A philosophical encounter

This paper, along with the following paper by John McCarthy, introduces some of the topics to be discussed at the IJCAI95 event 'A philosophical encounter: An interactive presentation of some of the key philosophical problems in AI and AI problems in philosophy. ' Philosophy needs AI in order to make progress with many difficult questions about the nature of mind, and AI needs philosophy in order to help clarify goals, methods, and concepts and to help with several specific technical problems. Whilst philosophical attacks on AI continue to be welcomed by a significant subset of the general public, AI defenders need to learn how to avoid philosophically naive rebuttals. 1 AI as philosophy Most AI researchers regard philosophy as irrelevant to their work, though some textbooks (e.g. [Boden, 1978; Russell and Norvig, 1995]) treat the two as strongly related, as does McCarthy, one of the founders of AI. If we ignore explicit statements of objectives, and survey the variety of research actually to be found in AI conferences