In this essay we argue that the notion of machine necessarily includes its being designed for a purpose. Therefore, being a mechanical system is not enough for being a machine. Since the experimental scientific method excludes any consideration of finality on methodological grounds, it is then also insufficient to fully understand what machines are. Instead in order to understand a machine it is first required to understand its purpose, along with its structure, in clear parallel with Aristotle’s final and formal (...) causes. Obviously, purpose and structure are not machine components that can physically interact with other components; nonetheless they are essential to understanding their operation. This casts an interesting light on the relationship between mind and body: for just as an artifact’s finality and structure explain its operation, so also consciousness is the explanation—not the efficient cause—of specifically human behavior. What machines and human beings have in common is that, in order to understand them, it is necessary to appeal to the principle of finality. Yet while finality is given and extrinsic in the case of machines, we human beings are characterized by the ability to self-propose our own ends. Since the principle of finality is essential to understanding the production of machines, the traditional view in modern Western philosophy that finality lies beyond the scope of objective/scientific knowledge should be rectified to allow for a genuine science of the artificial. We think a correct understanding of final causality will overcome current resistance to this principle. (shrink)

In this condensed survey, I look to recent perspectives on evolution suggesting that cultural change likely alters the genome. Since theories of development are nested within assumptions about evolution (evo-devo), I next review some oft-cited developmental theories and other psychological theories of the 20th century to see if any match the emerging perspectives in evolutionary theory. I seek theories based neither in nature (genetics) nor nurture (the environment) but in the creative play of human communication responding to necessity. This survey (...) finally looks to more recent work to do with the appearance of independent self-consciousness in the individual following empathic group awareness. The result of such self-created group awareness and symbolic communication is seen to be cultural consciousness, unique to humanity, from which individual consciousness and personhood derive. I conclude by noting the general implications for these approaches in our schools, politics, and in ultimate ontological questions. (shrink)

ArgumentEighteenth-century Montpellerian vitalism and contemporaneous French “vitalist” materialism, exemplified by the medical and biological materialism of La Mettrie and Diderot, differ in some essential aspects from some later forms of vitalism that tended to postulate immaterial vital principles or forces. This article examines the arguments defending the existence of vital properties in living organisms presented in the context of eighteenth-century French materialism. These arguments had recourse to technological metaphors and analogies, mainly clockworks, in order to claim that just as machines (...) can have functional properties which its parts do not possess, so living organisms can, as material entities, also have organic or vital properties which its material parts do not possess. Such arguments, with the help of a healthy dose of epistemological scepticism, tend to strike a balance between two positions concerning the ontology of life which we now tend to label “vitalism” and “emergentism.” Although there is nothing inconsistent in viewing vital properties as emergent, some ambiguity results if one does not draw a clear distinction between properties and functions. The philosophical problems related to these ambiguities are revealed in Diderot's apparent hesitation concerning sentience as “a general property of matter or the product of organization.”. (shrink)

The photographic apparatus whose emergence is located in the mid-nineteenth century has not been perfectly located within the history of technology, sometimes considered as a simple tool or instrument whose utility was mainly in the field of scientific research, other times giving it the status of machine, accentuating this time the automatism of its operation. Both visions seem insufficient to us since both one and the other present a certain partiality in the understanding of the apparatus, which should not be (...) reduced to its mere optical character or to its automatism, since this is also a form of recording, of memory. Our interest will focus on demonstrating how photography should be thought of as “apparatus”, that is, as a complex element within the history of technology; that not only was able to perfect our vision considered as deficient, but at the same time was able to grant a new temporality and a specific type of perception to an entire era. (shrink)

The study outlines the existing and potential philosophical issues of the idea of conscious machines originated from the development of artificial consciousness within the framework of contemporary research of artificial intelligence and cognitive robotics. The outline shows that the idea of conscious machines is concerned with two big philosophical issues. The first philosophical issue is a definition of consciousness, taking into account the selection of a set of objects that can have consciousness, the typology of consciousness, the clarifying of the (...) nature of consciousness' carriers and the relationship between consciousness and its environment and the relationship between consciousness and language, in order to create an artificial consciousness within a machine, making that machine conscious. The second philosophical issue is a clarification whether only artificially created machines can be conscious machines, or cyborgizated human beings also can be considered of conscious machines. These philosophical issues show that there can be two ways to create conscious machines: 1) the creating of artificial consciousness within artificially created machine; and 2) the cyborgization of human being, transforming it into artificially created machine possessed natural consciousness. (shrink)

The claim of the freedom of the will (understood as an individual who is transcendent to Nature) in the name of XXth century scientific knowledge, against the perspective of XVIIIth-XIXth century scientific materialism, is analysed and refuted in the present paper. The hypothesis of reductionism finds no obstacle within contemporary natural sciences. Determinism in classical physics is irrefutable, unless classical physics is itself refuted. From quantum mechanics, some authors argue that free will is possible because there is an ontological indeterminism (...) in the natural laws, and that the mind is responsible for the wave function collapse of matter, which leads to a choice among the different possibilities for the body. However, here I defend the opposite thesis because indeterminism does not imply free will, and because the considerations about an autonomous mind sending orders to the body is against neuroscience or evolutionary theories about human beings. The quantum theory of measurement can be interpreted without the intervention of human minds, but other fields of science cannot contemplate the mentalist scenario. A fatalistic or materialist view, which denies the possibility of a free will, makes much more sense in scientific terms. (shrink)

