In my Eastern APA talk last year, I argued that a genuinely random physical process should not be counted as a computation (in the interesting sense of the term). Jack Copeland disagreed.So here in Jerusalem, I took the opportunity to ask two “great men” for their opinion. I’m happy to …
Here are some things I found out last night from John McCarthy:When he famously created Lisp (which became the standard programming language in AI), he had gotten the idea of list processing from Allen Newell and Herbert Simon at the Darmouth conference on AI in 1956.When he “stole” the lambda …
I’m in Jerusalem at the workshop on The Origins and Nature of Computation, which started today. Many of the most prominent historians and philosophers of computation are here (e.g., Kripke, Copeland, Sieg, Shagrir, Stewart Shapiro), and so are some of the founding fathers of computer science (e.g., Martin Davis, John …
My trusted assistant, John Gabriel, has created a list of online resources on how to study, write papers, apply to graduate school, publish, and get a job in philosophy. Some students may find it useful. Some of the links are to previous posts on this blog, but there is much …
I just saw this mockery of philosophy refereeing by Chase Wrenn. Funny.
Margaret Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, due July 15, 2006.In my opinion, Boden is one of the best philosophers of AI and cognitive science. (I say it because she is probably less recognized and cited, at least in the U.S., than she …
A short report on a robot designed to experiment with its environment and learn “like a human infant,” based on neural network technology and testing neuroscience models. (Link courtesy of my student, Adam Hartke.)
