In this essay we will not attempt to decide whether artificial intelligence is the same as natural intelligence. Instead we will examine some of the issues and terms that must be clarified before that question can be resolved. We will discuss how the question about the relationship between natural and artificial intelli gence can be formulated. One of the first things that must be clarified is the ambiguous word artificial. This adjective can be used in two senses, and it is important to determine which one applies in the term artificial intelligence. The word artificial is used in one sense when it is applied, say, to flowers, and in another sense when it is applied to light. In both cases something is called artificial because it is fabricated. But in the first usage artificial means that the thing seems to be, but really is not, what it looks like. The artificial is the merely apparent; it just shows how something else looks. Artificial flowers are only paper, not flowers at all; anyone who takes them to be flowers is mistaken. But artificial light is light and it does illuminate. It is fabricated as a substitute for natural light, but once fabricated it is what it seems to be. In this sense the artificial is not the merely apparent, not simply an imitation of something else. The appearance of the thing reveals what it is, not how something else looks. The movement of an automobile is another example of something that is artificial in the second sense of the word. An automobile
The central part of the European Sand Belt is an area where intense aeolian processes led to the development of large dune fields in the Late Glacial. They have been studied principally in terms of their stratigraphy, with less attention given to their evolution and geomorphology. It is also uncertain whether large dune fields in cold areas arise analogously to those formed in other climatic zones. To fill this gap, we performed a pattern analysis of 31 stabilized dune fields in Poland using high-resolution LiDAR data. We related the outcomes to the morphological zones associated with the extent of the ice sheet during the LGM, the position of the dune fields, and the shape of the bedding. The results indicate that dune fields in cold areas evolve in the same way as in other climatic zones, as expressed in the preserved relation between crest length, spacing and defect density. The study found that the investigated dune fields have simple patterns composed of single populations of dunes facing E-ESE, suggesting their simultaneous formation in the Younger Dryas. At the same time, the varying degree of pattern development indicates the different duration of aeolian processes that shaped individual dune fields. The dominance of transverse dunes transformed partially or completely into parabolic dunes reflects the increasing role of vegetation over time and the decreasing supply of sand. The development of the dune field patterns was not found to be correlated with the extent of the ice sheet during the LGM, the morphological position, or the shape of the substrate.
The term most closely associated with phenomenology is "intentionality." The core doctrine in phenomenology is the teaching that every act of consciousness we perform, every experience that we have, is intentional: it is essentially "consciousness of" or an "experience of" something or other. All our awareness is directed toward objects. If I see, I see some visual object, such as a tree or a lake; if I imagine, my imagining presents an imaginary object, such as a car that I visualize coming down a road; if I am involved in remembering, I remember a past object; if I am engaged in judging, I intend a state of affairs or a fact. Every act of consciousness, every experience, is correlated with an object. Every intending has its intended object.
In the last two chapters we have explored several dimensions of the content of speech, but one topic has remained largely undiscussed and must be approached now: the fact that we also speak about things when they are not bodily present. In Chapter 7 we used as our paradigm the case of two people, Henry and Jane, speaking to each other about an oak tree that is present to both of them; Henry points it out and says something about it. But most of our speech and conversation is about things that are not present: about what we did last week or what we will do tomorrow, about Tokyo or Buenos Aires, Napoleon or Charlemagne, quarks or the center of the sun. The names that designate things before us can also be used to designate things that are absent. An essential strength of speech and thinking is that they can reach into the absent as well as respond to what is present. The ability to deal with the absent is a constitutive element in rationality. One of the important philosophical discoveries of Edmund Husserl was the role of absence in human experience, thinking, and expression. We can distinguish four ways in which absence enters into our experience and thinking.
PHILOSOPHERS HAVE LONG AGREED that thinking is expressed in the use of language, that we in the medium of words. (1) It is also true, however, that we think in the medium of pictures, and it is likely that these two ways of thinking are interrelated; certainly, we could not think in pictures if we did not have words, and perhaps we could not use words, in principle, unless we were also engaged in some sort of picturing, at least in our imagination. An ideographic language like Chinese would give greater support to the latter possibility than would our phonetically based form of writing. Philosophically, words and pictures can be used to illuminate one another and to shed light on what it is to think. In both words and pictures, we deal with compositions, and in both cases the compositions are, to use a phrase of Michael Oakeshott, exhibitions of intelligence. (2) There is a difference between the two that we notice immediately: spoken words are fleeting and pictures are durable; words and pictures differ in their temporality. They also differ in other ways that are philosophically important. Let us explore these differences. I Words and Their Structure. We begin with spoken words, and we ask what it means to think in the medium of speech. (3) When we speak, we present things as articulated into wholes and parts, and we do so for ourselves and for others. The paradigmatic form of speech is found in conversation, whether between two people or among many, whether in private or in public. The focus of speech is not the speech itself but the things that are spoken about. Thoughtful speech is like a magic wand that we wave over things. As we wave the wand, the parts and wholes of things become disclosed: their identity, their features, their relationships, their essentials and their accidentals, in a word, their intelligibility, all come to light, for ourselves and for our interlocutors. However, we do not articulate just the things that we present. While we explicate things, we also conjugate the words we speak. The speech that we declare is itself segmented into its own kinds of parts and wholes. We continually assemble and reassemble the wand itself as well as the things we wave it over. We display things by structuring our speech. Our listeners are intent on the things we talk about, but they must also be aware, marginally, of the words we speak. The eye is caught by the thing and the ear is caught by the sound, but the mind is shaped by both: we attend to what is seen as we listen to what is said. Speech is articulated on two levels. First, on the higher level, each sentence and each argument is made up of lexicon and grammar, of content and syntax. Second, on the lower level, each word is internally made up of phonemes, of vowels and consonants. The phonemic structure inside a word establishes each word as a word, and these words are conjoined in grammatical and lexical sequences. When all this happens on the side of speech, parts of the world come to light. The artful combinatorics in words and sentences lets the articulation of things take place, and such exhibition occurs whether we speak of things in their presence or their absence. Human reason can articulate on all these levels; it keeps all of these dimensions in mind, and all of them are significant: human intelligence composes words out of phonemes and statements out of words, and simultaneously it displays things in their parts and wholes. We charge our words with so much intelligence that things themselves begin to appear in the light that the words give off. The person who accomplishes this, furthermore, does so for himself and for others. All discourse is in principle a matter of conversational reciprocity. Thinking in the medium of words is inherently intersubjective, and so is human reason. The most conspicuous and most tangible feature of our verbal articulation is the way in which phrases are embedded into one another. …
