Fundamental Questions

I first heard about AI in 1969 from Max Clowes, then an AI vision researcher, when I was a philosophy lecturer at Sussex University (with a background in mathematics and physics). Gradually I came to realise that the best way to make progress in most areas of philosophy (e.g. philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and probably even aesthetics) was to do AI. Attempting (and usually failing) to design and implement working fragments of minds with human-like capabilities is a much more rapid route to understanding the real problems than the typical arm-chair analysis and smoke-filled seminar discussions of philosophers (in those days). That was partly because apriori philosophical analyses are usually based on ignorance of requirements and constraints that must be met by working systems and also ignorance of the full range of possible mechanisms, architectures, forms of representation, virtual machine types, etc.