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.
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