Mindful Things: cross cultural perspectives on the criteria for intelligence
Dirk Baltzly, John Bigelow, Monima Chadha, Jay Garfield (Smith College), John Heil (Davidson College). ARC Discovery Grant 2002 ($50,000)
This project will bring contemporary theories on artificial intelligence into conversation with ancient Greek and Indian philosophy. Turing proposed that a machine that could imitate a human's conversational abilities would count as thinking. The ancient Greeks and Indians supposed that there were mindful things, like the cosmos as a whole, that would not pass such a test. Why is there such disagreement? We will learn something about our own conception of the mind by examining their reasons for supposing that such things had minds. One objective is to question the degree to which the idea of a mind is culturally constructed.