Moderated discussion by Ratneel Deo between Rohitash Chandra and John Hawkins

The history of academic thought begins with philosophy. The original texts were penned by philosophers in antiquity who strove to understand the complex world around them. As our ideas progressed, we formed specific disciplines founded on empirical and rational techniques that allowed intellectual progress. Nevertheless, philosophy has continued to contribute to academic thought, sometimes by just being a source of critique and analysis. One example of this is multi-disciplinary fields like cognitive science, where philosophers like Daniel Dennet and Patricia Churchland have contributed by critiquing and clarifying ideas that come from other disciplines.

Artificial Intelligence is a field that forms one of the other core spokes of cognitive science, it asks us to try and understand the mind by replicating some of its behaviour. As we make progress in this field we find that more questions are being opened up. In addition, these questions encroach on the world of pure philosophy which has always engaged humanity to understand the nature of knowledge, experience, rationality and sentience. Furthermore, there has been a debate between Western and Eastern philosophical systems about the foundations of modern science and the role of Hindu philosophy such as Pramana and Nyaya.

In this discussion, we explore the questions that are emerging from artificial intelligence research as well as the cross-cultural consideration of these technologies and their impact on society. Furthermore, we will focus on the importance of knowledge about philosophical schools such as positivism when it comes to scientific methods, statistics, and machine learning.

Host: Ratneel Deo is a PhD student in Machine Learning at the University of Sydney. His research interests are in areas of applied machine learning, Bayesian deep learning and climate extremes.

Dr Rohitash Chandra, is a Senior Lecturer in Data Science at the School of Mathematics and Statistics, UNSW Sydney. He has a PhD in AI from Victoria University Wellington (2022) and his research interests are in methodologies and applications of artificial intelligence, including Bayesian deep learning, large language models and climate extremes. He is a student of Hindu philosophy and currently working on a research paper about modern science and Pramana, which is related to this discussion.

Dr John Hawkins is a Director of the Pingla Institute which is an independent research organisation with a focus on artificial intelligence. He has more than two decades of experience as a data scientist in the industry. Dr Hawkins has a PhD in AI and has a background in Western philosophy. His research interests are in methodologies and applications of artificial intelligence, including bioinformatics, machine learning, economic forecasting, and large language models.

Time: 5pm, Rm 4082