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Role of philosophy in computer science?
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Role of philosophy in computer science?

ben.vitale
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Posted 08/14/09 - 03:46 PM: Subject: Role of philosophy in computer science?	#1
Article: Are we on the brink of creating a computer with a human brain? Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/science...-creating-human-brain.html Professor Henry Markram claimed, at a conference in Oxford, that he plans to build an electronic human brain 'within ten years'. What would that mean? How to make a machine think? Here's another article that I found fascinating: Robot Scientist Becomes First Machine To Discover New Scientific Knowledge a 'robot scientist' which they believe have discovered new scientific knowledge. I'd like to know how philosophers address these issues.

Uncertainty Principl
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Posted 08/14/09 - 08:51 PM:
Subject: Role of Philosophy in Computer Science?

This brings up some rather interesting questions related to what it means to be human. Are we nothing more than intelligent robots? If this is the case, then why should we treat humans any different than the mechanisms we create which we call robots? Perhaps it is because humans possess a soul that we should be treated different from intelligent robots. If this is the case, how do we know we have a soul?

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Some further questions that could be asked could be something along these lines: I think I have emotions, but how do I know I have not been programmed to think this way? If humans have a soul, does it play any role in intelligence? While we know the process of thought—if it can be called that—in a robot, what is the process of thought in humans? Since one thought generates another thought, what generated the first thought in your existence?

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I would highly recommend the book The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil. In this book, he predicts where technology will be in the next one hundred years. He predicts that humans and other artificial life forms will be indistinguishable.

ben.vitale
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Posted 08/15/09 - 11:45 AM:	#3
Thanks for the feedback. I'm a math major student, and an amateur in philosophy. "The Age of Spiritual Machines" by Ray Kurzweil. I'll check it out. You asked: "how do we know we have a soul?" Do we have any physical evidence of the existence of the soul? We don't. Why do many believe in its existence? People believe in many weird stuff. Humans do have penchant for belief in the afterlife... the existence of souls may be a cognitive illusion. In the article, "Robot Scientist Becomes First Machine To Discover New Scientific Knowledge," the Prof Ross King, who led the research said: "Ultimately we hope to have teams of human and robot scientists working together in laboratories." And "If science was more efficient it would be better placed to help solve society's problems. One way to make science more efficient is through automation. Automation was the driving force behind much of the 19th and 20th century progress, and this is likely to continue." Automation means making society more efficient... we could, if we accept his premise, extend to other functions in society, such as governing and ruling, managing companies and businesses. What about the unintended consequences? I mean the implications for human societies, and threats to our dignity. I find the idea of creating 'robot scientists' intriguing and threatening. What if we to build machines with intellectual capacities that rival and becomes superior to human beings? The 2 articles I posted present other issues, such epistemological, metaphysical and ethical issues. Epistemological issues : The 'robot scientist' is believed to have discovered new scientific knowledge. That brings the question, "what knowledge is and what we should expect to get from a theory of knowledge?" and as computers and A.I. become more "efficient", i.e. more intelligent and knowledgable, what can we say about the value of theories about knowledge? Metaphysical issue : what constitutes a person? Ethical issues : - unexpected consequences: dangers and potential misuse of the technology. - how to use A.I. to benefit humanity. - legal rights of A.I. : we will be able, one day, create sentient creatures. So we might as well prepare ourselves and discuss it. - we need to create A.I. that can behave ethically. Could we trust ourselves to do that? How can we guarantee that? - What A.I. they could become self-sufficient and able to make their own decisions? Then, what? Last night, inspired by these 2 articles, I went and watched the movie "A.I." on DVD. In that movie an A.I. falls in love with a female human. When that movie was released it made lots of people uncomfortable. So my question is : If an A.I. can truly love a human, what is the responsibility of the human? Can a human love back?

wuliheron
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Posted 08/15/09 - 07:37 PM:	#4
Hey, whatever blows your skirt up. Just don't be dumping the sordid details here. I think building an artificial brain is a long way from creating a self-aware machine. It's not nature vs. nurture, but nature and nurture. It may be that the first human-like self-aware machines actually have to have bodies and childhoods like the rest of us, and that might take awhile to accomplish. There are more just plain nose-to-the-grindstone applications of philosophy today in the computer sciences. Some have even been declared "important to the national securty" because of their impact on artifical intelligence today. Some,for example, involve complex recursive matrises calculus based on various tweaks to the rule of the excluded middle. Another interesting approach involved a massive ten year study of the I-Ching. The end result was a slight refinement to the text that in the future could produce such notable novalties as an adorable Yoda doll who sometimes seems to really understand how you feel and helps you to work out your problems. Studies thus far have not shown people to be all that descerning about whether they are talking to a computer program or a real person and, in fact, they tend to feel safer talking to a machine. Edited by wuliheron on 08/15/09 - 07:51 PM

ben.vitale
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Posted 08/17/09 - 10:27 AM:	#5
Hey, whatever blows your skirt up. Just don't be dumping the sordid details here. Could you please explain?

wuliheron
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Posted 08/17/09 - 06:03 PM:	#6
I prefer not to read a blow-by-blow description of android love here.

ecspose
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Posted 08/17/09 - 09:28 PM:	#7
Uncertainty Principl wrote: While we know the process of thought—if it can be called that—in a robot, what is the process of thought in humans? I think that when we deveolp AI we will find that experience is a lot more necessary than we thought when it comes to intelligent behaviour. I think we will find experience exists like we had never considered, not in a magical sense, but as an intrinsic property of behaviour. ben.vitale wrote: So my question is : If an A.I. can truly love a human, what is the responsibility of the human? To provide other robots capable of reciprocating love to those existing robots. Whether a human can love a robot would depend on the robot's capability of satisfying human requirements for love. Maybe it will be the other way around, and robots will find superficial the human experience of love. Perhaps in time instead of enslaving us, we would become like pets to the robots, completely dependant on them for our daily needs, but with no real understanding of the complex interactions taking place between different robot hierarchies. The world would be decided by things beyond our measure, and we would be only as good as we are loyal.
Self replication leads to self replication

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