am smarter than a chimpanzee, but more like I am smarter than a pencil sharpener. To many, computation seems like the wrong paradigm for studying the mind. (Actually, I think there are deeper and darker reasons why A…Read more
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706After the Humans are GonePhilosophy Now 61 (May/June): 16-19. 2007.Recently, on the History Channel, artificial intelligence (AI) was singled out, with much wringing of hands, as one of the seven possible causes of the end of human life on Earth. I argue that the wringing of hands is quite inappropriate: the best thing that could happen to humans, and the rest of life of on planet Earth, would be for us to develop intelligent machines and then usher in our own extinction.
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60Thinking Computers and Virtual Persons: Essays on the Intentionality of Machines (edited book)Academic Press. 1994.Can computers think? This book is intended to demonstrate that thinking, understanding, and intelligence are more than simply the execution of algorithms--that is, that machines cannot think. Written and edited by leaders in the fields of artificial intelligence and the philosophy of computing.
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452AI and the Mechanistic Forces of DarknessJ. Of Experimental and Theoretical AI 7 (2): 155-161. 1995.Under the Superstition Mountains in central Arizona toil those who would rob humankind o f its humanity. These gray, soulless monsters methodically tear away at our meaning, our subjectivity, our essence as transcendent beings. With each advance, they steal our freedom and dignity. Who are these denizens of darkness, these usurpers of all that is good and holy? None other than humanity’s arch-foe: The Cognitive Scientists -- AI researchers, fallen philosophers, psychologists, and other benighted…Read more
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41Some assumptions underlying Smolensky's treatment of connectionismBehavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1): 29-31. 1988.
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Philosophy of artificial intelligenceIn Lynn Nadel (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Macmillan. pp. 203--208. 2002.
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32Brute association is not identityBehavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (1): 171-171. 1999.O'Brien & Opie run into conceptual problems trying to equate stable patterns of neural activation with phenomenal experiences. They also seem to make a logical mistake in thinking that the brute association between stable neural patterns and phenomenal experiences implies that they are identical. In general, the authors do not provide us with a story as to why stable neural patterns constitute phenomenal experience.
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407Dynamic Systems and Paradise Regained, or How to avoid being a calculator (review)J. Of Experimental and Theoretical AI 11 (4): 473-478. 1999.The new kid on the block in cognitive science these days is dynamic systems. This way of thinking about the mind is, as usual, radically opposed to computationalism - - the hypothesis that thinking is computing. The use of dynamic systems is just the latest in a series of attempts, from Searle's Chinese Room Argument, through the weirdnesses of postmodernism, to overthrown computationalism, which as we all know is a perfectly nice hypothesis about the mind that never hurt anyone.
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841In defense of representationCognitive Psychology 40 (2): 138--171. 2000.The computational paradigm, which has dominated psychology and artificial intelligence since the cognitive revolution, has been a source of intense debate. Recently, several cognitive scientists have argued against this paradigm, not by objecting to computation, but rather by objecting to the notion of representation. Our analysis of these objections reveals that it is not the notion of representation per se that is causing the problem, but rather specific properties of representations as they a…Read more
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47Cognitive science and the mechanistic forces of darknessTechnC) 5 (2). 2000.Under the Superstition Mountains in central Arizona toil those who would rob humankind of its humanity. These gray, soulless monsters methodically tear away at our meaning, our subjectivity, our essence as transcendent beings. With each advance, they steal our freedom and dignity. Who are these denizens of darkness, these usurpers of all that is good and holy? None other than humanity’s arch-foe: The Cognitive Scientists -- AI researchers, fallen philosophers, psychologists, and other benighted …Read more
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1143The Paradox of Consciousness and the Realism/Anti-Realism DebateLogos Architekton 3 (1): 7-37. 2009.Beginning with the paradoxes of zombie twins, we present an argument that dualism is both true and false. We show that avoiding this contradiction is impossible. Our diagnosis is that consciousness itself engenders this contradiction by producing contradictory points of view. This result has a large effect on the realism/anti-realism debate, namely, it suggests that this debate is intractable, and furthermore, it explains why this debate is intractable. We close with some comments on what our re…Read more
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839Analogical insight: toward unifying categorization and analogy.Cognitive Processing 11 (4): 331-. 2010.The purpose of this paper is to present two kinds of analogical representational change, both occurring early in the analogy-making process, and then, using these two kinds of change, to present a model unifying one sort of analogy-making and categorization. The proposed unification rests on three key claims: (1) a certain type of rapid representational abstraction is crucial to making the relevant analogies (this is the first kind of representational change; a computer model is presented that d…Read more
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633Subvert the dominant paradigm!J. Of Experimental and Theoretical AI. 2002.We again press the case for computationalism by considering the latest in ill- conceived attacks on this foundational idea. We briefly but clearly define and delimit computationalism and then consider three authors from a new anti- computationalist collection.