Richard Koch1 became known in the 1920s with works on basic medical theory. Among these publications, the character of medical action and its status within the theory of science was presented as the most important theme. While science is inherently driven by the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, medicine pursues the practical purpose of helping the sick. Therefore, medicine must be seen as an active relationship between a helping and a suffering person. While elucidating this relationship, Koch discusses (...) the fundamental elements of medicine found in natural philosophy and the relationship of medicine to its own history. One of his aims is to unite natural history and the history of ideas without reducing intellectual processes to biological ones. Koch considers free will as something intuitively certain. It must serve as an axiom which will capture human as well as non-human reality. Based on the fact that human free will, considered a psychic quality, evolved out of inanimate matter, Koch grants matter (proto-) psychic qualities. They are evoked through specific constellations of matter. – With regard to history, Koch rejects the notion of constant progress. The history of medicine has provided insights that cannot be surpassed but can be obscured. Historical self-contemplation serves as a means for avoiding any deviations which may prevent medicine from fulfiling its ultimate purpose. Koch connects nature and history through the concept of a unity between natural history and the historical development of medicine. Medicine is considered an especially complex development of a purposive reaction to harmful stimuli, a reaction which can already be encountered in unicellular organisms. Without intending to reduce historical and mental processes to biological ones, Koch sets for himself the aim of gathering different phenomena and presenting them in one encapsulating unity. (shrink)

Traces the development of recursive functions from their origins in the late nineteenth century to the mid-1930s, with particular emphasis on the work and influence of Kurt Gödel.

Irony and sarcasm are common linguistic tropes. They are both based on falsehoods that the speaker pretends to be true. I briefly characterize their differences. A third trope exists that works when the relevant propositions are true – yet its rhetorical effect resembles irony and sarcasm, I call it mocking. It is mimetic evil: an agent copies another so that the result ridicules him. The image is, in a limited way, true of him and it hurts; we all are vulnerable. (...) I provide a systematic framework for understanding this phenomenon, mocking, in terms of emulation and simulation. Finally, I introduce an idea of universal mimesis and discuss René Girard’s theory of desire. He argues that desires are copies of a model. This may not be possible, and I suggest a modification to his theory. I pay attention to his idea of mimetic desire as a source of hatred, which is obviously related to what I call here mimetic mocking. (shrink)

The debate over whether human animals are linked by bonds of justice to nonhu-man animals is ancient and has been several times settled. The Roman jurists defined the j us naturae in terms of what nature had taught 'all animals', but Grotius and other natural-law theorists rejected this view and redefined the jus naturae as that which accorded with human nature, thereby founding the 'modern' view which has excluded nonhuman animals from the sphere of justice. This paper examines Grotius's argument (...) as part of a larger seventeenth-century 'counter-revolution' in thought and argues that its incoherence becomes intelligible only when viewed as an attempt to deal with the embarrassing phenomenon of inhumane warfare. Warned by the example of Grotius, we may wish to inquire to what extent any discussion of animal justice, whatever side it takes, may be an exercise in the perpetration of injustice. (shrink)

A. M. Turing has bequeathed us a conceptulary including 'Turing, or Turing-Church, thesis', 'Turing machine', 'universal Turing machine', 'Turing test' and 'Turing structures', plus other unnamed achievements. These include a proof that any formal language adequate to express arithmetic contains undecidable formulas, as well as achievements in computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics, biology, and cognitive science. Here it is argued that these achievements hang together and have prospered well in the 50 years since Turing's death.

In the novel Die Automate (Hoffmann, 1957 ed.), the German writer Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822) describes different kinds of musical automatons which play music with expression and musicality. The whole novel is based on the effect of the automatic performances on the feelings of the two personages and on the appearance of musical automatons which simulate, with their musical skill and expressiveness, the structures of the knowledge and feelings of human beings.

The photographic apparatus whose emergence is located in the mid-nineteenth century has not been perfectly located within the history of technology, sometimes considered as a simple tool or instrument whose utility was mainly in the field of scientific research, other times giving it the status of machine, accentuating this time the automatism of its operation. Both visions seem insufficient to us since both one and the other present a certain partiality in the understanding of the apparatus, which should not be (...) reduced to its mere optical character or to its automatism, since this is also a form of recording, of memory. Our interest will focus on demonstrating how photography should be thought of as “apparatus”, that is, as a complex element within the history of technology; that not only was able to perfect our vision considered as deficient, but at the same time was able to grant a new temporality and a specific type of perception to an entire era. (shrink)