Under the then-current paradigm for example, machines could recognize

patterns only with a strictly limited explicitly predetermined human-

programmed feature-set (page 15).

The upshot here, for Dreyfus, was that this failure helped to reveal the hidden
sophistication of human pattern recognition. Similarly, in terms of language
processing, the limits of human programmers in making rules governing
language use and interpretation revealed a much deeper knowledge of the
unsuspected complexity of syntax and semantics. (page 13) For the researcher
intent on realizing human-level pattern-recognition and language processing,
however, Dreyfus observed at the time that the horizon of research seems to
be receding at an accelerating rate (page 16) rather than drawing closer.

He traces the dogmatic pursuit of research programs attempting to capture

human-like reasoning in symbol-manipulating programs to associationism
(beginning page 49) at root of which is the working hypothesis that human
information processing proceeds through discrete manipulation of explicit
variables this is the core of the associationist thesis.

Association of a string with a value is staple programming, suitable for formal,

predetermined and structured problem spaces.

Dreyfus point is that gross similarities of behavior between people and

computers does not justify the associationist assumption noting that to test
such requires a detailed comparison of the steps involved in human and
machine processing. (original emphasis, page 50)1

On his account, these steps necessarily involve distinctly human modes of

information processing inaccessible to then-current machines, on the fringes of
consciousness, with the transition from implicit to explicit giving rise to
consciousness of clear and distinct ideas as typically understood.

In terms of understanding patterns, Dreyfus illustrates this distinction and its

consequence for consciousness via the Muller-Lyer Illusion, in which two figures
generate the sense that the central line segments which are equal are of

To date, such a comparison is not forthcoming, though information processing models of cognition
have been proposed these are not empirically testable at the level of explicit association. We have
no means of understanding how registers are revalued, and to track just which values are replaced.

Instead, the associationist assumption that Dreyfus challenges rests on general performance, much as
researchers today aspire to artificial general intelligence in the near-term.
different lengths. The difference between the two is due secondary lines which
rest on the fringes of the perceptual field (page 58) but which affect the
perception of the central segments and cause the noted difference in perceived
length of which human beings are conscious. Another aspect of human cognition
that is lost in explicit computation is brought to light in the case of the Necker
Cube, which requires that one adopt different perspectives on the figure in order
to interpret it in multiple ways and without which there appears no ambiguity in
what the figure represents. The capacity to compute these different perspectives
is not programmable on Dreyfus insight: To say that now one, now the other
orientation was being presented would make no sense in such a program,
although this alternation of perspective could easily affect human behavior.
(Page 58)

At the same time, he veils a dig at the researchers in AI for their own incapacity
to appreciate the value of human cognition, writing that it is perhaps because
the field provides no example of insight that some people in cognitive
simulation have mistaken the operation of [a general problem solving computer
program] for intelligent behavior. (page 30)

In order to make specific in which contexts human insight is indispensible,

For example, when attempting to explicitly program a computer to play a

simplified version of go with some success, a researcher may expect similar
success when attempting the same method in a full chess context and fail.

which he describes as an analog computer using ion solutions whose electrical

properties change with various local saturations may be necessary in order

This is to say that human information processing cannot be reduced to

associationist symbol manipulation, and that in order to succeed AI researchers
would instead have to bend the computational medium to reflect the processes
native to human cognition, tempering the early enthusiasm for the idea that
human information processing and discrete variable by variable computer
programming proceed by a common dynamic.
Even after recognizing the force of the dynamical systems approach, Dreyfus
recounts one limitation iterated in his early analysis, that of identifying just
which dimensions of a given context are salient to any given purpose.

Skilled engagement with the world and fringe consciousness:

Not only is discrete computation and explicit counting out of possibilities

unnecessary to human engagement with the world, it is counterproductive,
helping to explain the rapid slowing of early advances.
Joseph Rouse observes that for Dreyfus any attempt to insinuate conceptually articulated
representations in the midst of everyday practicalperceptual skills or the extra- ordinary
performances of experts would then be doubly mistaken. Conceptual understanding is superfluous
wherever we have become skillfully responsive to circumstances, since we can be flexibly and
appropriately responsive without any intervening conceptualized representations. Reflective
conceptual articulation is also antagonistic to skilled engagement with the world: in stopping to
think, we would dissolve any smooth-flowing skilled bodily attunement to what is taking place.
(page 252)

expert players of chess or baseball do not have a concept in mind, but instead respond directly to
the affordances or solicitations of a situation on the board or field. (page 252)

