Wikipedia

Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus(/ˈdraɪfəs/DRY-fəs;October 15, 1929 – April 22, 2017) was an American philosopher and a professor of philosophy at theUniversity of California, Berkeley.His main interests includedphenomenology,existentialismand the philosophy of bothpsychologyandliterature,as well as the philosophical implications ofartificial intelligence.He was widely known for hisexegesisofMartin Heidegger,which critics labeled "Dreydegger".[4]

Hubert Dreyfus
Dreyfus in 2011
Born
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus

(1929-10-15)October 15, 1929
Terre Haute,Indiana,US
DiedApril 22, 2017(2017-04-22)(aged 87)
Berkeley,California,US
EducationHarvard University(BA,MA,PhD)
University of Freiburg
École normale supérieure
SpouseGeneviève Boissier-Dreyfus[3]
School
Institutions
ThesisHusserl's Phenomenology of Perception(1964)
Doctoral students
Other notable studentsEric Kaplan
Main interests
Notable ideas

Dreyfus was featured inTao Ruspoli's filmBeing in the World(2010),[5]and was among the philosophers interviewed byBryan Mageefor theBBC TelevisionseriesThe Great Philosophers(1987).[6]

TheFuturamacharacterProfessorHubertFarnsworthis partly named after him, writerEric Kaplanhaving been a former student.[3]

Life and career

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Dreyfus was born on 15 October 1929, inTerre Haute, Indiana,to Stanley S. and Irene (Lederer) Dreyfus.[7][8]

He attendedHarvard Universityfrom 1947.[9]With a senior honors thesis onCausality and Quantum Theory(for whichW. V. O. Quinewas the main examiner)[9]he was awarded aB.A.summa cum laudein 1951[8]and joinedPhi Beta Kappa.[10]He was awarded aM.A.in 1952.[8][10]He was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard in 1952-1953 (as he was again in 1954 and 1956).[11]Then, on a Harvard Sheldon traveling fellowship, Dreyfus studied at theUniversity of Freiburgover 1953–1954.[10]During this time he had an interview withMartin Heidegger.[9]Sean D. Kellyrecords that Dreyfus found the meeting 'disappointing.'[12]Brief mention of it was made by Dreyfus during his 1987BBCinterview withBryan Mageein remarks that are revealing of both his and Heidegger's opinion of the work ofJean-Paul Sartre.[13][6]

Between 1956 and 1957, Dreyfus undertook research at theHusserl Archivesat theUniversity of Louvainon aFulbright Fellowship.[10]Towards the end of his stay, his first (jointly authored) paper "Curds and Lions inDon Quijote"would appear in print.[12][14]After acting as an instructor in philosophy atBrandeis University(1957–1959),[8][11]he attended theEcole Normale Supérieure, Paris,on a French government grant (1959–1960).[10]

From 1960, first as an instructor, then as anassistantand thenassociate professor,Dreyfus taught philosophy at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT).[8]In 1964, with his dissertationHusserl's Phenomenology of Perception,he obtained hisPh.D.from Harvard.[10][15](Due to his knowledge of Husserl,Dagfinn Føllesdalsat on the thesis committee but he has asserted that Dreyfus "was not really my student." )[16]That same year, his co-translation (with his first wife) ofSense and Non-SensebyMaurice Merleau-Pontywas published.[7]

Also in 1964, and whilst still atMIT,he was employed as a consultant by theRAND Corporationto review the work ofAllen NewellandHerbert A. Simonin the field ofartificial intelligence(AI).[9]This resulted in the publication, in 1965, of the "famously combative"Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence,which proved to be the first of a series of papers and books attacking the AI field's claims and assumptions.[17][18]The first edition ofWhat Computers Can't Dowould follow in 1972, and this critique of AI (which has been translated into at least ten languages) would establish Dreyfus's public reputation.[9]However, as the editors of hisFestschriftnoted: "the study and interpretation of'continental'philosophers... came first in the order of his philosophical interests and influences. "[9]

