Abstract
Harry Collins interprets Hubert Dreyfus’s philosophy of embodiment as a criticism of all possible forms of artificial intelligence. I argue that this characterization is inaccurate and predicated upon a misunderstanding of the relevance of phenomenology for empirical scientific research.
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Notes
Personal communication from Collins to Selinger on 10/15/2006.
While Dreyfus suggests some causal models that deserve consideration, he does not propose a scientific explanation of why human bodies and minds function as they do though there are exceptions. Thus, occasionally, Dreyfus has tried to interface his phenomenology with scientific explanations of how the human brain functions. See, for example, his discussion of Walter Freeman. Similarly, although he now repudiates it, in Mind Over Machine Dreyfus and his brother Stuart entertained the possibility that the human mind might have a hologram structure. Also, in a recent interview with Harry Kreisler, Dreyfus suggests that it would be useful to correlate his analysis of “incorporeality” with the new empirical research on mirror neurons.
The frame problem is expressed in the following question. If a computer has a representation of a current state of the world, how can it determine which of the represented facts remain constant and which require updating?
In this sense, it comes as no surprise that in recent years, Dreyfus has made some positive (although still cautious) claims about neural nets. The underlying epistemological assumptions that guide the design of neural nets vary radically from the underlying assumptions that guided GOFAI.
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Selinger, E. Collins’s incorrect depiction of Dreyfus’s critique of artificial intelligence. Phenom Cogn Sci 7, 301–308 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-006-9039-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-006-9039-6