Discusses the scientific potential represented by intelligent machines and their social implications.

“Who am I?” is the ultimate ontological question, and we often refer to it as the issue of consciousness. When people speak of consciousness they often slip into considerations of behavioral and neurological correlates of consciousness (for example, whether or not an entity can be self‐reflective). But these are third‐person (objective) issues and do not represent what David Chalmers calls the “hard question” of consciousness. The question of whether or not an entity is conscious is apparent only to itself. The (...) difference between neurological correlates of consciousness (such as intelligent behavior) and the ontological reality of consciousness is the difference between objective and subjective reality. That is why we cannot propose an objective consciousness detector without philosophical assumptions built into it. (shrink)

Singularity is a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. This chapter argues that within several decades information‐ based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the pattern‐recognition powers, problem‐solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself. The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. Most long‐range forecasts of what (...) is technically feasible in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments because they are based on the “intuitive linear” view of history rather than the “historical exponential” view. The history of evolution ‐ both biological and technological ‐ is conceptualized as occurring in six epochs. The Singularity begins with Epoch Five and will spread from Earth to the rest of the universe in Epoch Six. (shrink)

Technology has always been a double‐edged sword, bringing us longer and healthier lifespans, freedom from physical and mental drudgery, and many new creative possibilities, on the one hand, while introducing new and salient dangers on the other. Technology empowers both our creative and destructive natures.

There is a debate about the possibility of mind-uploading – a process that purportedly transfers human minds and therefore human identities into computers. This paper bypasses the debate about the metaphysics of mind-uploading to address the rationality of submitting yourself to it. I argue that an ineliminable risk that mind-uploading will fail makes it prudentially irrational for humans to undergo it.

Los programas de computación, ante todo la ingeniería de la visión artificial y la programación de los sensores somáticos, ya han permitido, y lo harán con mayor perfección en el futuro, construir con alta perfección androides o cyborgs que colaborarán con el hombre y abrirán sin duda nuevas reflexiones morales sobre como respetar en su dignidad ontológica las nuevas máquinas humanoides. Además, tanto los hombres actuales como los nuevos androides estarán en conexión con inmensas redes de computación externa que harán (...) crecer de forma casi increíble la eficacia en el dominio del propio cuerpo y de la naturaleza. Sin embargo, nuestro conocimiento científico actual, por una parte, del hardware y del software que sostendrá tanto las máquinas humanoides como las redes de computación externa hechas con la ingeniería existente y, por otra, nuestro conocimiento científico sobre el comportamiento animal y humano desde las estructuras biológico-neuronales que producen un sistema psíquico, nos permiten establecer que no existe fundamento científico que permita hablar de una identidad ontológica entre las máquinas computacionales y el hombre. En consecuencia, diversas ontologías producirán sistemas funcionales diversos. Podrá haber simulación, pero nunca identidad ontológica. Estas ideas son esenciales para valorar el pensamiento transhumanista de Ray Kurzweil. (shrink)

Are We Spiritual Machines? as well as Ray Kurzweil for his response to my essay in that book and his willingness to take part in this discussion. My essay in that book was titled "Kurzweil's Impoverished Spirituality" and was essentially a stripped down version of a piece I had done for..

By turning to geometric metaphors, the author defends the naturally based intelligence and – in the context of analysing Ray Kurzweil’s conception – criticises the artificial in­telligence. The focus is on the ability of man and machine to solve the so-called unsolv­able problems. This issue is discussed in conjunction with the issues of hierarchy, homo­geneity and heterogeneity, contradiction and analogy, meaning and information. Argu­ments are given to support the following ideas: 1) digital technologies do not overcome the fundamental limitations (...) of analogue technologies, thus AI capabilities are also ir­reparably limited; 2) the natural intelligence works in an original way (not by analogy), so there can be no insoluble theoretical problems for it; 3) in a healthy human brain, there is neither excess nor deficiency, it does not need artificial improvement; 4) incomplete actualisation of the brain potential is not a weakness, but a strength and special feature of the human mind; 5) the theory of artificial intelligence is characterised by excessive re­ductionism and fetishization of speed. (shrink)

