Document Type : Research Paper
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Abstract
To shed some lights on the history of AI's transitions from a philosophical perspective during the 20th and 21st centuries, this article differentiates among three separate periods: 1. the authority of symbolic paradigm; 2. turn to connectionism; 3. dawn of artificial life. The main argument of this paper is that returnning to connectionism and birth of artificial life confirm the Dreyfus critiques of earlier approaches in artificial intelligence. According to Dreyfus, an atomistic-formalistic attitude towards the brain, mind, knowledge, and Being advocates the symbolic paradigm. Symbolic AI's failure to formalize everyday understanding and returning to holism in connectionism also corroborate the Dreyfus’s' critiques. Also, artificial life, by accepting the embedded-embodiment knowledge, confirmed his position. However the Dreyfus support of Heideggerian AI isn’t acceptable. Moreover it isn’t true that this stream will put the Heideggerian ontology in an empirical evaluation. Furthermore, it is shown that Dreyfus spans over the philosophical critique of AI and the critique of the whole western thought and culture, and indicates that, to authenticate the theoretical understanding and forgetting of the human world, the risk before this culture is the emergence of mechanized humans and not machines possessed with powers beyond human capabilities
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