In “Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable?” Aaron M. Bornstein surveys the field of artificial neural networks, claiming that “[a]s exciting as their performance gains have been… there’s a troubling fact about modern neural networks: Nobody knows quite how they work.” The article is fascinating in its own right, and Peter over at Consciousness Entities provides an excellent overview, but I would like to use it to flex a little theoretical muscle, and show the way the neural network ‘Inscrutability Problem’ turns on the same basic dynamics underwriting the apparent ‘hard problem’ of intentionality. Once you have a workable, thoroughly naturalistic account of cognition, you can begin to see why computer science finds itself bedevilled with strange parallels of the problems one finds in the philosophy of mind.

This parallel is evident in what Bornstein identifies as the primary issue, interpretability. The problem with artificial neural networks…