It is not likely that we will ever convincingly know how and why we came to be on this planet; of course, this has never prevented inquisitive minds from pushing the frontiers of understanding and discovery further. Our origin is the subject of scientific theories and continuous inquiries with no end in sight, as the shells of related complexities are getting much harder to crack. Paraphrasing philosopher and historian Will Durant, a very few people are getting to know more and (...) more about less and less. This knowledge and the scientific language used to express it are now becoming more and more incomprehensible to most humans; therefore, despite the sincere efforts of communication media’s countless “talking heads,” we may be inevitably driven by default to a new religion of worshiping the church of science, along with its scientist “priests,” and to a life filled with the unequivocal dangers that could befall us from such devotions. Humanity and the planet are faced with dangers that have and can be issued from the absence or deficiency of proper public knowledge and guiding ethical principles for handling many of the new scientific and engineering discoveries and innovations, such as artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and plant, animal, and human gene editing, etc. To avoid inadvertent adverse impacts, which could seriously endanger our normal ways of life and even existence, knowledge has to be humanized and massively disseminated. Even at the expense of some mistakes, the benefits certainly outweigh the loss. -/- This book is a small effort along this path. -/- . (shrink)

The book is thought-provoking and informative, wide in scope while also being technically detailed, and still relevant to modem AI [at least as of 1998, the time of writing this review, but probably also at the time of posting this entry here, 2023] even though it was published in 1989. This relevance lies mainly in the book’s advocacy of distributed computation at multiple levels of description, its combining of neural networks and other techniques, its emphasis on the interplay between (...) action and perception, and its particular approach to natural language processing. The criticisms I have occasionally made above are relatively minor, and one of the major shortcomings of schema theory at least at the time of the book’s publication -- namely the lack of a detailed, preferably neural, mechanism for schema instantiation -- is one of which Arbib is well aware. The book is well produced, for the most part clearly written, and has useful summaries at the beginning of each chapter. Both general readers and AI researchers (mainly but not exclusively those working on robotics, vision and neural networks) could benefit from reading the book. (shrink)

In artificial intelligence, recent research has demonstrated the remarkable potential of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs), which seem to exceed state-of-the-art performance in new domains weekly, especially on the sorts of very difficult perceptual discrimination tasks that skeptics thought would remain beyond the reach of artificial intelligence. However, it has proven difficult to explain why DCNNs perform so well. In philosophy of mind, empiricists have long suggested that complex cognition is based on information derived from sensory experience, (...) often appealing to a faculty of abstraction. Rationalists have frequently complained, however, that empiricists never adequately explained how this faculty of abstraction actually works. In this paper, I tie these two questions together, to the mutual benefit of both disciplines. I argue that the architectural features that distinguish DCNNs from earlier neural networks allow them to implement a form of hierarchical processing that I call “transformational abstraction”. Transformational abstraction iteratively converts sensory-based representations of category exemplars into new formats that are increasingly tolerant to “nuisance variation” in input. Reflecting upon the way that DCNNs leverage a combination of linear and non-linear processing to efficiently accomplish this feat allows us to understand how the brain is capable of bi-directional travel between exemplars and abstractions, addressing longstanding problems in empiricist philosophy of mind. I end by considering the prospects for future research on DCNNs, arguing that rather than simply implementing 80s connectionism with more brute-force computation, transformational abstraction counts as a qualitatively distinct form of processing ripe with philosophical and psychological significance, because it is significantly better suited to depict the generic mechanism responsible for this important kind of psychological processing in the brain. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence has historically been conceptualized in anthropomorphic terms. Some algorithms deploy biomimetic designs in a deliberate attempt to effect a sort of digital isomorphism of the human brain. Others leverage more general learning strategies that happen to coincide with popular theories of cognitive science and social epistemology. In this paper, I challenge the anthropomorphic credentials of the neural network algorithm, whose similarities to human cognition I argue are vastly overstated and narrowly construed. I submit that three alternative (...) supervised learning methods—namely lasso penalties, bagging, and boosting—offer subtler, more interesting analogies to human reasoning as both an individual and a social phenomenon. Despite the temptation to fall back on anthropomorphic tropes when discussing AI, however, I conclude that such rhetoric is at best misleading and at worst downright dangerous. The impulse to humanize algorithms is an obstacle to properly conceptualizing the ethical challenges posed by emerging technologies. (shrink)

The paper outlines an analysis of two types of information - ordinary and subjective, consideration is given to the difference between the concepts of intelligence and perceiving mind. It also provides description of some logical functional features of consciousness. A technical approach is proposed to technical obtaining of subjective information by changing the signal’s time degree of freedom to the spatial one in order to obtain the "observer" function in the system and information signals appearing in relation to it, that (...) serve as subjective sensations. The solution to this problem may give a new approach to designing a strong artificial intelligence and shed light on the difficult problem of the mind. (shrink)

This book reports on the results of the third edition of the premier conference in the field of philosophy of artificial intelligence, PT-AI 2017, held on November 4 - 5, 2017 at the University of Leeds, UK. It covers: advanced knowledge on key AI concepts, including complexity, computation, creativity, embodiment, representation and superintelligence; cutting-edge ethical issues, such as the AI impact on human dignity and society, responsibilities and rights of machines, as well as AI threats to humanity and AI (...) safety; and cutting-edge developments in techniques to achieve AI, including machine learning, neural networks, dynamical systems. The book also discusses important applications of AI, including big data analytics, expert systems, cognitive architectures, and robotics. It offers a timely, yet very comprehensive snapshot of what is going on in the field of AI, especially at the interfaces between philosophy, cognitive science, ethics and computing. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss one of the key issuesin the philosophy of neuroscience:neurosemantics. The project of neurosemanticsinvolves explaining what it means for states ofneurons and neural systems to haverepresentational contents. Neurosemantics thusinvolves issues of common concern between thephilosophy of neuroscience and philosophy ofmind. I discuss a problem that arises foraccounts of representational content that Icall ``the economy problem'': the problem ofshowing that a candidate theory of mentalrepresentation can bear the work requiredwithin in the causal economy of a mind (...) and anorganism. My approach in the current paper isto explore this and other key themes inneurosemantics through the use of computermodels of neural networks embodied and evolvedin virtual organisms. The models allow for thelaying bare of the causal economies of entireyet simple artificial organisms so that therelations between the neural bases of, forinstance, representation in perception andmemory can be regarded in the context of anentire organism. On the basis of thesesimulations, I argue for an account ofneurosemantics adequate for the solution of theeconomy problem. (shrink)

In the book, the author defines the evolution as a continuous and nonlinear complex of the structure of matter, interaction types and environments of existence; analyzes existing in modern science and philosophy approaches to the study of the process of evolution, degree of development factors and causes of evolution. Unifying interdisciplinary research in cosmology, evolution, biology, neuroscience and philosophy, the author presents his vision of the evolution model of «Evolving matter», which allows us to consider not only the laws of (...) the transition space vacuum in neural networks but also to see our Universe as a complex, heterogeneous organization. Interdisciplinary amount of information on the theory of evolution is systematized and a new method of world perception is proposed in the book. (shrink)

The segregation of image parts into foreground and background is an important aspect of the neural computation of 3D scene perception. To achieve such segregation, the brain needs information about border ownership; that is, the belongingness of a contour to a specific surface represented in the image. This article presents psychophysical data derived from 3D percepts of figure and ground that were generated by presenting 2D images composed of spatially disjoint shapes that pointed inward or outward relative to the (...) continuous boundaries that they induced along their collinear edges. The shapes in some images had the same contrast (black or white) with respect to the background gray. Other images included opposite contrasts along each induced continuous boundary. Psychophysical results demonstrate conditions under which figure-ground judgment probabilities in response to these ambiguous displays are determined by the orientation of contrasts only, not by their relative contrasts, despite the fact that many border ownership cells in cortical area V2 respond to a preferred relative contrast. Studies are also reviewed in which both polarity-specific and polarity-invariant properties obtain perceptual figure-ground grouping results. The FACADE and 3D LAMINART models are used to explain these data. Keywords: figure-ground separation, border ownership, perceptual grouping, surface filling-in, V2, V4, FACADE Theory. (shrink)

