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Philosophy of Mind, PHIL-UA 80, Fall 2022 Lecture: TR 3:30 PM-4:45 PM Kimmel 803 Professor: Ned Block Sections: 8:00 AM-9:15 AM, BOBST LL145 9:30-10:45, BOBST
LL151 Preceptor: Noga Gratvol Office hours: Fridays: 11 AM-12PM and by appointment 5 Washington Place, Room 415 |
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This course examines the question of whether AI can be
sentient or sapient through the lense of the conflict
between computational and biological approaches to the mind. The first half of
the course will focus on sapience, i.e. machine intelligence and thought, and
the second half will be on sentience, i.e. what it is like to perceive and
think. The approach to sapience will start with classic issues in the
philosophy of AI, the Turing Test, the blockhead, Searle's Chinese Room thought
experiment and functional role semantics as the answer to Searle. The functional
role semantics point of view will be applied to GPT-3, PaLM,
Dall-e-2 and other large language models. The second half of the course on
sentience will consider the inverted spectrum hypothesis, whether there is more
informational capacity in consciousness than in cognition, higher order
theories of consciousness and phenomenal consciousness vs access consciousness.
We will ask whether computational and biological approaches
are complementary or whether they conflict; that is, whether the mind is fundamentally
computational or whether it is fundamentally neural or whether it can be
fundamentally both.
ATTENTION: The final examination will be in class on Tuesday,
December 13th, the last class. The final exam will have 10
questions, of which the student should answer any 7. No reading material,
laptops, phones or other electronic devices will be allowed.
No late
papers. If you miss the deadline for one assignment, just do another.
Assignments
are posted on this web page. Slides are posted on Brightspace after each
lecture. Please submit your assignments electronically on Brightspace by 8 PM
EDT on the due date. If you have problems with Brightspace, send your paper by
email to Noga Gratvol. Put
your student number on your paper but not your name so that assignments can be
graded anonymously.
More
information on assignments and grading can be found below in the section Requirements, Rules and Grading
Read Jim Pryor's advice on writing a philosophy paper, Guidelines on
Writing a Philosophy Paper
All assignments are due by 8:00 PM New York time on the date due. DUE
DATES MAY BE MOVED LATER or earlier DEPENDING ON OUR PROGRESS
Assignment 1-4 are on the web; subsequent assignments will be
uploaded when their times come.
Assignment 1: The Turing Test
(Due Tuesday, September 13th)
Assignment 2: The Blockhead
(Due Tuesday, September 20th)
Assignment 3: Searle's Chinese
Room (Due Tuesday, September 27th)
Assignment 4: Functional Role
Semantics (Due Tuesday, October 4th)
Assignment 5: The Octopus Test
(due Tuesday, October 18th)
Assignment 6: Large Language
Models (Due Tuesday, October 25th)
Assignment 7: Iconic
Representation ( Due Tuesday November 1st)
Assignment 8: Inverted Spectrum
(Due Tuesday November 8rd)
Assignment 9: Higher order
thought (Due Tuesday November 15th)
Assignment 10: Phenomenal
Overflow (Due November 22nd)
Assignment 11: Prefrontal
Cortex (Due December 1st)
Assignment 12: The Zombie
Within (Due December 8th)
Readings
Note that the list of readings may be changed as
the term progresses
Please send me email about broken
links
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The Turing Test A.M. Turing, "Computing
Machinery and Intelligence", Mind
59: 433-460, 1950. Ned Block, "The
Mind as the Software of the Brain",
section 11.1.1, "Machine Intelligence" in An
Invitation to Cognitive Science, edited by
D. Osherson, L. Gleitman,
S. Kosslyn, E. Smith and S. Sternberg, MIT Press, 1995) David
Braddon-Mitchell and Frank Jackson
"Four Challenges to
Functionalism", pages 107-128 of Philosophy
of Mind and Cognition, 2nd Edition, Blackwell, 2007 Dinosaur Comics
September 29, 2006 Try Mitsuku
and the original Eliza
program Stuart Shieber,
"Lessons
from a Restricted Modern Turing Test", Communications of the Association for Computing
Machinery, volume 37, number 6, pages 70-78, 1994. Hugh Loebner,
"In Response"
(reply to Shieber) Communications of the ACM. 37.6 (June 1994) p79 Stuart Shieber,
"On Loebner's Lessons,"
Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery,
volume 37, number 6, pages 83-84, 1994. 2009 Loebner Prize Transcripts Searle's Chinese Room Argument John Searle, "Minds,
Brains and Programs" Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 3, 1980, p.417-424 Ned
Block, "The Mind as the Software of
the Brain", 11.1.2, 11.1.3, 11.1.4,
11.1.5, 11.2 Michael
Rescorla, Section 5.2 of SEP article on The
Computational Theory of Mind The
following 5 replies to Searle and Searle's rejoinder all have the same URL.
