Shared Moral and Spiritual Development Among Human Persons and Artificially Intelligent Agents

Technical advances in artificial intelligence make somewhat likely the possibility of robotic or software agents exhibiting or extending human-level intelligence within a few decades. Theological investigation can help meet significant research goals in artificial intelligence by orienting the development of agent communication and moral reasoning toward a shared moral and spiritual development of human persons and intelligent agents. In particular, Josiah Royce’s Loyalty-to-Loyalty initiates a moral stance within which humans and intelligent agents can develop constructive ethical frameworks and his semiotic philosophy of community can guide the development and functioning of an agent’s interpretive processes and can model shared spiritual formation.     

Performing the imago Dei: human enhancement,artificial intelligence and optative image-bearing

If the imago Dei is not a taxonomic definition but rather something that is performed in context, what are the implications for questions of human enhancement and the development of artificial intelligence (AI)? The author considers Alistair McFadyen’s performative vision of the imago Dei, one that actively seeks humanity in concrete situations, in the context of human enhancement and AI, asking the questions, ‘Does becoming cyborg through human enhancement make us less bearers of the divine image?’ And, ‘Can AI ever be considered to be in the image of God?’ Briefly tracing the shift in perspectives on the imago Dei, before considering what a performance of the image might look like, the author proposes three performances that have significant implications for questions about what it means to be human. To be an image-bearer is not dependent upon human DNA or species membership, but on an optative performance of the imago Dei.     

Pollock on token physicalism,agent materialism and strong artificial intelligence

An examination of John Pollock's theory of artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind raises difficulties for his mechanist concept of person. Token physicalism, agent materialism, and strong artificial intelligence are so related that if the first two propositions are not well‐established, then there is no justification for believing that an artificial consciousness can be designed and built. Pollock's arguments are shown to be inconclusive in upholding a functionalist theory of persons as supervenient but purely physical entities. In part this is the result of Pollock's thin definition of the concept of supervenience, according to which any complex supervenes on its proper parts. The limitations of this account are apparent when contrasted with richer conceptions of supervenience, such as Joseph Margolis’. But on Margolis’ theory, the mind and its expressions supervene on or rise above their material embodiments in the sense that they cannot be fully explained in physical terms, which contradicts Pollock's token physicalism and agent materialism. The consequence for Pollock's project to explain the mind as mechanical, and to manufacture artificial persons, is that these systems can at best aspire to impressive innovations in weak artificial intelligence, but realistically cannot aspire to strong or mentalistic artificial intelligence.     

从人类共情走向智能体共情

随着机器人在人类生活中重要性的增强,人们开始关注其传统智能以外的其它能力,如共情。基于共情的经典理论,本文以新兴的智能体共情（artificial empathy）为主题,同时结合人工智能领域的最新研究,系统地阐述了现有与智能体共情有关的理论模型和实证研究,并结合文献计量学分析,对该领域研究宏观现状进行可视化呈现。指出在未来研究中,借鉴心理学、认知神经科学和计算机科学等学科的研究成果,注重机器人理论模型的建构和研究方法的创新,对机器人共情系统的建构有着重要作用,而其间涉及到的伦理问题同样不容忽视。     

Applying Deutsch’s concept of good explanations to artificial intelligence and neuroscience – An initial exploration

Artificial intelligence has made great strides since the deep learning revolution, but AI systems remain incapable of learning principles and rules which allow them to extrapolate outside of their training data to new situations. For inspiration we look to the domain of science, where scientists have been able to develop theories which show remarkable ability to extrapolate and sometimes even predict the existence of phenomena which have never been observed before. According to David Deutsch, this type of extrapolation, which he calls “reach”, is due to scientific theories being hard to vary. In this work we investigate Deutsch’s hard-to-vary principle and how it relates to more formalized principles in deep learning such as the bias-variance trade-off and Occam’s razor. We distinguish internal variability, how much a model/theory can be varied internally while still yielding the same predictions, with external variability, which is how much a model must be varied to predict new, out-of-distribution data. We discuss how to measure internal variability using the notion of the Rashomon set and how to measure external variability using Kolmogorov complexity. We explore what role hard-to-vary explanations play in intelligence by looking at the human brain, the only example of highly general purpose intelligence known. We distinguish two learning systems in the brain – the first operates similar to deep learning and likely underlies most of perception while the second is a more creative system capable of generating hard-to-vary models and explanations of the world. We make contact with Popperian epistemology which suggests that the generation of scientific theories is a not an inductive process but rather an evolutionary process which proceeds through conjecture and refutation. We argue that figuring out how replicate this second system, which is capable of generating hard-to-vary explanations, is a key challenge which needs to be solved in order to realize artificial general intelligence.     

