Date of Award

5-2-2018

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Philosophy

First Advisor

Daniel Weiskopf

Second Advisor

Neil Van Leeuwen

Abstract

The Frame Problem originated as an obstacle for classical, symbolic A.I. that was adopted, expanded, and reformulated by philosophers. The version of the problem that I focus on, the Holism Problem, points out the difficulty in programming systems to recognize and consider mostly relevant information, given that relevance is context-sensitive. My goal in this thesis is to determine whether the Global Workspace Theory (GWT) can solve the holism problem. GWT proposes that distributed parallel processing, global broadcast, and chaotic itinerancy can solve the problem by providing a system with 1) the speed to search through information, 2) access to the information it needs to compute relevance, 3) the ability to synthesize information. I argue that GWT fails to enable a system to recognize any relevant information because it inadequately responds to the Epistemological Holism Problem, which requires successfully determining the norms by which a system can recognize relevance.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.57709/11731422

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