Computer assisted theorem proving is an increasingly important part of mathematical methodology, as well as a long-standing topic in artificial intelligence (AI) research. However, the current generation of theorem proving software have limited functioning in terms of providing new proofs. Importantly, they are not able to discriminate interesting theorems and proofs from trivial ones. In order for computers to develop further in theorem proving, there would need to be a radical change in how the software functions. Recently, machine learning (...) results in solving mathematical tasks have shown early promise that deep artificial neural networks could learn symbolic mathematical processing. In this paper, I analyze the theoretical prospects of such neural networks in proving mathematical theorems. In particular, I focus on the question how such AI systems could be incorporated in practice to theorem proving and what consequences that could have. In the most optimistic scenario, this includes the possibility of autonomous automated theorem provers (AATP). Here I discuss whether such AI systems could, or should, become accepted as active agents in mathematical communities. (shrink)

Mental representations remain the central posits of psychology after many decades of scrutiny. However, there is no consensus about the representational format(s) of biological cognition. This paper provides a survey of evidence from computational cognitive psychology, perceptual psychology, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and social psychology, and concludes that one type of format that routinely crops up is the language-of-thought (LoT). We outline six core properties of LoTs: (i) discrete constituents; (ii) role-filler independence; (iii) predicate–argument structure; (iv) logical operators; (v) inferential (...) promiscuity; and (vi) abstract content. These properties cluster together throughout cognitive science. Bayesian computational modeling, compositional features of object perception, complex infant and animal reasoning, and automatic, intuitive cognition in adults all implicate LoT-like structures. Instead of regarding LoT as a relic of the previous century, researchers in cognitive science and philosophy-of-mind must take seriously the explanatory breadth of LoT-based architectures. We grant that the mind may harbor many formats and architectures, including iconic and associative structures as well as deep-neural-network-like architectures. However, as computational/representational approaches to the mind continue to advance, classical compositional symbolic structures – that is, LoTs – only prove more flexible and well-supported over time. (shrink)

Quilty-Dunn et al. argue that deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) optimized for image classification exemplify structural disanalogies to human vision. A different kind of artificial vision – found in reinforcement-learning agents navigating artificial three-dimensional environments – can be expected to be more human-like. Recent work suggests that language-like representations substantially improves these agents’ performance, lending some indirect support to the language-of-thought hypothesis (LoTH).

In her seminal text, What Should We Do With Our Brain? (2008), Catherine Malabou gestured towards neuroplasticity to upend Bergson's famous parallel of the brain as a "central telephonic exchange," whereby the function of the brain is simply that of a node where perceptions get in touch with motor mechanisms, the brain as an instrument limited to the transmission and divisions of movements. Drawing from the history of cybernetics one can trace how Bergson's 'telephonic exchange' prefigures the neural 'cybernetic (...) metaphor.' It is elsewhere, however, that What Should We Do With Our Brain? finds its crux: inspired a dialectical-speculative opposition between plasticity and flexibility (wherein plasticity is the way in which time shapes or fashions us, constitutes our subjectivity and at the same time allows for resistance), Malabou invalidates the 'telephonic exchange' metaphor for failing to take into account synaptic and neuronal vitality. Bolstered by neurologist Marc Jeannerod's research in The Nature of Mind (2002), Malabou further demonstrated, in her past work, that the cybernetic metaphor has also had its day. In Morphing Intelligence, by problematizing intelligence as strictly empirical and biologically determined, Malabou also troubles the traditional distinction between intelligence and intuition. This division is perhaps best exemplified by Bergson’s analysis of intellectual measurement magnitudes in his appeal to intensity, and intensity alone. Malabou, drawing from Dewey and the pragmatism mode of thought, characterizes this fetid standstill as little more than provincialism, charging that, ater Bergson, no truly new argument was offered to counter intelligence as defined by psychologists and biologists, including the most recent cognitivist version. Despite I disagree with her claims regarding cognitivism, in echoing Georges Canguilhem, Malabou castigates psychology’s instrumentalist regard for intelligence, making the claim that it is able to measure only the human ability to “become an instrument.” Malabou contends that Alfred Binet (who heavily critiqued Bergson) had it right—intelligence is constituted by intensities and qualities. This book picks up from this critique and works genealogically; in my exegetical review, I engage with Malabou's and its implications, given her past work. (shrink)

When this article was first planned, writing was going to be exclusively about two things - the origin of life and human evolution. But it turned out to be out of the question for the author to restrict himself to these biological and anthropological topics. A proper understanding of them required answering questions like “What is the nature of the universe – the home of life – and how did it originate?”, “How can time travel be removed from fantasy and (...) science fiction, to be made scientific and practical?”, and “How can the proposed young age of genus Homo be made to actually be reasonable – when simply stating it would be solid ground for instant rejection and dismissal?” The result is that the article also talks about subjects like Artificial Intelligence, General Relativity, and cosmology. -/- From where did life originate? God? Evolution? Panspermia? If the tendency of humans and scientists to regard undiscovered science as pseudoscience can be overcome, Einstein gave another alternative to consider when he introduced General Relativity. Time isn’t linear – progressing in a straight line from past to present to future. That assumption ignores Relativity which states that space AND TIME are curved. Where did life and the genetic code come from? Can the answer build AI? -/- The first question can be answered by the section of this article titled SETI, Evolution, and Time which says life (possibly multicellular and intelligent) and the genetic code came from humans acquiring knowledge of these things over the centuries, then applying that knowledge – via terraforming, accumulation of raw materials like amino acids and nucleic acids, genetic engineering - to a time in the past when life didn’t exist. From that origin, life evolved through innumerable mutations and adaptations, with humans once again acquiring knowledge of it in cyclic (nonlinear) time. -/- The second question is answered by saying artificial intelligence (AI) as the product of life is only half of the equation. The other half refers to Relativity’s curved space-time and violation of the notion that time always travels from past to future. We have always lived in an artificially intelligent, non-probabilistic universe where everything in time and space is connected into one thing by quantum entanglement – making the brain and genes products of binary-digit activity or artificial intelligence (life is not merely dependent on biology’s “lock and key” mechanisms but also possesses AI). -/- The earliest documented representative of the genus Homo is Homo habilis, which evolved around 2.8 million years ago. Scientists used to believe there was a straight line from H. habilis to us, Homo sapiens. This article will use the “advanced” waves loved by Physics Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, view the history of science through the lens of Conic Sections applied to Relativity’s curved space-time, and incorporate the necessity of so-called imaginary time * – popularized by Prof. Stephen Hawking. While the evolutionary proposals are more in agreement with this early straight line than with modern theories, Albert Einstein’s General Relativity is used to transform the straight line into a curved line, ultimately concluding that Homo habilis (H. habilis) originated only (and unbelievably, as far as today’s science and technology is concerned) ~250,000 years ago. Other branches and dead ends of Homo – e.g. Neanderthals – are the result of mutations and adaptations, with the resultant modifications to anatomy and physiology. The surprisingly young age of H. habilis allows nearly 200,000 years for habilis, or one of its descendants, to reach Australia … if this country’s indigenous Aboriginal population did, as claimed, reach this “island continent” 60,000 years ago. -/- * The ultraviolet catastrophe, also called the Rayleigh–Jeans catastrophe, is a failure of classical physics to predict observed phenomena: it can be shown that a blackbody - a hypothetical perfect absorber and radiator of energy - would release an infinite amount of energy, contradicting the principles of conservation of energy and indicating that a new model for the behaviour of blackbodies was needed. At the start of the 20th century, physicist Max Planck derived the correct solution by making some strange (for the time) assumptions. In particular, Planck assumed that electromagnetic radiation can only be emitted or absorbed in discrete packets, called quanta. Albert Einstein postulated that Planck's quanta were real physical particles (what we now call photons), not just a mathematical fiction. From there, Einstein developed his explanation of the photoelectric effect (when quanta or photons of light shine on certain metals, electrons are released and can form an electric current). So it appears entirely possible that another supposed mathematical trickery (imaginary time and the y-axis of Wick rotation) will find practical application in the future. -/- The article includes mathematical references to cosmology (spoiler alert – you’ll read about things like Vector-Tensor-Scalar Geometry, topology, the “eternal present”, Einstein’s Unified Field, the inverse-square law, and there being no Big Bang and no multiverse - but there will also be no equations). -/- The other subheadings in this essay are – -/- NONLINEAR TIME AND ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING (about a 2009 electrical engineering experiment at America’s Yale University, and cosmic wormholes) -/- BITS AND TOPOLOGY (base-2 maths aka Binary digiTS, Mobius strips, and figure-8 Klein bottles) -/- WICK ROTATION, CAUSALITY, AND UNITING TIME (do past, present and future co-exist in an “eternal present”?) -/- DIGITAL BRAIN, DIGITAL UNIVERSE (if the brain and the universe are ultimately composed of binary digits, we'll someday be able to do the same things with the brain and universe that we now do with computers) -/- PROPOSAL: HUMAN AND ANIMAL INSTINCTS ARE THE RESULT OF THE UNIVERSE BEING UNIFIED BY BINARY DIGITS (AND TOPOLOGY) (If everything in the universe is ultimately composed of electronic BITS, then the universe must possess Artificial Intelligence - some prefer the term Cosmic Consciousness) -/- INFORMATION THEORY CONQUERS A RED GIANT (preserving Earth by keeping the Sun near today’s level of activity forever). (shrink)