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1050Explanatory pluralism in cognitive scienceCognitive Science 33 (2): 739-742. 2009.This brief commentary has three goals. The first is to argue that ‘‘framework debate’’ in cognitive science is unresolvable. The idea that one theory or framework can singly account for the vast complexity and variety of cognitive processes seems unlikely if not impossible. The second goal is a consequence of this: We should consider how the various theories on offer work together in diverse contexts of investigation. A final goal is to supply a brief review for readers who are compelled by thes…Read more
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15Replies to my computational commentatorsSocial Epistemology 369 (October-December): 369-375. 1990.
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1411It only seems as if zombies are logically possible, or how consciousness hides the truth of materialism: A critical review of The Conscious Mind (review)Minds and Machines 8 (3): 441-461. 1998.
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37What is consciousness? Of course, each of us knows, privately, what consciousness is. And we each think, for basically irresistible reasons, that all other conscious humans by and large have experiences like ours. So we conclude that we all know what consciousness is. It's the felt experiences of our lives. But that is not the answer we, as cognitive scientists, seek in asking our question. We all want to know what physical process consciousness is and why it produces this very strange, almost m…Read more
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507Banbury Bound, or Can a machine be conscious?J. Of Experimental and Theoretical AI 13 (2): 177-180. 2001.In mid-May of 2001, I attended a fascinating workshop at Cold Spring Harbor Labs. The conference was held at the lab's Banbury Center, an elegant mansion and its beautiful surrounding estate, located on Banbury Lane, in the outskirts of Lloyd Harbor, overlooking the north shore of Long Island in New York. The estate was formerly owned by Charles Sammis Robertson. In 1976, Robertson donated his estate, and an endowment for its upkeep, to the Lab. The donation included the Robertson's mansion, now…Read more
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1447ComputationalismSocial Epistemology 4 (2): 135-154. 1990.This paper argues for a noncognitiveist computationalism in the philosophy of mind. It further argues that both humans and computers have intentionality, that is, their mental states are semantical -- they are about things in their worlds.
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649AI, Concepts, and the Paradox of Mental Representation, with a brief discussion of psychological essentialismJ. Of Exper. And Theor. AI 13 (1): 1-7. 2001.Mostly philosophers cause trouble. I know because on alternate Thursdays I am one -- and I live in a philosophy department where I watch all of them cause trouble. Everyone in artificial intelligence knows how much trouble philosophers can cause (and in particular, we know how much trouble one philosopher -- John Searle -- has caused). And, we know where they tend to cause it: in knowledge representation and the semantics of data structures. This essay is about a recent case of this sort of thin…Read more
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255Sisyphus's Boulder: Consciousness and the Limits of the KnowableJohn Benjamins. 2004.In Sisyphus's Boulder, Eric Dietrich and Valerie Hardcastle argue that we will never get such a theory because consciousness has an essential property that..
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709Excellent Beauty: The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of the WorldColumbia University Press. 2015.Flipping convention on its head, Eric Dietrich argues that science uncovers awe-inspiring, enduring mysteries, while religion, regarded as the source for such mysteries, is a biological phenomenon. Just like spoken language, Dietrich shows that religion is an evolutionary adaptation. Science is the source of perplexing yet beautiful mysteries, however natural the search for answers may be to human existence. _Excellent Beauty_ undoes our misconception of scientific inquiry as an executioner of b…Read more
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