What a machine should know about philosophical problems?

Abstract

This paper maps out some of the few remaining challenges to artificial intelligence from the point of view of philosophy and fuzzy logic. Certain key ideas of Lotfi Zadeh are used as a point of reference. Human reasoning is a complex procedure which is able to handle such problems as the counterfactual truth and the supervenience relation, which are difficult to explain in terms of the classical logical theory. To achieve this, one needs to understand them in a more natural manner than the standard positivistic logic is able to do. Next some examples taken from ethical theory are discussed, such as the fact/value-distinction and supererogation. These provide typically hard cases to the positivist methodology, as its representatives have always admitted. The results are applied to the philosophical problems of robotics, especially to the notion of a Cyborg on the information web. A Cyborg on the Web should be able to combine human-like reasoning with unlimited information processing.