1997). The structure of our culture, the ability to store information outside us using languages,
and the way we interact with each other. We need to address these issues if we want higher
cognition to emerge in artificial systems.
Future Culture: Artificial Cognition
“The only impossible thing is something to be impossible”
Biologically, we are not that different from men of six thousand years ago. Why we are
so intelligent compared to them? Because of the accumulation of knowledge, provided by
language and culture. Education provides the transmission of this knowledge to new
generations. If we would isolate a small group of newborns in a closed society, they would not
be that different from other primates. If we build a system capable of simulating human
cognition, at the beginning the system would not be smarter than a neanderthal. In the same
way we educate our children and transmit them our culture, we would need to educate such a
system in order to be high-cognitive. This means that “intelligent machines” would need to
depart from our culture. Once they would grasp their own culture based on ours, where would
their culture go? Wherever we would direct them to lead it. And it seems it would be hard to
make a distinction between their culture and our culture.
Beliefs and Misbeliefs
We believe that reason is based on beliefs. That beliefs are the axioms of reason. Thus,
reason cannot be proven31... just believed32. We could say that most of our beliefs are learned
by imitation. This implies that, since we cannot be sure of our beliefs, some of them could be
collective misbeliefs.
With our experiments, we could see that some misbeliefs were broken by experience.
But some did not. It seems that the more experience, the less misbeliefs we will have. But will
all our experiences break all our misbeliefs?
31This is based on Gδdel's incompleteness theorem (See Section 0.2).
32More completely speaking; reason, beliefs, and experience, are based each one on the others. The
exposition of our philosophical system still needs to be made in another work.
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