Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert L. Dreyfus (* October 15, 1929 in Terre Haute, Indiana ) is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He mainly deals with phenomenology, existentialism, the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence (AI ) and the philosophy of psychology and literature.

Background

Dreyfus was known for his criticism of the artificial intelligence and the author of the classic 1972 book What computers can not do. The limits of artificial intelligence. A revised version appeared in 1979 under the title What Computers Still Can not Thu Dreyfus taught 1960-1968 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He worked for the Rand Corporation in 1965 and was a visiting professor at the University of Frankfurt and at Hamilton College in Clinton ( Oneida County, New York).

In 1964, Dreyfus published his book Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence, which attacked the work of Allen Newell and Herbert Simon. Both were the leading minds in the field of artificial intelligence. Dreyfus not only provided the results of the two in question, but also criticized their basic requirements (intelligence is produced by the manipulation of physical symbols to the corresponding formal rules). He believes that the research program of AI was doomed to failure. He was, however, in 1967 the first man, who lost against a chess program ( against MacHack VI by Richard Greenblatt ).

Dreyfus and Heidegger

In addition to his work in the field of artificial intelligence, Dreyfus is known for his work on the European philosophers, especially Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, he made analytically trained philosophers accessible.

So Dreyfus was among the first American translation group for Heidegger's Being and Time. This was in the fifties when John Wild in his seminars at Harvard, had it translated at Northwestern University and Yale parts of Being and Time. Dreyfus was then graduated Harvard student. As this 1952 during a visit to the Oxford Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor met, the first small circle formed on Heidegger is interested.

Dreyfus ' book What Computers Can not Do (1972 ) is marked in substantial parts by a reception Heidegger 's philosophy. Heidegger's concept of the world (also see the article in Being and Time ) stands for Dreyfus to the possibility of artificial intelligence for two reasons against:

First, take us in the world never individual things opposite, which we then only attach a meaning, but things are always involved in a meaning wholeness for us: The hammer is for hammering there, nails holding the boards together for a house, the house serves the housing, protection against bad weather, etc., etc. Dreyfus linked here to Heidegger's concepts of "stuff " to the "stuff wholeness " and " Bewandtniszusammenhangs ". However, this understanding of things can never be made completely explicit in propositional form ( apophantisches " as " know-what ), but is always only one being the practical approach to things always takes accessible ( hermeneutic " as " know-how ).

Secondly, for Dreyfus dealing with the world is not much that we calculate possibilities were, in practical situations. We try, for example, when we see the sun not to touch it, we do not speak with stones: but all this would have to start from the representatives of artificial intelligence, are made by a computer brain. This keeps Dreyfus due to the infinity of possibilities to be calculated for not feasible, because such a machine needed an infinite set of rules to deal with the things in the world deal with it.

Dreyfus had a number of students who apply to Heidegger, such as

  • Charles Guignon (Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge (1983)),
  • John Richardson ( Existential Epistemology: A Heideggerian Critique of the Cartesian Project ( 1986) ),
  • John Haugeland ( 's existence Disclosedness (1989)),
  • William Blattner (Heidegger 's Temporal Idealism (1999)).

It is indicative of the CONTINUED to Dreyfus Heidegger reception that he and his students turn to almost exclusively epistemological phenomena. So Heidegger's concept of being-in -world - of Edmund Husserl Searlschen conception of intentionality is opposed, but the entire second half of Being and Time, so the themes of temporality and historicity neglected. However, Dreyfus is currently preparing a new edition of his commentary Being -in- the-world, in which the last half of Being and Time is to find attention.

Criticism of Dreyfus at the KI

The criticism of Dreyfus at the artificial intelligence (AI) based on how he looks at the four primary assumptions of AI research. The first two assumptions, which he criticizes, he calls biological and psychological assumptions. The biological assumption is that the brain with computer hardware and the mind with computer software can be compared. The psychological assumption is that the mind works by performing discrete computations (in the form of algorithmic rules ) on discrete representations of symbols.

Dreyfus argues that the credibility of the psychological assumption is based on two other: the epistemological and the ontological assumption. The epistemological assumption is that all activities (of animate and inanimate objects) can be described in advance by mathematical rules and laws. Researchers in the field ( AI ) argue that intelligence is nothing more than to follow formal laws. The ontological assumption is that reality is actually independent from a lot from each other, atomic ( indivisible ) facts exists (see fuzzy logic). They justified this by the fact that people use internal representations of reality.

Based on these two assumptions, claim researchers in the field ( AI ), that cognition arises by manipulating internal symbols by internal rules. That is why human behavior is largely context-free. Therefore, a real scientific psychology is possible that fully describes the internal rules of the human mind, just as the laws of physics describe the external laws of the physical world. However, these same key assumption denies Dreyfus. In other words, he argues that we will never understand our own behavior exactly as we objects, such as in physics or chemistry, to understand, so as we look at ourselves as a thing, predicted its behavior by objective and context-free scientific laws can be. According to Dreyfus, a context free psychology is a contradiction in terms.

The arguments of Dreyfus against this position are from the phenomenological tradition (especially the work of Martin Heidegger). Heidegger argued that our being is highly contextual, as opposed to the cognitive view of the AI ​​is based, and the two context-free assumptions are wrong. Dreyfus does not contradict that we can view the human (or other) activity as determined by law, just as we can view the reality as a collection of atomic facts - if we want. But it does because of a big leap towards establishing: Just because we can see things or want it an objective fact and thus the case is, therefore. In fact, argues Dreyfus that they do not (necessarily ) are the case and therefore any research program that accepts it is so, very quickly comes to profound theoretical and practical problems. Therefore, the current efforts of researchers in this field are to fail damned.

It is important to emphasize that Dreyfus does not believe that AI is impossible in principle, only the current research program is severely flawed. Instead, he argues that in order to obtain a machine with human-like intelligence, it is necessary to give it a human-like existence in the world. Such a device needs a body, similar to ours, and a social culture ( as a society ) similar to our ( This view is shared by psychologists in the Embodied psychology ( Lakoff and Johnson 1999) and in the tradition of distributed cognition: Their opinions similar as surprising of Rodney Brooks and others in the field of Artificial Intelligence ).

Honors

The Erasmus University Rotterdam gave Dreyfus an honorary doctorate: For his brilliant and very influential work in the field of artificial intelligence and for his equally outstanding contribution to the analysis and interpretation of European philosophers in the twentieth century.

Writings

  • Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence. In 1964.
  • Continental Philosophy: An Introduction.
  • What Computers Can not Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence. 1972, ISBN 0-06-090613-8. German: What computers can not do. The limits of artificial intelligence. 1989, ISBN 3-610-04723-2
  • What Computers Still Can not Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. 1979, ISBN 0-262-54067-3. Reprint: MIT Press, 1992, ISBN 0-262-04134-0
  • With Stuart Dreyfus: Mind Over Machine. Free Press, 1986.
  • Being in the World: Division 1 in 1991.
  • Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honour of Hubert L. Dreyfus. MIT Press, 2000.
  • On the Internet. Routledge 2001, ISBN 0-415-22807-7.
  • Internet. , 2002.
  • Me Sean Kelly: All Things Shining. Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. New York, 2011.
Clinton (Oneida County, New York) Charles Taylor (philosopher) Ontology George Lakoff Integrated Authority File
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