The logical problem of artificial intelligence—the question of whether the notion sometimes referred to as ‘strong’ AI is self-contradictory—is, essentially, the question of whether an artificial form of life is possible. This question has an immediately paradoxical character, which can be made explicit if we recast it (in terms that would ordinarily seem to be implied by it) as the question of whether an unnatural form of nature is possible. The present paper seeks to explain this paradoxical kind of possibility (...) by arguing that machines can share the human form of life and thus acquire human mindedness, which is to say they can be intelligent, conscious, sentient, etc. in precisely the way that a human being typically is. (shrink)

An investigation of the concept of “surveyability” as traced through the thought of Hilbert, Wittgenstein, and Turing. The communicability and reproducibility of proof, with certainty, are seen as earmarked by the “surveyability” of symbols, sequences, and structures of proof in all these thinkers. Hilbert initiated the idea within his metamathematics, Wittgenstein took up a kind of game formalism in the 1920s and early 1930s in response. Turing carried Hilbert’s conception of the “surveyability” of proof in metamathematics through into his analysis (...) of what a formal system (what a step in a computation) is in “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (1936). Wittgenstein’s 1939 investigations of the significance of surveyability to the concept of “proof “in Principia Mathematica were influenced, both by Turing’s remarkable everyday analysis of the Hilbertian idea, and by conversations with Turing. Although Turing does not use the word “surveyability” explicitly, it is clear that the Hilbertian idea plays a recurrent role in his work, refracted through his engagement with Wittgenstein’s idea of a “language-game”. This is evinced in some of his later writings, where the “reform” of mathematical notation for the sake of human surveyability (1944/45) may be seen to draw out the Hilbertian idea. For Turing, as for Wittgenstein, the need for “surveyability” earmarks the evolving culture of humans located in an evolving social and scientific world, just as it had for Hilbert. (shrink)