Surviving death: how to refute termination theses

When deciding how ‘death’ should be defined, it is helpful to consider cases in which vital functions are restored to an organism long after those vital functions have ceased. Here I consider whether such restoration cases can be used to refute termination theses. Focusing largely on the termination thesis applied to human animals (the view that when human animals die they cease to exist), I develop a line of argument from the possibility of human restoration to the conclusion that in many actual cases, human animals continue to exist after they die. The line of reasoning developed here can be extended to show that other organisms survive death in many actual cases. This line of reasoning improves on other arguments that have been offered against termination theses. And if my argument regarding human animals surviving death is successful, then assuming that human persons are animals, we can also conclude that human persons in many actual cases continue to exist after death.     

A Critical Taxonomy of the Theories About the Paths into the Reduction

The paths or ways to the transcendental reduction are a pivotal phenomenological notion in Husserl’s philosophy. The metaphor of path, in fact, alludes to the demonstrative proofs of transcendental phenomenology. Nonetheless, Husserlian scholarship has not yet been able to end the disputes surrounding this topic, and as a result, competing interpretations continue to prevail. Since existing theories about the paths have not yet been cataloged or analyzed in their global context, I intend to classify the main existing theories about the paths and evaluate the trend established by Iso Kern. Thus, this paper answers the following questions: how many kinds of theories about the paths are there? And, how plausible is the trend and approach initiated by Kern? In order to evaluate each theory, I will compare the interpretation with its exemplary cases. The key contribution of this investigation is therefore twofold: to distinguish with unequivocal concepts the two main trends of hermeneutical theories in play and to evaluate the plausibility of the aforementioned Kernian one. The paper also attempts to show that the hermeneutical approach initiated by Kern has no contextual examples for its conceptual scheme and should consequently be abandoned in favor of an alternative solution.     

Spiritual robots: Religion and our scientific view of the natural world

Religion plays a powerful role in the formation of scientific theories. By comparing the goals and practice of robotics and artificial intelligence in the US and Japan, differences between the two countries can be traced to their religious environments. Christian expectations of cosmic purpose and hope for salvation in purified, unearthly bodies leads to US researchers' preference for artificial intelligence over humanoid robots, a desire to see cosmic meaning in the development of that intelligence, and salvation of human minds in virtual, non-biological bodies. In Japan, robots, which have been the subjects of ritual consecrations and religious transcendence, participate in a fundamental sanctity of the natural world. A positive outlook on being human promotes a preference for humanoid robots and a future in which robots serve human beings, who do not forsake their bodies for virtual lives. Divergent scientific strategies cannot be separated from the religious worlds of their practitioners.     

Natural Rights to Welfare

Abstract: Many people have lamented the proliferation of human rights claims. The cure for this problem, it may be thought, would be to develop a theory that can distinguish ‘real’ from ‘supposed’ human rights. I argue, however, that the proliferation of human rights mirrors a deep problem in human rights theory itself. Contemporary theories of natural rights to welfare are historical descendants from a theory of rights to subsistence which was developed in twelfth‐century Europe. According to this theory, each human being has a special role to fulfil in God's plan and therefore has inalienable rights to subsist. Later theories have secularized this idea by claiming that human beings are purposive agents. Secularization, however, comes at a price. In the case of these theories, the price is a failure to provide satisfactory answers to the most basic questions we would expect of a theory of natural rights to answer. They have failed to provide a basis for ascribing these rights to all and only to human beings. They have not been able to generate a clear and viable criterion for ascribing duties correlative to these rights. And they cannot limit rights‐claims in a non‐arbitrary way. Hence we should abandon these theories.     

