In this paper I attempt to study the notion of “folding of a semiotic continuum” in a direction of a possible application to the biological processes. More specifically, the process of obtaining protein structures is compared in this paper to the folding of a semiotic continuum. Consequently, peptide chain is presented as a continuous line potential to be formed in order to create functional units. The functional units are protein structures having certain function in the cell or organism. Moreover, protein (...) folding is analyzed in terms of tension between syntax and semantics. (shrink)

An action-oriented theory of embodied memory is favorable for many reasons, but it will not provide a quick yet clean solution to the grounding problem in the way Glenberg (1997t) envisages. Although structural mapping via analogical representations may be an adequate mechanism of cognitive representation, it will not suffice to explain representation as such.

In his recent paper "Indeterminacy, empiricism, and the first person" John R. Searle tries to refute Willard V. O. Quine's famous "indeterminacy of translation thesis" by arguing that this thesis is in fact a reductio ad absurdum of Quine's own "linguistic behaviorism". Searle accuses Quine of being "antimentalistic" and suggests that the "absurdity" of Quine's thesis might be avoided if a full-fledged "intentionality" were tolerated in the debate on meaning. - This anti-Quinean approach in some respects reminds of the "improbable (...) debate" between Searle and Jacques Derrida ten years ago, when Derrida had split and "deferred" intentionality by showing that the essential "iterability" of signs inevitably infects every intentional act with an unremovable "non-presence". In this paper it is argued that Searle's attacks on Quine and Derrida have both failed - and that there are structural similarities between these two failures which reveal some interesting parallels between Quine's and Derrida's philosophy. (shrink)

Sequential transformative design of research :224–235, 2015; Groleau et al. in J Mental Health 16:731–741, 2007; Robson and McCartan in Real world research: a resource for users of social research methods in applied settings, Wiley, Chichester, 2016) allows testing a group of theoretical assumptions about the connections of artificial intelligence with culture and education. In the course of research, semiotics ensures the description of self-organizing systems of cultural signs and symbols in terms of artificial intelligence as a special set of (...) algorithms. This approach helps to consider the arguments proposed by Searle :417–457, 1980) against ‘strong’ artificial intelligence. Searle :417–457, 1980) believes that artificial or machine intelligence cannot fully emulate the processes of the human mind. Machine intelligence shows own inevitable weakness. This is non-autonomous tool for computations and data operating. In fact, this tool cannot provide insight into real cognitive conditions. After Lotman and Uspensky, authors expand the meaning of artificial intelligence. The authors identify a cultural type of ‘strong’ artificial intelligence or ‘self-increase of Logos’ in terms by Lotman and Uspensky. The interpretation of human intelligence as imitation of machine intelligence makes possible such immersion of artificial intelligence in culture. The authors reveal a case of self-organizing autonomous generation, encoding, decoding, reception, storage, and transmission of social information in the field of physical training. From the empirical studies it is clear that the organization of collective activities without external control ensures the development of positive emotions and social orientations. Interest in autonomous behavior provides the formation of educational and cognitive motives. As a special set of algorithms, these motives are the most promising and favorable for personal development. (shrink)

It has been claimed that a great deal of AI research is an attempt to discover the empirical laws describing a new type of entity in the world—the artificial computing system. I call this enterprise 'medium AI', since it is in some respects stronger than Searle's 'weak AI', and in other respects weaker than 'strong AI'. Bruce Buchanan, among others, conceives of medium AI as an empirical science entirely on a par with psychology or chemistry. I argue that medium AI (...) is not an empirical science at all. Depending on how artificial computing systems are categorized, it is either an a priori science like mathematics, or a branch of engineering. (shrink)

