Kousaku Yui, PhD in Philosophy

Everyone knows what the self is: it is one's conscious first-person perspective on the world. This view is so central to the Western philosophical tradition, so often taken as the default intuition, that it is no exaggeration to call it a dogma: The Dogma of the Conscious Self. I question this dogma on historical and empirical grounds.

Consciousness and the Self

Topics in Artificial Intelligence

Despite seemingly rapid advances, the field of AI is held back by philosophical issues. The issue is that we are not even sure what the desired AI system should look like, both from the perspective of ethics and engineering.

I have taught multiple courses on the Philosophy of AI, and given several public talks aimed at a non-academic audience. I am currently applying to post-docs on the topic of the philosophy of AI, applying my dissertation work to the question of what makes for genuine AI.

The Socio-functional Self

Most views of the self are individualistic, in the sense that the self can be conceptualized at the boundaries of an individual. I propose a socio-functional alternative. A single neuron plucked from the brain, no matter how closely studied in isolation, will not tell us about the nature of a particular thought. And that is because, though neurons realize the information processing functions that make up thoughts, neurons are not themselves thoughts. Instead, the mind is defined by its functional relations within an appropriately organized cognitive system. The traditional individualistic way we have understood the self, similarly, plucks the individual from the social system. Though an isolated individual may have a body and mind—just as an isolated neuron may have a cell membrane and electrical potential—that entity is no more a self than a neuron is a thought.