Concept

Philosophy of artificial intelligence

Overview

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. Furthermore, the technology is concerned with the creation of artificial animals or artificial people (or, at least, artificial creatures; see artificial life), so the discipline is of considerable interest to philosophers. These factors contributed to the emergence of the philosophy of artificial intelligence.

The philosophy of artificial intelligence attempts to answer such questions as:

Can a machine act intelligently? Can it solve any problem that a person would solve by thinking?

Are human intelligence and machine intelligence the same? Is the human brain essentially a computer?

Can a machine have a mind, mental states, and consciousness in the same sense that a human being can? Can it feel how things are? (i.e. does it have qualia?)

Questions like these reflect the divergent interests of AI researchers, cognitive scientists and philosophers respectively. The scientific answers to these questions depend on the definition of "intelligence" and "consciousness" and exactly which "machines" are under discussion.

Important propositions in the philosophy of AI include some of the following:

Turing's "polite convention": If a machine behaves as intelligently as a human being, then it is as intelligent as a human being.

The Dartmouth proposal: "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 A. Simon's physical symbol system hypothesis: "A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means of general intelligent action."

John Searle's strong AI hypothesis: "The appropriately programmed computer with the right inputs and outputs would thereby have a mind in exactly the same sense human beings have minds."

Hobbes' mechanism: "For 'reason' ... is nothing but 'reckoning,' that is adding and subtracting, of the consequences of general names agreed upon for the 'marking' and 'signifying' of our thoughts..."

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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But all philosophy is either cognition on the basis of pure reason, or the cognition of reason on the basis of empirical principles. The former is termed pure, the latter empirical philosophy. The philosophy of pure reason is either propædeutic, that is, an inquiry into the powers of reason in regard to pure à priori cognition, and is termed critical philosophy; or it is, secondly, the system of pure reason—a…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
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In that case, that instantaneous state of things from which every other state of things is calculable consists in the positions and velocities of all the particles at any instant. This, the usual and most logical form of necessitarianism, is called the mechanical philosophy. When I have asked thinking men what reason they had to believe that every fact in the universe is precisely determined by law, the first answer…
Charles S. Peirce, Chance, Love, and Logic
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Thought in such circumstances means no more than an act of abstraction or of formal identity. That is the sense in which thought is understood by Locke and all empiricists. Cognition, it is often said, can never do more than separate the given concrete objects into their abstract elements, and then consider these elements in their isolation. It is, however, at once apparent that this turns things upside down, and…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
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Carlo Penco

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