Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

When Albert Einstein said ‘Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better’, he did not have Artificial Intelligence (AI) in mind.”

Yet many of Einstein's ideas were almost purely products of his mind (if also based on previous work). Sure, he wanted to confirm them with observations, experiments, etc. However, they began life as largely mathematical ideas, despite Einstein’s stress on scientific imagery.

Take the case of Eddington showing that the sun did indeed bend light. When Einstein was informed about this, he didn’t seem to be that impressed (at least according to some accounts). In other words, he believed that he knew he was right well before any “empirical conformations”.

So although much in AI may seem fanciful, what’s happening has occurred in all the sciences many times before: i.e., speculation, thought-experiments, etc.

The article also seems to emphasise the Argument From Complexity. In other words: it’s all down to the complexity of the brain. Yet some philosophers and AI researchers argue that it may not be complexity in and of itself that explains all the limitations to AI: some problems may be otherwise. In any case, there’s no reason (in principle) that the complexity of the brain can’t be replicated in the future. The question is: Does AI need to replicate every aspect of the brain in order to bring about greater successes in the future?

Many “cognitivists” believe that the brain is a computer. (Sometimes they say “a kind of computer”.) Thus, as a result of this belief, they attempt to discover the computational processes which enable such things as perception and learning. However, expressed in that manner (as it often is), things are a little unclear.

Such cognitivists believe that the brain is also a machine — a computing machine.

Computationalists (computationalism is a branch of cognitivism) claim that all thought is computation. But what does that mean? 

extremely general terms, it can said that behaviourism was a response to the Cartesian (or, even more widely, Western) philosophical tradition in which behaviour, actions and what is done by persons was seen as the outward expression of what goes on in the mind. Thus, in that sense, many of those who were initially involved in artificial intelligence (AI) were following in behaviourism’s footsteps in that they believed that if a computer (or robot) behaved as if it had intelligence (or had a mind), then, by definition, it must actually be intelligent (or have a mind).

Many other currents in post-World War Two philosophy played-down the innards of the mind and, consequently, played-up behaviour. We had the work of the late Wittgenstein in which private mental states were seen as nothing more than “beetles in boxes”. We also had Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind and Quine saying that all there is to meaning is “overt behaviour”. And then functionalism (in the philosophy of mind) followed all that. …