Ray Kurzweil and others have posited that the confluence of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and genetic engineering will soon produce posthuman beings that will far surpass us in power and intelligence. Just as black holes constitute a ldquo;singularityrdquo; from which no information can escape, posthumans will constitute a ldquo;singularity:rdquo; whose aims and capacities lie beyond our ken. I argue that technological posthumanists, whether wittingly or unwittingly, draw upon the long-standing Christian discourse of ldquo;theosis,rdquo; according to which humans are capable (...) of being God or god-like. From St. Paul and Luther to Hegel and Kurzweil, the idea of human self-deification plays a prominent role. Hegel in particular emphasizes that God becomes wholly actualized only in the process by which humanity achieves absolute consciousness. Kurzweil agrees that God becomes fully actual only through historical processes that illuminate and thus transform the entire universe. The difference is that for Kurzweil and many other posthumanists, our offspringmdash;the posthumansmdash;will carry out this extraordinary process. What will happen to Home sapiens in the meantime is a daunting question. (shrink)

Presenting a landmark in linguistics and cognitive science, Ray Jackendoff proposes a new holistic theory of the relation between the sounds, structure, and meaning of language and their relation to mind and brain. Foundations of Language exhibits the most fundamental new thinking in linguistics since Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1965—yet is readable, stylish, and accessible to a wide readership. Along the way it provides new insights on the evolution of language, thought, and communication.

Ludwig Wittgenstein is perhaps the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the most original in the entire Western tradition. Given the inaccessibility of his work, it is remarkable that he has inspired poems, paintings, films, musical compositions, titles of books -- and even novels. In his splendid biography, Ray Monk has made this very compelling human being come alive in a way that perfectly explains the fascination he has evoked. Wittgenstein's life was one of great moral (...) and spiritual depth. Although his work addresses problems of logic, language, mind, and knowledge, he often described it as having an ethical point, and once said that he "could not help seeing every problem from a religious point of view." In successfully bridging the gap assumed by many to exist between Wittgenstein's life and his work, Monk's biography helps to explain the interest in Wittgenstein's later philosophy on the part of Buddhist scholars. (shrink)

Examining one of the fundamental issues in cognitive psychology: How does our conscious experience come to be the way it is?

Already hailed as a masterpiece, Foundations of Language offers a brilliant overhaul of the last thirty-five years of research in generative linguistics and related fields. "Few books really deserve the cliché 'this should be read by every researcher in the field'," writes Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct, "but Ray Jackendoff's Foundations of Language does." Foundations of Language offers a radically new understanding of how language, the brain, and perception intermesh. The book renews the promise of early generative linguistics: (...) that language can be a valuable entrée into understanding the human mind and brain. The approach is remarkably interdisciplinary. Behind its innovations is Jackendoff's fundamental proposal that the creativity of language derives from multiple parallel generative systems linked by interface components. This shift in basic architecture makes possible a radical reconception of mental grammar and how it is learned. As a consequence, Jackendoff is able to reintegrate linguistics with philosophy of mind, cognitive and developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and computational linguistics. Among the major topics treated are language processing, the relation of language to perception, the innateness of language, and the evolution of the language capacity, as well as more standard issues in linguistic theory such as the roles of syntax and the lexicon. In addition, Jackendoff offers a sophisticated theory of semantics that incorporates insights from philosophy of language, logic and formal semantics, lexical semantics of various stripes, cognitive grammar, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic approaches, and the author's own conceptual semantics. (shrink)

Credences are beliefs about evidential probabilities. We give the view an assessment-sensitive formulation, show how it evades the standard objections, and give several arguments in support.

A study of the contribution semantics makes to the syntactic patterns of English: an intepretive theory of grammar.

Semantic Structures is a large-scale study of conceptual structure and its lexical and syntactic expression in English that builds on the theory of Conceptual...

This book emphasizes the role of semantics as a bridge between the theory of language and the theories of other cognitive capacities such as visual perception...

