Posts Tagged artificial intelligence

Dreyfus on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Artificial Intelligence

Posted by Brad Younger in PEL's Notes, Web Detritus on December 19, 2011

[Brad is a frequent contributor to our Facebook page, so we invited him to post on the blog - welcome him!]

I found this to be an interesting video which relates to both the Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty episodes. In the video, Hubert Dreyfus discusses Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and the philosophical implications for artificial intelligence. Dreyfus has long been a critic of AI and has often cited Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty as offering important phenomenological insights into AI’s philosophical underpinnings.

Dreyfus discusses how human expertise depends primarily on practical coping skills and a basic engagement with the world, not on some internalization of rules. I think he’s spot on. Practical knowledge, as more fundamental than that of the theoretical, need not even rise to the level of consciousness.

Merleau-Ponty is mentioned as being significant for calling out that the body plays an essential role for our being-in-the-world. Whereas the philosophical tradition has always taken the body to be something which gets in the way of reason and the intellect, Merleau-Ponty takes it to be crucial. Dreyfus goes on to talk about his book, the internet, and how the past failures of AI were based on mistaken philosophical presuppositions.  [The video is in two parts, if you don't get a youtube link at the end to part II, you can find it here.]

-Brad Younger

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From Technologist to Humanist: Google’s “In-House” Philosopher

Posted by Tom McDonald in Web Detritus on July 24, 2011

I had been thinking about the PEL debate on the value of higher education, and came across this compelling story by Damon Horowitz.

Did you know that Google has an “in-house philosopher”? Horowitz shares his personal story of self-transformation in this article for the Chronicle of Higher Education. With a background in software engineering, he had developed a career in the world of information technology. He had established his own business engineering “natural language processing” components for Artificial Intelligence systems. (Natural language processing is the part of AI, usually based on formal logic, that is supposed to make computers understand us).

But his challenging encounters with the limitations of AI led him to broader philosophical questions about “the nature of thought, the structure of language, [and] the grounds of meaning.” Horowitz thus left the world of IT to do a PhD in Philosophy and has today become a sort of evangelist for appreciation of the humanities in the world of technology. He makes an argument for the value of leaving technology to do a degree in the humanities (it is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed after all), but even if you are not sold on that idea, his point extends to a larger argument about importance of bringing a humanities perspective to the world of technology which is bad off for its lack:

From Technologist to Philosopher
http://chronicle.com/article/From-Technologist-to/128231/

- Tom McDonald

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Episode 21: What Is the Mind? (Turing, et al)

Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on June 28, 2010

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:20:26 — 128.6MB)

Discussing articles by Alan Turing, Gilbert Ryle, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and Dan Dennett.

What is this mind stuff, and how can it “be” the brain? Can computers think? No? What if they’re really sexified? Then can they think? Can the mind be a computer? Can it be a room with a guy in it that doesn’t speak Chinese? Can science completely understand it? …The mind, that is, not the room, or Chinese. What is it like to be a bat? What about a weevil? Do you even know what a weevil is, really? Then how do you know it’s not a mind? Hmmmm? Is guest podcaster Marco Wise a robot? Even his wife cannot be sure!

We introduce the mind/body problem and the wackiness that it engenders by breezing through several articles, which you may read along with us:

1. Alan Turing’s 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”

2. A chapter of Gilbert Ryle’s 1949 book The Concept of Mind called “Descartes’ Myth.”

3. Thomas Nagel’s 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

4. John Searle’s Chinese Room argument, discussed in a 1980 piece, “Minds, Brains and Programs.”

5. Daniel C. Dennett’s “Quining Qualia.”

Some additional resources that we talk about: David Chalmers’s “Consciousness and its Place in Nature, “ Frank Jackson’s “Epiphenomenal Qualia”, Paul Churchland’s Matter and Consciousness,Jerry Fodor’s “The Mind-Body Problem,” Zoltan Torey’s The Crucible of Consciousness,and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s long entry on the Chinese Room argument.

End Song: “No Mind” from 1998’s Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio; the whole album is now free online.

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