This is a new release of the original 1948 edition.

Ascribing mental qualities like beliefs, intentions and wants to a machine is sometimes correct if done conservatively and is sometimes necessary to express what is known about its state. We propose some new definitional tools for this: definitions relative to an approximate theory and second order structural definitions.

John Searle begins his ``Consciousness, Explanatory Inversion and Cognitive Science'' with " ``Ten years ago in this journal I published an article criticising what I call Strong AI, the view that for a system to have mental states it is sufficient for the system to implement the right sort of program with right inputs and outputs. Strong AI is rather easy to refute and the basic argument can be summarized in one sentence: {it a system, me for example, could (...) implement a program for understanding Chinese, for example, without understanding any Chinese at all.} This idea, when developed, became known as the Chinese Room Argument.'' " The Chinese Room Argument can be refuted in one sentence. (shrink)

In AI, consciousness of self consists in a program having certain kinds of facts about its own mental processes and state of mind. We discuss what consciousness of its own mental structures a robot will need in order to operate in the common sense world and accomplish the tasks humans will give it. It's quite a lot. 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 contexts. 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. Gödel's idea of relative consistency is used to formalize non-knowledge. Programs with the kind of consciousness discussed in this article do not yet exist, although programs with some components of it exist. Thinking about consciousness with a view to designing it provides a new approach to some of the problems of consciousness studied by philosophers. One advantage is that it focusses on the aspects of consciousness important for intelligent behavior. (shrink)

We discuss first order theories in which individual concepts are admitted as mathematical objects along with the things that reify them. This allows very straightforward formalizations of knowledge, belief, wanting, and necessity in ordinary first order logic without modal operators. Applications are given in philosophy and in artificial intelligence. We do not treat general concepts, and we do not present any full axiomatizations but rather show how various facts can be expressed.

This collection of articles and associated discussion papers focuses on a problem that has attracted increasing attention from linguists and psychologists throughout the world during the past several years. Reduced to essentials, the problem is that of discovering the character of the mental capacities that make it possible for human beings to attain knowledge of their language on the basis of fragmentary and haphazard early linguistic experience. A fundamental assumption running through all of these contributions is that people possess strong (...) innate predispositions that are critical for success in this task. (shrink)

Circadian rhythm abnormalities in bipolar disorder have led to a search for genetic abnormalities in circadian "clock genes" associated with BD. However, no significant clock gene findings have emerged from genome-wide association studies. At least three factors could account for this discrepancy: complex traits are polygenic, the organization of the clock is more complex than previously recognized, and/or genetic risk for BD may be shared across multiple illnesses. To investigate these issues, we considered the clock gene network at three levels: (...) essential "core" clock genes, upstream circadian clock modulators, and downstream clock controlled genes. Using relaxed thresholds for GWAS statistical significance, we determined the rates of clock vs. control genetic associations with BD, and four additional illnesses that share clinical features and/or genetic risk with BD. Then we compared the results to a set of lithium-responsive genes. Associations with BD-spectrum illnesses and lithium-responsiveness were both enriched among core clock genes but not among upstream clock modulators. Associations with BD-spectrum illnesses and lithium-responsiveness were also enriched among pervasively rhythmic clock-controlled genes but not among genes that were less pervasively rhythmic or non-rhythmic. Our analysis reveals previously unrecognized associations between clock genes and BD-spectrum illnesses, partly reconciling previously discordant results from past GWAS and candidate gene studies. (shrink)

This article is inspired by recent psychological studies confirming that a child is not born a blank slate but has important innate capabilities. An important part of the ``learning'' required to deal with the three dimensional world of objects, processes, and other beings was done by evolution. Each child need not do this learning itself.

This article is the basis of an invited talk at KR-96 in 1996 November. It has been modified from the version that appeared in the preprints of that meeting. There is an html version, a.dvi version,.pdf version and a.ps version. Up to: Main McCarthy page Up to: Send comments to mccarthy @stanford.edu. I sometimes make changes suggested in them. - John McCarthy.

How do we educate so all can learn? What does successful differentiation look like? John McCarthy shares how educators finally understand how differentiation can work. Bridging pedagogy and practice, each chapter addresses a key understanding for how good teaching practices can include differentiation with examples, concrete methods and strategies.

• Lisp programs are Lisp data—abstract syntax. Programming languages need functions for their abstract • English is important for its semantics—not its syntax • The largest piece of cake—Kleene µ operator • An elephant never forgets and is faithful. • Resolution considered harmful. • Special provers are just strategies—Davis-Putnam • Programs as logical formulas—Algol 48 and Algol..

These notes discuss formalizing contexts as first class objects. The basic relationships are: ist(c,p) meaning that the proposition p is true in the context c, and value(c,p) designating the value of the term e in the context c Besides these, there are lifting formulas that relate the propositions and terms in subcontexts to possibly more general propositions and terms in the outer context. Subcontextx are often specialised with regard to time, place and terminology. Introducing contexts as formal objects will permit (...) axiomatizations in limited contexts to be expanded to transcend the original limitations. This seems necessary to provide AI programs using logic with certain capabilities that human fact representation and human reasoning possess. Fully implementing transcendence seems to require further extensions to mathematical logic, ie. beyond the nonmonotonic inference methods first invented in AI and now studied as a new domain of logic. (shrink)

This paper reexamines the thesis of a split between politics and morality in the political theory of the eighteenth century. At its center is the notion of a “civil society” and the safeguards necessary for its proper functioning. While arguments are drawn from several discourses (economic, juridical, political, ethical), the focus is on the political and ethical reasoning of the age derivative of natural law and dependent upon the free and open exchange of ideas.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where (...) they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.Cormac McCarthy, The Road. (shrink)

internal events that happen spontaneously from external events (actions). It also treats processes, e.g. a buzzer, that do not settle down. The non-monotonic reasoning is circumscription done situation by situation.

