Alan Turing and Neural Computation

(Caveat: for the sake of exposition, at times I articulate past views in slightly anachronistic terms; I do my best to capture the gist of what Alan Turing and others meant in terms that contemporary readers should find perspicuous.) The computational theory of cognition says that cognition is largely explained …

CFA: Kinds of Intelligence 3 – Cognitive Science Beyond the Human

The third annual Kinds of Intelligence conference will be held in Cambridge, UK from June 22-25 2020. The conference brings together researchers from philosophy, cognitive science and artificial intelligence to address questions concerning the structure, function and nature of intelligence and cognition, with a particular emphasis on non-human intelligences – …

Reasoning About Deceit: 1. The Computational Perspective

[The following is Part I in a two-part guest post by Will Bridewell and Alistair M. C. Isaac. — JS] We live in an age of post-truth rhetoric, fake news, and misinformation; consequently, questions of how to accurately identify deceptive communication and to appropriately respond to it have become increasingly …

2. Psychological and Computational Models of Sentence Processing

Last time, I argued that there are substantive open questions about whether the theoretical constructs of formal linguistics play any role in the psychological processes underlying language use. Let’s now address those questions. When people talk about “the psychological reality of syntax”, there are (at least) two importantly different types …

4. Conceptual Emergence and Neural Networks

Conceptual emergence occurs when, in order to understand or effectively represent some phenomenon, a different representational apparatus must be introduced at the current working level. Such changes in representation are common in the sciences but it has usually been considered in connection with changes in synchronic representations. Here, I’ll consider …

In Memoriam: Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert L. Dreyfus, for nearly 50 years a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, died this past Saturday.

As many will know, Dreyfus was an early critic of artificial intelligence and an influential interpreter of Martin Heidegger and other phenomenologists. More recently he challenged John McDowell’s conceptualist accounts of perception and action with arguments that drew on his reading of Merleau-Ponty and longstanding interests in the phenomenology of skill. He will be sorely missed.

For more on Bert’s life, his teaching, and what made his approach to philosophy so revolutionary, here is a lengthy obituary by his student Sean Dorrance Kelly.

The Unexplained Intellect: Consequences of Imperfection

The previous post argued that Theoretical Computer Science can show things to be naturalistically inexplicable—(where this is much stronger than showing them to be inexplicable with a Classically Computational Theory)—by showing those things to require more time than the universe allows.  I’ve not yet said anything about which things might …

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