Theories of epistemology make reference—via the perspective of an observer—to the structure of information transfer, which generates reality, of which the observer himself forms a part. It can be shown that any epistemological approach which implies the participation of tautological structural elements in the information transfer necessarily leads to an antinomy. Nevertheless, since the time of Aristotle the paradigm of mathematics—and thus tautological structure—has always been a hidden ingredient in the various concepts of knowledge acquisition or general theories of information (...) transfer. We hold that Darwin's Evolutionary Theory is the first scientific theory which consistently presupposes a non-tautological structure for the information transfer and, at the same time, keeps it strictly distinct from the tautological metric of scientific observation. The consequences of this technique—namely the dissociation of information from intentionality—have not yet been fully drawn. Erkenntnistheorien beziehen sich über die Perspektive eines Beobachters auf die Struktur des Informationstransfers, der die Realität erzeugt, von der der Beobachter selbst ein Element ist. Man kann zeigen, dass jeder erkenntnistheoretische Ansatz, der an diesem Transfer von Information tautologische Strukturelemente teilnehmen lässt, zu einer Antinomie führt. Dennoch bilden das Paradigma der Mathematik—und damit tautologische Strukturen—seit Aristoteles einen festen Bestandteil von Erkenntnistheorien und generell von Theorien des Informationstransfers. Unserer These zufolge ist Darwins Evolutionstheorie die erste wissenschaftliche Theorie, die den Informations-transfer ausschließlich als nicht-tautologische Struktur auffasst und diese zugleich strikt von der tautologischen Struktur der Beobachtungsmetrik getrennt hält. Die Konsequenzen für die Erkenntnistheorie—namentlich die Trennung von Information und Intentionalitätsind bisher nicht gezogen worden. (shrink)

According to the conventional wisdom, Turing said that computing machines can be intelligent. I don't believe it. I think that what Turing really said was that computing machines –- computers limited to computing –- can only fake intelligence. If we want computers to become genuinelyintelligent, we will have to give them enough “initiative” to do more than compute. In this paper, I want to try to develop this idea. I want to explain how giving computers more ``initiative'' can allow them (...) to do more than compute. And I want to say why I believe that they will have to go beyond computation before they can become genuinely intelligent. (shrink)

A series of representations must be semantics-driven if the members of that series are to combine into a single thought: where semantics is not operative, there is at most a series of disjoint representations that add up to nothing true or false, and therefore do not constitute a thought at all. A consequence is that there is necessarily a gulf between simulating thought, on the one hand, and actually thinking, on the other. A related point is that a popular doctrine (...) - the so-called 'computational theory of mind' (CTM) - is based on a confusion. CTM is the view that thought-processes consist in 'computations', where a computation is defined as a 'form-driven' operation on symbols. The expression 'form-driven operation' is ambiguous, as it may refer either to syntax-driven operations or to morphology-driven operations. Syntax-driven operations presuppose the existence of operations that are driven by semantic and extra-semantic knowledge. So CTM is false if the terms 'computation' and 'form-driven operation' are taken to refer to syntax-driven operations. Thus, if CTM is to work, those expressions must be taken to refer to morphology-driven operations. CTM therefore fails, given that an operation must be semantics-driven if it is to qualify as a thought. CTM therefore fails on each possible disambiguation of the expressions 'formal operation' and 'computation,' and it is therefore false. (shrink)

Information transfer implies two independent beings and two distinct, although closely tied levels of reality. In other words the „information transfer" is a multi-layer reality. The investigation of the „causal" mechanisms presupposes a proper description of the phenomenal effects. It is the phenomenal sphere of the directly observable events which provokes - in our mind - the questions driving the effort to explore the „mechanisms". It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to approach the process of description with the sufficiently unbiased means. (...) A premature narrowing on the descriptive level may fatally affect our „explanatory" ideas on the underlying mechanisms. For instance, in the realm of „information theories" there is a deeply rooted, but not too reliable conviction, that the descriptive means, used in the process of the construction and utilization of some technical devices, give us a fair chance to describe the „Information transfer" within or between the living creatures. (shrink)

Information transfer implies two independent beings and two distinct, although closely tied levels of reality. In other words the „information transfer" is a multi-layer reality. The investigation of the „causal" mechanisms presupposes a proper description of the phenomenal effects. It is the phenomenal sphere of the directly observable events which provokes - in our mind - the questions driving the effort to explore the „mechanisms". It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to approach the process of description with the sufficiently unbiased means. (...) A premature narrowing on the descriptive level may fatally affect our „explanatory" ideas on the underlying mechanisms. For instance, in the realm of „information theories" there is a deeply rooted, but not too reliable conviction, that the descriptive means, used in the process of the construction and utilization of some technical devices, give us a fair chance to describe the „Information transfer" within or between the living creatures. (shrink)

