Philosophy

The Philosophy Department and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences are proud to present the fourth talk of our Philosophy and AI speaker series, by Professor Cameron Buckner, (University of Houston). Please see below for information about the talk. A reception will follow in Griffin-Floyd 303.

Title: Sentimental Machines: New Inspiration for Artificial Social and Moral Cognition from Adam Smith and Sophie De Grouchy

While deep learning has demonstrated dramatic success in areas as diverse as perceptual recognition, strategy gameplay, text generation, and predicting the final structure of folding proteins, it has made comparatively less progress on the social and moral aspects of cognition. In this talk, I argue that research has been too influenced by Macchiavellian, rationalist frames that emphasize particularly tricky propositional attitude ascriptions which could not plausibly be derived from associative learning, such as those involving false beliefs. In the alternative, more empiricist-leaning, sentimentalist tradition — which I will characterize using the work of David Hume, Adam Smith, and Sophie de Grouchy — success instead involves adapting one’s own emotional and affective learning capacities to emulate and coordinate with other agents. Such adaptation — often involving a faculty of empathy/sympathy — facilitates social learning and moral decision-making by helping agents cooperate with one another and solicit help, sanction social defectors, share cultural knowledge through cohesive groups, and eventually achieve the perspective of an “impartial observer” in one of these groups as an aid to normative decision-making.