Volume 3 (2012): Issue 1 (May 2012)

Orseau and Ring, as well as Dewey, have recently described problems, including self-delusion, with the behavior of agents using various definitions of utility functions. An agent's utility function is defined in terms of the agent's history of interactions with its environment. This paper argues, via two examples, that the behavior problems can be avoided by formulating the utility function in two steps: 1) inferring a model of the environment from interactions, and 2) computing utility as a function of the environment model. Basing a utility function on a model that the agent must learn implies that the utility function must initially be expressed in terms of specifications to be matched to structures in the learned model. These specifications constitute prior assumptions about the environment so this approach will not work with arbitrary environments. But the approach should work for agents designed by humans to act in the physical world. The paper also addresses the issue of self-modifying agents and shows that if provided with the possibility to modify their utility functions agents will not choose to do so, under some usual assumptions.

Dreyfus' call ‘to make artificial intelligence (AI) more Heideggerian‘ echoes Heidegger's affirmation that pure calculations produce no ‘intelligence’ (Dreyfus, 2007). But what exactly is it that AI needs more than mathematics? The question in the title gives rise to a reexamination of the basic principles of cognition in Husserl's Phenomenology. Using Husserl's Phenomenological Method, a formalization of these principles is presented that provides the principal idea of cognition, and as a consequence, a ‘natural logic’. Only in a second step, mathematics is obtained from this natural logic by abstraction.

The limitations of pure reasoning are demonstrated for fundamental considerations (Hilbert's ‘finite Einstellung’) as well as for the task of solving practical problems. Principles will be presented for the design of general intelligent systems, which make use of a natural logic.