For many employees, ‘work’ is no longer something performed while sitting at a computer in an office. Employees in a growing number of industries are expected to carry mobile devices and be available for work-related interactions even when beyond the workplace and outside of normal business hours. In this article it is argued that a future step will increasingly be to move work-related information and communication technology (ICT) inside the human body through the use of neuroprosthetics, to create employees who (...) are always ‘online’ and connected to their workplace’s digital ecosystems. At present, neural implants are used primarily to restore abilities lost through injury or illness, however their use for augmentative purposes is expected to grow, resulting in populations of human beings who possess technologically altered capacities for perception, memory, imagination, and the manipulation of physical environments and virtual cyberspace. Such workers may exchange thoughts and share knowledge within posthuman cybernetic networks that are inaccessible to unaugmented human beings. Scholars note that despite their potential benefits, such neuroprosthetic devices may create numerous problems for their users, including a sense of alienation, the threat of computer viruses and hacking, financial burdens, and legal questions surrounding ownership of intellectual property produced while using such implants. Moreover, different populations of human beings may eventually come to occupy irreconcilable digital ecosystems as some persons embrace neuroprosthetic technology, others feel coerced into augmenting their brains to compete within the economy, others might reject such technology, and still others will simply be unable to afford it. In this text we propose a model for analyzing how particular neuroprosthetic devices will either facilitate human beings’ participation in new forms of socioeconomic interaction and digital workplace ecosystems – or undermine their mental and physical health, privacy, autonomy, and authenticity. We then show how such a model can be used to create device ontologies and typologies that help us classify and understand different kinds of advanced neuroprosthetic devices according to the impact that they will have on individual human beings. (shrink)

Applications of artificial intelligence (AI) for cybersecurity tasks are attracting greater attention from the private and the public sectors. Estimates indicate that the market for AI in cybersecurity will grow from US$1 billion in 2016 to a US$34.8 billion net worth by 2025. The latest national cybersecurity and defence strategies of several governments explicitly mention AI capabilities. At the same time, initiatives to define new standards and certification procedures to elicit users’ trust in AI are emerging on a global (...) scale. However, trust in AI (both machine learning and neural networks) to deliver cybersecurity tasks is a double edged sword: it can improve substantially cybersecurity practices, but can also facilitate new forms of attacks to the AI applications themselves, which may pose severe security threats. We argue that trust in AI for cybersecurity is unwarranted and that, to reduce security risks, some form of control to ensure the deployment of ‘reliable AI’ for cybersecurity is necessary. To this end, we offer three recommendations focusing on the design, development and deployment of AI for cybersecurity. (shrink)

The grammatical forms and material of the book of Revelation suggest a complex interplay of Old Testament and 1st century literature and language. As well, the book does not lack its own peculiarity and character that is unparalleled in the literate world. Various analytical tools including historical-comparative methodologies have been employed to reconstruct the linguistic paradigm of the book. Artificial intelligence and its derivatives provide alternate methods of probing this paradigm.

Today, artificial intelligence, especially machine learning, is structurally dependent on human participation. Technologies such as Deep Learning (DL) leverage networked media infrastructures and human-machine interaction designs to harness users to provide training and verification data. The emergence of DL is therefore based on a fundamental socio-technological transformation of the relationship between humans and machines. Rather than simulating human intelligence, DL-based AIs capture human cognitive abilities, so they are hybrid human-machine apparatuses. From a perspective of media philosophy and social-theoretical critique, (...) I differentiate five types of “media technologies of capture” in AI apparatuses and analyze them as forms of power relations between humans and machines. Finally, I argue that the current hype about AI implies a relational and distributed understanding of (human/artificial) intelligence, which I categorize under the term “cybernetic AI”. This form of AI manifests in socio-technological apparatuses that involve new modes of subjectivation, social control and discrimination of users. (shrink)

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has produced prophets and prophecies announcing that the age of artificial consciousness is near. Not only does the mere idea that any machine could ever possess the full potential of human consciousness suggest that AI could replace the role of God in the future, it also puts into question the fundamental human right to freedom and dignity. This position paper takes the stand that, in the light of all we currently know about (...) brain evolution and the never-stopping formation of adaptive neural circuitry for learning, memory, decision making and, ultimately, fully conscious reasoning and creativity in the human species, the idea of an artificial consciousness appears misconceived. The paper highlights some of the major reasons why. While awareness to external stimuli for processes such as perception, recognition, and operational problem solving is under the direct control of functionally specific brain networks associated with sensory and cognitive functions across animal species, consciousness is a unique property of the human mind. (shrink)

The article considers the problem of images and the role they play in our reflection turning to evidence provided by two seemingly very distant theories of mind together with two sorts of corresponding visions: dreams as analyzed by Freud who claimed that they are pictures of our thoughts, and their mechanical counterparts produced by neural networks designed for object recognition and classification. Freud’s theory of dreams has largely been ignored by philosophers interested in cognition, most of whom focused solely (...) on the linguistic incarnation of thoughts, but even though commonly neglected by respectable theories of thinking, dream images may prove to be the key to the black box of thought. As argued in this article, when seen from the right perspective and approached with the right set of questions, oneiric visions yield groundbreaking insights into the mechanism of how concepts and judgments are formed. Support for this conclusion comes from a tradition seemingly remote, if not opposed to psychoanalysis: the mechanical model of the mind conceived by information sciences and embodied in the form of artificial neural nets which mirror the activity of human visual cortex producing visions strikingly similar to those created by the sleeping mind. These purely mechanical, artificial ‘dreams’ constitute byproducts of algorithms designed for object recognition and classification, which, as I shall argue, reveals the true purpose of our own oneiric visual formations. Just like their mechanical counterparts produced by neural networks, condensations and displacements encountered in dreams are in fact visual universals. (shrink)

In this work, a general framework for the analysis of governance of artificial intelligence is presented. A dashboard developed for this analysis comes from the perspective of political theory. This dashboard allows eventual comparisons between democratic and non democratic regimes, useful for countries in the global south and western countries. The dashboard allows us to assess the key features that determine the governance model for artificial intelligence at the national level, for local governments and for other participant actors. (...) The dashboard allows us to appraise aims of AI strategy and aims left aside in alternative strategies. The work shows the theoretical framework could be of use to advance case studies globally, and comparative endeavors. Applying the theoretical dashboard, the case study on China is undertaken. These are the main points the study tackles in the final discussion, conclusion and further recommendations: 1) the complex reality of AI command and control 2) uncertainties about future society and the polity against AI development and 3) particular cultural values enshrined in countries' AI development. (shrink)

The principle of self-organization has acquired a fundamental significance in the newly emerging field of computational philosophy. Self-organizing systems have been described in various domains in science and philosophy including physics, neuroscience, biology and medicine, ecology, and sociology. While system architecture and their general purpose may depend on domain-specific concepts and definitions, there are (at least) seven key properties of self-organization clearly identified in brain systems: 1) modular connectivity, 2) unsupervised learning, 3) adaptive ability, 4) functional resiliency, 5) functional plasticity, (...) 6) from-local-to-global functional organization, and 7) dynamic system growth. These are defined here in the light of insight from neurobiology, cognitive neuroscience and Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART), and physics to show that self-organization achieves stability and functional plasticity while minimizing structural system complexity. A specific example informed by empirical research is discussed to illustrate how modularity, adaptive learning, and dynamic network growth enable stable yet plastic somatosensory representation for human grip force control. Implications for the design of “strong” artificial intelligence in robotics are brought forward. (shrink)

This selective review explores biologically inspired learning as a model for intelligent robot control and sensing technology on the basis of specific examples. Hebbian synaptic learning is discussed as a functionally relevant model for machine learning and intelligence, as explained on the basis of examples from the highly plastic biological neural networks of invertebrates and vertebrates. Its potential for adaptive learning and control without supervision, the generation of functional complexity, and control architectures based on self-organization is brought forward. Learning (...) without prior knowledge based on excitatory and inhibitory neural mechanisms accounts for the process through which survival-relevant or task-relevant representations are either reinforced or suppressed. The basic mechanisms of unsupervised biological learning drive synaptic plasticity and adaptation for behavioral success in living brains with different levels of complexity. The insights collected here point toward the Hebbian model as a choice solution for “intelligent” robotics and sensor systems. Keywords: Hebbian learning; synaptic plasticity; neural networks; self-organization; brain; reinforcement; sensory processing; robot control . (shrink)