Jennifer Lackey has recently presented a new and lucid analysis of the notion ofjustified group belief, i.e. a set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for a group to justifiedly believe some proposition. In this paper, however, I argue that theanalysansshe proposes is too narrow: one of the conditions she takes to be necessary for justified group belief is not necessary. To substantiate this claim, I present a potential counterexample to Lackey's analysis where a group knows and thus justifiedly (...) believes some proposition but there is no single group member who actually believes that proposition. I close by defending the example against the objection that the group in question does notknowbut is at mostin a positionto know the target proposition. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Materialism—the view that all of reality is wholly determined by the very, very small—and extreme nominalism—the view that properties, kinds, and qualities do not really exist—have been the dominant view in analytic philosophy for the last 100 years or so. Both views, however, have failed to provide adequate accounts for the possibility of intentionality and of knowledge. We must therefore look to alternatives. One well-tested alternative, the hylomorphism of Aristotle and the medieval scholastics, was rejected without being refuted and so (...) deserves further examination. I will argue that Aristotelian hylomorphic provides a markedly superior account of knowledge, cognitive normativity, and intentionality. (shrink)

The scales across which physical properties exist are vast and subtle in their effects on particular systems placed locally on such scales. For example, human experiential access is restricted only to partial segments of the mass density, size, and temperature scales of the universe. I argue that philosophers must learn to appreciate better the effects of physical scales. Specifically, thought experiments in philosophy should be more sensitive to physical scale effects, because the conclusion of a thought experiment may be undermined (...) by unintentionally ignored scale effects, and the changes required to obtain the foreground state of affairs in a thought experiment might require unacknowledged scale-spanning changes to the contextual background. I discuss four philosophical thought experiments: Putnam's Twin Earth and Brain in a Vat, Searle's Chinese Room, and Chalmers's Zombies Without Qualia. I close by briefly defending the greater interest and importance of physical possibility over logical possibility. (shrink)

We present a model of a fundamental property of consciousness as the capacity of a system to opt among presented alternatives. Any system possessing this capacity is "conscious" in some degree, whether or not it has the higher capacity of reflecting on its opting. We argue that quantum systems, composed of microphysical particles, as studied by quantum mechanics, possess this quality in a protomental form. That is, such particles display the capacity to opt among alternatives, even though they lack the (...) ability to experience or communicate their experiences. Human consciousness stands at the opposite end of the hierarchy of conscious life forms as the most sophisticated system of which we have direct acquaintance. We contend that it shares the common characteristic of a system capable of opting among alternatives. Because the fundamental property of consciousness is shared by human beings and the constituents of elementary matter in the universe, our model of consciousness can be considered as a modified form of panpsychism. (shrink)

There is substantial disagreement among philosophers of embodied cognitive science about the meaning of embodiment. In what follows, I describe three different views that can be found in the current literature. I show how this debate centers around the question of whether the science of embodied cognition can retain the computer theory of mind. One view, which I will label body functionalism, takes the body to play the functional role of linking external resources for problem solving with internal biological machinery. (...) Embodiment is thus understood in terms of the role the body plays in supporting the computational circuits that realize cognition. Body enactivism argues by contrast that no computational account of cognition can account for the role of commonsense knowledge in our everyday practical engagement with the world. I will attempt a reconciliation of these seemingly opposed views. (shrink)

David Marr's theory of vision has been widely cited by philosophers and psychologists. I have three projects in this paper. First, I try to offer a perspicuous characterization of Marr's theory. Next, I consider the implications of Marr's work for some currently popular philosophies of psychology, specifically, the "hegemony of neurophysiology view", the theories of Jerry Fodor, Daniel Dennett, and Stephen Stich, and the view that perception is permeated by belief. In the last section, I consider what the phenomenon of (...) vision must be like for Marr's project to succeed. (shrink)

As Gray insists, his comparator model proposes a brute correlation only – of consciousness with septohippocampal output. I suggest that the comparator straddles a feedback loop that boosts the activation ofnovelrepresentations, thus helping them feature in present or recollected experience. Such a role in organizing conscious contents would transcend correlation and help explain how consciousness emerges from brain function.

