In this post, we provide a brief history of the disciplines that contributed ideas, viewpoints, and techniques to AI. Like any history, this one is forced to (concentrate on a small number of people, events, and ideas and to ignore others that (also were important. We organize the history around a series of questions. We certainly would not wish to give the impression that these questions are the only ones the disciplines address or that the disciplines have all been working toward A1 as their ultimate fruition.
Philosophy
- Can formal rules be used to draw valid conclusions?
- How does the mental mind arise from a physical brain?
- Where does knowledge come from?
- How does knowledge lead to action?
Developments:
Aristotle (384 - 322 B.C.) was the first to formulate a precise set of laws governing the rational part of the mind. He developed an informal system of syllogisms for proper reasoning, which in principle allowed one to generate conclusions mechanically, given initial premises. Much later, Ramon Lull (d. 13 15) had the idea that useful reasoning could actually be carried out by a mechanical artifact. His " concept wheels " are on the cover of this book. Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) proposed that reasoning was like numerical computation, that " we add and subtract in our silent thoughts. " The automation of computation itself was already well under way; around 1500, Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) designed but did not build a mechanical calculator; recent reconstructions have shown the design to be functional. The first known calculating machine was constructed around 1623 by the German scientist Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635), although the Pascaline, built in 1642 by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), is more famous. Pascal wrote that " the arithmetical machine produces effects which appear nearer to thought than all the actions of animals. " Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 - 1716) built a mechanical device intended to carry out operations on concepts rather than numbers,
but its scope was rather limited.
Now that we have the idea of a set of rules that can describe the formal, rational part of the mind, the next step is to consider the mind as a physical system. RenC Descartes (1596 - 1650) gave the first clear discussion of the distinction between mind and matter and of the problems that arise. One problem with a purely physical conception of the mind is that it seems to leave little room for free will: if the mind is governed entirely by physical laws, then it has no more free will than a rock " deciding " to fall toward the center of the earth. Although a strong advocate of the power of reasoning, Descartes was also a proponent of dualism. He held that there is a part of the human mind (or soul or spirit) that is outside of nature, exempt from physical laws. Animals, on the other hand, did not possess this dual quality; they could be treated as machines. An alternative to dualism is materialism, which holds that the brain's operation according to the laws of physics constitutes the mind. Free will is simply the way that the perception of available choices appears to the choice process.
Given a physical mind that manipulates knowledge, the next problem is to establish the source of knowledge. The empiricism movement, starting with Francis Bacon's (1561 - 1626) Novum is characterized by a dictum of John Locke (1632 - 1704): " Nothing is in the understanding, which was not first in the senses. " David Hume's (171 1 - 1776) A Treatise of Human Nature (Hume, 1739) proposed what is now known as the principle of induction: that general rules are acquired by exposure to repeated associations between their elements. Building on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951) and Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), the famous Vienna Circle, led by Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), developed the doctrine of logical positivism. This doctrine holds that all knowledge can be characterized by logical theories connected, ultimately, to observation sentences that correspond to sensory inputs. The confirmation theory of Carnap and Carl Hempel (1905 - 1997) attempted to understand how knowledge can be acquired from experience. Carnap's book The Logical Structure of the World (1928) defined an explicit computational procedure for extracting knowledge from elementary experiences. It was probably the first theory of mind as a computational process.
The final element in the philosophical picture of the mind is the connection between knowledge and action. This question is vital to AI, because intelligence requires action as well as reasoning. Moreover, only by understanding how actions are justified can we understand how to build an agent whose actions are justifiable (or rational). Aristotle argued that actions are justified by a logical connection between goals and knowledge of the action's outcome (the last part of this extract also appears on the front cover of this book).
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