Philosophy of Computing and Information Technology
Lecturer: Dr. John Quinn.
Teaching takes place Sat. 0800-1100 in the CIT conference room.
Thanks to Charles Fox (University of Oxford) for help in preparing this course.
This course will cover philosophical and other issues relating to computing and machines. Supporting material will be added to this page each week. Topics to be covered in this course are:
Models and representation
Minimum reading for this topic:
- Models in Science (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- What is Occam's Razor? (class handout).
- Domingos (1998), Occam's Two Razors.
- Harman (2003), Inductive Simplicity and the Matrix.
- Davis et al (1993), What is a knowledge representation?
- Linhares (2000), A glimpse at the metaphysics of Bongard problems.
Recommended reading:
- Bensusan (1998), God doesn't always shave with Occam's razor.
Minds and machines
Minimum reading for this topic:
- Turing (1950), Computing Machinery and Intelligence.
- LeCun, Malik, Russell, Sutton (2005), "Towards Human-Level AI" workshop slides.
Recommended reading:
- Chalmers (1995) Facing up to the problem of consciousness.
- Dennet (1995) Facing backwards on the problem of consciousness.
- Hut and Shepard (1996), Turning the Hard Problem Upside Down and Sideways.
- Harman (2000) Practical aspects of theoretical reasoning.
- Nilson (2004), Human level AI? Be serious!
- Nilson (2002), Considerations regarding human level AI.
- Schmidt et al (2006) Sense and Nonsense.
Causality and Bayes
- An intuitive explanation of Bayesian reasoning. (class handout).
- Brown (2002), Bayes' theorem and the philosophy of science.
- Griffiths and Tennenbaum (2006), Statistics and the Bayesian mind.
- Pearl (2003), Statistics and Causal Inference: A Review.
- Goodman's 'New riddle of Induction'.
- Spirtes et al (2004), Causal Inference.
Social issues and computing in Africa
Computer ethics
Page maintained by John Quinn.