Symbolism, Digital Culture and Artificial Intelligence.
Abstract
This article is an invited contribution in the form of an essay, with the aim of illustrating the modalities of use and development of artificial intelligence in learning environments and as a support for educational design and research.
The aim is to place electronic computing in an anthropological perspective, to outline the salient features of the new digital culture, and to articulate the most positive purpose of artificial intelligence, which is to aid in the creation, preservation and acquisition of knowledge.
In the first part, I will show that access to symbolic cognition, which is unique to the human species, implies a correspondence between the sensible world and the intelligible world. Therefore, transformations of sensible objects can mean transformations of concepts. This is why, like language, the notion of calculation is inscribed in the very essence of the human being.
In the second part, I'll sketch out a genealogy of automatic calculation that leads to contemporary culture, based on the collective feeding and real-time sharing of a digital memory common to humanity.
The third part of the article describes the two main trends in contemporary artificial intelligence, symbolic models and neural models, with their advantages and disadvantages. I then suggest an original solution to overcome the division between the two approaches, combining the main advantages of both types of models while minimizing their disadvantages.
The article concludes with a brief discussion of the problem of machine consciousness.
Downloads
References
Boole, George. The Laws of Thought. [1854]. Chicago and London: Open Court, 1916.
Buber, Martin. I and Thou. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970.
Chomsky, Noam. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Chomsky, Noam. Syntaxic Structures. La Hague & Paris: Mouton, 1957.
Deacon, Terrence, D. The Symbolic Species. The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. New York and London: Norton and Cie, 1997.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Mille Plateaux. Paris: Minuit, 1980.
Dumézil, George. L’idéologie Tripartie Des Indo-Européens. Bruxelles: Latomus, 1958.
D’Avila Garcez, Artur, and Lamb, Luis. “Neurosymbolic AI: The 3rd Wave.” arxiv.org, December 2020. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.05876.pdf.
D’Avila Garcez, Artur, Lamb, Luis and Gabbay, Dove. Neural-Symbolic Cognitive Reasoning. Cognitive Technologies. Springer, 2009.
Gibson, James. The Theory of Affordances. The Visual Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.
Hejlmslev, Louis. Prolégomènes à Une Théorie Du Langage – La Structure Fondamentale Du Langage. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2000.
Heylighen, Francis. “Stigmergy as a Universal Coordination Mechanism I: Definition and Components.” Cognitive Systems Research 38 (2016): 4–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2015.12.002.
Heylighen, Francis. “Stigmergy as a Universal Coordination Mechanism II: Varieties and Evolution.” Cognitive Systems Research, 2016, 50–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2015.12.007.
Husserl, Edmund. Idées Directrices Pour Une Phénoménologie. Paris: Gallimard, 1950.
Ifrah, George. Les Chiffres Ou l’histoire d’une Grande Invention. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1985.
Jakobson, Roman. Essais de Linguistique Générale, Tomes 1 et 2. Paris: Minuit, 1963.
Javary, Cyril. Le Discours de La Tortue. Découvrir La Pensée Chinoise Au Fil Du Yi King. Paris: Albin Michel, 2003.
Julien, François. Figures de l’immanence. Pour Une Lecture Philosophique Du Yi King. Paris: Grasset, 1993.
Kaplan, Robert. À Propos de Rien. Une Histoire Du Zéro. Paris: Dunod, 2004.
Leroi-Gourhan, André. Le Geste et La Parole. Paris: Albin Michel, 1964.
Lévy, Pierre. “L’invention de l’ordinateur.” In Éléments d’histoire Des Sciences, Ed. Michel Serres., 515–35. Paris: Bordas, 1989.
Lévy, Pierre. “La pyramide algorithmique.” Sens Public, Numéro special: Ontologies du numérique (2017): 29.
http://www.sens-public.org/article1275.html
Lévy, Pierre. “Pour Un Changement de Paradigme En Intelligence Artificielle.” Giornale Di Filosofia 2, no. 2 (2021). https://mimesisjournals.com/ojs/index.php/giornale-filosofia/article/view/1693.
DOI 10.7413/1827-5834016
Lévy, Pierre. “Semantic Computing with IEML.” Collective Intelligence 2, no. 4 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1177/26339137231207634.
Lévy, Pierre. “The IEML Research Program. From Social Computing to Reflexive Collective Intelligence.” Information Sciences 180, no. 1 (2010): 71–94.
Lévy, Pierre. L’Intelligence collective. Pour une anthropologie du cyberespace. Paris: La Découverte, 1994.
Lévy, Pierre. Qu’est-ce que le virtuel? Paris: La Découverte, 1995.
Lévy, Pierre. The Semantic Sphere. Computation Cognition and Information Economy. New York: Wiley, 2011.
Marcus, Gary, and Ernest Davis. Rebooting AI. New York: Pantheon, 2019.
Margolis, Eric, and Stephen Laurence, eds. The Conceptual Mind. New Directions in the Study of Concepts. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 2015.
Melchuk, Igor. Communicative Organization in Natural Language: The Semantic-Communicative Structure of Sentences. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001.
Mulgan, Geoff. Big Mind. How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.
Pearl, Judea, and Dana Mackenzie. The Book of Why. The New Science of Cause and Effect. New York: Basic Books, 2019.
Saussure de, Ferdinand. Cours de Linguistique Générale. Lausanne / Paris: Payot, 1916.
Searle, John. Intentionality. London: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Shannon, Claude. “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits” 57, no. 12 (1938): 713–23. https://doi.org/doi:10.1109/T-AIEE.1938.5057767.
Tesnières, Lucien. Eléments de Syntaxe Structurale. Paris: Klincksieck, 1959.
Wilhelm, Richard, and Perrot Etienne. Yi King Le Livre Des Transformations. Paris: Librairie de Médicis, 1973.
Copyright (c) 2024 Distance Education Journal
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Las obras que se publican en esta revista están sujetas a los siguientes términos:
1. El Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Murcia (la editorial) conserva los derechos patrimoniales (copyright) de las obras publicadas, y favorece y permite la reutilización de las mismas bajo la licencia de uso indicada en el punto 2.
2. Las obras se publican en la edición electrónica de la revista bajo una licencia Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-SinObraDerivada 3.0 España (texto legal). Se pueden copiar, usar, difundir, transmitir y exponer públicamente, siempre que: i) se cite la autoría y la fuente original de su publicación (revista, editorial y URL de la obra); ii) no se usen para fines comerciales; iii) se mencione la existencia y especificaciones de esta licencia de uso.
3. Condiciones de auto-archivo. Se permite y se anima a los autores a difundir electrónicamente las versiones pre-print (versión antes de ser evaluada) y/o post-print (versión evaluada y aceptada para su publicación) de sus obras antes de su publicación, ya que favorece su circulación y difusión más temprana y con ello un posible aumento en su citación y alcance entre la comunidad académica. Color RoMEO: verde.
