God’s Machines: Descartes on the Mechanization of Mind

Autonomous adaptation inspired by the model of a minimal living system provided by chemoton theory

“…The ideas on the mechanistic nature of living systems can be found in the work of earlier scientists and thinkers e.g. Descartes in XVII century [14,69]. However, they grew into a scientific field only in the early 1940s with the birth of cybernetics, a science of control and communication [48,70].…”

Plastic machines: behavioural diversity and the Turing test

“…This species of causation, which is also to be found in some recent AI systems (e.g. the evolved GasNets deployed by Husbands et al (1998); see Wheeler 2005 for philosophical discussion) plausibly bestows on a machine a certain kind of large-scale holistic flexibility, a flexibility that seems to be ripe to account, in part, for the fluid context-switching highlighted by the inter-context frame problem (Wheeler 2005(Wheeler , 2008a(Wheeler , 2008b. Why do I say 'in part'?…”

“…His negative claim is that no mere machine could either continually generate complex linguistic responses which are flexibly sensitive to varying contexts, in the way that all linguistically competent human beings do, or succeed in behaving appropriately in any context, in the way that all behaviourally normal human beings do. The way to understand this claim, I think (Wheeler 2005(Wheeler , 2008b, is to interpret the observations regarding language-use as identifying a particular case of a more general phenomenon. More specifically, the point that no machine (in virtue solely of its own intrinsic capacities) could reproduce the generative and contextually sensitive linguistic capabilities displayed by human beings is actually just a local version of the more general point that no machine (in virtue solely of its intrinsic capacities) could reproduce the unrestricted range of adaptively flexible and contextually sensitive behaviour displayed by human beings.…”

“…This will give us a definition of an entity that I shall call a Cartesian machine. (For detailed exegetical discussion that justifies this analysis, see Wheeler (2008b).) A Cartesian machine is a material system that (a) unfolds purely according to the laws of blind physical causation, (b) is susceptible to norms of correct and incorrect functioning, and (c) is either a special-purpose system or an integrated collection of special-purpose subsystems (where a system or subsystem is specialpurpose if it is capable of producing appropriate actions only within some restricted task domain).…”

A Note on Chances and Limitations of Psychometric AI

“…And also from a system engineer's perspective, given that at any point in time there will only be a finite number of commonly accepted tests of intelligence available, the maxim underlying nPAI seems dubious: Each of the individual capacities could be addressed by a specifically dedicated standalone subsystem, so that intelligence would actually be reduced to correctly selecting and executing the respective module from a finite number of available subprograms based on a finite number of possible input categories. But this could hardly be considered satisfactory as an answer to the intelligence puzzle for anyone but diehard followers of Descartes: At least the Cartesian would be comforted in that the resulting AI -being an almost ideal instantiation of a "type-c machine" [5] -might be able to pass any test for a particular set of cognitive capacities, whilst still failing a test for any mental power whatsoever. General Psychometric AI: A second, more commonly used definition of PAI, to which I will henceforth refer as "general PAI" (gPAI), is also introduced in [1]: "Psychometric AI is the field devoted to building information-processing entities capable of at least solid performance on all established, validated tests of intelligence and mental ability, a class of tests that includes not just the rather restrictive IQ tests, but also tests of artistic and literary creativity, mechanical ability, and so on.…”