Lecture/Discussion Series

The Agenda of Realism

Consciousness as Internal Experience

Professor John McCarthy, Stanford University

At CSLI, Cordura Hall, Stanford University.
June 12th, 2007, 4:15pm to 5:45pm

Abstract

Conscious knowledge and other information is distinguished from unconscious information by being observable, and its observation results in conscious knowledge about it. We call this introspective knowledge; it's an internal form of experience.

A robot will need to use introspective knowledge in order to operate in the common sense world and accomplish the tasks humans will give it.

Many features of human consciousness will be wanted, some will not, and some abilities not possessed by humans have already been found feasible and useful in limited domains. We give preliminary fragments of a logical language a robot can use to represent information about its own state of mind.

A robot will often have to conclude that it cannot decide a question on the basis of the information in memory and therefore must seek information externally. Paradoxes, e.g. as mentioned by Montague, lie in wait for us here, but Godel's idea of relative consistency lets us formalize non-knowledge and avoid paradox. It turns out that relative consistency, is the basis of many other introspective abilities.

Programs with much introspective consciousness do not yet exist.

Thinking about consciousness with a view to designing it provides a new approach to some of the problems of consciousness studied by philosophers.

IASE Introduction

By Steven Ericsson-Zenith

Is the manifest existence of experience in the world to be mastered only by poets and priests, or is its mystery one that science can disclose?

Before 1950 the answer was clear, experience lay at the foundation of scientific consideration. But the positivist agenda was abandoned, in part because the implementations of logic in computing machinery proved so successful.

In his 1950 seminal paper, Alan Turing wrote:

I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no mystery about consciousness. There is, for example, something of a paradox connected with any attempt to localize it. But I do not think these mysteries necessarily need to be solved before we can answer the question with which we are concerned ...

Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence. 1950.

But was Turing right that he could ignore the mysteries and still make progress to the ultimate solution? I think not.

Turing's goal was to take rigorous steps forward in reasoning about intelligence and it is a remarkable fact that we are able to capture certain aspects of our intelligence by implementing symbolic logic in computing machinery. But this approach, necessarily, changed the fundamental conception of logical construction from the non-local differentiation from the landscape of the entire embodiment of sense proposed by logical positivism, to the strong locality of integration of logical parts.

Upon these foundations was born a first view of how an artificial intelligence might be conceived. It is a great opportunity for us then, and it is with some pleasure, that in this event we hear from the front lines of that revolution.

In this second of our lecture/discussions on the Foundations of Logic and Apprehension, Professor John McCarthy leads the discussion. His name is, perhaps, that most associated with the initial conception of artificial intelligence. He invented LISP, the language most used to that end, and famously coined the term "Artificial Intelligence" at the Dartmouth conference in 1955. He worked with Claude Shannon and many other founders of computer science to build the science as we know it today. He may even have known Turing, we shall have to ask him.

Professor John McCarthy is Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, more details can be found at his Stanford University home page.

Past Events

TRANSCRIPT AND AUDIO OF THESE EVENTS WILL BE AVAILABLE SHORTLY

The Positivist Agenda

Logic and Experience in the Logical Empiricist Tradition

Professor Michael Friedman, Stanford University

At CSLI, Cordura Hall, Stanford University.
May 15th, 2007, 4:15pm to 5:45pm. Please register for the event by clicking here.

Abstract

I consider how the logical empiricists - mainly Carnap and Schlick - developed a characteristic perspective on the relationship between logic and experience against the background of their understanding of Einstein, Frege, and Hilbert, and also against the background of an earlier strand in scientific philosophy represented by Helmholtz and Poincaré. Although this tradition (especially via Helmholtz) was also engaged with developments in the psychology and physiology of the time, it was much more closely engaged with developments within the exact sciences - and, in particular, with the modern axiomatic tradition associated especially with Hilbert. This gave the conception of the logical empiricists a distinctively "transcendentalist" flavor (associated with the Kantian and neo-Kantian tradition) quite different from various current forms of "naturalism" and "psychologism."

IASE Introduction

By Steven Ericsson-Zenith

Is the manifest existence of experience in the world to be mastered only by poets and priests, or is its mystery one that science can disclose?

Before 1950 the answer was clear, experience lay at the foundation of scientific consideration. But the challenge of it seemed unsurmountable.

In 1928, the philosopher of science, Rudolf Carnap, wrote:

The question is this: provided that to all or some types of psychological processes there correspond simultaneous processes in the central nervous system, what connects the processes in question with one another? Very little has been done toward a solution to the correlation problem of the psychophysical relation, but, even if this problem were solved (i.e., if we could infer the characteristics of a brain process from the characteristics of a psychological process, and vice versa), nothing would have been achieved to further the solution of the essence problem (i.e., the psychophysical problem). For this problem is not concerned with the correlation, but with the essential relation; that is, with that which "essentially" or "fundamentally" leads from one process to the other or which brings forth both from a common root.

...there still remain, in the main, three hypotheses: mutual influence, parallelism, and identity in the sense of the two aspect theory...

Three contradicting and unsatisfactory answers and no possibility of finding or even imagining an empirical fact that could here make the difference: a more hopeless situation can hardly be imagined...

Rudolf Carnap, P. 37-38. The Logical Structure of the World. 1928.

Since 1928 a lot of work has been done in neuroscience on what Carnap calls the “correlation problem.” We have identified behavior in the nervous system that corresponds to certain psychological processes. But, as Carnap anticipated, no progress has been made on the essential problem, popularly known as the “mind / body problem.”

In workshops and seminars the Institute for Advanced Science & Engineering aims to bring together leading theorists, logicians and computer scientists, with empirical research in biology and physics to ask some of the harder questions regarding the foundations of logic and apprehension, with the ultimate goal of addressing what is, perhaps, the last remaining really hard problem in science and moving toward a demonstrable explanation of experience in nature.

This series of lecture/discussions is a prelude to our workshop in December. Speakers from multiple disciplines are invited to present in the context the Institute's theme, "Explaining Experience in Nature." We will create sub-tracks in the series such as "The Positivist Agenda" and "The Agenda of Realism" to indicate the general approach under discussion. The format of this series of lectures/debates consists of a 40 minute lecture followed by a led discussion and informal debate.

Professor Michael Friedman, a leading scholar of the history of logical positivism, gives our inaugural talk on the positivist agenda. He is Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of Humanities at Stanford University and is the author of Reconsidering Logical Positivism published in 1999 by Cambridge University Press. For more information about Professor Friedman see his Stanford University profile..

Professor John McCarthy, also of Stanford University and speaks in this series next month, will offer an initial response to Professor Friedman's presentation.

We anticipate that this event will be video recorded and a form of that recording will be made available on the web after the event.