Walter Massing (1995) Metaphysical Windmills in Robotland
. Psycoloquy: 6(16) Robot Consciousness (11)
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Psycoloquy 6(16): Metaphysical Windmills in Robotland
METAPHYSICAL WINDMILLS IN ROBOTLAND
Book Review of Bringsjord on Robot-Consciousness
Walter Massing
Day Clinic of the Langenhagen Psychiatric Clinic
Koenigstrasse 6a
D-30175 Hannover Germany
ndxdmass@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de
Abstract
One of the main difficulties in Bringsjord's book What
Robots Can and Can't Be (1992, 1994) arises due to the fact that
concepts such as "person", "free will" and "introspection" are
metaphysical and cannot be subjected to empirical scrutiny. Central
statements such as "project to build a person" (PBP) are
imprecisely formulated, for PBP is not a project, but is at best a
prediction. Finally, Bringsjord's method is inadequately defined
when he speaks of "precise deductive arguments which sometimes
border on proofs," for deduction should not be regarded as a
method but as a rule. Without going all the way down the road of
the "eight clusters of philosophical issues," we will take a look
at natural language as well as the more stringent Turing Test and
the Goedel argument.
Keywords
behaviorism, Chinese Room Argument, cognition,
consciousness, finite automata, free will, functionalism,
introspection, mind, story generation, Turing machines, Turing
Test.
References
- Bringsjord, S. (1992). What Robots Can and Can't Be. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
- Bringsjord, S. (1994). Precis of: What Robots Can and Can't Be. PSYCOLOQUY 5(59) robot-consciousness.1.bringsjord.
- Chow, Siu L. (1994). Theory-Data Relations and Theory Acceptance: Book Review of Rakover on Metapsychology. PSYCOLOQUY 5(25) metapsychology.5.chow.
- Harnad, S. (1991) Other Bodies, Other Minds: A Machine Incarnation of an Old Philosophical Problem. Minds & Machines 1.1: pp. 43-55.
- Lucas, J.R. (1961) Minds, Machines, and Goedel, in A.R. Andersen, ed., Minds and Machines (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall), pp. 43-89.
- Tarski, A. (1944) The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations fo Semantics. Philosophy and Phenomenology Research 4, pp. 341-375.
- Turing, A.M. (1937) On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society (2) 42.
- Turing, A.M. (1950) Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind 59:433- 460.