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rocurley comments on What was your biggest recent surprise? - Less Wrong Discussion

11 Post author: DataPacRat 09 June 2012 11:57PM

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Comment author: rocurley 10 June 2012 07:23:51AM 16 points [-]

all currently described AI agents are Cartesian dualists

I don't quite understand what you mean by that, can you elaborate?

Comment author: [deleted] 12 June 2012 10:34:52PM *  2 points [-]

Some AI have a limited understanding of their own bodies; they can learn kinematic models of the actuators in the robots they control or form "affordances", ideas about what kind of interactions with their environments they can effect. But very few (apparently no?) cognitive architectures or AI designs model thier minds as being algorithms executing on their computing hardware, so whatever metacognitive representation and processing they have, it's "disembodied", like old ideas of the mind being made of spooky stuff. The combination of physical bodies and spooky minds is called Cartesian Dualism after philospher René Descartes.