perm filename MENTAL.2[F76,JMC]1 blob sn#255885 filedate 1977-01-01 generic text, type C, neo UTF8
COMMENT ⊗   VALID 00005 PAGES
C REC  PAGE   DESCRIPTION
C00001 00001
C00002 00002	#. Airline Reservation Systems
C00003 00003	Metaphysics and epistemology - 
C00007 00004	#. The "argument from design".
C00009 00005
C00010 ENDMK
C⊗;
#. Airline Reservation Systems



Metaphysics and epistemology - 

	This paper following (McCarthy and Hayes 1969) has used these
terms in ways that correspond reasonably well to the dictionary
definitions,  but which need to be explained.

	An intelligent computer program must be equipped with certain
framework within which facts of science and of common sense can be
put.  The necessary notions include time (at least in the form
of a precedence relation between events), events, states, objects,
the persistence of objects in time, causality, ability, the
creation and destruction of objects, the locaation and motion
of objects in space, mass terms, and actors with their ability
and inability to achieve goals.  I have called this domain
metaphysics, because its general formulation should be neutral
between physical theories.  This framework must allow the expression
of facts of particular sciences and also facts of what may be
called %2common sense physics%1 - the knowledge that allows us,
for example, to predict the effects of spilling a cup of coffee
on the table without using the science of hydrodynamics.  Common
sense science gives less information than science proper, but it
demands less input data and less understanding as well.
Formalizing common sense science encounters difficulties not
met in science proper, because of the need to use extremely
incomplete information and imprecise theories.

Much recent analytical philosophy can be regarded as common sense
science, but the problem of partial information hasn't really
been directly faced.

	The word ⊗epistemology has always concerned the study of
what can be known, but this is ordinarily taken as referring to
very general knowledge.  For AI, we need to study what can
be known under particular circumstances of observation and previous
knowledge and how this knowledge can be represented in the
memory of a computer, and how new knowledge can be obtained.
The representation of facts what other's know is particularly
important, and again analytical philosophy has studied many
of the questions important for AI.
Two technical issues that have been studied in the Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory are "knowing what" as compared to
"knowing that" and the formalization of a theory of non-knowledge.
Giving sufficient conditions for proving that someone does not
know a fact.
#. The "argument from design".

	From the AI point of view, the most powerful argument for
materialism may be called %2"the argument from design"%1.  Namely,
if one sets out to make an intelligent machine, there seems to be
no way to do it without producing something with the following
characteristics:

	1. There is no way to assure that the world
can be defined in terms of its sense impressions, because there
is no way to insure that it can discover everything we humans
can discover.  Thus even if I am some kind of empiricist, my
intelligent program can't correctly (from my notion of correct)
be an empiricist.

	2. Suppose we provide it with a certain way of representing
general hypotheses about the world.  There is no way we can insure
that the basic concepts we provide it with are more than approximations.