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54The Great Philoosphical Objections to AI: The History and Legacy of the AI WarsBloomsbury Academic. 2021.This book surveys and examines the most famous philosophical arguments against building a machine with human-level intelligence. From claims and counter-claims about the ability to implement consciousness, rationality, and meaning, to arguments about cognitive architecture, the book presents a vivid history of the clash between the philosophy and AI. Tellingly, the AI Wars are mostly quiet now. Explaining this crucial fact opens new paths to understanding the current resurgence AI (especially, d…Read more
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7The Allure of the Serial KillerIn Fritz Allhoff & S. Waller (eds.), Serial Killers ‐ Philosophy for Everyone, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010-09-24.This chapter contains sections titled: The Allure of Monsters Explaining the Allure: First Look Stalking the Deeper Reasons Closing in for the Kill Removing Empathy The Prison of Rules Conclusion.
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26Editorial: Epistemic Feelings: Phenomenology, Implementation, and Role in CognitionFrontiers in Psychology 11. 2020.
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390Why Philosophy Makes No ProgressGlobal Philosophy 33 (2): 1-14. 2023.This paper offers an explanation for why some parts of philosophy have made no progress. Philosophy has made no progress because it cannot make progress. And it cannot because of the nature of the phenomena philosophy is tasked with explaining—all of it involves consciousness. Here, it will not be argued directly that consciousness is intractable. Rather, it will be shown that a specific version of the problem of consciousness is unsolvable. This version is the Problem of the Subjective and Obje…Read more
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1707Realism and Anti-Realism Are Both True (and False)Mind and Matter 18 (2): 121-148. 2020.The perennial nature of some of philosophy’s deepest problems is a puzzle. Here, one problem, the realism–anti-realism debate, and one type of explanation for its longevity, are examined. It is argued that realism and anti-realism form a dialetheic pair: While they are in fact each other’s logical opposite, nevertheless, both are true (and both false). First, several reasons why one might think such a thing are presented. These reasons are merely the beginning, however. In the following sections…Read more
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25When Science Confronts Philosophy: Three Case StudiesAxiomathes 30 (5): 479-500. 2020.This paper examines three cases of the clash between science and philosophy: Zeno’s paradoxes, the Frame Problem, and a recent attempt to experimentally refute skepticism. In all three cases, the relevant science claims to have resolved the purported problem. The sciences, construing the term broadly, are mathematics, artificial intelligence, and psychology. The goal of this paper is to show that none of the three scientific solutions work. The three philosophical problems remain as vibrant as e…Read more
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306Equivalence of the Frame and Halting ProblemsAlgorithms 13 (175): 1-9. 2020.The open-domain Frame Problem is the problem of determining what features of an open task environment need to be updated following an action. Here we prove that the open-domain Frame Problem is equivalent to the Halting Problem and is therefore undecidable. We discuss two other open-domain problems closely related to the Frame Problem, the system identification problem and the symbol-grounding problem, and show that they are similarly undecidable. We then reformulate the Frame Problem as a quant…Read more
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8Review of The Death of Philosophy: Reference and Self-Reference in Contemporary Thought, by Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel, trans. Richard A. Lynch (review)Essays in Philosophy 13 (2): 605-610. 2012.
