Description

The Institute of Philosophy cordially invites you to the online lecture by Cameron Buckner (University of Florida) entitled Moderate empiricism and artificial intelligence, which will be presented at the AI? Philosophical Questions on Artificial Intelligence seminar series.

Both the lecture and the subsequent discussion will take place in English, online on Zoom. To participate, pre-registration is required, the link to which can be found on the seminar series page by clicking here.
Please note that we will only be able to send the link to those who register before 12 noon on the day of the seminar.

Presentation date: Tuesday 4 March 2025, 2PM

Abstract:

In recent years deep learning systems have achieved impressive results in AI, but their scale and complexity makes it very difficult to understand why they perform as well as they do. In this talk, I link deep learning's research agenda to classic empiricist philosophy of mind from figures like John Locke and David Hume. According to this moderate empiricism, active, general-purpose faculties--such as perception, memory, imagination, attention, and empathy--play a crucial role in allowing us to extract abstract knowledge from sensory experience. I illustrate the utility of this interdisciplinary connection by showing how it can provide benefits to both philosophy and computer science: computer scientists can continue to mine the history of philosophy for ideas and aspirational targets to hit on the way to more robustly rational artificial agents, and philosophers can see how some of the historical empiricists’ most ambitious speculations can be realized in specific computational systems.