The book’s core argument is that an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim: Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer. In supporting their claim, the authors, Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, (...) marshal evidence from mathematics, physics, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and biology, setting up their book around three central questions: What are the essential marks of human intelligence? What is it that researchers try to do when they attempt to achieve "artificial intelligence" (AI)? And why, after more than 50 years, are our most common interactions with AI, for example with our bank’s computers, still so unsatisfactory? Landgrebe and Smith show how a widespread fear about AI’s potential to bring about radical changes in the nature of human beings and in the human social order is founded on an error. There is still, as they demonstrate in a final chapter, a great deal that AI can achieve which will benefit humanity. But these benefits will be achieved without the aid of systems that are more powerful than humans, which are as impossible as AI systems that are intrinsically "evil" or able to "will" a takeover of human society. (shrink)

A mixed bag dominated by H & D's reductionist nonsense. This is a follow-up to Hofstadter´s famous (or infamous as I would now say, considering its unrelenting nonsense) Godel, Escher, Bach (1980). Like its predecessor, it is concerned largely with the foundations of artificial intelligence, but it is composed mostly of stories, essays and extracts from a wide range of people, with a few essays by DH and DD and comments to all of the contributions by one or the (...) other of them. For my views on the attempts of D and H to understand behavior see my review of Hofstadter's ‘I am a Strange Loop’ and other writings. -/- Much of it is very reductionistic in tone (i.e., " explains " everything in terms of physics/math and denies " reality " of psychology) but as Hofstadter notes, the quantum field equations of a water molecule are too complex to solve (and so is a vacuum)and nobody has a clue about how to explain the way properties emerge (e.g., water properties from H2 and 02) as you go up the scale from the vacuum to the brain, so reductionism, like holism, requires a great deal of faith and in fact is incoherent as one cannot even frame it's arguments without presupposing the coherence of higher order thought. Additional problems for reductionism are the uncertainty principle, chaos (e.g., no way to predict how a pile of sand will fall), the logically necessary incompleteness of math (and all thought) and the impossibility of matching higher order behaviors (e.g., language) with lower order phenomena (e.g., biochemistry), i.e., the combinatorial explosion or underdetermination. In sum, though there are many interesting comments, like nearly all writing on behavior, this work lacks any coherent account of the logical structure of rationality, which I try to give in my writings. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019) and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019) . (shrink)

Symmetry in biological and physical systems is a product of self-organization driven by evolutionary processes, or mechanical systems under constraints. Symmetry-based feature extraction or representation by neural networks may unravel the most informative contents in large image databases. Despite significant achievements of artificial intelligence in recognition and classification of regular patterns, the problem of uncertainty remains a major challenge in ambiguous data. In this study, we present an artificial neural network that detects symmetry uncertainty states in (...) human observers. To this end, we exploit a neural network metric in the output of a biologically inspired Self- Organizing Map Quantization Error (SOM-QE). Shape pairs with perfect geometry mirror symmetry but a non-homogenous appearance, caused by local variations in hue, saturation, or lightness within and/or across the shapes in a given pair produce, as shown here, a longer choice response time (RT) for “yes” responses relative to symmetry. These data are consistently mirrored by the variations in the SOM-QE from unsupervised neural network analysis of the same stimulus images. The neural network metric is thus capable of detecting and scaling human symmetry uncertainty in response to patterns. Such capacity is tightly linked to the metric’s proven selectivity to local contrast and color variations in large and highly complex image data. (shrink)

How much does stimulus input shape perception? The common-sense view is that our perceptions are representations of objects and their features and that the stimulus structures the perceptual object. The problem for this view concerns perceptual biases as responsible for distortions and the subjectivity of perceptual experience. These biases are increasingly studied as constitutive factors of brain processes in recent neuroscience. In neural network models the brain is said to cope with the plethora of sensory information by predicting stimulus (...) regularities on the basis of previous experiences. Drawing on this development, this chapter analyses perceptions as processes. Looking at olfaction as a model system, it argues for the need to abandon a stimulus-centred perspective, where smells are thought of as stable percepts, computationally linked to external objects such as odorous molecules. Perception here is presented as a measure of changing signal ratios in an environment informed by expectancy effects from top-down processes. (shrink)

Why would we want to develop artificial human-like arithmetical intelligence, when computers already outperform humans in arithmetical calculations? Aside from arithmetic consisting of much more than mere calculations, one suggested reason is that AI research can help us explain the development of human arithmetical cognition. Here I argue that this question needs to be studied already in the context of basic, non-symbolic, numerical cognition. Analyzing recent machine learning research on artificial neural networks, I show how AI studies (...) could potentially shed light on the development of human numerical abilities, from the proto-arithmetical abilities of subitizing and estimating to counting procedures. Although the current results are far from conclusive and much more work is needed, I argue that AI research should be included in the interdisciplinary toolbox when we try to explain the development and character of numerical cognition and arithmetical intelligence. This makes it relevant also for the epistemology of mathematics. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

Diabetes is one of the most common diseases worldwide where a cure is not found for it yet. Annually it cost a lot of money to care for people with diabetes. Thus the most important issue is the prediction to be very accurate and to use a reliable method for that. One of these methods is using artificial intelligence systems and in particular is the use of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). So in this paper, we used (...) class='Hi'>artificial neural networks to predict whether a person is diabetic or not. The criterion was to minimize the error function in neural network training using a neural network model. After training the ANN model, the average error function of the neural network was equal to 0.01 and the accuracy of the prediction of whether a person is diabetics or not was 87.3%. (shrink)

Variable quality essays dominated by reductionist nonsense. This is a followup to Hofstadter´s famous Godel, Escher, Bach (1980). Like its predecessor, it is concerned largely with the foundations of artificial intelligence, but it is composed mostly of stories, essays and extracts from a wide range of people, with a few essays by DH and DD and comments to all of the contributions by one or the other of them. For my views on the attempts of D and H to (...) understand behaviour see my review of D's " I am a Strange Loop. " Much of it is very reductionistic in tone (ie, " explains " everything in terms of physics/math and denies " reality " of psychology) but as Hofstadter notes, the quantum field equations of a water molecule are too complex to solve (and so is a vacuum)and nobody has a clue about how to explain the way properties emerge(eg, water properties from H2 and 02) as you go up the scale from the vacuum to the brain, so reductionism, like holism, requires a great deal of faith and in fact is incoherent as one cannot even frame it's arguments without presupposing the coherence of higher order thought. Additional problems for reductionism are the uncertainty principle, chaos (eg, no way to predict how a pile of sand will fall) and the logically necessary incompleteness of math (and all thought). In sum, though there are many interesting comments, like nearly all writing on behavior this work lacks any coherent account of the logical structure of rationality which I give in my more recent writings. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019). (shrink)

Buddhist philosophy asserts that human suffering is caused by ignorance regarding the true nature of reality. According to this, perceptions and thoughts are largely fabrications of our own minds, based on conditioned tendencies which often involve problematic fears, aversions, compulsions, etc. In Buddhist psychology, these tendencies reside in a portion of mind known as Store consciousness. Here, I suggest a correspondence between this Buddhist Store consciousness and the neuroscientific idea of stored synaptic weights. These weights are strong synaptic connections built (...) in through experience. Buddhist philosophy claims that humans can find relief from suffering through a process in which the Store consciousness is transformed. Here, I argue that this Buddhist 'transformation at the base' corresponds to a loosening of the learned synaptic connections. I will argue that Buddhist meditation practices create conditions in the brain which are optimal for diminishing the strength of our conditioned perceptual and behavioural tendencies. (shrink)

Defining Artificial Intelligence and Artificial General Intelligence remain controversial and disputed. They stem from a longer-standing controversy of what is the definition of consciousness, which if solved could possibly offer a solution to defining AI and AGI. Central to these problems is the paradox that appraising AI and Consciousness requires epistemological objectivity of domains that are ontologically subjective. I propose that applying the philosophy of art, which also aims to define art through a lens of epistemological objectivity where (...) the domains are ontologically subjective, can further elucidate this unsolved question. In this sense, Art and AI and ultimately consciousness are multifaceted domains where conventional complexity theory and current philosophical approaches may be augmented by aesthetic principles ranging from classical Aristotelian essentialism to Wittgensteinian anti-essentialism. This approach of AI as art may offer novel solutions to characterising and elucidating the ciphers of consciousness and AI. (shrink)