Here's the article which was a 1964 Stanford AI Memo. After the original memo, several people offered different proofs of the theorem including Shmuel Winograd, Marvin Minsky and Dimitri Stefanyuk - none published, to my knowledge. Winograd claimed that his proof was non-creative, because it didn't use an extraneous idea like the colors of the squares. This set off a contest to see who could produce the most non-creative proof. Minsky's idea was to start with the diagonal next to an (...) excluded corner ssquare, note that 2 dominoes had to project from it to the diagonal with three squares, and from there 1 domino to the four square diagonal, etc. Coming from the other end also leaves only six of the eight squares in the long diagonal covered. Minsky's proof gets high points for non-creativity, because it is specific to the 8 by 8 board. (Using the colors it is easy to show that a Minsky style proof will work for any even sized board.). (shrink)

McCarthy provided the audience with a concise summary of the basic approach and central theses of the common text. He then posed two substantial questions. The first concerned the possibility of extending the analysis of discourse and silence to deal with non-senseful "utterance." The second dealt with the relation between the concept of silence proposed by Dauenhauer and Ricoeur's concept of distantiation. What follows is an edited version of his paper.

My 1953 proof that the function is everywhere continuous and nowhere differentiable is just 13 lines. I've added some remarks to the note in the American Mathematical Monthly.

AI needs many ideas that have hitherto been studied only by philosophers. This is because a robot, if it is to have human level intelligence and ability to learn from its experience, needs a general world view in which to organize facts. It turns out that many philosophical problems take new forms when thought about in terms of how to design a robot. Some approaches to philosophy are helpful and others are not.

Elephant 2000 is a proposed programming language good for writing and verifying programs that interact with people (eg. transaction processing) or interact with programs belonging to other organizations (eg. electronic data interchange) 1. Communication inputs and outputs are in an I-O language whose sentences are meaningful speech acts identified in the language as questions, answers, offers, acceptances, declinations, requests, permissions and promises. 2. The correctness of programs is partly defined in terms of proper performance of the speech acts. Answers should (...) be truthful and responsive, and promises should be kept. Sentences of logic expressing these forms of correctness can be generated automatically from the form of the program. 3. Elephant aource programs may not need data structures, because they can refer directly to the past. Thus a program can say that an airline passenger has a reservation if he has made one and hasn't cancelled it. 4. Elephant programs themselves can be represented as sentences of logic. Their extensional properties follow from this representation without an intervening theory of programming or anything like Hoare axioms. 5. Elephant programs that interact non-trivially with the outside world can have both input-output specification, relating the programs inputs and outputs, and accomplishment specifications concerning what the program accomplishes in the world. These concepts are respectively generalizations of the philosophers' illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. 6. Programs that engage in commercial transactions assume obligations on behalf of their owners in exchange for obligations assumed by other entities. It may be part of the specification of an Elephant 2000 program that these obligations are exchanged as intended, and this too can be expressed by a logical sentence. 7. Human speech acts involve intelligence. Elephant 2000 is on the borderline of AI, but the article emphasizes the Elephant usages that do not require AI. (shrink)

Here are some essays written at various times. What does it mean to be rational? American History for Valley Girls The Chief Seattle Theme Park Here's a Manifesto of the Newtonian Brotherhood of Truly Christian Scientists . I regret to say that it has turned out to be necessary to explicitly characterize it as humor. I didn't mind that some careless readers accused me of being a bigot, but I had to put in a disclaimer when some readers emailed me (...) with their support for the ideas. (shrink)

This article was published in {\em Man and Computer. Proc. int. Conf., Bordeaux 1970, pp. 48-57 (Karger, Basel 1972)}. It is interesting to compare its 1970 proposals with the current situation, 30 years later. I have decorated it with footnotes commenting on the 1970 situation and making comparisons. Some of the improvements advocated in the paper are still yet to come. I claim quite a few prophet points for it.

engineering—The world presents problems to intelligence. Study information and action available in the world. 1. Write programs using non-logical representations. 2. Represent facts about the world in logic and decide what to do by logical inference.

#tex2html_wrap_inline114# Easy aspects of state: battery level, memory available, etc. #tex2html_wrap_inline116# Ongoing activities: serving users, driving a car #tex2html_wrap_inline118# Knowledge and lack of knowledge #tex2html_wrap_inline120# purposes, intentions, hopes, fears, likes, dislikes #tex2html_wrap_inline122# Actions it is free to choose among relative to external constraints. That's where free will comes from.

Apology: My knowledge of of machine learning is no more recent than Tom Mitchell's book. Its chapters describe, except for inductive logic programming, programs aimed at classifying appearances.

A consideration of the argument developed by Thomas Aquinas in Summa contra gentiles, II c. 46.

The basic computer components are universal. Whatever can be built from transistors can also be built from vacuum tubes, relays, fluidic elements, McCulloch-Pitts neurons, connectionist neurons, or from any of the other kinds of neuron Marvin Minsky proved universal in his 1954 Princeton PhD dissertation.