Articles
The Philosophy of AI and the AI of Philosophy
Artificial intelligence (AI) has closer scientific connections with philosophy than do other sciences, because AI shares many concepts with philosophy, e.g. action, consciousness, epistemology (what it is sensible to say about the world), and even free will. This article treats the philosophy of AI but also analyzes some concepts common to philosophy and AI from the standpoint of AI.The philosophy of X, where X is a science, involves philosophers analyzing the concepts of X and sometimes commenting on what concepts are or are not likely to be coherent. Artificial intelligence (AI) has closer scientific connections with philosophy than do other sciences, because AI shares many concepts with philosophy, e.g. action, consciousness, epistemology (what it is sensible to say about the world), and even free will. This article treats the philosophy of AI but also analyzes some concepts common to philosophy and AI from the standpoint of AI. The philosophy of X often involves advice to practitioners of X about what they can and cannot do.
We partly reverse the usual course and offer advice to philosophers, especially philosophers of mind. The AI point of view is that philosophical theories are useful to AI only if they don't preclude human-level artificial systems and provide a basis for designing systems with beliefs, do reasoning, and plan. AI research has particularly emphasized formalizing the actions available in a situation and the consequences of taking each of several actions. In order to do this, AI has mainly dealt with simple approximations to phenomena.
A key problem for both AI and philosophy is understanding common sense knowledge and abilities. We treat the notion of the common sense informatic situation, the situation a person or computer program is in when the knowledge available is partial both as to observation and as to theory, and ill-defined concepts must be used. Concepts ill-defined in general may be precise in specialized contexts.
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