Selmer Bringsjord (1995) Computationalism is Doomed, and we can Come to Know it
. Psycoloquy: 6(10) Robot Consciousness (5)
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Psycoloquy 6(10): Computationalism is Doomed, and we can Come to Know it
COMPUTATIONALISM IS DOOMED, AND WE CAN COME TO KNOW IT
Reply to Scholl on Robot-Consciousness
Selmer Bringsjord
Dept. of Philosophy, Psychology & Cognitive Science
Department of Computer Science
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY 12180
selmer@rpi.edu
Abstract
Scholl (1994) claims in his review of What Robots Can &
Can't Be (ROBOTS; 1992, 1994) that my six-prong attack on what I
call the Person Building Project (the engineering side of Strong
AI) begs the question. Scholl does an admirable job of
recapitulating the computationalist party line, but his position is
plagued by a failure of imagination, a fatally flawed method, and,
ironically enough, repeated instances of the fallacy of begging the
question.
Keywords
behaviorism, Chinese Room Argument, cognition,
consciousness, finite automata, free will, functionalism,
introspection, mind, story generation, Turing machines, Turing
Test.
References
- Boolos, G.S. & Jeffrey, R.C. (1980). Computability and Logic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Bringsjord, S. (1992). What Robots Can and Can't Be. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
- Bringsjord, S. (1993) Toward Non-Algorithmic AI, in Ryan, K.T. & Sutcliffe, R.F.E., eds., AI and Cog Sci 92, in the Workshop in Computing Series, Springer-Verlag, pp. 277-288.
- Bringsjord, S. (1994). Precis of: What Robots Can and Can't Be. PSYCOLOQUY 5(59) robot-consciousness.1.bringsjord.
- Bringsjord, S. & Patterson, W. (in press). Review of John Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind. Minds and Machines.
- Bringsjord, S. & Zenzen, M. (forthcoming) In Defense of Uncomputable Cognition. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
- Churchland, P.M. & Churchland, P.S. (1990). Could a Machine Think? Scientific American, 262.1: 32-37.
- Jacquette, D. (1994) Philosophy of Mind. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
- Kugel, P. (1986) Thinking May Be More Than Computing. Cognition, 22: 137-198.
- Nagel, T. (1974). What Is it Like to Be a Bat? Reprinted in Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
- Pollock, J. (1989). How to Build a Person: a Prolegomenon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Rado, T. (1963). On Non-Computable Functions. Bell Systems Technical Journal, 41: 877-884.
- Scholl, B. (1994). Intuitions, Agnosticism, and Conscious Robots: Book review of Bringsjord on Robot-Consciousness. PSYCOLOQUY 5(84) robot-consciousness.4.scholl.
- Weyl, H. (1949). Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (See pp. 38-42.)