Dreyfus (left) outside his Berkeley home in 1976

Berkeley

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In 1968, although he had been grantedtenure,Dreyfus leftMITand became an associate professor of philosophy at theUniversity of California, Berkeley,[8][10](winning, that same year, theHarbisonPrize for Outstanding Teaching).[3]In 1972 he was promoted to full professor.[8][10]Though Dreyfus retired from his chair in 1994, he continued as professor of philosophy in the Graduate School (and held, from 1999, a joint appointment in the rhetoric department).[3]He continued to teach philosophy atUC Berkeleyuntil his last class in December 2016.[3]

Dreyfus was elected a fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciencesin 2001.[19]He was also awarded an honorary doctorate for "his brilliant and highly influential work in the field of artificial intelligence" and his interpretation of twentieth century continental philosophy by Erasmus University.[3]

Dreyfus died on April 22, 2017.[7][12]

His younger brother and sometimes collaborator,Stuart Dreyfus,is a professor emeritus of industrial engineering and operations research at theUniversity of California, Berkeley.

Dreyfus' criticism of AI

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Main article:Hubert Dreyfus's views on artificial intelligence

Dreyfus' critique ofartificial intelligence(AI) concerns what he considers to be the four primary assumptions of AI research. The first two assumptions are what he calls the "biological" and "psychological" assumptions. The biological assumption is that the brain is analogous tocomputer hardwareand the mind is analogous to computersoftware.The psychological assumption is that the mind works by performing discrete computations (in the form ofalgorithmicrules) on discreterepresentationsorsymbols.

Dreyfus claims that the plausibility of the psychological assumption rests on two others: theepistemologicalandontologicalassumptions. The epistemological assumption is that all activity (either by animate or inanimate objects) can be formalized (mathematically) in the form of predictive rules or laws. The ontological assumption is that reality consists entirely of a set of mutually independent, atomic (indivisible) facts. It's because of the epistemological assumption that workers in the field argue thatintelligenceis the same as formal rule-following, and it's because of the ontological one that they argue that human knowledge consists entirely of internal representations of reality.

On the basis of these two assumptions, workers in the field claim thatcognitionis the manipulation of internal symbols by internal rules, and that, therefore, human behaviour is, to a large extent, context free (seecontextualism). Therefore, a trulyscientificpsychologyis possible, which will detail the 'internal' rules of the human mind, in the same way the laws of physics detail the 'external' laws of the physical world. However, it is this key assumption that Dreyfus denies. In other words, he argues that we cannot now (and never will be able to) understand our own behaviorin the same wayas we understand objects in, for example, physics or chemistry: that is, by considering ourselves as things whose behaviour can be predicted via 'objective', context free scientific laws. According to Dreyfus, a context-freepsychologyis a contradiction in terms.

Dreyfus's arguments against this position are taken from thephenomenologicalandhermeneuticaltradition (especially the work ofMartin Heidegger). Heidegger argued that, contrary to thecognitivistviews (on which AI has been based), our being is in fact highly context-bound, which is why the two context-free assumptions are false. Dreyfus doesn't deny that we canchoose to seehuman (or any) activity as being 'law-governed', in the same way that we canchoose to seereality as consisting of indivisible atomic facts... if we wish. But it is a huge leap from that to state that because we want to or can see things in this way thatit is therefore an objective fact that they are the case.In fact, Dreyfus argues that they arenot(necessarily) the case, and that, therefore, any research program that assumes theyarewill quickly run into profound theoretical and practical problems. Therefore, the current efforts of workers in the field are doomed to failure.

Dreyfus argues that to get a device or devices with human-like intelligence would require them to have a human-like being-in-the-world and to have bodies more or less like ours, and social acculturation (i.e. a society) more or less like ours. (This view is shared by psychologists in theembodied psychology(Lakoff and Johnson 1999) anddistributed cognitiontraditions. His opinions are similar to those ofroboticsresearchers such asRodney Brooksas well as researchers in the field ofartificial life.)

