Michael A. Arbib - In search of the person: philosophical explorations in cognitive science
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In search of the person: philosophical explorations in cognitive science
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The University of Massachusetts Press Amherst, 1985
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Copyright 1985 by The University of Massachusetts Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America LC 85-14152 ISBN 0-87023-499-4 cloth; 500-1 paper
Designed by Barbara Werden Drawings by June Gaeke Set In Linotron Trump Medieval at G & S Typesetters, Inc. Printed and bound by Cushing-Malloy, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Arbib, Michael A. In search of the person. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Artificial intelligence. 2. Cognition. 3. Neuropsychology. I. Title. Q335.A731985006.385-14152 ISBN 0-87023-499-4 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-87023-500-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
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This volume is dedicated to Mary Hesse in gratitude for three years of lively debate and to Rolando Lara and Elena Sandoval for all that was and all that might have been
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Preface
For the last twenty-five years, I have been trying to understand both the workings of brains and new approaches to the design of intelligent machines. Such concerns often led me to ponder philosophical questions about the nature of mind and knowledge, but more narrowly scientific concerns left too little time to pursue them. However, when the University of Edinburgh invited me to deliver the Gifford Lectures I accepted with alacrity, not only because of the great honor involved, but also because I knew that the responsibility of preparing these lectures (I was given three years' formal notice) would force me to at last find time for the serious study of philosophy.
But this book is not the serious tome that such study led me to produce. That tome is The Construction of Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1986) which goes far beyond the scope of the Giffords. It was written with Mary Hesse, with whom I was invited to share the ten lectures in November 1983, and developed as we strove to understand our points of agreement and disagreement for Edinburgh. The present book grew from a
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series of five "Post Gifford" lectures given at the University of Massachusetts, under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, designed to share some of the ideas from Edinburgh with friends, colleagues, and students. It is self-contained, and yet will, I hope, invite a number of readers to go on to read the more detailed and far-reaching account in The Construction of Reality.
The "Interview by Way of Introduction" opens the book by placing my philosophical explorations in the context of an ongoing concern with cognitive science in general and brain theory in particular.
Chapter 1 then addresses the question: To what extent can cognitive science (including artificial intelligence) give an adequate account of the person? I shall suggest that there are no limits to artificial intelligence as such, but still argue that there is much that is specifically human about our intelligence which depends both on our bodies and on our interactions within society. An intelligent machine must learn, and some element of logical inconsistency is inescapable in any system that makes intelligent decisions while interacting with a complex and changing world. This answers critics who see Gdel's Incompleteness Theorem as proving the impossibility of machine intelligence.
A central theme of this book is to build on Piaget's study of assimilation and accommodation in the child and my own work in brain theory and artificial intelligence to develop a schema theory which will link cognitive science to the study of persons in society. I seek to show how the hundreds of thousands of schemas in a single brain may cohere to constitute a single person, thus setting the stage for our discussion of freedom of the individual. Schemas provide the bridge between the unitary self and the billions-fold complexity of the activity of the neurons of the brain.
Chapter 2 outlines a schema-theoretic account of language as
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a socially constructed reality, while showing how that reality is embodied in the schemas of individual members of the language community, presenting a neo-Piagetian view of language acquisition. I explore both the commonality and individuality of the schemas held by different people. This account supports a view of language as metaphor, which I show to be necessary for philosophy of science as well as being central to the study of religious language and myth.
Freud provides a link from the brain-theoretic dimension of schema theory to what might seem beyond the reach of science, namely a concern with myth. Freud started as a neurologist, yet came to ascribe reality to the Oedipus myth as a causal factor in both ontogeny and phylogeny. In chapter 3, I offer a schema-theoretic account of consciousness and then compare this with Freud's theory to highlight the contributions of schema theory and also the extent to which it has not yet come to terms with the "darkness of the soul," as seen in those phenomena which led Freud to his theory of repression. I then explore Freud's views on religion both for his theory of projectionGod as constructand for his pessimistic view of civilization.
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1985