This paper contributes to the recently renewed debate over methodological individualism (MI) by carefully sorting out various individualist claims and by making use of recent work on reduction and explanation outside the social sciences. My major focus is on individualist claims about reduction and explanation. I argue that reductionist versions of MI fail for much the same reasons that mental predicates cannot be reduced to physical predicates and that attempts to establish reducibility by weakening the requirements for reduction also fail. (...) I consider and reject a number of explanatory theses, among them the claims that any adequate theory must refer only to individuals and that individualist theory suffices to explain fully. The latter claim, I argue, is not entailed by the supervenience of social facts on individual facts. Lastly, I argue that there is one individualist restriction on explanation which is far more plausible and significant than one would initially suspect. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence is developing rapidly. There are technologies available that fulfil several tasks better than humans can and even behave like humans to some extent. Thus, the situation prompts the question whether AI should be granted legal person- and/or agenthood? There have been similar situations in history where the legal status of slaves or indigenous peoples was discussed. Still, in those historical questions, the subjects under study were always natural persons, i.e., they were living beings belonging to the species Homo (...) sapiens. We analyse the situation from moral-ethical and practical perspectives. The final conclusion is that the currently existing AIs are still so far removed from humans that there is simply no need to think seriously about legal person- or agenthood. Doing so would mean imposing obligations on the AI to follow. This, in turn, would mean that certain rights in relation to those obligations would have to be granted as well. By all evidence, this is something that humans are not ready to do yet and might never get that far. (shrink)

The assumption that psychological states and processes are computational in character pervades much of cognitive science, what many call the computational theory of mind. In addition to occupying a central place in cognitive science, the computational theory of mind has also had a second life supporting “individualism”, the view that psychological states should be taxonomized so as to supervene only on the intrinsic, physical properties of individuals. One response to individualism has been to raise the prospect of “wide computational systems”, (...) in which some computational units are instantiated outside the individual. “Wide computationalism” attempts to sever the link between individualism and computational psychology by enlarging the concept of computation. However, in spite of its potential interest to cognitive science, wide computationalism has received little attention in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. This paper aims to revisit the prospect of wide computationalism. It is argued that by appropriating a mechanistic conception of computation wide computationalism can overcome several issues that plague initial formulations. The aim is to show that cognitive science has overlooked an important and viable option in computational psychology. The paper marshals empirical support and responds to possible objections. (shrink)

Artificial life (ALife) is the attempt to create artificial instances of life in a variety of media, but primarily within the digital computer. As such, the field brings together computationally-minded biologists and biologically-minded computer scientists. I argue that this new field is filled with interesting philosophical issues. However, there is a dearth of philosophers actively conducting research in this area. I discuss two books on the new field: Margaret A. Boden's The philosophy of artificial life and Christopher G. Langton's Artificial (...) life: an overview. They cover three areas of philosophical interest: the definition of life, the relationship between life and mind, and the possibility of creating life within a computational environment. This discussion allows me to critique past work in the philosophy of ALife that tends to see the field as a proving ground for traditional arguments from the philosophy of artificial intelligence. Instead, I suggest, what is interesting about ALife is how it differs from artificial intelligence and that the most interesting philosophical issues in the area are those derived from biology, not psychology. I recommend that these two books taken together constitute an interesting introduction to ALife and the wealth of philosophical issues found therein. (shrink)

Computational imagination (CI) conceives imagination as an agent’s simulated sensorimotor interaction with the environment in the absence of sensory feedback, predicting consequences based on this interaction (Marques and Holland in Neurocomputing 72:743–759, 2009). Its bedrock is the simulation hypothesis whereby imagination resembles seeing or doing something in reality as both involve similar neural structures in the brain (Hesslow in Trends Cogn Sci 6(6):242–247, 2002). This paper raises two-forked doubts: (1) neural-level equivalence is escalated to make phenomenological equivalence. Even at an (...) abstract level, many imagined and real actions turn out to be dissimilar. More so, some imagined actions have no corresponding real actions and vice versa, even though neural regions involved in imaginings and real action-perception are the same (Sect. 1). (2) At the implementation level, the hypothesis presents a mutually exclusive view of imagination and perception whereby imagination functions in the absence of the sensory feedback and is action based. Both these issues are contested here: Neither imagination functions in the absence of perception nor all forms of imaginings are action based; it is, rather, about conceiving possibilities which emerge during the perceptual stage itself (Sect. 2). For the modal aspect to arise, it is submitted that an integrative framework is required which Kant can provide for whom imagination is an indispensable part of perception. Kant’s views on concept-formation are presented here to illustrate this aspect (Sect. 3). The Paper is concluded with emphasizing the relevance of Kant’s views to the problems identified in the two sections. (shrink)