While practical efforts in the field of artificial intelligence grow exponentially, the truly scientific and mathematically exact understanding of the underlying phenomena of intelligence and consciousness is still missing in the conventional science framework. The inevitably dominating empirical, trial-and-error approach has vanishing efficiency for those extremely complicated phenomena, ending up in fundamentally limited imitations of intelligent behaviour. We provide the first-principle analysis of unreduced many-body interaction process in the brain revealing its qualitatively new features, which give rise to rigorously (...) defined chaotic, noncomputable, intelligent and conscious behaviour. Based on the obtained universal concepts of unreduced dynamic complexity, intelligence and consciousness, we derive the universal laws of intelligence applicable to any kind of intelligent system interacting with the environment. We finally show why and how these fundamentally substantiated and therefore practically efficient laws of intelligent system dynamics are indispensable for correct AI design and training, which is urgently needed in this time of critical global change towards the truly sustainable development. (shrink)

In this paper an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model, for predicting the category of a tumor was developed and tested. Taking patients’ tests, a number of information gained that influence the classification of the tumor. Such information as age, sex, histologic-type, degree-of-diffe, status of bone, bone-marrow, lung, pleura, peritoneum, liver, brain, skin, neck, supraclavicular, axillar, mediastinum, and abdominal. They were used as input variables for the ANN model. A model based on the Multilayer Perceptron Topology was established and (...) trained using data set which its title is “primary tumor” and was obtained from the University Medical Centre, Institute of Oncology, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia Test data evaluation shows that the ANN model is able to correctly predict the tumor category with 76.67 % accuracy. (shrink)

Guided by key insights of the four great philosophers mentioned in the title, here, in review of and expanding on our earlier work (Burchard, 2005, 2011), we present an exposition of the role played by language, & in the broader sense, λογοζ, the Logos, in how the CNS, the brain, is running the human being. Evolution by neural Darwinism has been forcing the linguistic nature of mind, enabling it to overcome & exploit the cognitive gap between an animal and (...) its world by recognizing environmental structures. Our work was greatly influenced by Heidegger’s lecture notes on metaphysics (Heidegger, 1935). We found agreement with recent progress in neuroscience, but also mathematical foundations of language theory, equating Logos with the mathematical concept of structure. The mystery of perception across the gap is analyzed as radiation and molecules impinging on sensory neurons that carry linguistic information about gross environmental structures, and only remotely about the physical reality of elementary particles. The most important logical brain function is Ego or Self, guiding the workings of the brain as a logos machine. Ego or Self operates from neurons in frontopolar cortex with global receptive fields. The logos machine can function only by availing itself of global context, its internally stored noumenal cosmos NK, and the categorical-conceptual apparatus CCA, updated continually through the neural default mode network (Raichle, 2005). In the Transcendental Deduction, Immanuel Kant discovered that Ego or Self is responsible for conscious control in perception relying on concepts & categories for a fitting percept to be incorporated intoNK. The entire CNS runs as a “movie-in-the-brain” (Parvizi & Damasio, 2001), at peak speed processing simultaneously in a series of cortical centers a stack of up to twelve frames in gamma rhythm of 25 ms intervals. We equate global context, or NK, with our human world, Heidegger’s Dasein being-in-the-world, and are able to demonstrate that the great philosopher in EM parallels neuro-science concerning the human mind. (shrink)

Ita La recensione presenta la prospettiva enattivista difesa da Alva Noë, e ne discute alcuni aspetti specifici. Il pensiero, la coscienza e la cognizione non sono pienamente comprensibili, secondo l’enattivismo di Noë, senza un’adeguata considerazione del ruolo ricoperto dal corpo e dall’ambiente. Sarebbe quindi sbagliato continuare a pensare che il cervello da solo sia responsabile dei processi cognitivi umani: il programma che ricerca i correlati neurali della coscienza sarebbe quindi destinato al fallimento dal principio, perché tralascia in partenza corpo e (...) ambiente; i programmi di ricerca nel campo dell’intelligenza artificiale sarebbero ugualmente compromessi, non solo con una concezione computazionalista della cognizione, ma anche con la vecchia idea che un cervello artificiale sia sufficiente alla cognizione quanto un cervello naturale. Di seguito si prendono in esame due prospettive sperimentali su cui Noë fa grande affidamento: gli studi sulla plasticità neurale dei furetti svolti da Mriganka Sur e altri, e la realizzazione di un sistema di sostituzione visuo-tattile da parte di Paul Bach-Y-Rita. Per Noë si tratta di elementi cruciali in supporto alla propria prospettiva: in realtà, come emerge dalla breve analisi, l’attribuire loro un significato così chiaro e univoco pro-enattivismo è qualcosa di molto meno scontato. Infine, segue un breve bilancio del libro di Noë, dove gli elementi d’interesse del volume sono presentati insieme all’individuazione di alcuni punti deboli, che il testo condivide con la gran parte degli studi che in vario modo fanno leva sull’intuizione legata all’embodiement: da un lato una difficoltà strutturale riguarda la possibilità di identificare con chiarezza gli elementi costitutivi del mentale; dall’altro lato, il riferimento a forme di esternalismo radicale sembra ugualmente comportare diversi problemi. -/- Abstract Eng The review presents Alva Noë’s enactivist view, and aims at discussing some of its ideas. Thought, consciousness, and cognition are not understandable, Noë claims, without taking into proper consideration the role played by the body and the environment. It would be wrong indeed to go on thinking that our brain alone is responsible for human cognitive processes: the program searching for the neural correlates of consciousness is hopeless in principle, because it neglects from the beginning the body and the environment; research programs in artificial intelligence are as well compromised, not only with a computationalist view of cognition, but also with the old idea that an artificial brain will suffice for cognition just like a natural one. Thereafter, two experimental perspectives, that Noë uses to support his view, are examined: Mriganka Sur’s studies on neural plasticity of ferrets, and Paul Bach-Y-Rita’s tactile-visual substitution system. Noë argues that these results are crucial in supporting his view, but, as the discussion highlights, their pro-enactivism meaning is not so clear and unambiguous. Finally, a balance of the book follows, where the many elements of interest are presented together with the acknowledgment of some weak points, that the book shares with the majority of the proposals that deal with the embodiment’s insight: on the one hand, a structural difficulty concerns the possibility to identify clearly the constitutive elements of the mental; on the other hand, the reference to radical versions of externalism seems to entail many difficulties as well. (shrink)

Abstract: This research focuses on utilizing Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to predict Audit Risk accurately, a critical aspect of ensuring financial system integrity and preventing fraud. Our dataset, gathered from Kaggle, comprises 18 diverse features, including financial and historical parameters, offering a comprehensive view of audit-related factors. These features encompass 'Sector_score,' 'PARA_A,' 'SCORE_A,' 'PARA_B,' 'SCORE_B,' 'TOTAL,' 'numbers,' 'marks,' 'Money_Value,' 'District,' 'Loss,' 'Loss_SCORE,' 'History,' 'History_score,' 'score,' and 'Risk,' with a total of 774 samples. Our proposed neural network architecture, (...) consisting of three layers (1 input, 1 hidden, and 1 output), forms the core of this study. While it may seem simple, the power of ANNs lies not in complexity but in their ability to uncover intricate data patterns. The model underwent rigorous training and validation, resulting in remarkable outcomes—an accuracy of 100% and an average error rate of 0.000015. In addition to performance metrics, our research investigates feature importance, revealing the key contributors to Audit Risk prediction. Notably, 'Sector_score,' 'PARA_A,' 'SCORE_A,' 'PARA_B,' 'SCORE_B,' 'TOTAL,' 'numbers,' 'marks,' 'Money_Value,' 'District,' 'Loss,' 'Loss_SCORE,' 'History,' and 'History_score' emerged as the most influential factors, shedding light on the elements crucial for precise risk assessment. This study advances Audit Risk prediction models and highlights the potential of ANNs in strengthening financial system integrity and fraud prevention. The insights gained from our findings offer practical guidance for stakeholders in the audit and financial sectors. (shrink)

