Dr Yinya Liu participated and delivered an oral presentation in the Seventh World Conference on Metaphysics 2018, which was held at the Pontifical University of Salamanca, Spain, October 24-27, 2018. The title of the presentation was “Some Genetic Ideas on Ideogrammatic Writing for a Metaphysical Consideration of Artificial Intelligence”.
Robert Sokolowski has raised several key questions on the formulation of natural and artificial intelligence (AI) and left some of them open in his essay Natural and Artificial Intelligence in 1988. One of the questions about the capability of originating a machine’s own thinking in AI is still in a controversial and unresolved situation after thirty years’ development of technology. This presentation examines a proposed approach for the question of how a machine has the dimension of subjectivity and intentionality from the perspective of the metaphysics of mind is possible. This is an essential issue because it provides a new angle to explore how the machine thinks as a subject, but not like a subject is possible, i.e., how the machine will function as a subject by means of not only distinguishing, but also intellectually shifting between the objects that exist in the understanding and objects that exists in reality. Ideogrammatic writing as an example of this approach, which is preliminarily proposed by Sokolowski in his essay, will be applied to analyze this process by considering two concepts, imaging and memory. The proposed conclusion of this presentation is that ideogrammatic writing provides potential angle for AI on how to project meaning toward the thing rather than toward the word, which will bring in a new perspective for understanding “subject” itself under a new context.