The article presents the possible role of consciousness in quantum-mechanical description of physical reality. The widely spread interpretations of quantum phenomena are considered as indicating the apparent connection between conscious processes and the properties of the microcosm. The reasons for discrepancies between the results of observations of the microcosm and macrocosm and the potential association of consciousness with these reasons are closely investigated. The mentioned connection is meant to be interpreted in the sense that the probable requirement for a complete (...) understanding of quantum theory is the adequate description of consciousness within it and that the correct theory of consciousness should include quantum-mechanical theoretical apparatus. In this context, the question about the methods of scientific cognition is discussed, in particular, the problem of the place and the importance of intellectual intuition in science and philosophy of science. The author draws the conclusions about the current state of the “measuring” consciousness. problem in its relationship with. (shrink)

We confront the following popular views: that mind or life are algorithms; that thinking, or more generally any process other than computation, is computation; that anything other than a working brain can have thoughts; that anything other than a biological organism can be alive; that form and function are independent of matter; that sufficiently accurate simulations are just as genuine as the real things they imitate; and that the Turing test is either a necessary or sufficient or scientific procedure for (...) evaluating whether or not an entity is intelligent. Drawing on the distinction between activities and tasks, and the fundamental scientific principles of ontological lawfulness, epistemological realism, and methodological skepticism, we argue for traditional scientific materialism of the emergentist kind in opposition to the functionalism, behaviourism, tacit idealism, and merely decorative materialism of the artificial intelligence and artificial life communities. (shrink)

In domains as disparate as playing Go and predicting the structure of proteins, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have begun to perform at levels beyond which any humans can achieve. Does this fact represent something lamentable? Does superhuman AI performance somehow undermine the value of human achievements in these areas? Go grandmaster Lee Sedol suggested as much when he announced his retirement from professional Go, blaming the advances of Go-playing programs like AlphaGo for sapping his will to play the game at (...) a high level. In this paper, I attempt to make sense of Sedol’s lament. I consider a number of ways that the existence of superhuman-performing AI technologies could undermine the value of human achievements. I argue there is very little in the nature of the technology itself that warrants such despair. (Compare: does the existence of a fighter jet undermine the value of being the fastest human sprinter?) But I also argue there are several more localized domains where these technologies threaten to displace human beings from being able to achieve valuable things at all. This is a particular worry for those in unequal societies, I argue, given the difficulty of many achievements and the corresponding amount of resources needed to achieve great things. (shrink)

The normativity of meaning—introduced by Kripke in 1982, and the subject of active debate since the early 1990s—has been exclusively understood in terms of duty-imposing norms. But there are norms of another type, well-known within the philosophy of law: authority-conferring norms. Philosophers thinking and writing about the normativity of meaning—normativists, anti-normativists, and even Kripke himself—seem to have failed to consider the possibility that semantic norms are authority-conferring. I argue that semantic norms should be understood as having an authority-conferring structure, and (...) show how this allows normativism about meaning to escape the two most popular arguments against it. (shrink)

Advocates of extended cognition argue that the boundaries of cognition span brain, body, and environment. Critics maintain that cognitive processes are confined to a boundary centered on the individual. All participants to this debate require a criterion for distinguishing what is internal to cognition from what is external. Yet none of the available proposals are completely successful. I offer a new account, the mutual manipulability account, according to which cognitive boundaries are determined by relationships of mutual manipulability between the properties (...) and activities of putative components and the overall behavior of the cognitive mechanism in which they figure. Among its main advantages, this criterion is capable of (a) distinguishing components of cognition from causal background conditions and lower-level correlates, and (b) showing how the core hypothesis of extended cognition can serve as a legitimate empirical hypothesis amenable to experimental test and confirmation. Conceiving the debate in these terms transforms the current clash over extended cognition into a substantive empirical debate resolvable on the basis of evidence from cognitive science and neuroscience. (shrink)