[northern-lights]

> there is a function capable of transforming information into "thinked information", or what we usually call reasoning. We know that function exists, because we ourselves are an example of such function.

We mistakenly assume, they are true because perhaps we want them to be true. But we have no proof that either of these are true.

[genewitch]

Descartes disagrees.

[s_m_t]

And? Mind-body dualism as Descartes imagined has been practically disproven on almost every front.

[bigstrat2003]

Mind-body dualism has nothing to do with this. The point is that, as Descartes observed, the fact that I myself am thinking proves that I exist. This goes directly against what northern-lights said, when he said that we have no proof that reasoning exists or that we do it.

[viccis]

Kant addressed this Cartesian duality in the "The paralogisms of pure reason" section of the Transcendental Dialectic within his Critique of Pure Reason. He points out that the "I" in "I think, therefore I am" is a different "I" in the subject part vs the object part of that phrase.

Quick context: His view of what constitutes a subject, which is to say a thinking person in this case, is one which over time (and time is very important here) observes manifold partial aspects about objects through perception, then through apprehension (the building of understanding through successive sensibilities over time) the subject schematizes information about the object. Through logical judgments, from which Kant derives his categories, we can understand the object and use synthetic a priori reasoning about the object.

So for him, the statement "I am" means simply that you are a subject who performs this perception and reasoning process, as one's "existence" is mediated and predicated on doing such a process over time. So then "I think, therefore I am" becomes a tautology. Assuming that the "I" in "I am" exists as an object, which is to say a thing of substance, one which other thinking subjects could reason about, becomes what he calls "transcendental illusion", which is the application of transcendental reasoning not rooted in sensibility. He calls this metaphysics, and he focuses on the soul (the topic at hand here), the cosmos, and God as the three topics of metaphysics in his Transcendental Dialectic.

I think that in general, discussion about epistemology with regard to AI would be better if people started at least from Kant (either building on his ideas or critical of them), as his CPR really shaped a lot of the post-Enlightenment views on epistemology that a lot of us carry with us without knowing. In my opinion, AI is vulnerable to a criticism that empiricists like Hume applied to people (viewing people as "bundles of experience" and critiquing the idea that we can create new ideas independent of our experience). I do think that AI suffers from this problem, as estimating a generative probability distribution over data means that no new information can be created that is not simply a logically ungrounded combination of previous information. I have not read any discussion of how Kant's view of our ability to make new information (application of categories grounded by our perception) might influence a way to make an actual thinking machine. It would be fascinating to see an approach that combines new AI approaches as the way the machine perceives information and then combines it with old AI approaches that build on logic systems to "reason" in a way that's grounded in truth. The problem with old AI is that it's impossible to model everything with logic (the failure of logical posivitism should have warned them), however it IS possible to combine logic with perception like Kant proposed.

I hope this makes sense. I've noticed a lack of philosophical rigor around the discussion of AI epistemology, and it feels like a lot of American philosophy research, being rooted in modern analytical tradition that IMO can't adapt easily to an ontological shift from human to machine as the subject, hasn't really risen to the challenge yet.

[scifiducky]

This critique misses the point of Descartes. It can be reformulated as something like "a thought has happened, therefore we can know at least that something that thinks exists." Getting caught up in the subject-object semantics has no bearing on Descartes approach to objectivity. This is no more tautological than seeing a car and then concluding that cars exist.

[viccis]

How do you define "exists"?

Remember, this is about Cartesian duality (mind-brain duality), so the key question here is not whether a brain exists, but whether the mind exists independently of it.

[riwsky]

“Cogito ergo cogito”?