Chapter 1 Chapter 2

Notes Chapter 1 1. These are my translations of Pascal’s self-produced pamphlet, the original of which can be seen here: http://history-computer. com/Library/PascalLettreToChancelier.pdf with a transcrip- tion here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/pascal.html Chapter 2 1. Of course, this glosses over some important metaphysical questions that have only recently arisen in conjunction with computer science; what is it to talk of ‘identity’ when concerning the entities – programs, files, folders, sub-routines etc. – of computer science? In what sense is a later revision of ‘mybook.doc’ the same file as an earlier draft? For some discussion of these deep issues, see Smith (1996). 2. See http://aturingmachine.com/ for this particular device; the video footage there is breathtaking. See also http://legoofdoom. blogspot.com/ for examples of what one can do with this sort of machine. 3. Randall Munroe’s excellent webcomic “xkcd” even has a graphical map of optimal moves for playing the perfect exhaustive game: http:// xkcd.com/832/ 4. Hodges (2008) suggests that this reference to “mistakes” gives Turing a way out of the kinds of Gödel-style objections that we will consider in the next chapter. Indeed, it does; see page 70. 5. For substantial, but accessible, detail on the former, see Campbell et al. (2002), for material on both aspects written by an IBM insider, see Hsu (2002). 6. IBM Deep Blue FAQs: http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/ meet/html/d.3.3a.html#ai 7. Ibid. 8. There are many online versions that one can play around with. The best I have found (because it is based closely on Weizenbaum’s program, and because it lets you tinker around with the code) is 197 198 Notes the Javascript implementation found at: http://www.chayden.net/ eliza/Eliza.html 9. It should be noted that, whilst the idea that mental states are mutliply realised has been a prominent assumption in philosophy of cognitive science and AI, it has nevertheless recently become a topic of consid- erable controversy, following Bechtel and Mundale (1999) and Shapiro (2000). Chapter 3 1. When presented with this robot-system reply, a student in my Philoso- phy of AI class exclaimed “What more is there?” Quite. Chapter 4 1. XOR = “Either A or B but not both” as in “This soup comes with either side-salad XOR sandwich”. 2. I don’t know whether this prediction has been confirmed, but one might expect it to be true on independent anecdotal grounds. Given that the most common verbs to which a child has been exposed end in hard consonants (“Stop! Sit! Put that down!”), one who displays good prosody might expect a hard consonant to be followed by an -ed inflection, and thus add one to a correctly produced irregular past-tense verb stem. 3. Note, however, that the similarity with the temperature/statistical mechanics case is not absolute; the latter requires type-identity between the two, and nobody claims that connectionist models are type-identical to cognitive phenomena. Chapter 5 1. It should be noted that this way of putting it is somewhat controversial. Some (e.g., Gordon, 1986; Goldman, 1992) have argued that folk psychology is not really a (proto-)‘theory’ at all (but rather a set of practical, heuristic, guides to action), and is thus not the sort of thing that could be eliminated as false. This would, of course, rather undermine Ramsey, Stich and Garon’s conclusion, but since it would do so in a way that would obviate the need to even engage with their argument, I shall set it to one side in what follows. 2. For succinctness, this is just a sampling of the exhaustive list presented by Fodor and Pylyshyn. Both Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988) and Harnish Notes 199 (2002) provide much more comprehensive discussions, though their conclusions apply, mutatis mutandis, to what I mention here. 3. For the former, see Chalmers (1990, 1993). For the latter, see Sun (1995); Wermter and Sun (2000) Chapter 6 1. This terminology comes from Smith (1996), p.12n. 2. Strictly speaking, van Gelder’s claim in the latter of these two quotations is false. Dynamical systems theory (i.e., the branch of mathematics) is ‘more catholic’ in the literal sense of ‘of interest or use to all’. Van Gelder’s dynamicism, however, is less catholic, since it prescribes a certain use of DST (in low-dimensional, continuous systems). He repeatedly makes this claim in his 1998 article, arguing that the dynamical hypothesis is “concerned not with low-level systems, but with how agents are causally organised at the highest level relevant to an explanation of cognitive per- formances” (p.619) and that “cognitive agents instantiate quantitative systems at the highest relevant level of causal organisation” (p.623). As the context of these quotations makes clear, the ‘highest relevant level’ is intended to denote the psychological level; van Gelder is not, after all, an eliminativist, for whom there is no theoretically relevant level above the neural one. But in this case, the normative element in the dynamical hypothesis restricts it to ‘high-level’ phenomena, making it narrow rather than ‘catholic’! Chapter 7 1. Strictly, Moore’s law concerns transistor density: The number of tran- sistors that can be placed on a certain sized integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. 