Scroll down to reach the appropriate article Daniel
Dennett, The Milk of Human
Intentionality, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, 1980, 428-430 John Haugeland, "Programs, Causal Powers and
Intentionality", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, 1980,
432-433 Jerry
Fodor, Searle on what only
Brains can Do, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, 1980, 431 Zenon Pylyshyn, "The causal powers of
machines", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, 1980, 442-444 John
Searle, "Author's
Response," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, 1980. Read
responses to Dennett, Haugeland, Fodor and Pylyshyn, 452-454 Functional Role Semantics Ned
Block, "Semantics,
Conceptual Role", Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Ned
Block, "Holism, Mental and Semantic" , Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Jerry Fodor, "Tom Swift and his Procedural
Grandmother" Cognition Volume 6,
Issue 3, 1978, Pages 229-247. (Background to Fodor: P. Johnson-Laird ,
"Procedural Semantics". Cog. 5 3 (1977), pp. 189 214) For the Tom Swift
allusion, click here. Jerry Fodor, "Having Concepts; A Brief Refutation
Of The 20th Century", Mind & Language 19, 1, 2004, p
29-47. Searle's Wall Argument John Searle,"Is
the Brain a Digital Computer?" APA Presidential
Address Ned
Block, "The
Mind as the Software of the Brain",
section 11.2.2, p 398-400 GPT-3, PaLM and other
large language models: what they can do and what they cannot do Economist, "Huge "Foundation models" are
turbo-charging AI progress", June 11, 2022. Interactive
version available here if you are logging in from NYU Dall-e 2. Try a few of the options Adam
Stroker, This
is how PaLM works, a model three times superior to
GPT-3
Kevin Lacker, Giving
GPT-3 a Turing Test, blog post
Douglas
Hofstadter, "Artificial
neural networks today are not conscious, according to Douglas Hofstadter,"
The Economist June 9, 2022. Another
link.
Melanie Mitchell,
"Can
GPT-3 Make Analogies?" Large
parts of this article can be skimmed Gary Marcus, "Horse Rides
Astronaut" May 28, 2022 Eric Schwitzgebel,
"Results:
The Computerized Philosopher: Can you distinguish Daniel Dennett from a
Computer? Blog post, July 25, 2022
Shayla Love, In
Experiment, AI Successfully Impersonates Famous Philosopher, Vice July
26, 2022
The
Octopus Test for Artificial Intelligence Emily Bender and Alexander Koller, "Climbing towards NLU: Julian Michael, To
Dissect an Octopus: Making Sense of the Form/Meaning Debate
Steven Piantadosi and Felix Hill, "Meaning without
reference in large language models", ArXiv,
10.48550/ARXIV.2208.02957, 2022 Jacob Browning and
Yann LeCun, "AI
and the Limits of Language", Noema August 23, 2022 Symbolic
Artificial Intelligence Gary Marcus and Elliot Murphy, " Three
ideas from linguistics that everyone in AI should know"
Gary Marcus, "Deep
Learning Alone isn't Getting Us to Human-Like AI", Noema,
August 11, 2022 Gary Marcus and
Scott Alexander, "Does
AI really need a paradigm shift?", June 11, 2022. Follow the links
to see the whole conversation. Extra reading:
Jacob Browning and Yann LeCun, "What
AI can Tell Us about Intelligence, June 16, 2022 Iconic mental representation and analog computation Ned
