The computer revolution in philosophy docx

Out of print 1978 book now accessible online free of charge: THE COMPUTER REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY: Philosophy, science and models of mind. http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/crp/ By Aaron Sloman School of Computer Science The University of Birmingham. For more freely available online books see THE ONLINE BOOKS PAGE http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ This book, published in 1978 by Harvester Press and Humanities Press, has been out of print for many years, and is now online. This online version was produced from a scanned in copy of the original, digitised by OCR software and made available in September 2001. Since then a number of notes and 1 corrections have been added. Not all the most recent changes are indicated below. PDF VERSIONS NOW AVAILABLE A PDF file of the whole book, can be downloaded containing everything listed below (apart from news items in this file) in a single file. (Size about 3 MBytes.) This is also available from the EPRINTS repository of ASSC (The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness) See http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/247/ A PDF version of this file is available (it is not kept up to date, so may not have everything that is in this html file). See further information about downloads below. ONLINE CONTENTS Titlepage of the book PDF version. (Added 31 Jan 2007) Slightly edited version of the 1978 book’s front-matter. Contents List (original page numbers) PDF version. (Added 31 Jan 2007) Preface PDF version (added Jan 2007) Acknowledgements PDF version (added Jan 2007) Chapter 1: Introduction and Overview (Minor formatting changes 15 Jan 2002) PDF version (added Jan 2007) Chapter 2: What are the aims of science? (Minor formatting changes 15 Jan 2002. Notes added Nov 2008) PDF version (added Jan 2007) Chapter 3: Science and Philosophy (Minor formatting changes 15 Jan 2002) PDF version (added Jan 2007) Chapter 4: What is conceptual analysis? (Minor formatting changes 15 Jan 2002) PDF version (added Jan 2007) Chapter 5: Are computers really relevant? (Notes added at end, 20 Jan 2002) PDF version (added Jan 2007) 2 Chapter 6: Sketch of an intelligent mechanism. PDF version (added July 2005 Improved Jan 2007) (Minor formatting changes 16 Jan 2002. Further changes and notes in May 2004, Jan 2007. Chapter 7: Intuition and analogical reasoning. PDF version (added Jan 2007) (Minor formatting changes 16 Jan 2002, New cross-references: Aug 2004) Chapter 8: On learning about numbers: problems and speculations. PDF version (added Jan 2007) (A retrospective additional note added 7 Oct 2001. Further retrospective notes and comments added 15 Jan 2002.) Chapter 9: Perception as a computational process. PDF version added July 2005 A substantial set of additional notes on more recent developments was added in September 2001. (Minor additional changes 28 Aug 2002, 15 Jun 2003) (Some reformatting and addititional references at end 29 Dec 2006) Chapter 10: More on A.I. and philosophical problems. PDF version (added Jan 2007) (Note added 26 Sep 2009) (Minor formatting changes 28 Jan 2007) Epilogue (on cruelty to robots, etc.). PDF version (added January 2007) (Minor formatting changes 28 Jan 2007) See also my more recent comments on Asimov’s laws of robotics as unethical Postscript (on metalanguages) PDF version (added January 2007) Bibliography PDF version (added January 2007) (Original index not included) Remaining contents of this file Some Reviews and Other Comments on this Book Philosophical relevance Relevance to AI and Cognitive Science More recent work by the author Information about the online version NOTE About PDF versions Download everything at once NOTE on educational predictions Hardcopy version available 3 Some Reviews and Other Comments on this Book NOTE added: 4 Oct 2007 I have discovered that a review by Douglas Hofstander is available online: here. BULLETIN (New Series) OF THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY Volume 2, Number 2, March 1980 Copyright 1980 American Mathematical Society 0002-9904/80/0000-0109/$03.75 The computer revolution in philosophy: Philosophy, science and models of mind by Aaron Sloman, Harvester Studies in Cognitive Science Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, N. J., 1978, xvi + 304 pp., cloth, $22.50. Reviewed by Douglas R. Hofstadter (The review rightly criticises some of the unnecessarily aggressive tone and throw-away remarks, but also gives the most thorough assessment of the main ideas of the book that I have ever seen. Like many researchers in AI (and probably most in philosophy) he regards the philosophy of science in the first part of the book, e.g. Chapter 2, as relatively uninteresting, whereas I still think understanding those issues is central to understanding how human minds work as they learn more about the world and themselves. Some of my recent work is still trying to get to grips with those issues in the context of a theory of varieties of learning and development in biological and artificial systems, e.g. in connection with the CoSy robotic project.) Older entries: Comments on the historical significance (or non-significance!) of this book can be found in the introduction to Luciano Floridi’s textbook "Philosophy of information" referenced on Blackwell’s site. Several of the reviews published in response to the original book are now available online, e.g. Donald Mackay’s review in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Vol 30 No 3 (1979), which castigated me for not