Anthropocentrism, Logocentrism, And Neural Networks: Victoria Davion Prefigures Some Important Lessons From Nature

Abstract

In her 2002 essay, “Anthropocentrism, Artificial Intelligence, and Moral Network Theory: An Ecofeminist Perspective,” Victoria Davion points out, utilizing Val Plumwood's ecofeminist analysis, the faulty anthropocentric, logocentric assumptions made both within the artificial intelligence (AI) community, generating serious problems in the effort to build “intelligent” machines, and in moral philosophy, its “rule-based picture of moral reasoning” (169) coming under fire from the emerging field of neural net research. Davion demonstrates prescience regarding the direction in which both disciplines eventually move, as they learn important “lessons from nature”: That intelligence and moral reasoning are widely distributed throughout the Biosphere and are not based upon what has been taken as paradigmatic—the reductive, linear logic, abstracted from all context, characteristic of only one possible way of approaching the world. I present updates regarding artificial intelligence, neuropsychology, and the philosophical analysis of anthropocentrism, affirming that directing open, respectful attention toward the Other in the real, living world will eventually provide us with the ontological foundation for a nonanthropocentric ethics capable of sustaining truly intelligent and moral ways of living.

Publication Date

9-1-2018

Publication Title

Ethics and the Environment

Volume

23

Issue

2

Number of Pages

37-81

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.2979/ethicsenviro.23.2.04

Socpus ID

85057113956 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85057113956

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