We introduce the notion of complexity, first at an intuitive level and then in relatively more concrete terms, explaining the various characteristic features of complex systems with examples. There exists a vast literature on complexity, and our exposition is intended to be an elementary introduction, meant for a broad audience. -/- Briefly, a complex system is one whose description involves a hierarchy of levels, where each level is made of a large number of components interacting among themselves. The time evolution (...) of such a system is of a complex nature, depending on the interactions among subsystems in the next level below the one under consideration and, at the same time, conditioned by the level above, where the latter sets the context for the evolution. Generally speaking, the interactions among the constituents of the various levels lead to a dynamics characterized by numerous characteristic scales, each level having its own set of scales. What is more, a level commonly exhibits ‘emergent properties’ that cannot be derived from considerations relating to its component systems taken in isolation or to those in a different contextual setting. In the dynamic evolution of some particular level, there occurs a self-organized emergence of a higher level and the process is repeated at still higher levels. -/- The interaction and self-organization of the components of a complex system follow the principle commonly expressed by saying that the ‘whole is different from the sum of the parts’. In the case of systems whose behavior can be expressed mathematically in terms of differential equations this means that the interactions are nonlinear in nature. -/- While all of the above features are not universally exhibited by complex systems, these are nevertheless indicative of a broad commonness relative to which individual systems can be described and analyzed. There exist measures of complexity which, once again, are not of universal applicability, being more heuristic than exact. The present state of knowledge and understanding of complex systems is itself an emerging one. Still, a large number of results on various systems can be related to their complex character, making complexity an immensely fertile concept in the study of natural, biological, and social phenomena. -/- All this puts a very definite limitation on the complete description of a complex system as a whole since such a system can be precisely described only contextually, relative to some particular level, where emergent properties rule out an exact description of more than one levels within a common framework. -/- We discuss the implications of these observations in the context of our conception of the so-called noumenal reality that has a mind-independent existence and is perceived by us in the form of the phenomenal reality. The latter is derived from the former by means of our perceptions and interpretations, and our efforts at sorting out and making sense of the bewildering complexity of reality takes the form of incessant processes of inference that lead to theories. Strictly speaking, theories apply to models that are constructed as idealized versions of parts of reality, within which inferences and abstractions can be carried out meaningfully, enabling us to construct the theories. -/- There exists a correspondence between the phenomenal and the noumenal realities in terms of events and their correlations, where these are experienced as the complex behavior of systems or entities of various descriptions. The infinite diversity of behavior of systems in the phenomenal world are explained within specified contexts by theories. The latter are constructs generated in our ceaseless attempts at interpreting the world, and the question arises as to whether these are reflections of `laws of nature' residing in the noumenal world. This is a fundamental concern of scientific realism, within the fold of which there exists a trend towards the assumption that theories express truths about the noumenal reality. We examine this assumption (referred to as a ‘point of view’ in the present essay) closely and indicate that an alternative point of view is also consistent within the broad framework of scientific realism. This is the view that theories are domain-specific and contextual, and that these are arrived at by independent processes of inference and abstractions in the various domains of experience. Theories in contiguous domains of experience dovetail and interpenetrate with one another, and bear the responsibility of correctly explaining our observations within these domains. -/- With accumulating experience, theories get revised and the network of our theories of the world acquires a complex structure, exhibiting a complex evolution. There exists a tendency within the fold of scientific realism of interpreting this complex evolution in rather simple terms, where one assumes (this, again, is a point of view) that theories tend more and more closely to truths about Nature and, what is more, progress towards an all-embracing ‘ultimate theory’ -- a foundational one in respect of all our inquiries into nature. We examine this point of view closely and outline the alternative view -- one broadly consistent with scientific realism -- that there is no ‘ultimate’ law of nature, that theories do not correspond to truths inherent in reality, and that successive revisions in theory do not lead monotonically to some ultimate truth. Instead, the theories generated in succession are incommensurate with each other, testifying to the fact that a theory gives us a perspective view of some part of reality, arrived at contextually. Instead of resembling a monotonically converging series successive theories are analogous to asymptotic series. -/- Before we summarize all the above considerations, we briefly address the issue of the complexity of the {\it human mind} -- one as pervasive as the complexity of Nature at large. The complexity of the mind is related to the complexity of the underlying neuronal organization in the brain, which operates within a larger biological context, its activities being modulated by other physiological systems, notably the one involving a host of chemical messengers. The mind, with no materiality of its own, is nevertheless emergent from the activity of interacting neuronal assemblies in the brain. As in the case of reality at large, there can be no ultimate theory of the mind, from which one can explain and predict the entire spectrum of human behavior, which is an infinitely rich and diverse one. (shrink)

We explicate representational content by addressing how representations that ex- plain intelligent behavior might be acquired through processes of Darwinian evo- lution. We present the results of computer simulations of evolved neural network controllers and discuss the similarity of the simulations to real-world examples of neural network control of animal behavior. We argue that focusing on the simplest cases of evolved intelligent behavior, in both simulated and real organisms, reveals that evolved representations must carry information about the creature’s (...) environ- ments and further can do so only if their neural states are appropriately isomor- phic to environmental states. Further, these informational and isomorphism rela- tions are what are tracked by content attributions in folk-psychological and cognitive scientific explanations of these intelligent behaviors. (shrink)

This volume offers very selected papers from the 2014 conference of the “International Association for Computing and Philosophy” (IACAP) - a conference tradition of 28 years. - - - Table of Contents - 0 Vincent C. Müller: - Editorial - 1) Philosophy of computing - 1 Çem Bozsahin: - What is a computational constraint? - 2 Joe Dewhurst: - Computing Mechanisms and Autopoietic Systems - 3 Vincenzo Fano, Pierluigi Graziani, Roberto Macrelli and Gino Tarozzi: - Are Gandy Machines really local? (...) - 4 Doukas Kapantais: - A refutation of the Church-Turing thesis according to some interpretation of what the thesis says - 5 Paul Schweizer: - In What Sense Does the Brain Compute? - 2) Philosophy of computer science & discovery - 6 Mark Addis, Peter Sozou, Peter C R Lane and Fernand Gobet: - Computational Scientific Discovery and Cognitive Science Theories - 7 Nicola Angius and Petros Stefaneas: - Discovering Empirical Theories of Modular Software Systems. An Algebraic Approach. - 8 Selmer Bringsjord, John Licato, Daniel Arista, Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu and Paul Bello: - Introducing the Doxastically Centered Approach to Formalizing Relevance Bonds in Conditionals - 9 Orly Stettiner: - From Silico to Vitro: - Computational Models of Complex Biological Systems Reveal Real-world Emergent Phenomena - 3) Philosophy of cognition & intelligence - 10 Douglas Campbell: - Why We Shouldn’t Reason Classically, and the Implications for Artificial Intelligence - 11 Stefano Franchi: - Cognition as Higher Order Regulation - 12 Marcello Guarini: - Eliminativisms, Languages of Thought, & the Philosophy of Computational Cognitive Modeling - 13 Marcin Miłkowski: - A Mechanistic Account of Computational Explanation in Cognitive Science and Computational Neuroscience - 14 Alex Tillas: - Internal supervision & clustering: - A new lesson from ‘old’ findings? - 4) Computing & society - 15 Vasileios Galanos: - Floridi/Flusser: - Parallel Lives in Hyper/Posthistory - 16 Paul Bello: - Machine Ethics and Modal Psychology - 17 Marty J. Wolf and Nir Fresco: - My Liver Is Broken, Can You Print Me a New One? - 18 Marty J. Wolf, Frances Grodzinsky and Keith W. Miller: - Robots, Ethics and Software – FOSS vs. Proprietary Licenses. (shrink)

Advanced AI systems are rapidly making their way into medical research and practice, and, arguably, it is only a matter of time before they will surpass human practitioners in terms of accuracy, reliability, and knowledge. If this is true, practitioners will have a prima facie epistemic and professional obligation to align their medical verdicts with those of advanced AI systems. However, in light of their complexity, these AI systems will often function as black boxes: the details of their contents, calculations, (...) and procedures cannot be meaningfully understood by human practitioners. When AI systems reach this level of complexity, we can also speak of black-box medicine. In this paper, we want to argue that black-box medicine conflicts with core ideals of patient-centered medicine. In particular, we claim, black-box medicine is not conducive for supporting informed decision-making based on shared information, shared deliberation, and shared mind between practitioner and patient. (shrink)

