Abstract
SmartData are to be our surrogates in virtual environments, responding to requests for our personal information just as we would were we in those environments. How could data possibly respond as we would? One might think that only intelligent agents can respond as we would, and thus, SmartData must be intelligent agents themselves—hence “SmartData”. One might infer, then, that creating SmartData requires creating intelligent agents, which requires identifying the nature of, among other properties, intelligence, agency, meaning, understanding, and consciousness. Accordingly, since identifying the nature of these properties is a project in the philosophy of mind and language, one might think that philosophy of mind and language should dominate the pursuit of SmartData, especially in the early stages. In this paper, I explore this line of reasoning, arguing that even if only intelligent agents can be effective surrogates, pursuing SmartData does not require identifying the nature of intelligence, agency, etc., and moreover, attempting to identify the nature of these properties would be a strategic mistake. I conclude by suggesting that philosophy of mind and language should play a limited role in the pursuit of SmartData nonetheless.
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Notes
- 1.
Slightly less roughly, where a surrogate is a token SmartData agent and a paired user is the person whose surrogate that agent is, for any surrogate s and paired user u, inputs i 1 … i n, and outputs o 1 … o n, we want s to transform i x into o x if and only if u would transform i x into o x if u received a suitably translated version of i x.
- 2.
Of course, sometimes philosophers discuss theories of consciousness that ask whether consciousness is physical or not, whether it has causal properties or not, and so on. These issues extend beyond merely identifying which functions correspond to consciousness since rational people can agree about which functions correspond to consciousness while disagreeing about whether its physical, whether is has causal properties, and so on. These are legitimate issues, but they fall outside the scope of ‘theory of consciousness’ as that phrase is used here.
References
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Don Borrett, Han Kwan, and George Tomko for useful discussions of these issues.
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Biggs, S. (2013). Philosophy and SmartData. In: Harvey, I., Cavoukian, A., Tomko, G., Borrett, D., Kwan, H., Hatzinakos, D. (eds) SmartData. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6409-9_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6409-9_5
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