The point of the examples is that expert chess players or second basemen need not, and perhaps
cannot, have concepts explicitly or implicitly in mind, and cannot take up a stance of reflective
detachment while they perform well. (page 252)

In the context of language, Rouse writes: sometimes we become tongue-tied precisely when we
stop to consider our words more carefully (page 256)

However, Rouse also points to Haurgelands criticism of Dreyfus, that if this were all that were the
case, then there could be no sense of error in execution. To understand that one made the wrong
move, one must reflect on possible moves, and this requires the sort of explicit counting out that
Dreyfus at once wants to neglect. Rouse writes that:
Grandmasters playing blitz chess do make errors, of course. Yet Dreyfuss account of skilled
coping as ground-floor nonconceptual intentionality cannot recognize them as errors, but only as
responses that are abnormal for grandmasters. They would only be errors if the conceptually
articulated regulative and strategic norms of chess play already constitutively governed the
pattern-recognition capacities involved. (page 254)

Rouse observes that Dreyfus should agree that grandmasters playing blitz chess must
understand the concepts of rooks, moves along ranks and files, and winning, and must recognize
that their play is accountable to that understanding.(page 254)

But at the same time, Rouse points to a further concern, namely that many of the patterns actually
recognizable by grandmasters (and other skilled perceivers) may have no higher-order articulation
than that constituted by the ability to recognize them, and hence that such skillful recognition is
irreplaceable by any rule-governed system. (page 254)

This is to emphasize the grounding of concepts in the engagement which they serve to regulate.
The only measure of opportunity is the recognition of said opportunity, no rule can deliver this
recognition. Find opportunities may be a regulatory concept according to which action can be
evaluated, but it cannot guide this action. Only skilled coping, fringe consciousness can deliver
this.
In terms of the discrete symbol-manipulation at which digital computers excel,
Rouse finds a similar ground at work in human demonstration. In accord with
Dreyfus (1965) assessment of language recognition in AI, Rouse writes that:
Rapid, fluent conversation is not explicitly mindful of the concepts it expresses. Speakers can
respond fluently and smoothly to the solicitations of the conversational situation, and often
discover what they have to say only when they say it. Such talk is not thereby preconceptual or
nonconceptual. (page 256)

Dreyfus himself holds a slightly different position, which we may interpret here in light of that set
out very early and that we have revealed in terms of his 1965 analysis of the state of AI. In 1965,
Dreyfus point was that trade in symbols is a different kind of thing than what he comes to call
skilled coping which in 1965 he sets out in terms of tolerance to ambiguity and fringe
consciousness, and that Rouse characterizes as insisting upon a fundamental difference in kind
between conceptually articulated thought and nonconceptual perceptual practice. (page 258) This
is to say that Dreyfus begins with what Rouse identifies as a thin conception of language, and
though he understands other things in terms of situated engagement and skilled coping with a
changing world, this original notion of language as discrete symbol manipulation remains active on
the fringe of his own consciousness, thereby influencing how he came to think about things the
five decade afterwards. (Here I should point to a couple of examples???) Moreover, this early
conception is reinforced for Dreyfus by the presumptions of discussants with which he was
constantly engaged. Rouse notes that The practicalperceptual skills of speakers and listeners,
their bodily involvement in the world, and the social-institutional settings in which their skills are
exercised, typically play no role in such philosophical conceptions of language. (page 260)

Rouse is right to point to the problem, that in human beings such as when speaking so quickly that
ones own meaning is revealed only after an utterance is made, expression through language is
clearly a nonconceptual exercise for those skilled in the use of language. There is no essential
difference in kind, here. But, this does not coincide with the vector of Dreyfus entry point into the
field, that there is and that this is why early successes had been met with rapid failures. And,
where Dreyfus carries forward in this direction, Rouse feels that he makes a mistake.

Instead, Rouse recasts Dreyfus original vector: I therefore propose to explore the possibility of
understanding conceptual articulation and understanding as itself an extended form of practical
perceptual coping with surrounding circumstances. (page 258)

Rouse gives three aspects of the starting points of such a vector. First, understand organisms
teleologically, as directed toward the goal of maintaining and reproducing their characteristic life-
cyclical pattern under changing circumstances. (page 259)

Second, that life-cyclical pattern does not distinguish the organisms form of life from its
environmental niche, but is instead a unified phenomenon. (page 259)

Third, I take from Dreyfus and Todes the recognition that practicalperceptual activity has a
reflective rather than determinative teleology: its intentional fulfillment would not be a
predetermined goal or condition toward which it aims, but is instead an indefinite exploration
toward what Dreyfus sometimes calls an optimal grip, translating Merleau-Pontys maximum
prise. (page 259)

From this starting point, we can embrace Dreyfus direction while regrounding the originally hard
distinction between explicit and implicit in a circular causality between inner and outer aspects of
the agential system, being in the world.