reviewing previous relevant work by Craik, Wiener and McCulloch. An excellent survey of their work and others is now available in Margaret Boden’s two volume Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science published by Oxford University Press 29th June 2006 (see also http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/boden-mindasmachine.html) Perhaps the earliest published reference to this book is Shallice, T., & Evans, M. E. (1978). The involvement of the frontal lobes in cognitive estimation. Cortex, 14, 294-303, available at: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~evansem/shallice-evans.doc JUMP TO TABLE OF CONTENTS Philosophical relevance Some parts of the book are dated whereas others are still relevant both to the scientific study of mind and to philosophical questions about the aims of science, the nature of theories and explanations, varieties of concept formation, and to questions about the nature of mind. In particular, Chapter 2 analyses the variety of scientific advances ranging from shallow discoveries of new laws and correlations to deep science which extends our ontology, i.e. our understanding of what is possible, rather than just our understanding of what happens when. 4 Insofar as AI explores designs for possible mental mechanisms, possible mental architectures, and possible minds using those mechanisms and architectures, it is primarily a contribution to deep science, in contrast with most empirical psychology which is shallow science, exploring correlations. This "design stance" approach to the study of mind was very different from the "intentional stance" being developed by Dan Dennett at the same time, expounded in his 1978 book Brainstorms, and later partly re-invented by Alan Newell as the study of "The knowledge Level" (see his 1990 book Unified Theories of Cognition). Both Dennett and Newell based their methodologies on a presumption of rationality, whereas the design-stance considers functionality, which is possible without rationality, as insects and microbes demonstrate well, Functional mechanisms may provide limited rationality, as Herb Simon noted in his 1969 book The Sciences of the Artificial. Relevance to AI and Cognitive Science In some ways the AI portions of the book are not as out of date as the publication date might suggest because it recommends approaches that have not yet been explored fully (e.g. the study of human-like mental architectures in Chapter 6); and some of the alternatives that have been explored have not made huge amounts of progress (e.g. there has been much vision research in directions that are different from those recommended in Chapter 9). I believe that ideas about "Representational Redescription" presented in Anette Karmiloff-Smith’s book Beyond Modularity summarised in her BBS 2004 article with pre-print here are illustrated by my discussion of some of what goes on when a child learns about numbers in Chapter 8. That chapter suggests mechanisms and processes involved in learning about numbers that could be important for developmental psychology, philosophy and AI, but have never been properly developed. Some chapters have short notes commenting on developments since the time the book was published. I may add more such notes from time to time. More recent work by the author A draft sequel to this book was partly written around 1985, but never published because I was dissatisfied with many of the ideas, especially because I did not think the notion of "computation" was well defined. More recent work developing themes from the book is available in the Cognition and Affect Project directory and also in the slides for recent conference and seminar presentations here: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/talks/ and in the papers, discussion notes and presentations related to the CoSy robotic project here: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cosy/papers/ A particularly relevant discussion note is my answer to the question ’what is information?’ in the context of the notion of an information-processing system (not Shannon’s notion of information): 5 http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/whats-information.html A more complete list of things I have done, many of which which grew out of the ideas in this book, can be found in http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/my-doings.html JUMP TO TABLE OF CONTENTS Information about the online version The book has been scanned and converted to HTML. This was completed on 29 Sep 2001. I am very grateful to Manuela Viezzer for photocopying the book and to Sammy Snow for giving up so much time to scanning it in. Thanks also to Chris Glur for reporting bits of the text that still needed cleaning up after scanning and conversion to html. The OCR package used had a hard task and very many errors had to be corrected in the digitised version. It is likely that many still remain. Please report any to me at A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk. It proved necessary to redo all the figures, for which I used the TGIF package, freely available for Linux and Unix systems from these sites: http://bourbon.cs.umd.edu:8001/tgif/ ftp://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/tgif/ The HTML version has several minor corrections and additions, and a number of recently added notes and comments, especially the long note at the end of Chapter 9 (on vision). JUMP TO TABLE OF CONTENTS NOTE About PDF versions PDF versions were produced by reading the html files into odt format in OpenOffice, then making minor formatting changes and exporting to