Artificial Agential Intelligence

Abstract

Since artificial intelligence (AI) emerged in the mid-20th century, it has incurred many theoretical criticisms (Dreyfus, H. [1972] What Computers Can’t Do (MIT Press, New York); Dreyfus, H. [1992] What Computers Still Can’t Do (MIT Press, New York); Searle, J. [1980] Minds, brains and programs, Behav. Brain Sci. 3, 417–457; Searle, J. [1984] Minds, Brains and Sciences (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA); Searle, J. [1992] The Rediscovery of the Mind (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA); Fodor, J. [2002] The Mind Doesn’t Work that Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA).). The technical improvements of machine learning and deep learning, though, have been continuing and many breakthroughs have occurred recently. This makes theoretical considerations urgent again: can this new wave of AI fare better than its precursors in emulating or even having human-like minds? I propose a cautious yet positive hypothesis: current AI might create human-like mind, but only if it incorporates certain conceptual rewiring: it needs to shift from a task-based to an agent-based framework, which can be dubbed “Artificial Agential Intelligence” (AAI). It comprises practical reason (McDowell, J. [1979] Virtue and reason, Monist 62(3), 331–350; McDowell, J. [1996] Mind and World (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA)), imaginative understanding (Campbell, J. [2020] Causation in Psychology (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA)), and animal knowledge (Sosa, E. [2007] A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, volume 1 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK); Sosa, E. [2015] Judgment and Agency (Oxford University Press, Cambridge, MA)). Moreover, I will explore whether and in what way neuroscience-inspired AI and predictive coding (Hassabis, D., Kumaran, D., Summerfield, C., & Botvinick, M. [2017] Neuroscience-inspired artificial intelligence, Neuron 95(2), 245–258) can help carry out this project.