Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence 2025
Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence 2025
Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith
MAP, USI, Lugano, Spring 2025
Introduction
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the subfield of Computer Science devoted to developing programs that enable computers to display behavior that can (broadly) be characterized as intelligent. On the strong version, the ultimate goal of AI is to create what is called General Artificial Intelligence (AGI), by which is meant an artificial system that is as intelligent as a human being.
Since its inception in the middle of the last century AI has enjoyed repeated cycles of enthusiasm and disappointment (AI summers and winters). Recent successes of ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) have opened a new era of popularization of AI. For the first time, AI tools have been created which are immediately available to the wider population, who for the first time can have real hands-on experience of what AI can do.
These developments in AI open up a series of questions such as:
- Will the powers of AI continue to grow in the future, and if so will they ever reach the point where they can be said to have intelligence equivalent to or greater than that of a human being?
- Could we ever reach the point where we can accept the thesis that an AI system could have something like consciousness or sentience?
- Could we reach the point where an AI system could be said to behave ethically, or to have responsibility for its actions?
- Can quantum computers enable a stronger AI than what we have today?
- Can a computer have desires, a will, and emotions?
- Can a computer have responsibility for its behavior?
- Could a machine have something like a personal identity? Would I really survive if the contents of my brain were uploaded to the cloud?
We will describe in detail how stochastic AI works, and consider these and a series of other questions at the borderlines of philosophy and AI. The class will close with presentations of papers on relevant topics given by students.
Some of the material for this class is derived from our book
and from the companion volume
- Symposium on Why Machines Will Never Rule the World — Guest editor, Janna Hastings, University of Zurich
which appeared as a special issue of the public access journal Cosmos + Taxis in early 2024.
Faculty
Jobst Landgrebe is the founder and CEO of Cognotekt, GmBH, an AI company based in Cologne specialised in the design and implementation of holistic AI solutions. He has 20 years experience in the AI field, 8 years as a management consultant and software architect. He has also worked as a physician and mathematician, and he views AI itself -- to the extent that it is not an elaborate hype -- as a branch of applied mathematics. CUrrently his primary focus is in the biomathematics of cancer.
Barry Smith is one of the world's most widely cited philosophers. He has contributed primarily to the field of applied ontology, which means applying philosophical ideas derived from analytical metaphysics to the concrete practical problems which arise where attempts are made to compare or combine heterogeneous bodies of data.
Grading
- Essay with presentation: 80%
- Essay with no presentation: 95%
- Presentation: 15%
- Class Participation 5%
Draft Schedule
Monday, February 17 (14:30-17:15) Introduction
Part 1: An introduction to the course: Impact of philosophy on AI; impact of AI on philosophy
Part 2: What are the essential marks of human intelligence?
The classical psychological definitions of intelligence are:
- A. the ability to adapt to new situations (applies both to humans and to animals)
- B. a very general mental capability (possessed only by humans) that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience
Can a machine be intelligent in either of these senses?
Readings:
- Linda S. Gottfredson. Mainstream Science on Intelligence. In: Intelligence 24 (1997), pp. 13–23.
- Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith: There is no Artificial General Intelligence
Background: Ersatz Definitions, Anthropomorphisms, and Pareidolia
- There's no 'I' in 'AI', Steven Pemberton, Amsterdam, December 12, 2024
- 1. Esatz definitions: using words like 'thinks' as in 'the machine is thinking', but with meanings quite different from those we use when talking about human beings. As when we define 'flying' as moving through the air, and then jumping up and down and saying "look, I'm flying!"
- 2. Pareidolia: a psychological phenomenon that causes people to see patterns, objects, or meaning in ambiguous or unrelated stimuli
- 3. If you can't spot irony, you're not intelligent
Tuesday February 18 (09:30-12:15) Limits of AI?
1. Surveys the technical fundamentals of AI: Methods, mathematics, usage as well
2. Outlines the theory of complex systems documented in our book
3. Shows why AI cannot model complex systems adequately and synoptically, and why they therefore cannot reach a level of intelligence equal to that of human beings.
Background: Will AI Destroy Humanity? A Soho Forum Debate (Spoiler: Jobst won)
Wednesday, February 19 (13:30 - 16:15) Transhumanism and digital immortality
1. Surveys the full spectrum of transhumanism and its cultural origins.
2. Debunk the feasibility of radically improving human beings via technology.
Background: TESCREALISM, or: why AI gods are so passionate about creating Artificial General Intelligence
Thursday, February 20 (9:30 - 12:15) Can a machine be conscious?
Machines cannot have intentionality; they cannot have experiences which are about something.
- Searle: Minds, Brains, and Programs
The machine will
Computers cannot have a will, because computers don't give a damn. Therefore there can be no machine ethics
- The lack of the giving-a-damn-factor is taken by Yann LeCun as a reason to reject the idea that AI might pose an existential risk to humanity – an AI will have no desire for self-preservation “Almost half of CEOs fear A.I. could destroy humanity five to 10 years from now — but ‘A.I. godfather' says an existential threat is ‘preposterously ridiculous’” Fortune, June 15, 2023. See also here.
Implications of the absence of a machine will:
- The problem of the singularity (when machines will take over from humans) will not arise
- The idea of digital immortality will never be realized Slides
- The idea that human beings are simulations can be rejected
- There can be no AI ethics (only: ethics governing human beings when they use AI)
- Fermi's paradox is solved
Monday, April 28 (14:30 - 17:30)
Are we living in a simulation?
The Fermi Paradox
Bostrom's Simulation Argument
David Chalmers' Reality+
- This (or this) can serve as background reading
Models and Ontologies in Mathematics and Physics
Tuesday, April 29 (13:30 - 16:30)
An introduction to the statistical foundations of AI
The types of AI
- Deterministic AI
- Good old fashioned AI (GOFAI)
- Basic stochastic AI
- How regression works
- Advanced stochastic AI
- Neural networks and deep learning
- Hybrid
- Neurosymbolic AI
- Background reading: Why machines will never rule the world, chapter 8
Wednesday April 30 (13:30 - 16:30)
Personal knowledge
- Explicit, implicit, practical, personal and tacit knowledge
- Knowing how vs Knowing that
- Personal knowledge and science
- Personal knowledge and creativity
- Personal knowledge and empathy
- Personal knowledge and entrepreneurship
- Personal knowledge and leadership
- Room: A23
Complex Systems and Cognitive Science: Why the Replication Problem is here to stay
- The 'replication problem' is the the inability of scientific communities to independently confirm the results of scientific work. Much has been written on this problem especially as it arises in (social) psychology, and on potential solutions under the heading of 'open science'. But we will see that the replication problem has plagued medicine as a positive science since its beginnings (Virchov and Pasteur). This problem has become worse over the last 30 years and has massive consequences for healthcare practice and policy.
Background:
- Reproducibility of Scientific Results, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2018
- Science has been in a “replication crisis” for a decade
- Irreproducibility Crisis and the Lehman Crash, Barry Smith, Youtube 2020
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Friday May 2 (13:30-16:30) Student Presentations and Concluding Survey
Background Material
An Introduction to AI for Philosophers
(AI experts are invited to criticize what I have to say in this talk)
An Introduction to Philosophy for Computer Scientists
(Philosophers are invited to criticize what I have to say in this talk)