PDF. OpenOffice is freely available for a variety of platforms from http://www.openoffice.org JUMP TO TABLE OF CONTENTS Download everything at once In HTML and PDF format The individual files may be accessed online via the table of contents above or the whole book fetched as one PDF file (about 1.7MByes). Alternatively, the complete set of separate HTML and PDF files can be downloaded for local use packaged in a zip file: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/crp.zip or a gzipped tar file: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/crp.tar.gz 6 In CHM format (out of date version) For users of Windows, Michael Malien kindly converted the html files (as they were on 8th June 2003) to CHM format, also packaged in a zip file: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/crp-chm.zip NB: the chm files are now out of date as there have been many corrections and notes added since 2003. CHM files (Compiled HTML files) are explained at http://www.techscribe.co.uk/techw/compiled_html.htm and at this Microsoft web site Nils Valentin kindly informed me that a tool for extracting html files from a chm file is obtainable here http://66.93.236.84/~jedwin/projects/chmlib/ Instructions for compiling and using the chmlib package are available here: http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/31/OpenOfficeConverters.pdf For most readers and especially users of linux/unix systems it will normally be more convenient to fetch the whole book as one pdf file, or fetch the crp.tar.gz or the crp.zip files mentioned above. These are more up to date. Anyone who wishes is free to print local copies of the book. Please see the ’creative commons’ licence at the end of this file. JUMP TO TABLE OF CONTENTS NOTE on educational predictions The world has changed a lot since the book was published, but not enough, in one important respect. In the Preface and in Chapter 1 comments were made about how the invention of computing was analogous to the combination of the invention of writing and of the printing press, and predictions were made about the power of computing to transform our educational system to stretch minds. Alas the predictions have not yet come true: instead computers are used in schools for lots of shallow activities. Instead of teaching cooking, as used to happen in ’domestic science’ courses we teaching them ’information cooking’ using word processors, browsers, an the like. We don’t teach them to design, debug, test, analyse, explain new machines and tools, merely to use existing ones as black boxes. That’s like teaching cooking instead of teaching chemistry. In 2004 a paper on that topic, accepted for a UK conference on grand challenges in computing education referred back to the predictions in the book and how the opportunities still remain. The paper, entitled ’Education Grand Challenge: A New Kind of Liberal Education Making People Want a Computing Education For Its Own Sake’ is available in HTML and PDF formats here http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/misc/gc-ed.html Additional comments were made in 2006 in this document Why Computing Education has Failed and How to Fix it JUMP TO TABLE OF CONTENTS 7 Hardcopy version available You may still be able to find second hand versions of the original book via Amazon and other booksellers, though it will not, of course, include the notes and additions now in this online version. A rather messy copy of the original book with some pencilled annotations I made around 1985 when thinking about a second edition, was photocopied by Manuela Viezzer several years ago (two pages side by side per A4 sheet) and may be ordered from the librarian in the School of Computer Science for UK £10(GBP), to cover photocopying, binding and posting in the EU. For airmail postage to other countries add £2(GBP). NOTE: it is a messy photocopy as the pencilled comments have not come out very clearly. It is probably better to print the online version, which has the pencilled annotations integrated and also a number of new notes, comments, and references. All of the chapters are now available in PDF format, which is more suited to printing than the HTML versions. Anyone paying by cheque/check should make it payable to The University of Birmingham, NOT to me. Please send orders to: Ms Ceinwen Cushway, Librarian, School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK EMAIL: C.Cushway AT cs.bham.ac.uk Links I found this site recommended by Iraq Museum International Museum Open Directory The "Conceptanalysis, Language and Logic"-site Buried in a page of chinese? Google’s directory of Cognitive Science The PsyPlexus Directory of Cognitive Science (A portal for mental health professionals) Frames-free web site This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. If you use or comment on my ideas please include a URL if possible, so that readers can see the original (or the latest version thereof). Last updated: 26 Sep 2009 8 THE COMPUTER REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY (1978) Aaron Sloman Book contents page This titlepage is also available in PDF format here. 1978 HARVESTER STUDIES IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE General Editor: Margaret A. Boden Harvester Studies in Cognitive Science is a new series which will explore the nature of knowledge by way of a distinctive theoretical approach one that takes account of the complex structures and interacting processes that make thought and action possible. Intelligence can be studied from the point of view of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, pedagogy and