Where much contemporary philosophy seeks to stave off the "threat" of nihilism by safeguarding the experience of meaning--characterized as the defining feature of human existence--from the Enlightenment logic of disenchantment, this book attempts to push nihilism to its ultimate conclusion by forging a link between revisionary naturalism in Anglo-American philosophy and anti-phenomenological realism in recent French philosophy. Contrary to an emerging "post-analytic" consensus which would bridge the analytic-continental divide by uniting Heidegger and Wittgenstein against the twin perils of scientism and (...) skepticism, this book short-circuits both traditions by plugging eliminative materialism directly into speculative realism. (shrink)

Evolutionary scepticism holds that the evolutionary account of the origins of the human cognitive apparatus has sceptical implications for at least some of our beliefs. A common target of evolutionary scepticism is moral realism. Scientific realism, on the other hand, is much less frequently targeted, though the idea that evolutionary theory should make us distrustful of science is by no means absent from the literature. This line of thought has received unduly little attention. I propose to remedy this by advancing (...) what I will call an evolutionary sceptical challenge to scientific realism. I argue that, given standard evolutionary theory, our possession of sound innate metaphysical intuitions would have taken an epistemically problematic ‘lucky accident’. This, as I will show, entails that scientific realism is a self-undermining position. I discuss objections to my argument’s two premises, including ones that appeal to the success of the sciences and to the possibility that sound innate metaphysical intuitions evolved as an evolutionary ‘by-product’. I then draw out an advantage of my argument over a similar one recently put forward by Graber and Golemon. I finish by submitting that scientific realism, given the soundness of my argument, is faced with a new ‘Darwinian Dilemma’, and briefly address the significance of this for the debate between realists and anti-realists in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Where much contemporary philosophy seeks to stave off the "threat" of nihilism by safeguarding the experience of meaning--characterized as the defining feature of human existence--from the Enlightenment logic of disenchantment, this book attempts to push nihilism to its ultimate conclusion by forging a link between revisionary naturalism in Anglo-American philosophy and anti-phenomenological realism in recent French philosophy. Contrary to an emerging "post-analytic" consensus which would bridge the analytic-continental divide by uniting Heidegger and Wittgenstein against the twin perils of scientism and (...) skepticism, this book short-circuits both traditions by plugging eliminative materialism directly into speculative realism. (shrink)

For the Intentionalist, utterance content is wholly determined by a speaker’s meaning-intentions; the sentence uttered serves merely to facilitate the audience’s recovering these intentions. We argue that Intentionalists ought to be Particularists, holding that the only “principles” of meaning recovery needed are those governing inferences to the best explanation; “principles” that are both defeasible and, in a sense to be elaborated, variable. We discuss some ways in which some theorists have erred in trying to tame the “wild west” of pragmatics (...) and context-sensitivity -- including recent work that makes essential appeal to the information structure of a discourse -- and in so doing, offer a general recipe for defending the Particularist picture of utterance content and its recovery that we favor. (shrink)

We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g. words and concepts) or not specific to humans (e.g. speech perception). We find the hypothesis problematic. It ignores the many aspects of grammar that are not recursive, such as phonology, morphology, case, agreement, and (...) many properties of words. It is inconsistent with the anatomy and neural control of the human vocal tract. And it is weakened by experiments suggesting that speech perception cannot be reduced to primate audition, that word learning cannot be reduced to fact learning, and that at least one gene involved in speech and language was evolutionarily selected in the human lineage but is not specific to recursion. The recursion-only claim, we suggest, is motivated by Chomsky’s recent approach to syntax, the Minimalist Program, which de-emphasizes the same aspects of language. The approach, however, is sufficiently problematic that it cannot be used to support claims about evolution. We contest related arguments that language is not an adaptation, namely that it is “perfect,” non-redundant, unusable in any partial form, and badly designed for.. (shrink)

The approach can be characterized at two somewhat independent levels. The first is the overall framework for the theory of meaning, and how this framework is integrated into linguistics, philosophy of language, and cognitive science (section 1). The second is the formal machinery that has been developed to achieve the goals of this framework (sections 2 and 3). The general framework might be realized in terms of other formal approaches, and many aspects of the formal machinery can empirically motivated within (...) any framework for studying meaning. (shrink)

