Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing it Would Require Making it More Heideggerian

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments This review essay is a revised version of my Barwise Prize talk delivered at the 2006 Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, which will be published by MIT Press in Philip Husbands, Owen Holland and Michael Wheeler (Eds.), The Mechanisation of Mind in History (Forthcoming, title to be confirmed). Notes Notes 1. Roger Schank proposed what he called "scripts." He tells us: "A script is a structure that describes appropriate sequences of events in a particular context. A script is made up of slots and requirements about what can fill those slots. The structure is an interconnected whole, and what is in one slot affects what can be in another. A script is a predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions that defines a well-known situation" (Schank as cited in Preston it is to allow oneself to respond to their call, which is made upon it independently of any representation" (p. 139). 5. According to Heidegger, intentional content isn't in the mind, nor in some third realm (as it is for Husserl), nor in the world; it isn't anywhere. It's a way of being-towards. 6. It's important to realize that when he introduces the term 'understanding', Heidegger (Citation1982, p. 276) explains that he means a kind of know-how. 7. This way of putting the source of significance covers both animals and people. By the time he published Being and Time, however, Heidegger was interested exclusively in the special kind of significance found in the world opened up by human beings who are defined by the stand they take on their own being. We might call this meaning. In this paper I'm putting the question of uniquely human meaning aside to concentrate on the sort of significance we share with animals. 8. I'm over simplifying here. Wheeler does note that Heidegger has an account of online, involved problem solving that Heidegger calls dealing with the "un-ready-to-hand." But while for Heidegger and for Wheeler coping at its best deals directly with the ready-to-hand with no place for representations of any sort, for Heidegger but not for Wheeler all un-ready-to-hand coping takes place on the background of an even more basic nonrepresentational holistic coping which allows copers to orient themselves in the world. As we shall see, it is this basic coping, not any kind of problem solving, agential or subagential, that enables Heideggerian AI to avoid the frame problem. 9. Just how Hebbian learning is translated into an attractor is not something Freeman claims to know in detail. He simply notes: "The attractors are not shaped by the stimuli directly, but by previous experience with those stimuli … and neuromodulators as well as sensory input. Together these modify the synaptic connectivity within the neuropil and thereby also the attractor landscape" (2000, p. 62). 10. Quotations from Freeman's books have been reviewed by him to correspond to his latest vocabulary and way of thinking about the phenomena. 11. In this connection Freeman speaks of "expectations" and a brain function he calls "preafference" but I suspect that this is bad phenomenology leading to dubious neuro-speculation. Once the stimulus has been classified by selecting an attractor that says eat this now, the problem for the brain is just how this eating is to be done. Online coping needs a stimuli-driven feedback policy dictating how to move rapidly over the terrain and approach and eat the carrot. Here, an actor-critic version of temporal difference reinforcement learning (TDRL) is needed to augment the Freeman model. According to TDRL, learning the appropriate movements in the current situation requires learning the expected final award as well as the movements. These two functions are learned slowly through repeated experiences. Then the brain can monitor directly whether the expectation of reward is being met as the rabbit approaches the carrot to eat it. There need be no expectation of a goal state. If the expected final reward suddenly decreases due, for example, to the current inaccessibility of the carrot, the relevant part of the brain prompts the olfactory bulb to switch to a new attractor or perspective on the situation that dictates a different learned action, say dragging the carrot with its expected reward. Only after a skill is thus acquired can the current stimuli, plus the past history of responding to related stimuli now wired into cell assemblies, produce the rapid responses required for on-going skillful coping. 12. If it seems that much of the time we don't experience any such pull toward the optimal, Merleau-Ponty would no doubt respond that the sensitivity to deviation is nonetheless guiding one's coping, just as an airport radio beacon doesn't give a warning signal unless the plane strays off course, and then, let us suppose, the plane gets a signal whose intensity corresponds to how far off course it is and the intensity of the signal diminishes as it approaches getting back on course. The silence that accompanies being on course doesn't mean the beacon isn't continually guiding the plane, likewise in the case of the absence of tension felt in perception.