2. See http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/ 3. See http://singinst.org/singularityfaq#WhatIsWholeBrain Suggestions for Further Reading Historical and theoretical background In addition to the primary sources discussed in the text, Hauge- land’s (1985) Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea provides an excellent discussion of the Early Modern precursors of AI, and asso- ciated philosophical complexities and consequences. Copeland’s (1993) Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction also provides some interesting details about the birth of both AI and its philosophy, whilst McCorduck’s Machines Who Think gives an insider’s perspective on both technical and sociological aspects of early AI, by providing fascinating interviews with many of the key players. Classical cognitive science and GOFAI Chapter 1 of Clark’s Microcognition gives a good survey of some of the central themes of classical cognitive science, while chapters 2 and 3 of Johnson-Laird’s (1989) The Computer and the Mind works through some of the ideas concerning symbols, computers and computability in an especially helpful way. Copeland’s (2004) edited volume The Essential Turing collects all of Turing’s most important writings, and provides some excellent editorial commentary, and to see a breathtaking example of a Turing Machine in action (well, a close variant, but with a non-infinite memory), you can visit http://aturingmachine.com/. Many of the original papers outlining GOFAI’s early successes are collected in Feigen- baum and Feldman’s (1995) Computers and Thought and Copeland (1993), once again, provides an illuminating philosophical discussion. 200 Suggestions for Further Reading 201 Gödel, the Turing Test and the Chinese Room The literature on Gödelian arguments against AI, the Turing Test and the Chinese Room thought experiment is vast, but judicious use of a philosophical search engine such as http://philpapers. org/ or David Chalmers’s http://consc.net/mindpapers will get the interested reader to the important papers quickly. Nagel and Newman’s (1971/2001) Gödel’s Proof is a very accessible introduction to the metamathematical background to the theorem itself, whilst Millican and Clark’s edited (1996) collection Machines and Thought contains many useful essays on the Turing Test and its legacy. Searle’s original (1980) Chinese Room paper comes with 27 commentators and his own reply. Preston and Bishop (2002) is a more recent collection of excellent new essays. The entry on “The Chinese Room Argument” in the Stanford Encyclo- pedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ chinese-room/) by David Cole not only gives an excellent concise summary, but goes some way towards providing a way of classifying the different replies into various categories. Connectionism Chapter 6 of Franklin’s (1995) Artificial Minds gives a brief but accessible introduction to some of connectionism’s major con- cepts. For a much more detailed and psychology-related introduction, McLeod, Plunkett and Rolls (1998) Introduction to Connection- ist Modelling of Cognitive Processes is a comprehensive text which comes with a software package that will allow the interested reader to experiment with neural nets themselves. Ellis and Humphreys (1999) Connectionist Psychology: A Text With Readings collects many famous connectionist examples with some helpful editorial commentary, and Bechtel and Abrahamsen (2002) Connectionism and the Mind is a comprehensive philosophical discussion. Criticisms and consequences of the connectionist approach Cynthia and Graham Macdonald’s (1995) Connectionism: Debates on Psychological Explanation contains many excellent papers on 202 Suggestions for Further Reading both eliminativism and compositionality. On the latter, Pinker and Mehler’s (1988) Connections and Symbols collects the original Fodor and Pylyshyn paper together with two prominent replies. The dynamical approach Van Gelder’s 1995 and 1998 papers are probably the most widely cited philosophical examples of the dynamical approach to cognition, and the latter also features many responses and criticisms, together with van Gelder’s reply. Port and van Gelder’s (1995) edited volume Mind as Motion collects many good examples of the use of DST in cognitive science, and, most recently, Shapiro’s (2010) Embodied Cognition has an excellent discussion of some of the philosophical aspects of dynamics and their connection to the ‘situated’ movement more generally. The Future: Mind and machine merged There has been a recent explosion of interest in the ‘Extended Mind’ hypothesis. Clark articulates a more developed version of his view in his (2008) Supersizing the Mind, Chemero’s (2009) Radical Embod- ied Cognitive Science and Rowlands’s (2010) The New Science of the Mind take things further, Menary’s (2010) edited volume The Extended Mind collects many key papers, and Adams and Aizawa’s (2008) The Bounds of Cognition provides an important dissenting voice.

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