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371When Science Confronts Philosophy: Three Case StudiesAxiomathes 1 1-22. 2020.This paper examines three cases of the clash between science and philosophy: Zeno’s paradoxes, the Frame Problem, and a recent attempt to experimentally refute skepticism. In all three cases, the relevant science claims to have resolved the purported problem. The sciences, construing the term broadly, are mathematics, artificial intelligence, and psychology. The goal of this paper is to show that none of the three scientific solutions work. The three philosophical problems remain as vibrant as e…Read more
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Computer Thought: Propositional Attitudes and Meta-KnowledgeDissertation, The University of Arizona. 1985.Though artificial intelligence scientists frequently use words such as "belief" and "desire" when describing the computational capacities of their programs and computers, they have completely ignored the philosophical and psychological theories of belief and desire. Hence, their explanations of computational capacities which use these terms are frequently little better than folk-psychological explanations. Conversely, though philosophers and psychologists attempt to couch their theories of belie…Read more
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25On the inappropriate use of the naturalistic fallacy in evolutionary psychologyBiology and Philosophy 18 (5): 669-681. 2003.The naturalistic fallacy is mentionedfrequently by evolutionary psychologists as anerroneous way of thinking about the ethicalimplications of evolved behaviors. However,evolutionary psychologists are themselvesconfused about the naturalistic fallacy and useit inappropriately to forestall legitimateethical discussion. We briefly review what thenaturalistic fallacy is and why it is misusedby evolutionary psychologists. Then we attemptto show how the ethical implications of evolvedbehaviors can be …Read more
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16Do Noncassical Worlds Entail Dualism? (review)Constructivist Foundations 12 (3): 275-276. 2017.The vast differences between the objective, classical realm of our everyday lives and any nonclassical realm have worried researchers for almost a century. No attempt at resolving the differences or explaining them away has ever worked. Maybe there are two realms, the classical and the nonclassical, and maybe they are paradoxical.
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120Something old, Something new: Extending the classical view of representationTrends in Cognitive Sciences 4 (12): 470-475. 2000.Representation is a central part of models in cognitive science, but recently this idea has come under attack. Researchers advocating perceptual symbol systems, situated action, embodied cognition, and dynamical systems have argued against central assumptions of the classical representational approach to mind. We review the core assumptions of the dominant view of representation and the four suggested alternatives. We argue that representation should remain a core part of cognitive science, but …Read more
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126Fodor's gloom, or what does it mean that dualism seems true?Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 11 (2): 145-152. 1999.Any time you have philosophers working on a problem, you know you’ve got troubles. If a question has attracted the attention of the philosophers that means that either it is intractably difficult with convolutions and labyrinthine difficulties that would make other researchers blanch, or that it is just flat out impossible to solve. Impossible problems masquerade as intractable problems until someone either proves the problem is impossible (which can only happen in mathematics), or someone shows…Read more
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204The Ubiquity of ComputationThink (misc) 2 (June): 27-29. 1993.For many years now, Harnad has argued that transduction is special among cognitive capacities -- special enough to block Searle's Chinese Room Argument. His arguments (as well as Searle's) have been important and useful, but not correct, it seems to me. Their arguments have provided the modern impetus for getting clear about computationalism and the nature of computing. This task has proven to be quite difficult. Which is simply to say that dealing with Harnad's arguments (as well as Searle's) h…Read more
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168A recent issue of Time magazine (March 29, 1999) was devoted to the twenty greatest "thinkers" of the twentieth century -- scientists, inventors, and engineers. There is one interesting omission: there are no cognitive psychologists or cognitive scientists. (Cognitive science is an amalgam of cognitive, neuro, and developmental psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, linguistics, biology, and anthropology.) Freud is there, to be sure. But, while he was very influential, it is not even c…Read more
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4097The Allure of the Serial KillerIn Sara Waller (ed.), Serial Killers and Philosophy, John Wiley. 2010.What is it about serial killers that grips our imaginations? They populate some of our most important literature and art, and to this day, Jack the Ripper intrigues us. In this paper, we examine this phenomenon, exploring the idea that serial killers in part represent something in us that, if not good, is at least admirable. To get at this, we have to peel off layers of other causes of our attraction, for our attraction to serial killing is complex (it mixes with repulsion, too). For examp…Read more
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724Review of David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (review)Minds and Machines 8 (3): 441-461. 1998.When Charles Darwin died in April, 1882, he left behind a world changed forever. Because of his writings, most notably, of course, The Origin of Species, by 1882, evolution was an almost universally acknowledged fact. What remained in dispute, however, was how evolution occurred. So because of Darwin’s work, everyone accepted that new species emerge over time, yet few agreed with him that it was natural selection that powered the change, as Darwin hypothesized. Chalmers’ book, The Conscious Mind…Read more
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98Semantics and the computational paradigm in computational psychologySynthese 79 (April): 119-41. 1989.There is a prevalent notion among cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind that computers are merely formal symbol manipulators, performing the actions they do solely on the basis of the syntactic properties of the symbols they manipulate. This view of computers has allowed some philosophers to divorce semantics from computational explanations. Semantic content, then, becomes something one adds to computational explanations to get psychological explanations. Other philosophers, such as St…Read more
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1321Analogy and Conceptual Change, or You can't step into the same mind twiceIn Eric Dietrich Art Markman (ed.), Cognitive Dynamics: Conceptual change in humans and machines., Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 265--294. 2000.Sometimes analogy researchers talk as if the freshness of an experience of analogy resides solely in seeing that something is like something else -- seeing that the atom is like a solar system, that heat is like flowing water, that paint brushes work like pumps, or that electricity is like a teeming crowd. But analogy is more than this. Analogy isn't just seeing that the atom is like a solar system; rather, it is seeing something new about the atom, an observation enabled by 'looking' at atoms f…Read more
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46Is Thagard's theory of explanatory coherence the new logical positivism?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (3): 473-474. 1989.
