Gregory R. Mulhauser (1995) What Philosophical Rigour can and Can't be . Psycoloquy: 6(28) Robot Consciousness (15)
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Psycoloquy 6(28): What Philosophical Rigour can and Can't be

WHAT PHILOSOPHICAL RIGOUR CAN AND CAN'T BE
Book Review of Bringsjord on Robot-Consciousness

Gregory R. Mulhauser
Department of Philosophy
University of Glasgow G12 8QQ
Scotland

scarab@udcf.gla.ac.uk

Abstract

Clarity of argumentation is the strongest mark in favour of What Robots Can and Can't Be (1992), in which Selmer Bringsjord attempts to show that what he calls the "Person Building Project", or (PBP) -- the proposition that "Cognitive Engineers will succeed in building persons" (p. 7) -- is doomed to failure. Interestingly, while denying (PBP), Bringsjord affirms that cognitive engineering will succeed in producing robots capable of passing more and more difficult versions of the Turing test -- it's just that those robots won't be persons. Unfortunately, the book is plagued with persistent technical errors which render its arguments wholly unconvincing.

Keywords

behaviorism, Chinese Room Argument, cognition, consciousness, finite automata, free will, functionalism, introspection, mind, story generation, Turing machines, Turing Test.

References