Philosophical foundations

Abstract

Much work in artificial intelligence (AI) has built on concepts and theories developed by philosophers and logicians. This chapter introduces this foundational work, surveying different conceptions of AI, the philosophical dream of mechanizing human reasoning, the conceptual roots of AI, and the major theories of mind that have underpinned different strands of AI research. It discusses an area that serves as an exemplar of AI that is bound up with philosophy. The three principal philosophical criticisms of strong AI that helped to change the tide in the AI community and point to new research directions are the critique of Hubert Dreyfus, Block's critique of machine functionalism via the China brain thought experiments and Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. Neural networks are capable of a certain type of learning; they can be trained to compute, or approximate, a target function.

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