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64Subvert the Dominant Paradigm!J. Of Experimental and Theoretical AI 15 (4): 375-382. 2003.We again press the case for computationalism by considering the latest in illconceived attacks on this foundational idea. We briefly but clearly define and delimit computationalism and then consider three authors from a new anticomputationalist collection.
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13Toward a book of counter-examples for cognitive science: Dynamic systems theory, emotion, and aardvarksDanish Yearbook of Philosophy 36 (1): 35-48. 2001.
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43In 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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34Toward extending the relational priming model: Six questionsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (4): 383-384. 2008.Six questions are posed that are really specific versions of this question: How can Leech et al.'s system be extended to handle adult-level analogies that frequently combine concepts from semantically distant domains sharing few relational labels and that involve the production of abstractions? It is Leech et al. who stress development; finding such an extension would seem to have to be high on their priority list
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196Consciousness and the limits of our imaginationsSynthese 126 (3): 361-381. 2001.Chalmers' anti-materialist arguments are an interesting twist on a well-known argument form, and his naturalistic dualism is exciting to contemplate. Nevertheless, we think we can save materialism from the Chalmerian attack. This is what we do in the present paper
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850Science Generates Limit ParadoxesAxiomathes 25 (4): 409-432. 2015.The sciences occasionally generate discoveries that undermine their own assumptions. Two such discoveries are characterized here: the discovery of apophenia by cognitive psychology and the discovery that physical systems cannot be locally bounded within quantum theory. It is shown that such discoveries have a common structure and that this common structure is an instance of Priest’s well-known Inclosure Schema. This demonstrates that science itself is dialetheic: it generates limit paradoxes. Ho…Read more
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463A Counterexample t o All Future Dynamic Systems Theories of CognitionJ. Of Experimental and Theoretical AI 12 (2): 377-382. 2000.Years ago, when I was an undergraduate math major at the University of Wyoming, I came across an interesting book in our library. It was a book of counterexamples t o propositions in real analysis (the mathematics of the real numbers). Mathematicians work more or less like the rest of us. They consider propositions. If one seems to them to be plausibly true, then they set about to prove it, to establish the proposition as a theorem. Instead o f setting out to prove propositions, the psychologist…Read more
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1350Role of the Frame Problem in Fodor's Modularity ThesisIn Ken Ford & Zenon Pylyshyn (eds.), The Robot's Dilemma Revisited, . 1996.It is shown that the Fodor's interpretation of the frame problem is the central indication that his version of the Modularity Thesis is incompatible with computationalism. Since computationalism is far more plausible than this thesis, the latter should be rejected.
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266On the inappropriate use of the naturalistic fallacy in evolutionary psychologyBiology and Philosophy 18 (5): 669-81. 2003.The naturalistic fallacy is mentionedfrequently by evolutionary psychologists as anerroneous way of thinking about the ethicalimplications of evolved behaviors. However,evolutionary psychologists are themselvesconfused about the naturalistic fallacy and useit inappropriately to forestall legitimateethical discussion. We briefly review what thenaturalistic fallacy is and why it is misusedby evolutionary psychologists. Then we attemptto show how the ethical implications of evolvedbehaviors can b…Read more
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