The philosophy of artificial intelligence is a branch of the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of computer science that explores artificial intelligence and its implications for knowledge and understanding of intelligence, ethics, consciousness, epistemology and free will. Because the technology is concerned with the creation of artificial animals or artificial people, the discipline is of considerable interest to philosophers, and it attempts to answer questions such as whether a machine can act intelligently or solve any problem a person would solve by thinking, whether human intelligence and machine intelligence are the same, and whether a machine can have a mind, mental states and consciousness in the same sense a human being can. Important propositions in the field include Turing's polite convention that a machine behaving as intelligently as a human being is as intelligent as a human being, the Dartmouth proposal that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon's physical symbol system hypothesis, and John Searle's strong AI hypothesis that an appropriately programmed computer with the right inputs and outputs would thereby have a mind in exactly the same sense human beings have minds.
Facts
Central QuestionWhat would it take to build an artificial creature that is genuinely intelligent, rather than one that merely appears, in suitable contexts, to be intelligent? 1 Key DebateWhether cognition is fundamentally symbolic computation over structured representations, the classical view, or whether distributed connectionist neural networks can explain the mind without any such explicit symbolic representations at all, a dispute distinct from the strong versus weak AI debate over whether a machine could possess genuine understanding. 2 Disputed
Key DebateStrong AI versus weak AI: whether a machine could ever possess genuine mental powers, including phenomenal consciousness, or whether artificial intelligence can only ever appear to have the full mental repertoire of a human person. 1 Connections
Associated With
Putnam's functionalism and computational theory of mind gave the philosophical framing, mental states as functional/computational states, that much of the field still argues from or against.
Searle's 1980 Chinese Room argument, against strong AI's claim that a correctly programmed computer genuinely understands, is the field's single most discussed thought experiment.
Sources
1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Informationentry: Artificial Intelligence, Introduction
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the field devoted to building artificial animals (or at least artificial creatures that, in suitable contexts, appear to be animals) and, for many, artificial persons (or at least artificial creatures that, in suitable contexts, appear to be persons).
entry: Artificial Intelligence, section 8.1
“Strong” AI seeks to create artificial persons: machines that have all the mental powers we have, including phenomenal consciousness. “Weak” AI, on the other hand, seeks to build information-processing machines that appear to have the full mental repertoire of human persons.
View the Source 2. Connectionism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Informationthe passage on Ramsey's objection to symbolic-representation attributions in neural netsQuote, the passage on Ramsey's objection to symbolic-representation attributions in neural nets
The novelty of distributed and superimposed connectionist information storage naturally causes one to wonder about the viability of classical notions of symbolic computation in describing the brain.
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.