Block, "Mental Pictures and
Cognitive Science" Philosophical Review Zenon Pylyshyn, Return
of the mental image: Are there pictures in the head? Trends
in Cognitive Sciences 17, 3, 2003, 113-118 Stephen
M. Kosslyn, Giorgio Ganis, William L.
Thompson, Mental Imagery:
Against the Nihilistic Hypothesis, Trends in Cognitive Sciences,
7, 3, March, 2003 , 109-111, or here Zenon Pylyshyn, Explaining
Mental imagery: now you see it, now you don't: Reply to Kosslyn, et. al.,
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17, 3, March, 2003, 111-112. The Inverted Spectrum Alex Byrne, "Inverted
Qualia", in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, paragraphs 89-133, 243-315 Martine Nida-Rumelin, Pseudonormal Vision, Philosophical Studies 82, p.145-157 Ned Block, "Wittgenstein and Qualia", Philosophical Perspectives (21, 1) edited by John Hawthorne. 2007: 73-115 Daniel Dennett, "Quining Qualia", in A. Marcel and E.
Bisiach, eds, Consciousness in Modern Science,
Oxford University Press 1988 Higher Order Theories of
Consciousness Hakwan Lau and Richard
Brown, The Emperor's New Phenomenology? The
Empirical Case for Conscious Experiences without First-Order Representation,
in Blockheads! Essays
on Ned Block's Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness, edited by Adam Pautz and Daniel Stoljar,
2019 Ned
Block, Empirical science meets higher
order views of consciousness: Reply to Hakwan Lau
and Richard Brown, in Blockheads! Essays
on Ned Block's Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness, edited by Adam Pautz and Daniel Stoljar,
2019 Extra Reading: Joe LeDoux and Hakwan Lau
(2020). "Seeing
consciousness through the lens of memory." Current Biology 30(18):
R1018-r1022. Richard Brown, Block's
Response to Lau and Brown on Inattentional Inflation. For the response by
Block and rejoinder by Brown, scroll down. Hakwan Lau & David
Rosenthal, Empirical
support for higher-order theories of conscious awareness, Trends in
Cognitive Sciences 15, 8, 2011, 365-373 Experiments
on Phenomenal Consciousness and Access Consciousness Victor Lamme's Youtube
talk Ned Block, ""Perceptual
consciousness overflows cognitive access". Trends in Cognitive Sciences December
15, 12, 2011, p 567-575 Michael Cohen and Daniel Dennett (2011) Consciousness cannot be separated
from function. Trends in
Cognitive Sciences 15, 358-364 Michael
Cohen, Daniel Dennett Nancy Kanwisher, "What is the Bandwidth of Perceptual
Experience?" Trends in Cognitive Sciences, May 2016 Ian
Phillips, "The
Methodological Puzzle of Phenomenal Consciousness," Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society B, 2018 Mathias Michel (2022) Consciousness and the
Prefrontal Cortex: A review. Journal
of Consciousness Studies. 29(7-8), 115-157 Rafael Malach (2022), "The Role of Prefrontal Cortex
in Conscious Perception: The localist Perspective," Journal of
Consciousness Studies 29(7-8), 93-114 Extra Reading: Ian Phillips (2015) "No
watershed for overflow: Recent work on the richness of
consciousness," Philosophical Psychology, on-line September 24, 2015 Nicholas Shea, Methodological
Encounters with the Phenomenal Kind, Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, Vol. LXXXIV No. 2, March 2012 The
Zombie Within Christof
Koch & Frances Crick, The
zombie within. Nature (2001) 411, 893 David
Milner and Mel Goodale, Precis
of The Visual Brain in Action, Psyche, 1998 Matthias Michel (2022) How (not) to
underestimate unconscious perception. Mind
& Language. Theories of Consciousness Ned Block (2009),
"Comparing
Theories of Consciousness" Michael Gazzaniga (ed.) The Cognitive
Neurosciences IV, MIT Press. David Chalmers
(2003), "Consciousness and
its Place in Nature". Read the first 5
sections plus section 7. In Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield
(eds.), Blackwell
Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. pp. 102--142 (2003). REQUIREMENTS, GRADING,
AND RULES
========================================================================= Students who
successfully complete this class will be able to combine philosophical and
scientific considerations to reason about issues on the cutting edge of
scientific thinking where what is at issue is not only what the answers are
but what the questions are Slides will be posted on
Brightspace after each class. MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science |
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should register with the Moses Center for Students with Disabilities at NYU's
Henry and Lucy Moses Center for Students with Disabilities 726 Broadway, 2nd
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