The paper develops two related thought experiments exploring variations on an ‘animat’ theme. Animats are hybrid devices with both artificial and biological components. Traditionally, ‘components’ have been construed in concrete terms, as physical parts or constituent material structures. Many fascinating issues arise within this context of hybrid physical organization. However, within the context of functional/computational theories of mentality, demarcations based purely on material structure are unduly narrow. It is abstract functional structure which does the key work in characterizing the (...) respective ‘components’ of thinking systems, while the ‘stuff’ of material implementation is of secondary importance. Thus the paper extends the received animat paradigm, and investigates some intriguing consequences of expanding the conception of bio-machine hybrids to include abstract functional and semantic structure. In particular, the thought experiments consider cases of mind-machine merger where there is no physical Brain-Machine Interface: indeed, the material human body and brain have been removed from the picture altogether. The first experiment illustrates some intrinsic theoretical difficulties in attempting to replicate the human mind in an alternative material medium, while the second reveals some deep conceptual problems in attempting to create a form of truly Artificial General Intelligence. (shrink)

Background: As part of a consistent effort to examine and provide integrative medical approaches to the therapeutic offering for psychophysical health, this study investigates the utilization of Olfactory Virtual Reality (OVR) in an inpatient psychiatry unit, more specifically in the Shepardson 3 Inpatient Psychiatry Unit at the University of Vermont Medical Center, in Burlington, VT, USA. Objectives: The purpose of this protocol is to explore the therapeutic value of olfactory virtual reality (OVR) in the above described population, and to collect (...) statistically significant data to determine the feasibility of potential future OVR studies. Method: Direct subject observation and monitoring in the context of Olfactory Virtual Reality (OVR) sessions and Qualitative data collection via the administration of subject surveys, subdivided in: a) Pre-OVR experience, b) Immediate post-OVR experience, and c) 1-to-3-hour post-OVR experience questionnaires. Results: The research yielded positive outcomes in all areas investigated, despite challenges related to the utilization of the device itself, issues in individual olfactory threshold, and COVID-19 restrictions and limitations. Conclusion: The outcome of this study indicates that the utilization of olfactory virtual reality technologies is a safe and effective integrative approach to target several aspects of psychological and physical health such as anxiety, stress, and pain, in combination with the psychotherapeutic and pharmacological standards of care in inpatient psychiatry. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines or software that work and reacts like humans, some of the computer activities with artificial intelligence are designed to include speech, recognition, learning, planning and problem solving. Deep learning is a collection of algorithms used in machine learning, it is part of a broad family of methods used for machine learning that are based on learning representations of data. Deep learning is used (...) as a technique to produce brain tumor detection and classification models using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) imaging for rapid and easy detection and identification of brain tumor. In this thesis, some ways and mechanisms will be reviewed to use deep learning techniques to produce a model for brain tumor detection. The goal is to find a good and effective way to detect brain tumor based on MRI to help the brain doctor in making decisions easily, accurately and rapidly. A recent report by the World Health Organization in February 2018 showed that the death rate from brain cancer or central nervous system (CNS) is the highest in the Asian continent. It is important to detect cancer early so that many of these lives can be saved. The model has been designed and implemented, including a dataset which consist of 10,000 images for brain tumor detection through the use of Deep learning algorithms based on neural networks. For testing, we have used our model, Inception, VGG16, MobileNet and ResNet models. The f-score accuracy we got for each model was as follows: Our model was 98.28, VGG16 was 99.86%, ResNet50 was 98.14%, MobileNet was 88,98%, and InceptionV3 was 99.88%. (shrink)

This essay presents a point of view for looking at `free will', with the purpose of interpreting where exactly the freedom lies. For, freedom is what we mean by it. It compares the exercise of free will with the making of inferences, which usually is predominantly inductive in nature. The making of inference and the exercise of free will, both draw upon psychological resources that define our ‘selves’. I examine the constitution of the self of an individual, especially the involvement (...) of personal beliefs, personal memories, affects, emotions, and the hugely important psychological value-system, all of which distinguish the self of one individual from that of another. The foundational position that adopted in this essay is that all psychological processes are correlated with corresponding ones involving large scale neural aggregates in the brain, communicating with one another through wavelike modes of excitation and de-excitation. Of central relevance is the value-network around which the affect system is organized, the latter, in turn, being the axis around which is assembled the self, with all its emotional correlates. The self is a complex system. I include a brief outline of what complexity consists of. In reality all systems are complex, for complexity is ubiquitous, and certain parts of nature appear to us to be ‘simple’ only in certain specific contexts. It is in this background that the issue of determinism is viewed in this essay. Instead of looking at determinism as a grand principle entrenched in nature independent of our interpretation of it, I look at our ability to explain and to predict events and phenomena around us, which is made possible by the existence of causal links running in a complex course that set up correlations between diverse parts of nature, in this way putting the stamp of necessity on these events. However, the complexity of systems limits our ability to explain and to predict to within certain horizons defined by contexts. Our ability to explain and predict in matters relating to acts of free will is similarly limited by the operations of the self that remain hidden from our own awareness. The aspects of necessity and determinism appear to us in the form of reason and rationality that explain and predict only within a limited horizon, while the rest depends on the complex operation of self-linked psychological resources, where the latter appear as contingent in the context of the exercise of free will. The hallmark of complex systems is the existence of amplifying factors that operate as destabilizing ones, along with inhibiting or stabilizing factors as well that generally limit the destabilizing influences to local occurrences, while preserving the global integrity of a system. This complex interplay of destabilizing and stabilizing influences lead to the possibility of an enormous number of distinct modes of behavior that appear as emergent phenomena in complex systems. Looking at the particular case of the self of an individual that guide her actions and thoughts, it is the operation of our emotions, built around the psychological value-system, that provide for the amplifying and inhibiting factors mentioned above. The operation of these self-linked factors stamps our actions and thoughts as contingent ones that do not fit with our concepts of reason and rationality. And this is what provides the basis of our idea of free will. Free will is not ‘free’ in virtue of exemption from causal links running through all our self-based processes - ones that remain hidden from our awareness, but is free of what is perceived to be ‘reason and rationality’ based on knowledge and the common pool of beliefs and principles associated with a shared world-view. When we speak of the choice involved in an act of exercise of free will what we actually refer to is the commonly observed fact that various different individuals of a similar disposition respond differently when placed under similar circumstances. In other words, free will is ‘free’ precisely because it is not subject to constraints of a commonly accepted and shared set of principles, beliefs, and values. While it is possible that, in an exercise of free will, the self-linked psychological resources are brought into action when a number of alternatives are presented to the self by the operation of the ingredients of a commonly shared world-view, it seems likely that, that set of alternatives is not of primary relevance in the final response that the mind produces, since the latter is primarily a product of the operation of the self-based psychological resources. What is of greater relevance here is the operation of emotion-driven processes, guided by the psychological value-system based on the activity of the so-called reward-punishment network in the brain. These processes lead the individual to a response that appears to be free from the shackles of determinism precisely because their mechanisms, which are hidden from us, do not conform to commonly accepted and shared rules and principles. In contrast, inductive inference is a process that is based on the ‘cognitive face’ of self, where the self-based psychological resources play a supportive role to the commonly shared world-view of an individual. There is never any freedom from the all-pervading causal links representing correlations among all objects, entities, and events in nature. In the midst of all this, the closest thing to freedom that we can have in our life comes with self-examination and self-improvement. The possibility of self-examination appears in the form of specific conjunctions between our complex self-processes and the ceaseless changes of scenario in our external world. This actually makes the emergent phenomenon of self-examination a matter of chance, but one that keeps on appearing again and again in our life. Once realized, self examination creates possibilities that would not be there in the absence of it, and these possibilities include the enhancement of further self-enrichment and further diversity in the exercise of our free will. (shrink)

The essay brings a summation of human efforts seeking to understand our existence. Plato and Kant & cognitive science complete reduction of philosophy to a neural mechanism, evolved along elementary Darwinian principles. Plato in his famous Cave Allegory explains that between reality and our experience of it there exists a great chasm, a metaphysical gap, fully confirmed through particle-wave duality of quantum physics. Kant found that we have two kinds of perception, two senses: By the spatial outer sense we (...) perceive phenomena, objects in space. Our temporal inner sense lets us perceive our inner state, noumena . Kant's two senses are fully confirmed through bilateral brain duality of cognitive science. The bilateral brain serves inner, temporal sense, logic & noumena in the left hemisphere. The right brain half is for the outer, spatial sense, geometry & phenomena. We form a whole system, a bilateral interior cosmos, a kind of world model, expressing what may lie beyond the metaphysical gap. In the right brain we build a phenomenal cosmos, to resemble the outer environment. In the brain's left hemisphere a noumenal cosmos, a model of our private world including Saint Teresa of Avila's castillo interior. The cosmos is regularly updated with novel sense data integrated into our memory banks. This was recognized early by Helmholtz (1860s). Our lives, health & well-being depend on us keeping our interior cosmos in good order. This used to be seen as saving one's precious soul from perdition. While we endeavour to keep our phenomenal cosmos neat & orderly by protecting the environment from harm, our noumenal cosmos to be livable requires us to engage in ethical conduct. This bilateral cosmos is responsible for our common sense judgment power, that we depend on for being able to lead a good & benign life. The 200 million neurons of BA10 in the prefrontal lobe have global access to the interior cosmos, & apply massive feedback to identify environmental conditions rapidly. The global access also gives conscious presence of the individual to itself, all that is present in the interior cosmos, for total freedom of action. In the left brain private ego, we are guarded by faith in divine mercy, & guided to choose the best course of action, able to survive under the most adverse conditions. For this, we receive directions from the Holy Ghost in Saint Teresa's castillo interior. (shrink)

