Sublime

Piagetian theory had an important corollary for teaching. It suggested a certain fixity in the way that thinking develops, with its view that the stages through which children passed were genetically determined and unvarying. It cautioned that children had to pass through these stages in sequence; if a stage hadn’t been traversed, then children

Plato underrated, we are told, the force of custom accumulated in the institution of monogamy, and in the moral code attached to that institution; he underestimated the possessive jealousy of males in supposing that a man would be content to have merely an aliquot portion of a wife; he minimized the maternal instinct in supposing that mothers would

“why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain.”

But his test is rooted in the empiricist mistake of seeking a purely behavioural criterion: it requires the judge to come to a conclusion without any explanation of how the candidate AI is supposed to work. But, in reality, judging whether something is a genuine AI will always depend on explanations of how it works.

also shouldn’t contradict important things we know in other areas of science, such as research on genetics or the brain (we will call that depth). In psychology these explanations also have to tell us how to make specific changes in the way we’re approaching life so that we will reach our goals (we will call those change processes).

The Standard Approach 1. Well-define a situation as a logical problem. 2. Assume identical agents who behave identically, rationally, and who know that other agents are identical and behave identically and rationally. 3. Assume agents’ behavior produces an aggregate outcome that validates their individual behavior. 4. The problem becomes

The ability to generate and follow rules is among the greatest human achievements.