MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

EECS Fall 1998 Catalogue Supplement

6.915 God and Computers

WF 2:30-4, 37-186
Anne Foerst, NE43-934, x6532
Prerequisite: Course VI seniors and Masters students; juniors by special permission.
3-0-9

Note: this subject was offered fall term 1997. Evaluations can be seen at http://hkn.mit.edu/6guide/src/fall97/6915.html

The subject consists of a 1.5 hour discussion meeting on Wednesdays and a 1.5 hour lecture on Fridays. No lab work. Students are expected to spend approximately 9 hours on the weekly readings and the weekly paper.

Students can use a paper from this subject to satisfy Phase II of their Writing requirement.

The class covers philosophical assumptions of AI; different camps within AI and their underlying worldviews; and analysis of these worldviews and their hidden hopes and myths, and relates these myths to Jewish and Christian traditions, developing criteria for myth, and liberating AI research from it.

The purpose of the class is to find where current AI research has Jewish and/or Christian biases built into it by the researchers and to expose those biases so that people can get beyond them and be aware when they are bringing such biases to their research. We will pursue this analysis in two steps.

In the first half of the class we will analyze the philosophical roots of AI. We will mainly focus on two different present philosophical camps-- Philosophy of Mind and Radical Constructivism--and will scrutinize their correlation with and their influence on AI; we will especially contrast the two main competitive camps within AI and their different understanding of humans and their intelligence: Embodied AI and Classical AI.

In the second half of the class we will trace out hidden myths within AI. Especially when pursuing the scientific goal of analyzing humans by building smart machines, AI researchers often include these myths in their research. There are three main myths: 1. the dream of building artificial humans, and thus to imitating God's creative powers,
2. the wish to be like God (often expressed by Artificial-Life researchers and the popular press), and
3. the desire to make people immortal and solve many of their problems like disease and sorrow.

While these myths are rarely expressed within scientific literature, they can often be found in science fiction literature; we will in this context read and watch some examples from science fiction.

We will analyze the theological roots of these myths within the Jewish and Christian context and will present their purposes within the human quest for meaning. By analyzing the inherent religious character of some parts of the AI research agenda, we will develop criteria for recognizing non-scientific elements within AI and the tools to free the research from these elements.

Subjects covered in this context are the Jewish Golem traditions, the Genesis 1 and 2 creation stories, and Jewish and Christian theories about afterlife and their AI counterparts.

The class is accompanied by a public lecture series "God and Computers: Minds, Machines and Metaphysics" in which well known computer scientists and cognitive scientists (both believers and atheists) will talk about their way of dealing with myths and existential issues within their research.