Contrary to a popular misconception, Dreyfus never predicted that computers would never beat humans at chess. InAlchemy and Artificial Intelligence,he only reported (correctly) the state of the art of the time: "Still no chess program can play even amateur chess."[18][20][21]

Daniel Crevierwrites: "time has proven the accuracy and perceptiveness of some of Dreyfus's comments. Had he formulated them less aggressively, constructive actions they suggested might have been taken much earlier."[22]

Webcasting philosophy

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When UC Berkeley and Apple began making a selected number of lecture classes freely available to the public as podcasts beginning around 2006, a recording of Dreyfus teaching a course called "Man, God, and Society in Western Literature – From Gods to God and Back" rose to the 58th most popular webcast on iTunes.[23]These webcasts have attracted the attention of many, including non-academics, to Dreyfus and his subject area.[24]

Works

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Books

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Festschrift

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  • 2000.Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert Dreyfus, Volume 1.Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.ISBN0-262-73127-4.[31]
  • 2000.Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume 2.Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.ISBN0-262-73128-2[31][32]

Select articles

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See also

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References

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  1. ^Hubert L. Dreyfus, Mark A. Wrathall (eds.),Heidegger Reexamined: Truth, realism, and the history of being,Routledge, 2002, pp. 245, 274, 280
  2. ^Wrathall, Mark A., ed. (2017-07-20).Heidegger's Hermeneutic Realism (1991).Vol. 1. Oxford University Press.doi:10.1093/oso/9780198796220.003.0005.ISBN978-0-19-879622-0.
  3. ^abcdefAnwar, Yasmin (2017-04-25)."Hubert Dreyfus, preeminent philosopher and AI critic, dies at 87".Berkeley News.Retrieved2019-04-15.
  4. ^Woessner, Martin (2011).Heidegger in America.Cambridge University Press. p. 203.ISBN978-0-521-51837-6.
  5. ^"BEING IN THE WORLD by Tao Ruspoli @ Brooklyn Film Festival".Retrieved2019-10-04.
  6. ^abMagee, Bryan,Dreyfus, Hubert L.Bryan Magee talks to Hubert Dreyfus about Husserl, Heidegger and modern existentialism.[viaYouTube]The Great PhilosophersBBC (1987)
  7. ^abcGrimes, William (2017-05-02)."Hubert L. Dreyfus, Philosopher of the Limits of Computers, Dies at 87".The New York Times.ISSN0362-4331.Retrieved2019-04-15.
  8. ^abcdefg"Dreyfus, Hubert L(ederer) 1929-."Contemporary Authors,New Revision Series.Encyclopedia.22 Aug. 2019
  9. ^abcdef"Introduction".Heidegger, authenticity, and modernity.Dreyfus, Hubert L., Wrathall, Mark A., Malpas, J. E. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 2000.ISBN9780262286459.OCLC62157918.{{cite book}}:CS1 maint: others (link)
  10. ^abcdefghShook, John R. (2005)."Dreyfus, Hubert Lederer (1929–)".The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers.Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum.ISBN9781849723589.OCLC276357640.
  11. ^ab"Professor Hubert Dreyfus Long form CV".sophos.berkeley.edu.Archived fromthe originalon 2019-08-22.Retrieved2019-08-23.
  12. ^abcKelly, Sean D.(2017-04-24). Weinberg, Justin (ed.)."Hubert Dreyfus (1929-2017)".Daily Nous.Retrieved2019-04-15.
  13. ^Magee, Bryan (1988).The Great Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy.Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. pp.275.ISBN9780192822017.OL2043183M.Sartre started out as a Husserlian, and as a phenomenologist he wrote a good novel calledNausea,which is a first-person description of a person's world breaking down. Then he read Heidegger and was converted to what he thought was Heideggerian existentialism. But as a Husserlian and a Frenchman he felt he had to fix up Heidegger and make him more Cartesian. So he starts with the individual conscious subject, but writes about Death, Anxiety, lnauthenticity, Being and Nothing - all the things that Heidegger talks about. The result,Being and Nothingness,is a brilliant misunderstanding ofBeing and Time.If the story that we've been telling is right, Heidegger was precisely trying to free us from our Cartesian assumptions. When I went to visit Heidegger he hadBeing and Nothingnesson his desk, in German translation, and I said, 'So you're reading Sartre?, and he responded, 'How can I even begin to read this muck?' (His word was 'Dreck'.) That's pretty strong, but I think accurate, since if you treat Heidegger as if he were talking about subjects you turn him back into Husserl.