artificial intelligence, and all these different emphases will be represented within the series. Other titles in this series: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND NATURAL MAN: Margaret A. Boden INFERENTIAL SEMANTICS: Frederick Parker-Rhodes Other titles in preparation: THE FORMAL MECHANICS OF MIND: Stephen N. Thomas THE COGNITIVE PARADIGM: Marc De Mey ANALOGICAL THINKING: MYTHS AND MECHANISMS: Robin Anderson EDUCATION AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Tim O’Shea 1 In 1978, the author was Reader in Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence, in the Cognitive Studies Programme, The University of Sussex. That later became the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences. Present post (since 2005): Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, UK. The book was first published in Great Britain in 1978 by THE HARVESTER PRESS LIMITED Publisher: John Spiers 2 Stanford Terrace, Hassocks, Sussex (Also published in the USA by Humanities Press, 1978) Copyright: Aaron Sloman, 1978 (When the book went out of print all rights reverted to the author. I hereby permit anyone to copy any or all of the contents of this book.) 2 [...]... changed in many ways The invention of painting and drawing permitted new thoughts in the processes of creating and interpreting pictures The invention of speaking and writing also permitted profound extensions of our abilities to think and communicate Computing is a bit like the invention of paper (a new medium of expression) and the invention of writing (new symbolisms to be embedded in the medium) combined... inferring, remembering, recognising, understanding, learning, proving, explaining, communicating, referring, describing, interpreting, imagining, creating, deliberating, choosing, acting, testing, verifying, and so on Philosophers, like most scientists, have an inadequate set of tools for theorising about such matters, being restricted to something like common sense plus the concepts of logic and physics... knowing that and knowing how) So, much current work in A.I is exploration of the knowledge underlying competence in a variety 11 of specialised domains seeing blocks, understanding children’s stories, making plans for building things out of blocks, assembling bits of machinery, reading handwriting, synthesising or checking computer programs, solving puzzles, playing chess and other games, solving geometrical... operating system, or Winograd’s program described in his book Understanding Natural Language) Instead of equations and the like, quite new non-numerical formalisms have evolved in the form of programming languages, along with a host of informal concepts relating the languages, the programs expressed therein, and the processes they generate Many of these concepts (e.g parsing, compiling, interpreting, pointer,... Nevertheless I am convinced that the ill effects of computers can eventually be outweighed by their benefits I am not thinking of the obvious benefits, like liberation from drudgery and the development of new kinds of information services Rather, I have in mind the role of the computer, and the processes which run on it, as a new medium of self-expression, perhaps comparable in importance to the invention... designing, maintaining, improving or even studying such processes are almost completely ignorant of the concepts, and untrained in the skills, required for thinking about very complex interacting processes Instead they mess about with variables (on ordinal, interval or ratio scales), looking for correlations between them, convinced that measurement and laws are the stuff of science, without recognizing that... Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man, and other works mentioned in the bibliography will take the interested reader into the depths of particular problem areas (Textbooks on AI will be especially useful for readers wishing to get involved in doing artificial intelligence.) My main aim in this book is to re-interpret some age-old philosophical problems, in the light of developments in computing These... appear frequently in this book (e.g., in the chapter on learning about numbers), observing them and interacting with them has taught me a great deal In return, my excursions into artificial intelligence and the topics of the book have changed my way of relating to children I think I now understand their problems better, and have acquired a deeper respect for their intellectual powers The University of... something, then this, together with relevant beliefs, suffices to explain the resulting actions But no decent theory is offered to explain how desires and beliefs are capable of generating action, and in particular no theory of how an individual finds relevant beliefs in his huge store of information, or how conflicting motives enter into the process, or how beliefs, purposes, skills, etc are combined in. .. control theory (e.g feedback) and the mathematical theory of games (e.g payoff matrix), but these are hopelessly deficient for the tasks of philosophy, just as they are for the task of psychology The new discipline of artificial intelligence explores ways of enabling computers to do things which previously could be done only by people and the higher mammals (like seeing things, solving problems, making . changed in many ways. The invention of painting and drawing permitted new thoughts in the processes of creating and interpreting pictures. The invention. how the invention of computing was analogous to the combination of the invention of writing and of the printing press, and predictions were made about the