The Nondeterministic Situation Calculus

The standard situation calculus assumes that atomic actions are deterministic. But many domains involve nondeterministic actions, with problems such as fully observable nondeterministic (FOND) planning and high-level program execution requiring solutions. Various approaches have been proposed to accommodate nondeterminism on top of the standard situation calculus language, for instance by introducing nondeterministic programs as in Golog and ConGolog. But a key problem in these approaches is that they don’t clearly distinguish between choices that can be made by the agent and choices that are made by the environment, i.e., angelic vs. devilish nondeterminism. In this paper, we propose a simple extension to the standard situation calculus that accommodates nondeterministic actions and preserves Reiter’s solution to the frame problem and answering projection queries through regression. We also provide a formalization of FOND planning and show how ConGolog high-level program execution in nondeterministic domains can be defined.

The AI Wars, 1950–2000, and Their Consequences

Philosophy and AI have had a difficult relationship from the beginning. The “classic” period from 1950 to 2000 saw four major conflicts, first about the logical coherence of AI as an endeavor, and then about architecture, semantics, and the Frame Problem. Since 2000, these early debates have been largely replaced by arguments about consciousness and ethics, arguments that now involve neuroscientists, lawyers, and economists as well as AI scientists and philosophers. We trace these developments, and speculate about the future.

Emotion

This chapter talks about Ronald de Sousa's dramatic claim that emotions are species of determinate patterns of salience among objects of attention, lines of inquiry, and inferential strategies. It provides an adequate background on emotion and arguments on the integral view of the role of emotion in virtue. It also analyzes the psychology of emotion, a judicious smattering of philosophy that harness Christine Tappolet's overview. The chapter investigates the biological hypothesis on the function of emotion in solving the philosopher's frame problem, meaning the problem of how to make use of just what is needed from the stupendous quantity of knowledge and how not to retrieve what is not needed. It narrates a story from Daniel Dennett about a robot that is informed a bomb is set to go off in its vicinity that resents a moral that pure reason is not sufficient to solve de Sousa's problem.

Updating the Frame Problem for AI Research

The Frame Problem is the problem of how to design a machine to use information so as to behave competently, with respect to the kinds of tasks a genuinely intelligent agent can reliably, effectively perform. I will argue that the way the Frame Problem is standardly interpreted, and so the strategies considered for attempting to solve it, must be updated. We must replace overly simplistic and reductionist assumptions with more sophisticated and plausible ones. In particular, the standard interpretation assumes that mental processes are identical to certain kinds of computational processes, and so solving the Frame Problem is a matter of finding a computational architecture that can effectively represent relations of semantic relevance. Instead, we must take seriously the possibility that the way in which intelligent agents use information is inherently different. Whereas intelligent agents are plausibly genuinely causally sensitive to semantic properties as such (to what they perceive, desire, believe intend, etc.), computational systems can only be causally sensitive to the formal features that represent these properties. Indeed, it is this very substitution of formal generalizations for genuinely semantic ones that is responsible for the way current AI systems are brittle, inflexible, and highly specialized. What we need is a more sophisticated way of investigating the relationship between computational information processing and genuinely semantic information use. I apply the generative methodology I have developed elsewhere for cognitive science and AI research to show how the Frame Problem can be appropriately updated.

Equivalence of the Frame and Halting Problems

The open-domain Frame Problem is the problem of determining what features of an open task environment need to be updated following an action. Here we prove that the open-domain Frame Problem is equivalent to the Halting Problem and is therefore undecidable. We discuss two other open-domain problems closely related to the Frame Problem, the system identification problem and the symbol-grounding problem, and show that they are similarly undecidable. We then reformulate the Frame Problem as a quantum decision problem, and show that it is undecidable by any finite quantum computer.

When Science Confronts Philosophy: Three Case Studies

This paper examines three cases of the clash between science and philosophy: Zeno’s paradoxes, the Frame Problem, and a recent attempt to experimentally refute skepticism. In all three cases, the relevant science claims to have resolved the purported problem. The sciences, construing the term broadly, are mathematics, artificial intelligence, and psychology. The goal of this paper is to show that none of the three scientific solutions work. The three philosophical problems remain as vibrant as ever in the face of robust scientific attempts to dispel them. The paper concludes by examining some consequences of this persistence.

The Frame Problem in Ethics

Although the “frame problem” in philosophy has been raised in the context of the artificial intelligence, it is only an exemplification of broader problem. It seems that contemporary ethical debates are not so much about conclusions, decisions, norms, but rather about what we might call a “frame”. Metaethics has always been the bridge between purely ethical principles (“this is good and it should be done”, “this is wrong and it should be avoided”) and broader (ontological, epistemic, anthropological etc.) assumptions. One of the most interesting meta-ethical debates concerns the “frame problem”: whether the ethical frame is objective and self-evident, or is it objective but not self-evident? In classical philosophy, this problem takes the form of a debate on the first principles: nonprovable but necessary starting points for any practical reasoning. They constitute the invisible but essential frame of every moral judgment, decision and action. The role of philosophy is not only to expose these principles, but also to understand the nature of the moral frame.