-
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
-
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.
-
26Editorial: Epistemic Feelings: Phenomenology, Implementation, and Role in CognitionFrontiers in Psychology 11. 2020.
-
406Why 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
-
1748Realism 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
-
26When 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
-
315Equivalence 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
-
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.
-
381When 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
-
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
-
26On 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
-
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.
-
691Semantics and the Computational Paradigm in Cognitive PsychologySynthese 79 (1): 119-141. 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 Step…Read more
-
78AI and the tyranny of Galen, or why evolutionary psychology and cognitive ethology are important to artificial intelligenceJournal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 6 (4): 325-330. 1994.Concern over the nature of AI is, for the tastes many AI scientists, probably overdone. In this they are like all other scientists. Working scientists worry about experiments, data, and theories, not foundational issues such as what their work is really about or whether their discipline is methodologically healthy. However, most scientists aren’t in a field that is approximately fifty years old. Even relatively new fields such as nonlinear dynamics or branches of biochemistry are in fact advance…Read more
-
26On the inappropriate use of the naturalistic fallacy in evolutionary psychologyBiology and Philosophy 18 (5): 669-681. 2003.The naturalistic fallacy is mentioned frequently by evolutionary psychologists as an erroneous way of thinking about the ethical implications of evolved behaviors. However, evolutionary psychologists are themselves confused about the naturalistic fallacy and use it inappropriately to forestall legitimate ethical discussion. We briefly review what the naturalistic fallacy is and why it is misused by evolutionary psychologists. Then we attempt to show how the ethical implications of evolved behavi…Read more
-
766Concepts: Fodor's little semantic BBs of thought - A critical look at Fodor's theory of concepts -J. Of Experimental and Theoretical AI 13 (2): 89-94. 2001.I find it interesting that AI researchers don't use concepts very often in their theorizing. No doubt they feel no pressure to. This is because most AI researchers do use representations which allow a system to chunk up its environment, and basically all we know about concepts is that they are representations which allow a system to chunk up its environment.
-
116Merleau-ponty, embodied cognition, and the problem of intentionalityCybernetics and Systems 28 345-58. 1997.
-
544The Prepared Mind: The Role of Representational Change in Chance DiscoveryIn Yukio Ohsawa Peter McBurney (ed.), Chance Discovery by Machines, Springer-verlag, Pp. 208-230.. 2003.Analogical reminding in humans and machines is a great source for chance discoveries because analogical reminding can produce representational change and thereby produce insights. Here, we present a new kind of representational change associated with analogical reminding called packing. We derived the algorithm in part from human data we have on packing. Here, we explain packing and its role in analogy making, and then present a computer model of packing in a micro-domain. We conclude that packi…Read more
-
48All information processing entails computation, or, if R. A. Fisher had been a cognitive scientist . .Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (5): 637-638. 1998.We argue that the dynamical and computational hypotheses are compatible and in fact need each other: they are about different aspects of cognition. However, only computationalism is about the information-processing aspect. We then argue that any form of information processing relying on matching and comparing, as cognition does, must use discrete representations and computations defined over them.
-
965Some 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.
-
47Review of "The Death of Philosophy: Reference and Self-Reference in Contemporary Thought" (review)Essays in Philosophy 13 (2): 605-610. 2012.
-
31Throwing the conscious baby out with the Cartesian bath waterBehavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (2): 202-203. 1992.
-
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
-
422A 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
-
1205Discrete 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
-
700It 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
-
716After 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.
-
66Thinking 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.
Vestal, New York, United States of America