Against the iDoctor: why artificial intelligence should not replace physician judgment

Experts in medical informatics have argued for the incorporation of ever more machine-learning algorithms into medical care. As artificial intelligence (AI) research advances, such technologies raise the possibility of an “iDoctor,” a machine theoretically capable of replacing the judgment of primary care physicians. In this article, I draw on Martin Heidegger’s critique of technology to show how an algorithmic approach to medicine distorts the physician–patient relationship. Among other problems, AI cannot adapt guidelines according to the individual patient’s needs. In response to the objection that AI could develop this capacity, I use Hubert Dreyfus’s analysis of AI to argue that attention to the needs of each patient requires the physician to attune his or her perception to the patient’s history and physical exam, an ability that seems uniquely human. Human physician judgment will remain better suited to the practice of primary care despite anticipated advances in AI technology.     

Freud and the Psychoanalysis of Telepathy: Commentary on Claudie Massicotte’s “Psychical Transmissions”

Freud was interested in and eventually accepted the diverse forms of telepathic communication as psychoanalytic rather than occult phenomena, particularly as manifested in dreams. Massicotte revisits the topic of Freud and his interest in the occult in a manner that invites serious reconsideration of this aspect of his work, long the subject of intense controversy in the history of psychoanalysis. In my response to Massicotte’s paper I argue that Freud’s interest in telepathy or thought transference belongs to his psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious and transference. His approach to telepathy parallels his approach to religious beliefs: He accounts for both as creations of the human mind as individuals attempt to make sense and meaning of their real experiences. What Freud meant by telepathy is what contemporary psychoanalysis refers to as unconscious communication, and the strange, often inexplicable forms it takes in clinical contexts. For Freud, instances of telepathy or unconscious communication are to be understood contextually and relationally, revealing important data about the nature of affectively charged human relationships.     

Semantic approaches in the philosophy of science

In this article I give an overview of some recent work in philosophy of science dedicated to analysing the scientific process in terms of (conceptual) mathematical models of theories and the various semantic relations between such models, scientific theories, and aspects of reality. In current philosophy of science, the most interesting questions centre around the ways in which writers distinguish between theories and the mathematical structures that interpret them and in which they are true, i.e. between scientific theories as linguistic systems and their non-linguistic models. In philosophy of science literature there are two main approaches to the structure of scientific theories, the statement or syntactic approach—advocated by Carnap, Hempel and Nagel—and the non-statement or semantic approach—advocated, among others, by Suppes, the structuralists, Beth, Van Fraassen, Giere, Wójcicki. In conclusion, I briefly review some of the usual realist inspired questions about the possibility and character of relations between scientific theories and reality as implied by the various approaches I discuss in the course of the article. The models of a scientific theory should indeed be adequate to the phenomena, but if the theory is ‘adequate’ to (true in) its conceptual (mathematical) models as well, we have a model-theoretic realism that addresses the possible meaning and reference of ‘theoretical entities’ without relapsing into the metaphysics typical of the usual scientific realist approaches.     

Body,thought, being-human and artificial intelligence: Merleau-Ponty and Lyotard

Abstract

This article focuses in a comparative manner on the thought of Merleau-Ponty and Lyotard with a view to lending support to Busch’s claim, that ‘existentialism’ preceded poststructuralism and postmodernism as far as criticism of certain features of modem philosophy are concerned. Attention is first given to Lyotard’s critique of artificial intelligence, especially in so far as it displays a dependence on and development of insights on the part of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological-existential understanding of human embodiment and the specificity of human perception. The focus then shifts to Merleau-Ponty in order to demonstrate the remarkable extent to which his understanding of human embodiment and related issues such as perception and creativity, paved the way for the work of, among others, Lyotard, and anticipated the critique of artificial intelligence on the part of the latter.     

A computational analysis of general intelligence tests for evaluating cognitive development

The progression in several cognitive tests for the same subjects at different ages provides valuable information about their cognitive development. One question that has caught recent interest is whether the same approach can be used to assess the cognitive development of artificial systems. In particular, can we assess whether the ‘fluid’ or ‘crystallised’ intelligence of an artificial cognitive system is changing during its cognitive development as a result of acquiring more concepts? In this paper, we address several IQ tests problems (odd-one-out problems, Raven’s Progressive Matrices and Thurstone’s letter series) with a general learning system that is not particularly designed on purpose to solve intelligence tests. The goal is to better understand the role of the basic cognitive operational constructs (such as identity, difference, order, counting, logic, etc.) that are needed to solve these intelligence test problems and serve as a proof-of-concept for evaluation in other developmental problems. From here, we gain some insights into the characteristics and usefulness of these tests and how careful we need to be when applying human test problems to assess the abilities and cognitive development of robots and other artificial cognitive systems.     