This book presents an analysis of the correlation between the mind and the body, a complex topic of study and discussion by scientists and philosophers. Drawing largely on neuroscience and philosophy, the author utilizes the scientific method and incorporates lessons learned from a vast array of sources. Based on the most recent cutting-edge scientific discoveries on the Mind-Body problem, Tomasi presents a full examination of multiple fields related to neuroscience. The volume offers a scientist-based and student-friendly journey into medicine, psychology, (...) artificial intelligence, embodied cognition, and social, ecological and anthropological models of perception, to discover our truest self. -/- Introduction The Exact Science of the Hard Matter Between Psyche and Mind Medicine on, of and off the Brain Brain, Culture, Society Perception and Cognition Conclusion: Philosophy as Basic Approach Toward Neuroscience . (shrink)

The tendency to idealise artificial intelligence as independent from human manipulators, combined with the growing ontological entanglement of humans and digital machines, has created an “anthrobotic” horizon, in which data analytics, statistics and probabilities throw our agential power into question. How can we avoid the consequences of a reified definition of intelligence as universal operation becoming imposed upon our destinies? It is here argued that the fantasised autonomy of automated intelligence presents a contradistinctive opportunity for philosophical consciousness to understand (...) itself anew as holistic and co-creative, beyond the recent “analytic” moment of the history of philosophy. Here we introduce the concept of “crealectic intelligence”, a meta-analytic and meta-dialectic aspect of consciousness. Intelligent behaviour may consist in distinguishing discrete familiar parts or reproducible functions in the midst of noise via an analytic process of segmentation; intelligence may also manifest itself in the constitution of larger wholes and dynamic unities through a dialectic process of association or assemblage. But, by contrast, crealectic intelligence co-creates realities in the image of an ideal or truth, taking into account the desiring agent imbued with a sense of possibility, in a relationship not only with the Real but also with the creative sublime or “Creal”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The individual-community relationship has always been one of the most fundamental topics of social sciences. In sociology, this is known as the micro-macro relationship while in economics it refers to the processes, through which, individual actions lead to macroeconomic phenomena. Based on philosophical discourse and systems theory, many sociologists even use the term "emergence" in their understanding of micro-macro relationship, which refers to collective phenomena that are created by the cooperation of individuals, but cannot be reduced to individual actions. (...) "Emergence" theories attempt to explain the nature of society as a complex system by examining how individuals and their relationships lead to the creation of integrated and macro-social phenomena such as markets, educational systems, cultural beliefs, and shared social practices. As a prelude to activity, every researcher has to answer the question from the methodological point of view, how is it possible to study the behavior of social groups and how can we gain knowledge about the laws related to social groups? Anyone who deals with humanities and social sciences or any reality and phenomenon that affects human beings, inevitably deals with the reality that is emerging. In fact, emergence occurs when one level of reality emerges radically from another level. Examples of emergent levels of reality include how the mind emerges from the body; or the way society emerges from human beings. Therefore, when there is an emerging factor, different scientific disciplines should be used, because it is inevitable to talk about social affairs, psychology and neurobiology, as well as physical and even chemical. -/- INTRODUCTION Since its beginning in the 19th century, sociology has faced the fundamental question of what a social phenomena stands for? At a glance, sociologists deal with the study of social groups, collective behavior, institutions, social structures, social networks, and social dynamics, and ultimately all such phenomena are composed of individuals. Therefore, social phenomena seem to have no independent ontological status, and in this case, sociology is ultimately about reducible individuals. Different approaches about the micro-macro relationship, using the concept of "emergence", argue that although collective phenomena are created by individuals, they cannot be reduced to individual action. The term "emergence" is used to distinguish "emergent results" from " Procedural results". Results are called Procedural that can only be calculated by adding or subtracting the causes that act together. On the contrary, they are emergent outcomes that are qualitatively novel compared to the causes from which they originate. An example of such emergent results is mental characteristics that emerge from neural processes, but are not considered among the characteristics of neural processes of components - which are their origin. Philosophical debates about emergentism and reductionism focus on the mind-brain relationship, but as many philosophers have noted, they can be generalized to apply to any hierarchical set of features. The cognitive revolution reactivated a 19th century controversy between theorists of Identity and dualism. The theorists of Identity believe in reductionist materialism and elimination of metaphysics, according to which the mind is nothing more than the biological, while the dualists believe that the mind and the brain are distinct from each other. Emergence has been considered as a third way between the theories of Identity and dualism. -/- METHODOLOGY Interdisciplinarity Is fundamentally indicated by the dominance of open systems as well as social and emerging systems at different levels. Therefore, as long as we are facing a new emergentism, there will necessarily be different fields and an interdisciplinary method. The commonality of social sciences and cognitive sciences on the issue of emergence provides the possibility of interaction and exchange of concepts between these two for deeper research. Therefore, in this research, apart from the concepts of Subvenience and downward causation, we have used multiple realization and wildly disjunctive, which are used to explain the emerging concept in cognitive sciences, including neurobiology, psychology, and philosophy. For analytical and interdisciplinary approaches, after examining the concepts of subvenience, and wildly disjunctive, Individualistic and collectivist emergentism have been reviewed. And then their adequacy is criticized and evaluated in meeting strong emergence conditions. -/- FINDINGS Philosophers of the mind have been able to define the conditions of irreducibility and downward causation, which are essential for strong emergence, by using the principle of subvenience with the help of multiple realization and wildly disjunctive principles. Therefore, by definition, emergentist individualism suffers from the problem of how to explain downward causality and irreducibility, and emergentist collectivism faces the challenge of reification. The analysis of the challenges facing the two methodological approaches of individualism and collectivism leads us to three unresolved issues about the emerging phenomenon, which are realism, downward causality, and mechanism. Despite the differences in the stances of these two approaches regarding the aforementioned triple problems, individualists and collectivists both agree that some social characteristics are reducible; and some others are irreducible due to their complexity, the determination of which, depends on the case study of the mechanism of emergence of each social characteristic. -/- CONCLUSION An emergence that is consistent with reductionism is called a weak emergence. And strong emergence includes the principle of irreducibility and downward causality. According to strong emergence, the characteristics of social phenomena have downward causal power, which cannot be reduced to the causal forces. The principle of subvenience, together with multiple realization and wildly disjunctive, can provide the conditions of irreducibility and downward causality, which are essential conditions of strong emergence. Based on the philosophical analysis of two methodological approaches, individualist and collectivist, it can be concluded that emergentist individualism suffers from the problem of how to explain downward causality and irreducibility, and reification collectivism faces the challenge of reification. The analysis of the problems faced by these two approaches leads us to three unresolved issues, which are realism, downward causality, and mechanism. individualist emergentists acknowledge the existence of emergent social characteristics, but despite this, they believe that these characteristics are not real but merely analytical constructs that require explanation based on individuals and their mutual actions. But collectivists argue that emergentism yields a categorical ontology and supports social realism. They accept the dependence of social characteristics on individuals, but claim that social entities and structures are ontologically independent. Individualists and collectivists both agree that some social characteristics are reducible; and others are irreducible due to their complexity; and the only way to recognize this is to engage in empirical studies of the mechanisms and temporal processes of "emergence" that create social characteristics. -/- NOVELTY The newness of this compact article is as follows: a) Presenting an interdisciplinary approach using the analysis of philosophy of cognitive sciences, including the philosophy of mind, neurobiology and psychology to formulate the issue of social emergence; b) Criticizing individualist and collectivist methodological approaches to the issue of social emergence and explaining the sufficiency and shortcomings of both in providing weak and strong emerging conditions; c) Explaining and categorizing the challenges facing methodological approaches in explaining the phenomenon of social emergence, in three categories: realism, downward causality, and mechanism. 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