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Article 4927 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: ld231782@LANCE.ColoState.Edu (L. Detweiler)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Ian Stewart on the philosophy of AI, hypothetically!
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Date: 6 Apr 92 02:52:23 GMT
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- - -

Foreword: I know a philosopher M.L. who is very knowledgeable on (current)
philosophy's areas of intersection with the field of artificial intelligence.
My opinion is that these areas will eventually vaporize, as has happened
analogously in the past, with e.g. geocentric theory (gratitude to Copernicus)
or properties of forces (gratitude to Newton).  (To spell it out, philosophers
of the church asserted the sun orbited the earth, and that `forces' originate
with capricious and dangerous spirits, respectively.  The new theories were
so indisputable that they quashed philosophical opinion in that area.
I speculate the same will eventually happen in AI.)

But M.L. manages to find every philosophical debate meaningful, and the
aforementioned areas of AI (mostly, questions of its possibility) especially
so. In my exasperation at his outright denial of my theory, I clandestinely
sought evidence that his opinion was flawed, and posed him the question,
``has there *ever* been a completely meaningless philosophical debate?''

He was of the opinion that there had not.  He submitted the example of the
medieval debate about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
Nice of him to voluntarily supply evidence for my case, I thought.  As if to
answer my thinking, he quickly stated that the case could easily be hastily
misconstrued as exactly an instance in my category, but that debate was
*really* a misunderstanding disguising some other fundamental, and
*meaningful* question.  (I lost the patience to ask what.)

So I felt vindicated in my decision to dismiss his ideas.  Surely, there have
been silly and meaningless philosophical debates (such as those above in
physics and astronomy) and that anyone who would not admit this was not to be
trusted!  I am happy to report that at least one eminent author shares this
view.  My purposes in sharing this excerpt are as follows: to suggest that
some philosophical inquiries are essentially inapplicable, and that today's
opinion regarding AI is in exactly that category.  How might a future
historian view the AI field in retrospect?

``It is not because I am the instantiation of a computer program that I am
able to understand English and have other forms of intentionality (I am, I
suppose, the instantiation of any number of computer programs), but as far
as we know it is because I am a certain sort of organism with a certain
biological (i.e. chemical and physical) structure, and this structure, under
certain conditions, is causally capable of producing perception, action,
understanding, learning, and other intentional phenomena.''
    ---John R. Searle [0]

``All the while ...artificial intelligence programs [1] were useless, people
thought about them as a problem in philosophy. That meant they had to be
invested with some deep and transcendent *meaning*.  Thus we find ...Searle
and Penrose [2] making statements like those that decorate this chapter.
For philosophers nothing is better than some obscure but mysterious idea
that nobody really cares about and certainly can't test, because then you
have plenty of room for clever arguments.  Angels on the head of a pin, and
so forth.  But when something actually becomes useful, most people stop
arguing about the philosophy and get on with the job instead. They don't care
what the deep philosophical essence of the new gadget is; they just want to
churn out as many results as they can in the shortest possible time by taking
advantage of it.  If you can actually *see* the angels dancing on the head of
the pin you stop trying to count them in favour of persuading them to dance
on a microchip instead.  And that's exactly what happened to ...AI in the
early 21st century [3].  The ...programmers discovered machine thought---
how to *think* with software [4].  And that turned out to be so powerful that
it would have been dreadfully embarrassing had some ingenious but unwary
philosopher proved that ...artificial intelligence really can't exist [5].
Philosophical questions (`What *is* this stupid thing?') can sometimes be
excuses for *not* getting on with the job of developing an elusive idea.
Overnight ...machine thought became so useful that no ...human [6] in his
right mind could possibly ignore it.  So the question mutated slightly, into
`what can you *do* with ... machine thought?', and the philosophical
question... evaporated.  Unmourned, unnoticed, forgotten, buried.  There
are other cases of this in the history of ...computing [7], but none more
clear-cut.  As time passes, the cultural world view changes.  What one
generation sees as a problem or a solution is not interpreted in the same
way by another generation.  Today, when ... human thought is seen as no less
abstract than other thinking systems, `artificial' ones included, [8] it's
hard to grasp how different it all looked to our forebears. We would do well
to bear this in mind when we think about the development of ...machine thought
[9].  To view history solely from the viewpoint of the current generation is
to court distortion and misinformation.''


- - -

The `eminent author' is Ian Stewart, and the above passage can be found in
the ``astonishingly racy account,'' _The_Problems_of_Mathematics_ (p. 122-123),
misquoted as follows:

[0] ``The divine spirit found a sublime outlet in that wonder of analysis,
    that portent of the ideal world, that amphibian between being and
    not-being, which we call the imaginary root of infinity.''
        ---Gottfried Leibniz

[1] complex numbers
[2] Leibniz
[3] complex numbers between about 1825 and 1850
[4] mathematicians discovered complex analysis---how to do *calculus* with
    complex numbers
[5] complex numbers really don't exist
[6] mathematician
[7] mathematics
[8] the real numbers are seen as no less abstract than many other number
    systems, complex numbers included,
[9] mathematics


--

ld231782@longs.LANCE.ColoState.EDU


