Browsing by Subject "Philosophical aspects"

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Open Access
Moral mechanisms
(2012) Davenport, D.
Moral philosophies are arguably all anthropocentric and so fundamentally concerned with biological mechanisms. Computationalism, on the other hand, sees biology as just one possible implementation medium. Can non-human, non-biological agents be moral' This paper looks at the nature of morals, at what is necessary for a mechanism to make moral decisions, and at the impact biology might have on the process. It concludes that moral behaviour is concerned solely with social well-being, independent of the nature of the individual agents that comprise the group. While biology certainly affects human moral reasoning, it in no way restricts the development of artificial moral agents. The consequences of sophisticated artifical mechanisms living with natural human ones is also explored. While the prospects for peaceful coexistence are not particularly good, it is the realisation that humans no longer occupy a privileged place in the world, that is likely to be the most disconcerting. Computationalism implies we are mechanisms; probably the most immoral of moral mechanisms.
Open Access
Situating logic and information in information science
(2009) Karamuftuoglu, M.
Information Science (IS) is commonly said to study collection, classification, storage, retrieval, and use of information. However, there is no consensus on what information is. This article examines some of the formal models of information and informational processes, namely, Situation Theory and Shannon's Information Theory, in terms of their suitability for providing a useful framework for studying information in IS. It is argued that formal models of information are concerned with mainly ontological aspects of information, whereas IS, because of its evaluative role with respect to semantic content, needs an epistemological conception of information. It is argued from this perspective that concepts of epistemological/aesthetic/ethical information are plausible, and that information science needs to rise to the challenge of studying many different conceptions of information embedded in different contexts. This goal requires exploration of a wide variety of tools from philosophy and logic. © 2009 ASIS&T.