Is a Science of the Mind possible? According to some people, this question has a simple answer: there is already a Science of the Mind, so of course it must be possible. This is the answer we would get from researchers in a new field, formed from the union of four traditional academic disciplines. The field is Cognitive Science and its four component fields are: philosophy, psychology, linguistics and computer science. It is an extremely active area of research, and it draws some of the brightest people from all four disciplines, along with large amounts of money to fund the research. The one branch of it that has been most in the news lately is Artificial Intelligence, or "AI" for short. There are a lot of reasons it has been in the news. Two of the most widely publicized ones are these.
First, there is competition with Japanese industry. In 1981, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) decided to commit a large block of resources to building what has been dubbed a "Fifth Generation Machine" - a machine capable of thought and language in just the same sense as a human being is capable, only much faster much more reliable and with a much larger memory. Large Japanese corporations gave some of their best, youngest and brightest personnel time off so that they could spend a decade or more on designing and building the first fifth generation machine. MITI does not make such decisions frivolously; billions of dollars were committed. The nation that produces the first fifth generation machine will enjoy an enormous economic advantage during the next century; some believe that it will dominate the world economy for decades to come. American corporations were scared. So they formed a consortium (Microelectronics and Computer Consortium) to pool resources and personnel, and they are likewise committing billions to developing a fifth generation machine. Without government support, the consortium fell apart. But the work continues at other sites. This work is already having an impact on corporate practice and planning. It is not unreasonable to assume that the kinds of lives you live - what economists call "quality of life" - and the kinds of careers you and your children can have, depend heavily on the results of this race for machines that (who?) can think.
The second reason that AI stays in the news is its hoped for role in various weapons systems. Already, hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into AI research in the hope that it will result in smart weapons and weapons systems, able to cope more effectively with the millions of split second decisions that would need to be made in defending against an all-out nuclear attack on the USA. There is much debate about whether or not the money is well-spent, but it is significant that there are people on both sides of the issue. AI has that much credibility.
Where does AI's credibility come from? Why are so many smart people willing, collectively, to bet billions on it? There are two sources: its past successes, which have been rather meager, and its driving theory, which is of interest to us.
We can state that theory loosely and metaphorically by saying that we think with our brains, and that the brain is a computer - a meat machine, as some have called it. This metaphor - the computer model of the mind - immediately encounters both misunderstanding and resistance, so we need to be careful about its proper interpretation.
The main misunderstanding that we have to guard against is taking "computer" or "machine" too narrowly, to refer simply to those familiar examples of the things that we often see around us.
The objects to which we typically apply those terms are computers and machines, but they do not exhaust the content of the concept as cognitive scientists use it. They have a much broader, more precise and more flexible definition for computers, as "interpreted formal systems," and one of our jobs will be to get as clear as we can about the concept's boundaries. The ultimate source of the definition is the mathematical theory developed by Alan Turing that provides the foundations for all computer science, the theory of automata, or, as it is also called, recursive function theory or the theory of computability. Fortunately, there is a very nice analogy between interpreted formal systems and familiar board games that allows us to avoid, or evade, much of the mathematical intricacies.
2000 David F. AustinGo to next section: Three Sources of Resistance to the Computer Model
