Link to originalThe fields of artificial intelligence ( AI) and artificial life (ALIFE) (Langton, 1997) are inspired by nature and biology in their attempt to create intelligence and forms of life from human-designed computation: the main idea is to abstract the principles from the medium, i.e., biology, and utilize such principles to devise algorithms and devices that reproduce properties of their biological counterparts.
| Current AI Algorithms | Minds |
|---|---|
| Outside-in design | Inside-out design |
| Stabilized by deterministic substrate | Self-organization |
| Decoupled, static data | Environmental coupling, dynamics |
| Prediction | Coherence |
| ML-Training | Continuous development |
History and Philosophy
You could describe AI as automating data processing.
The field also has a philosophical tradition: Understanding what the nature of the mind is.
This tradition starts with Aristotle, and made some progress with Leibnitz and La Mettrie who understood the mind as some kind of mathematical machine.
The notion of a mathematical machine means that it is not something that you know metaphorically as a clockwork or steam engine or things that push and pull at eachother, but as an abstract system that can be described by the way things change as a causal structure (patterns that change in a particular way).
Aristotle talk about the dynamic form of the physical substrate, and La Mettrie says that it can just be a structure that is producing paterns in a particular way.
Transclude of no-free-lunch-theorem#^d51516