Sylvan's Bottle and other Problems

According to Richard Routley, a comprehensive theory of fiction is impossible, since almost anything is in principle imaginable. In my view, Routley is right: for any purported logic of fiction, there will be actual or imaginable fictions that successfully counterexample the logic. Using the example of ‘impossible’ fictions, I test this claim against theories proposed by Routley’s Meinongian contemporaries and also by Routley himself (for what he called ‘esoteric’ works of fiction) and his 21st century heirs. I argue that the phenomenon of impossible fictions challenges even today’s modal Meinongians

Rethinking Turing’s Test and the Philosophical Implications

© 2020, Springer Nature B.V. In the 70 years since Alan Turing’s ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ appeared in Mind, there have been two widely-accepted interpretations of the Turing test: the canonical behaviourist interpretation and the rival inductive or epistemic interpretation. These readings are based on Turing’s Mind paper; few seem aware that Turing described two other versions of the imitation game. I have argued that both readings are inconsistent with Turing’s 1948 and 1952 statements about intelligence, and fail to explain the design of his game. I argue instead for a response-dependence interpretation (Proudfoot 2013). This interpretation has implications for Turing’s view of free will: I argue that Turing’s writings suggest a new form of free will compatibilism, which I call response-dependence compatibilism (Proudfoot 2017a). The philosophical implications of rethinking Turing’s test go yet further. It is assumed by numerous theorists that Turing anticipated the computational theory of mind. On the contrary, I argue, his remarks on intelligence and free will lead to a new objection to computationalism

Can a Robot Smile? Wittgenstein on Facial Expression

Some researchers in social robotics aim to build ‘face robots’—machines that interact with human beings (or other robots) by means of facial expression and gesture. They aim, in part, to use these robots to test hypotheses concerning human social and psychological development (and disorders such as autism) in controlled, repeatable experiments. A robot may be said to ‘grin’ and ‘frown’, or to have ‘a smile on its face’. This is not to claim merely that the robot has a certain physical configuration or behaviour; nor is it to say merely that the robot’s ‘facial’ display is, like an emoticon or photograph, a representation of a smile or frown. Although researchers may refrain from claiming that their machines have emotions, they attribute expressive behaviours to them literally and without qualification. Wittgenstein said, however, ‘A smiling mouth smiles only in a human face’. Smiling is a complex conventional gesture. A facial display is a smile only if it has a certain meaning—the meaning that distinguishes a smile from a human grimace or facial tic, and from a chimpanzee’s bared-teeth display. In this paper I explore the implications of Wittgenstein’s remarks on expression for the claim that face robots can smile or frown

Turing’s Three Senses of “Emotional”

Turing used the expression “emotional” in three distinct ways: to state his philosophical theory of the concept of intelligence, to classify arguments for and against the possibility of machine intelligence, and to describe the education of a “child machine”. The remarks on emotion include several of the most important philosophical claims. This paper analyses these remarks and their significance for current research in Artificial Intelligence

Can a Robot Smile? Wittgenstein on Facial Expression

Recent work in social robotics, which is aimed both at creating an artificial intelligence and providing a test-bed for psychological theories of human social development, involves building robots that can learn from ‘face-to-face’ interaction with human beings — as human infants do. The building-blocks of this interaction include the robot’s ‘expressive’ behaviours, for example, facial-expression and head-and-neck gesture. There is here an ideal opportunity to apply Wittgensteinian conceptual analysis to current theoretical and empirical work in the sciences. Wittgenstein’s philosophical psychology is sympathetic to embodied and situated Artificial Intelligence (see Proudfoot, 2002, 2004b), and his discussion of facial-expression is remarkably modern. In this chapter, I explore his approach to facial-expression, using smiling as a representative example, and apply it to the canonical interactive face robot, Cynthia Breazeal’s Kismet (see e.g. Breazeal, 2009, 2002). I assess the claim that Kismet has expressive behaviours, with the aim of generating philosophical insights for AI

AI's Promise: Our post-human future

In celebration of the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth, and motivated by the possibility of living forever in a cyborg body, we’ve given this forum over to refl ection on the future of machine intelligence. Turing is rightly called the father of computing, but just what did he accomplish, and what is his legacy? We begin to answer these questions with a rousing bit of speculation (and calls for restraint) by Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot, who consider the real promise of artifi cial intelligence. Next, John Preston gives us pause with an argument for the view that, Turing’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, computers will never really be thinking things. The famous Turing Test for machine intelligence gets a lot of attention, but Georges Rey argues that it’s small fry compared to Turing’s lesser known and much more profound ideas. Selmer Bringsjord and Joe Johnson warn of social upheaval ahead, owed to advances in robotics. We conclude with Luciano Floridi’s thoughts not just on Turing, but on the information revolution we fi nd ourselves in. Perhaps Turing’s ideas are transforming our conception of the universe and our place in it, in ways we have yet to understand fully. Floridi argues that Turing is still with us, and his legacy is very much alive.In celebration of the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth, and motivated by the possibility of living forever in a cyborg body, we’ve given this forum over to refl ection on the future of machine intelligence. Turing is rightly called the father of computing, but just what did he accomplish, and what is his legacy? We begin to answer these questions with a rousing bit of speculation (and calls for restraint) by Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot, who consider the real promise of artifi cial intelligence. Next, John Preston gives us pause with an argument for the view that, Turing’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, computers will never really be thinking things. The famous Turing Test for machine intelligence gets a lot of attention, but Georges Rey argues that it’s small fry compared to Turing’s lesser known and much more profound ideas. Selmer Bringsjord and Joe Johnson warn of social upheaval ahead, owed to advances in robotics. We conclude with Luciano Floridi’s thoughts not just on Turing, but on the information revolution we fi nd ourselves in. Perhaps Turing’s ideas are transforming our conception of the universe and our place in it, in ways we have yet to understand fully. Floridi argues that Turing is still with us, and his legacy is very much alive