  14. ^Dreyfus, Hubert L.; Broderick, James H. (1957-06-01). "Curds and Lions in Don Quijote a Study of Chapter 17, Book II".Modern Language Quarterly.18(2): 100–106.doi:10.1215/00267929-18-2-100.ISSN0026-7929.
  15. ^Dreyfus, Hubert L (1963).Husserl's phenomenology of perception: from transcendental to existential phenomenology(Thesis).OCLC18179097.
  16. ^Korsnes, C.2016,A Matter of Perspective: Interview with Dagfinn Føllesdal,Filosofisksupplement,2/2015
  17. ^Müller, Vincent C.,ed. (2015)."Errors, Insights, and Lessons of Famous Artificial Intelligence Predictions: And What They Mean for the Future"(PDF).Risks of Artificial Intelligence.Chapter by Stuart Armstrong, Kaj Sotala, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press - Chapman & Hall.doi:10.1201/b19187.ISBN978-1498734837.OCLC921182846.
  18. ^abcDreyfus, Hubert L. (1965).Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence(Report). Rand Corporation. p. 10.Retrieved2019-08-23.
  19. ^"Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter D"(PDF).American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived fromthe original(PDF)on 2018-08-09.Retrieved2011-04-19.
  20. ^Dreyfus, Hubert L.; Dreyfus, Stuart E. (1988).Mind over machine: the power of human intuition and expertise in the era of the computer(2nd paperback ed.). New York: The Free Press. p. 112.ISBN978-0-02-908061-0.{{cite book}}:CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  21. ^Dreyfus, Hubert L. (1992).What computers still can't do: a critique of artificial reason.Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. pp. 317, n.45.ISBN978-0-262-04134-8.
  22. ^Crevier, Daniel (1993).AI: the tumultuous history of the search for artificial intelligence.New York: Basic Books. pp.125.ISBN0465029973.OCLC26858345.
  23. ^The iPod lecture circuit,Michelle QuinnLos Angeles Times,24 November 2007, Archived byWayback Machine
  24. ^"Episode III: The Life and Death of Hubert Dreyfus · At World's End".atworldsend.co.Retrieved2019-10-25.
  25. ^Haugeland, John (1996-01-01)."Body and world: a review of What Computers Still Can't Do: A critique of artificial reason (Hubert L. Dreyfus): (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992); liii + 354 pages, $13.95"(PDF).Artificial Intelligence.80(1): 119–128.doi:10.1016/0004-3702(95)00084-4.ISSN0004-3702.Archived fromthe original(PDF)on 2018-07-12.
  26. ^Starr, Sandy"Nihilism online?",2001-07031,Spiked,Archived fromthe originalon 2001-11-18 [Review]
  27. ^[Reviewed byGarry WillsinSuperficial & Sublime?,New York Review of Books,2011-04-07, this being followed by'All Things Shining': An ExchangeinNYRBon 2011-05-26]
  28. ^MacAvoy, Leslie (2015-05-19)."Review of Skillful Coping: Essays on the Phenomenology of Everyday Perception and Action".Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.ISSN1538-1617.
  29. ^Roth, Paul A. (2015-11-16)."Review of Retrieving Realism".Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.ISSN1538-1617.
  30. ^Okrent, Mark (2018-02-08)."Review of Background Practices: Essays on the Understanding of Being".Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.ISSN1538-1617.
  31. ^abBrinkmann, Svend(2010)On the Road with Heidegger: Review of the Festschrift in honor of Hubert DreyfusPrePrintofpublished reviewin:SATS,Volume 3, Issue 1, Pages 175–180, ISSN (Online) 1869-7577, ISSN (Print) 1600-1974
  32. ^Sean Dorrance Kelly.2000.Grasping at Straws: Motor Intentionality and the Cognitive Science of Skilled BehaviorInHeidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus - Vol. II,edited by Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, II: Pp. 161–177. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press [Author Copy]

Criticism of AI sources

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