The Shrinking Difference Between Artifacts and Natural Objects *

The Web is commonly considered the most significant computational phenomenon to date. However, the Web itself has received scant attention from philosophy, being best regarded as a mere engineering artifact. Furthermore, the efforts to evolve the Web into the Semantic Web are viewed with suspicion by most philosophers as a return to Cartesian artificial intelligence. I argue that these widely held viewpoints are incorrect, and that the Web succeeds because of its design principles that distinguish it from both previous hypertext systems and knowledge representation systems in classical artificial intelligence. Furthermore, the Web embodies the logical conclusion of Clark’s Extended Mind thesis since it allows multiple individuals to access and manipulate the same representation, so offering the ultimate in cognitive scaffolding. This undermines the notion of individual intelligence at the heart of Cartesian artificial intelligence and presents a challenge to the role of representations as given in the recent wave of neo-Heideggerian focus on embodiment. Taking the Web seriously moves the primary focus of philosophy away from the role, or lack thereof, of internal representations to external representations. The Web is then properly understood as the creation and evolution of external representations in a universal information space. Berners-Lee calls this “philosophical engineering,” and it has surprising connections to neo-Fregeanism, anti-realism, and other long-standing philosophical debates. The Web as Philosophy The reigning model of computation usually considered by philosophers debating artificial intelligence is the lone Turing Machine manipulating representations in an existential void. The most controversial proposition of computer science that captures the imagination of philosophy is whether or not this model can be authentically intelligent. Under heavy attack from philosophers ranging from Dreyfus to Wheeler, this hypothesis of classical artificial intelligence is showing wear and tear, if not total defeat. From the ashes of what has been termed “Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence” has arisen a neo-Heideggerian theory of embodiment as based on work in dynamical systems, robotics, and artificial life. This line of work is inspired by the claim of Rodney Brooks that intelligence does not require representations (1991). While impressive, the vast majority of work in computing is not the building of embodied robots capable of simulating emotions. While the sheer ambition of embodied artificial intelligence grabs the imagination of philosophers, a revolution of everyday life has emerged due to the advent of the Web. The Web, and the complex web of human and computer interaction it engenders, is already supplanting the isolated digital computer in everyday life, and so will eventually supplant it as the basis for philosophical analysis of the nature of computation and the mind. We argue that the Web represents a fundamental turning point not just in computational systems but in philosophy as well, for the Web signals a return of representationalism of a distinctly different kind than that formerly theorized about by artificial intelligence, “embodied” or otherwise. In his “One Billion Lines of C++,” Brian Cantwell Smith notes that the models of computing used in philosophical debates over intelligence, representation, embodiment, and — APA Newsletter, Spring 2008, Volume 07, Number 2 — — 6 — consciousness ignore the majority of existing computers by framing the debate as if it were between logic-based symbolic reasoners and some alternative ranging from neural networks to epigenetic robotics (1997). As Smith points out, “It is impossible to make an exact estimate, but there are probably something on the order of 10, or one hundred billion lines of C++ in the world. And we are barely started. In sum: symbolic AI systems constitute approximately 0.01% of written software” (Smith, 1997). The same small fraction likely holds true of “non-symbolic AI” computational systems such as robots, artificial life, and connectionist networks. Numbers by themselves hold little intellectual weight, for one could always argue that the vast majority of computational systems are simply philosophically uninteresting. However, trends in philosophy contradict this intuition. The turn in philosophy away from artificial intelligence and linguistics to what has been termed a “philosophy of information” demonstrates that this wider class of computational systems is finally having an impact (Floridi 2004). The most significant computational system to date is the World Wide Web, described by its inventor Tim Berners-Lee as “a universal information space” (Berners-Lee 1998). Due to its hegemonic role today, understanding the principles that distinguish the Web from other computational systems should be a goal of the philosophy of information. To articulate what I term the “philosophy of the Web,” one needs to first clarify whether or not the Web is continuous or in conflict with the development of current trends in philosophy, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. This is not an easy endeavor at first glance, for the Web is nothing if not a robustly representational system, and a large amount of research on the Web focuses on how to enable increasingly powerful and flexible forms of representations. One development Berners-Lee calls the “Semantic Web” consists of standardizing the logical encoding of representations so that they may be directly usable by machines. There is suspicion among many of the now successful rebels against classical artificial intelligence that “Good Old Fashioned” artificial intelligence has not disappeared but has been instead born anew on the Semantic Web. Note that we do not present a fully developed philosophical theory of the Web, which would be far out of scope, but a broad picture of the philosophy of the Web, an intellectual endeavor that needs to be fleshed out and thoroughly argued in other work. Yet, in order to have detailed arguments over a philosophy of the Web, a precis that relates a new developing picture to more widely known and accepted paradigms is necessary. Beyond Neo-Heideggerian Embodiment It is difficult to summarize the hypothesis made by proponents of embodied artificial intelligence, yet this must be done in order to understand if this hypothesis is in fact continuous with the Web. In contrast, in defining classical artificial intelligence, Smith stated the Knowledge Representation Hypothesis: Any mechanically embodied intelligent process will be comprised of structural ingredients that a) we as external observers naturally take to represent a propositional account of the knowledge that the overall process exhibits, and b) independent of such external semantical attribution, play a formal but causal and essential role in engendering the behavior that manifests that knowledge. (Smith 1985) One compelling story put forward by the philosophers of embodied artificial intelligence is by Michael Wheeler (2005). Instead of phrasing a negative critique of classical artificial intelligence like Hubert Dreyfus, Wheeler turns his Heideggerian analysis into a positive program for embodied artificial intelligence. In order to contrast classical artificial intelligence with its embodied alternative, Wheeler produces three Cartesian claims that he believes underlie classical artificial intelligence (2005): 1. The subject-object dichotomy is a primary characteristic of the cognizer’s ordinary epistemic situation. 2. Mind, cognition, and intelligence are to be explained in terms of representational states and the ways in which such states are manipulated and transformed. 3. The bulk of intelligent human action is the outcome of general purpose reasoning processes that work by retrieving just those mental representations that are relevant to the present behavioral context and manipulating and transforming those representations in appropriate ways as to determine what to do. Wheeler then states that “word on the cognitive-scientific street is that classical systems have, by and large, failed to capture in anything like a compelling way, specific styles of thinking at which most humans naturally excel” (2005). Wheeler then contrasts the Cartesian assumptions of classical artificial intelligence with Heidegger in order to formulate the philosophical principles of embodied artificial intelligence (Wheeler 2005): 1. The primacy of online intelligence: The primary expression of biological intelligence, even in humans, consists not in doing math or logic, but in the capacity to exhibit.online intelligence.a suite of fluid and flexible real-time adaptive responses to incoming