AI and Mind

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

One long-running goal of the field of artificial intelligence is to create artificial minds. One significant impediment to achieving this goal, and to determining when it has been achieved, is that we don’t fully understand what minds are. We are not sure what it takes to have a mind, or what the relationship between minds, brains, and bodies is. A second issue is that we also don’t fully understand the most sophisticated contemporary AI systems. These systems are “black boxes”: they are opaque even to AI researchers and developers. In this seminar, we will study philosophy of mind and cognitive science. We will also study contemporary AI systems and the interpretability research concerning how they work. We will seek to understand what it would take for an AI system to have a mind. This will require facing some of the most difficult questions in philosophy and cognitive science. We will also consider what we can learn about human minds from research into AI.