This model is then to be exported into a revived analysis of AI in Dreyfus original spirit.

Here, Rouse points to what I feel to be the limit of current AI research, the emergence of purpose
within an AI. And, I feel as with Dreyfus that this is essentially a human problem, as his analysis
from 1965 sets out as the mistake of researchers to allow success in one type of problem to
influence how they proceed in trying to solve other types of problems. Dreyfus originally sets out
four such types (see preceding for review ???) and here I will first review the issue before
couching it in light of his original assay. Then, in conclusion, I will indicate some evidence of this
limit, and how it may be overcome.

Rouse analysis of language, and his regrounding in bottom-up conceptualization of embodied

practice, resonates with Dreyfus early assay. First, it requires an embodied situatedness that is on
his assay not sufficiently shared with other animals to enable effective communication let alone
with digital computers, who until recently and in rare and limited forms have no situation at all.
Second, language is usefully employed only in naming modes of practical engagement and
expressing these for the benefit of others similarly embodied and situated, and by whom these
names are then reinforced through replication or dissolved through dispute. Third, reinforcing the
common threads running through the prior two, language use and its names are only significant in
the effort of achieving a distinctive practical perceptual hold on circumstances including the
management of personal expectations in coordination with others who both share and shape these
circumstances (page 261).

Rouse puts the situation thusly:

Philosophers marginalize these phenomena that highlight the practical perceptual concreteness
of discursive practice, perhaps because we have been rightly but overly impressed with the
expressive resources of logic and linguistics. The insights from these more formal disciplines
encourage a misleading reversal in the order of understanding. Philosophers tend to see formal
relations as a framework around which the bodily and socially interactive aspects of discursive
practice are built. We should instead understand these powerful expressive resources as
abstracted from and presupposing immersion in a natural language as an integral part of the world
we inhabit. (page 262)

What explains the fact that 18 researchers are now bent to inquiry in AI for every one ??? years
ago, when Moor first articulated his law? One possible reason may be the lack of a sense of
circumstance to what end?

Looking back we may ask simply if we count that early tree-climbing as tangible
progress, today.

Imagine a young boy atop a tree, staring at that moon back in a day when the
moon remained a mystery, an unknown and maybe even a place worth visiting.
There would be no further effort past that tree-top were it not for these pre-
adolescent aspirations. This is to note a pattern even more general than Dreyfus,
that research programs follow the course of the lives of their pursuants. Many
die together. Where they do not, they continue on in students and through
artifacts. And, in so far as these early dreamers left an active legacy, we may
count their first steps as tangible progress. Going to the moon, the lift-off is the
most difficult part.
As with the moon, though, we may ask if continued work in this direction is
worthwhile. We may wonder why no one is on the moon, today, though its
visitation may have been proven in principle. Is there a lesson to be taken from
this? Dreyfus overall pattern does seem to apply to this work, as well. Today,
though the USA claims first achievement, there is no expansion of its
contemporary social-political order onto the Moon environment, though it seems
to expand in every other direction. Why, we may wonder, is this the case?

Diminishing returns? What does all of this effort actually get us?

So, should Dreyfus have performed his assay in similar terms now, should he
have tempered the reigning enthusiasm?

He should, perhaps even more vehemently, as our location in terms of his overall
pattern is itself tempered by the costs of fifty years of diminishing returns. Sure,
simulations are more fine-grained, and chess programs so good that there seems
little sense in investing the time to ever beat one. Soon enough, it is projected
that a machine will best the worlds best Starcraft players. Starcraft represents a
notably less rigid operational environment than chess, so direct rules
programming is impossible. We are talking about machines that recognize
patterns, learn them, and recompose them in novel ways to solve novel patterns.

Again, however, it is difficult to see how these machines result in better human
beings.

We can be confident that this is not the case, now, as indirectly evidenced in the revolutionary
performance of deep learning neural networks since Hinton (???).

Contemporary AI is advancing, and can make sense of some aspects of the human condition that
were beyond work fifty years ago.

IBMs Deep Blue beat the best human chess player in ??? only ??? after the prospective deadline
issued by Dreyfus contemporaries in 1965.

And, a similar feat was achieved in Go only in 2015 (???).

AI dedicated to winning more complicated games are currently under development. In South Korea,
some attention has been given to the development of an AI playing Starcraft. (???)