Kousaku Yui, PhD Philosophy

Everyone knows what the self is: it is one's conscious first-person perspective on the world. This view is so central to the Western philosophical tradition, so often taken as the default intuition, that it is no exaggeration to call it a dogma: The Dogma of the Conscious Self. I question this dogma on historical and empirical grounds.

Consciousness and the Self

Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence

Despite seemingly rapid advances, a foundational question remains in the field of AI: we are not even sure what the desired AI system should look like, both from the perspective of ethics and engineering. I think we can make headway on these issues by applying the tools and methods of the philosophy of cognitive science—what we know about human nature—to the question of what a genuine artificial intelligence is. I have given several public talks on AI aimed at a non-academic audience, and have taught undergraduate courses on the philosophy of AI.

The Socio-functional Self

Most views of the self are individualistic, in the sense that the self can be conceptualized at the boundaries of an individual. I propose a socio-functional alternative. Consider this analogy. A single neuron plucked from the brain, no matter how closely studied in isolation, will not tell us about the nature of a particular thought. And that is because, though neurons realize the information processing functions that make up thoughts, neurons are not themselves thoughts. Instead, the mind is defined by its functional relations within an appropriately organized cognitive system. The traditional individualistic way we have understood the self, similarly, plucks the individual from the social system. Though an isolated individual may have a body and mind—just as an isolated neuron may have a cell membrane and electrical potential—that entity is no more a self than a neuron is a thought.

Cross-cultural philosophy

When it comes to questions of personal identity and selfhood, academic philosophy has focused on the Western tradition. This is particularly unjustified because (1) theories of personhood and selfhood vary greatly across different cultures and (2) Western theories do not seem to have special justification. I am interested in what we can learn from theories coming from traditions such as African ubuntu, Classical Chinese, Japanese, Mesoamerican, First Nations, Buddhist, and orthodox Indian philosophy.

mail: kousaku.yui@k-yui.com