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DOI: https://doi.org/10.22503/inftars.XXIV.2024.2.5
Language: en
Title: The coherent emergentist concept of machines; or why the popular concept of artificial intelligence is a materialist anthropomorphism
Abstract: The concept of artificial intelligence is very popular in both science and culture today. Similarly, the concept of emergence has become quite popular during the last decades in the sciences. For example, it is commonplace in the case of machines to speak of an overall blueprint and several different material components; thus, we can regard the blueprint as a kind of comprehensive emergent additive. However, is it true then that the machine, due to this plus component, is not material? Practically nobody wants to acknowledge that. Still, in practice, there are no machines without added blueprints. In my paper, based on Samuel Alexander’s original concept of emergence, I will investigate these problems and contradictions, which stem from the materialist interpretation of the concept, and I will present a coherent emergentist concept of machines, according to which machines are clearly a unique kind between simple material things and living beings.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, emergentism, materialism, extended mind, Samuel Alexander, Michael Polanyi