I have now taken a big step toward transitioning from hi-tech into philosophy.  My foundational paper on Naturalistic Transcendentalism has now been accepted for publication in the Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism.  It has taken me awhile to fully appreciate the care and effort that is needed on footnotes. I had to go over my paper with a fine-tooth comb looking for places where I had claimed thoughts expressed by others.  Carefully footnoting these points was very valuable.  I found that sometimes my thoughts actually differed in subtle ways from the papers I was referencing.  In these cases, I included in the footnotes explanations that this was true and why it was true.  This clarified which ideas in my paper are actually my own, and which ideas have been published by others and are generally known.

John Searle

Perhaps my most valuable recent discovery was John Searle’s article on Biological Naturalism. As a graduate student at MIT, I knew of the debates that raged between Marvin Minsky, Jerry Fodor, and John Searle.  During those years as a young computer scientist, I thought that John Searle was inexplicably opposed to the idea that human consciousness was an information processing phenomenon.  In this paper, Searle shows that many philosophers have been resistant to this idea for a very long time.  Here was a paper by a recognized leader in philosophical thinking who explained and documented this state of affairs.  In this paper, Searle recognized the naturalistic basis for human consciousness just enough to allow me to build on his thoughts.

Artificial Intelligence

In my paper, I explained that my background as a computer scientist with training in artificial intelligence gave me a way of looking at the basic issues of human consciousness from a new perspective.  I explain how we make decisions at two different levels: the conscious decision-making level and the emotional level.  It shows the potential for increasing understanding of ourselves by understanding more of how our mind works.  Artificial intelligence, with its skills in reverse engineering from human intellectual capabilities, has valuable observations to share with philosophers.

Defining Intuition

I discovered that I had not explained the scientific foundations of my approach well.  I admitted that neither I nor Ralph Waldo Emerson were able to define clearly what we mean by intuition. I carefully described the scientific state of knowledge about what human consciousness is and how it works.  Science knows almost nothing about this phenomena.  I explained how to move forward both scientifically and philosophically from the current state of affairs.