Recent Submissions

  • Critique Of The Interpretations And Prospects Of Artificial Intelligence

    Marrero, Danny; Heffner, Rhaea (2022-05-01)
    The field of Artificial Intelligence has had a particular creative and productive period in recent years, drawing attention and further participation in its development from both researchers and business. Artificial Intelligence is said to be making progress on key benchmark tests and researchers are producing impressive and surprising machines. What interests us primarily as philosophers of Artificial intelligence is the interpretive meaning we give to these advances to the field, and whether human level general intelligence could ever be reproduced in a machine. In this paper, there will be a review of the dominant paradigms in the philosophy of artificial intelligence and various critique of their theories of mind and the views of artificial intelligence research and why they fail. There will be a proposal of a better meaning of intelligence and the Lovelace Test of machine intelligence that better encapsulates this meaning of intelligence. Lastly, there will be a demonstration of why serial computers have and will never pass the Lovelace Test and therefore never be intelligent.
  • A Philosophical Examination Of Social Media: The Endangerment Of Respect

    Mulnix, Michael; Sortwell, Sophia A. (2019-05-01)
    This paper aims to give a philosophical examination of social media and the threat it holds towards the moral development of children, specifically their level of respect. It is not maintained that these online platforms have the ability to changes adult’s current moral character. To support my claim, I will demonstrate social media’s prevalence and importance in order to establish its ability to have a widespread impact. Moreover, I will present Confucian and Kantian moral doctrines in order to establish respect’s importance. Subsequently, I will examine the nature of social media to exhibit how its means of communication make instances of disrespect more frequent and comfortable. Since, some may argue social media has the potential for Aristotelian virtue friendship, I have also provided a detailed analysis that demonstrates the contrary. I will also explicate further on the nature of social media, as well as human nature, to describe the impact that these platforms can have on individual’s psychological wellbeing. Specifically, social media can cause an increase in narcissistic behavior, and potentially a decrease in empathy, which are contradictory to the notion of respect. Lastly, I will present the concept of the virtual self in order to explain how these psychological consequences may come about. Through these pieces of supporting evidence, it is maintained that social media is negatively effecting the level of respect people have for one another as a society.
  • GNEISS

    Carey, Kevin; Bias, Nicholas (2018-01-01)
    GNEISS (pronounced nice) is a 23 min short film. It tells the story of Gneiss and his relocation. Gneiss after spending a nondescript amount of time at his grandmother's house in New Mexico moves with his mother, Mary, to a suburban home in Salem. During the trip Gneiss finds a stone he is inexplicably drawn to. Despite pleas from his emotionally distant mother to connect with him, he instead worships the stone. Missing class and isolating himself three weeks go by then Gneiss has an emotionally charged fight with his Mother about her leaving after his Dad died. As Gneiss packs a bag to run away the stone consumes his attention entirely and Gneiss vanishes. GNEISS is an adaptation and expansion of a previous work I made. The 20 page script was written over a semester with Kevin Carey as the faculty advisor. Then the following semester I shot the movie with actors Peter Keefe as Gneiss and Macey Jennings as Mary. I edited the movie after filming. A premiere was held April 30th to an Audience of around 30 people.