A Paradoxical Theology of Biology

Abstract

This article examines a sermon in which Desmond Tutu advocates for gay rights in light of his activism against apartheid in South Africa. In doing so it uncovers a paradoxical theology of biology that enables him to advocate universal notions of justice simultaneously with love for particular persons and bodies. This advocacy, however, is susceptible to the critiques of queer theorists and theologians who worry that liberationist frameworks unwittingly reinscribe injustices against a variety of queer persons. The article concludes by raising new questions to be asked about Desmond Tutu’s theology, and liberation theologies in general, about the potential of liberationist and prophetic frameworks for achieving social justice. It also raises questions for queer theology about the possibility and political efficacy of queering the act of preaching.     

Reasoning as simulation

The theory that human cognition proceeds through mental simulations, if true, would provide a parsimonious explanation of how the mechanisms of reasoning and problem solving integrate with and develop from mechanisms underlying forms of cognition that occur earlier in evolution and development. However, questions remain about whether simulation mechanisms are powerful enough to exhibit human-level reasoning and inference. In order to investigate this issue, we show that it is possible to characterize some of the most powerful modern artificial intelligence algorithms for logical and probabilistic inference as methods of simulating alternate states of the world. We show that a set of specific human perceptual mechanisms, even if not implemented using mechanisms described in artificial intelligence, can nevertheless perform the same operations as those algorithms. Although this result does not demonstrate that simulation theory is true, it does show that whatever mechanisms underlie perception have at least as much power to explain non-perceptual human reasoning and problem solving as some of the most powerful known algorithms.     

Malawian secondary students’ beliefs about intelligence

Students who view intelligence as malleable tend to be more academically motivated and perform at higher levels than students who view it as a fixed trait. We examined the beliefs of students from Malawi because the culture and schooling process in this country is very different from some other areas of the world in which students’ views of intelligence have already been studied. Our research questions were: (1) How do Malawian students define intelligence? (2) To what extent do Malawian students view intelligence as malleable? (3) Are Malawian students’ definitions of intelligence and beliefs about the malleability of intelligence similar to those of students in more developed countries? We conducted a mixed methods study and surveyed 136 students attending a secondary school in Malawi using a 39‐item questionnaire. Students responded to questions about their intelligence beliefs on open‐ and closed‐ended items. Our results showed that Malawian students believe that an intelligent student exhibits a variety of behaviors, including studying, working hard, reading, performing well on exams and in class, answering and asking questions, paying attention, and demonstrating good behavior. Most students believe that intelligence is malleable and provided responses that indicated that students can become more intelligent through effort. When compared to the findings of other studies, the present results suggest that the Malawian students who remain in secondary school have definitions of intelligence and beliefs about the malleability of intelligence that are similar to those of students in more developed countries, such as the US and Germany. In fact, it appears that Malawian secondary students have even higher malleable beliefs than American and German students. Finally, some of the measures that have been found to produce scores that are reliable and valid in other populations do not produce scores that are as reliable when used with Malawian students.     

The Problem of Other Minds

This paper reimagines the traditional problem of other minds. On a Cartesian view, the problem involves humans’ inability to perceive other persons’ minds. Similarly, Gilbert Ryle claims that we cannot directly access another’s mind. The paper’s rethinking of the problem of other minds moves beyond these questions of perceptibility and accessibility. It asks whether there are certain groups of people whose minds are systematically misinterpreted, or even denied mentality. It argues that there are. This claim builds off recent work in philosophy and social psychology on epistemic injustice and the role of social categories in mental state attribution. The paper proposes the Problem of the Other’s Mind: the phenomenon of a (relatively) socially privileged person’s inability or lack of desire to understand the mind of a (relatively) socially underprivileged person.     

Syntactic principles of heuristic-driven theory projection

Analogy making is a central construct in human cognition and plays an important role to explain cognitive abilities. While various psychologically or neurally inspired theories for analogical reasoning have been proposed, there is a lack of a logical foundation for analogical reasoning in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. We aim to close this gap and propose heuristic-driven theory projection (HDTP), a mathematically sound framework for analogy making. HDTP represents knowledge about the source and the target domain as first-order logic theories and compares them for structural commonalities using anti-unification. The paper provides an overview of the syntactic principles of HDTP, explains all phases of analogy making at a formal level, and illustrates these phases with examples.