If one investigates a process that has several causes but assumes that it has only one cause, one risks ruling out important causal factors. Three mechanisms account for this mistake: either the significance of the single cause under test is masked by noise contributed by the unsuspected and uncontrolled factors, or the process appears only when two or more causes interact, or the process appears when there are present any of a number of sufficient causes which are not mutally exclusive. (...) In ecology and evolutionary biology, experiments usually test single factor hypotheses, and many scientists apparently believe that hypotheses incorporating several factors are so much more difficult to test that to do so would not be practical. We discuss several areas in ecology and evolutionary biology in which the presupposition of simple causation has apparently impeded progress. We also examine a more mature field, the study of atherosclerosis, in which single factor studies did significantly delay progress towards understanding what now appears to be a multifactor process. The problem has three solutions: either factorial experiments, dynamic models that make quantitative predictions, response-surface methods, or all three. In choosing a definition for ‘cause’, we make a presupposition that profoundly influences subsequent observations and experimental designs. Alternative definitions of causation should be considered as contributing to potential cures for research problems. (shrink)

The science of linguistics is made accessible by the author of Consciousness and the Computational Mind, who demonstrates evidence for an innate Universal Grammar that provides the building blocks for all human languages.

According to proponents of the face-value account, a beliefreport of the form ‘S believes that p’ is true just in case the agentbelieves a proposition referred to by the that-clause. As againstthis familiar view, I argue that there are cases of true beliefreports of the relevant form in which there is no proposition that thethat-clause, or the speaker using the that-clause, can plausibly betaken as referring to. Moreover, I argue that given the distinctiveway in which the face-value theory of belief-reports (...) fails, there ispressure to give up the metaphysical thesis that belief is apropositional attitude. I conclude by suggesting that we allownon-propositional entities to be amongst the relata of thebelief-relation, and make some speculative remarks concerning whatsuch entities might be like. (shrink)

“What is it that agitates you, my dear Victor? What is it you fear?” -/- “The monster now becomes more vengeful. He murders Victor’s friend Henry Clerval and his wife Elizabeth on the night of her wedding to Victor, and Victor sets out in pursuit of the friend across the icy Artic regions. The monster is always ahead of him, leaving tell tale marks behind and tantalizing his creator. Victor meets with his death in the pursuit of the monster he (...) had created with a noble objective.” [ http://philpapers.org/profile/112741] . (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s use of the word ‘phenomenology’ to describe his own work in Philosophical Remarks and The Big Typescript has occasioned much puzzlement and confusion. This paper seeks to shed light on what Wittgenstein meant by the word through a close analysis of key passages in those two works. I argue against both the view of Nicholas Gier that Wittgenstein held ‘grammatical’ phenomenological remarks to be synthetic a priori and that expressed by Moritz Schlick that Wittgenstein held grammar to be tautological. (...) I also take issue with the claim by Merrill and Jaakko Hintikka that Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ought to be regarded as a work of phenomenology. Wittgenstein’s adoption of a variant of Husserlian phenomenology, I argue, lasted no more than a few months, from February to October 1929, during which he conceived of phenomenology as something that sought to establish what one might call ‘analytic a posteriori’ truths through something like the Husserlian method of ‘bracketing’. By the end of 1929, I claim, he had abandoned that in favour of the view expressed in the slogan ‘phenomenology is grammar’, where ‘grammar’ is not confined to the tautological, but is rather intimately linked to Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘the understanding that consists in seeing connections’. (shrink)

In performing an act of assertion we are sometimes responsible for more than the content of the literal meaning of the words we have used, sometimes less. A recently popular research program seeks to explain certain of the commitments we make in speech in terms of responsiveness to the conversational subject matter. We raise some issues for this view with the aim of providing a more general account of linguistic commitment: one that is grounded in a more general action‐theoretic notion (...) of responsibility. (shrink)

This book includes chapters on the most representative structuralists (in anthropology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, literature, and history) as well as on their opponents (in Marxism, hermeneutics, and sociology), so that this book about structuralism also put structuralism in its intellectual and political milieu.