Questions tagged [philosophy-of-computer-science]
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96 questions
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AI and Aristotle’s Four Causes: The Efficient vs. The Formal Cause
I’m trying to apply Aristotle’s 'Four Causes' to a debate I had about AI, and I’m hitting a wall.
Here is how I see it...
When I use an AI, I am the Efficient Cause (the source of movement). I’m the ...
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A couple of questions on Wheeler's "it from bit" and "pregeometry" ideas
Physicist John A Wheeler proposed an interesting idea which he summarized in a phrase "it from bit" which basically proposes that the universe and its laws of physics (including the most ...
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Could the idea of compression show that AGI is very unlikely? [closed]
Let’s assume that the universe is like a machine, where the machine evolves according to the law of physics from the beginning of time.
Now, our brains are obviously part of this universe. There is an ...
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If the universe were exactly modeled by continuous structures, would a Turing machine still be the most powerful computer?
Turing machines were initially conceptualised as an abstraction of the human way of solving problems : loading things into memory, carrying out instructions, updating memory, etc. But as it turned out,...
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Is mind uploading under these conditions logically impossible? [closed]
through an injection
upload happening at the exact time of death
without it being a copy
assuming a copy is not the real you
without replacing the physical brain or body
also assuming that ...
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If we could somehow take all the experiences/memories of every human who ever lived and merged them, could we make an objective qualia map? [closed]
This is really reaching but imagine you could take all the conscious memories and experiences of all humans starting from Cro-Magnan and Neanderthal minds and then every modern human up until now and ...
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What are analytic philosophical resolutions to the Chinese room argument?
The Chinese room argument is a thought experiment where one considers a room with a person, who doesn't speak Chinese, and an extremely large instruction book of every possible response to any ...
user103887
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How do computer models, languages, and algorithms relate to philosophy?
I recently articulated to myself how I was confusing my theories about stuff, with the stuff, or with my intuition about the stuff.
So, for example, if I have a piece of paper, folds are easy to keep ...
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Can we expect wisdom in AGIs, & would we know it if we saw it?
I was thinking about what it means to approach other humans with proper skepticism of whether they are conscious, or self-aware, or have whatever we think an AGI must have to be 'like us.'
We feel ...
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Is AI ethics a new area of philosophy?
In the near future I may take a course called "AI ethics". I know almost nothing about ethics (just Aristotle's 'Nichomachean Ethics' and Kant's second critique), however I wonder if AI ...
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Do LLMs weaken Penrose’s consciousness argument?
I've read Penrose's Emperor's New Mind (ENM, 1989), and I am now half-way through Shadows of the Mind (SM, 1994). I read ENM in 2021, and I found his argument compelling in its generality and clarity ...
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Do philosophers distinguish between computable/non-computable existence?
My background is in Computer Science, so apologies if this question is more appropriate for a theoretical computer science forum or if it is not phrased in standard philosophical language.
Consider ...
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Is the development of AI inevitable? [closed]
Whether the development of AI is similar to other human inventions such as steam engines and internal combustion engines is an inevitable process of human development.
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Is it acceptable to use concepts from category theory in non-mathematical contexts?
I am writing a text in which I refer to an "isomorphism" between two correspondent ideas from two texts written at different times. What I mean is that the ideas in both are structuraly ...
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Are 3D tensors and beyond redundant? [closed]
If the universe’s complexity can be reduced to pairwise interactions between entities, why do we need higher-dimensional structures like rank-3 tensors? Consider the following argument:
Any system—...
