Volume 44 (2019): Issue 1 (March 2019)

Fleck’s concept of thought style allows to realize the fact that in contemporary empirical sciences we deal with a computer thought style, as most research works are currently conducted with the use of computer-aided systems. In this article I support the thesis that contemporary research works are dominated by the computer research style. I refer to the findings of Fleck, Bolter, Castells, Crombie and Hacking.

This essay’s content is rendered by the titles of the successive sections. 1. Effective solvability versus intuitive solvability. — 2. Decidability, i.e. effective solvability, in predicate logic. The speedup phenomenon — 3. Contributions of the second-order logic to the problems of solvability — 4. The infinite progress of science in the light of Turing’s idea of the oracle. The term “oracle” is a technical counterpart of the notion of mathematical intuition.

A more detailed summary can be obtained through juxtaposing the textboxes labelled with letters A...F. Conclusion: in the progress of science an essential role is played by the feedback between intellectual intuitions (intuitive solvability) and algorithmic procedures (effective solvability).

In this article I defend the thesis that modern computer science has a significant philosophical potential, which is expressed in a form of worldview, called here informational worldview (IVW). It includes such theses like: a) each being contains a certain informational content (which may be revealed by computer science concepts, such as code or algorithm), b) the mind is an information processing system (which should be modeled by means of data processing systems), c) cognition is a type of computation. These (pre)philosophical theses are accepted in many sciences (e.g. in cognitive science), and this is both an expression and strengthening of the IWV. After a general discussion of the relations between philosophy, particular sciences and the worldview, and then the presentation of the basic assumptions and theses of the IWV, I analyze a certain specification of thesis b) expressed in the statement that “the mind is the Turing machine”. I distinguish three concepts of mind (static, variable and minimal) and explain how each of them is connected with the concept of the Turing machine.

Pancomputationalism is quite a wide-ranging concept, but most of its variants, either implicitly or explicitly, rely on Turing’s conceptualizations of a computer and computing, which are obvious anthropomorphisms. This paper questions the concept of pancomputationalism based on Turing computing and asks what concept of computation can be used to avoid the constrains of anthropomorphisations.

Throughout centuries philosophers have attempted to understand the disparity between the conscious experience and the material world – i.e., the problem of consciousness and the apparent mind–body dualism. Achievements in the fields of biology, neurology, and information science in the last century granted us more insight into processes that govern our minds. While there are still many mysteries to be solved when it comes to fully understanding the inner workings of our brains, new discoveries suggest stepping away from the metaphysical philosophy of mind, and closer to the computational viewpoint. In light of the advent of strong artificial intelligence and the development of increasingly complex artificial life models and simulations, we need a well-defined, formal theory of consciousness. In order to facilitate this, in this work we introduce mappism. Mappism is a framework in which alternative views on consciousness can be formally expressed in a uniform way, thus allowing one to analyze and compare existing theories, and enforcing the use of the language of mathematics, i.e, explicit functions and variables. Using this framework, we describe classical and artificial life approaches to consciousness.

The main aim of the presented study was to check whether the well-established measures concerning the attitude towards humanoid robots are good predictors for the uncanny valley effect. We present a study in which 12 computer rendered humanoid models were presented to our subjects. Their declared comfort level was cross-referenced with the Belief in Human Nature Uniqueness (BHNU) and the Negative Attitudes toward Robots that Display Human Traits (NARHT) scales. Subsequently, there was no evidence of a statistical significance between these scales and the existence of the uncanny valley phenomenon. However, correlations between expected stress level while human-robot interaction and both BHNU, as well as NARHT scales, were found. The study covered also the evaluation of the perceived robots’ characteristic and the emotional response to them.

The aim of this text is to show how, using the achievements of modern computer science, psychology and neurobiology, we can search for an answer to the question about the a priori mechanisms of shaping a phenomenal image of reality given by experience. This phenomenalism statement is very close to, so called, Bayesian model of mind by Karl Friesen. The author asks how in massive scale to reach the cognitive processes taking place without representation, outside the field of consciousness, which influence the formation of this model of the world. The result of the consideration is to be a neuromachine project whose task will be to automate and mass research of hidden cognitive attitudes. Its activity is to become a real alternative to opinion polls performed in the paradigm of the so-called declarative sociology, which do not provide results significantly reducing the risk of decision-making in management.