

Philosophy and Theoretical Computer Science (MIT Course 6.893) - nadahalli
http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/fa11/6.893/index.html

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mtraven
Looks really interesting, but seems limited (maybe wisely) to analytic
philosophy.

There is a whole strain of work from the 80s that was partly inspired by
Heidegger and phenomenology AND the realization that some classical AI
problems were computationally intractable. This work was controversial, to say
the least, but influential in its way. I'd suggest that any course on this
topic ought to at least touch on this work.

[http://mit.dspace.org/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6947/AITR-802....](http://mit.dspace.org/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6947/AITR-802.pdf)

<http://leidlmair.at/doc/WhyHeideggerianAIFailed.pdf>

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mshron
I can see why the Dreyfus article would be controversial, but so far (first
ten pages or so) I found it very enlightening.

This really struck a chord with me:

> What the learner acquires through experience is not _represented_ at all but
> is _presented_ to the learner as more and more finely discriminated
> situations, and, if the situation does not clearly solicit a single response
> or if the response does not produce a satisfactory result, the learner is
> led to further refine his discriminations, which, in turn, solicit more
> refined responses.

Comparing that to the meaning of "learn" commonly used in ML to mean "finding
optimal weights for some features" and you can see the gulf pretty starkly.

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madamepsychosis
Also mentioned here: <http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=755>

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michaelchisari
It's days like these I wish I went to MIT. Here's to hoping this shows up on
OpenCourseWare.

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reemrevnivek
Looks like a no on that front: The professor has said in comments to his blog
that he will not.

<http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=755#comment-27693>.

> Regarding recording, the main concern was that I didn’t want to inhibit
> open-ended discussion by recording everyone’s umms, uhhs, and half-baked
> thoughts for posterity. In addition, there didn’t seem like a pressing need
> for recording, since I’ve already essentially written a “course textbook” in
> the form of my essay (<http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf>). But
> as I said, we will have student reaction essays for each class session and
> they will go up on the website.

