ABSTRACT
Artificial intelligence is a science that finds itself in somewhat the same epistemological position as Aristotelian dentistry. Aristotle stated that women have fewer teeth than men 1 and attributed this characteristic to women's supposed lesser need, men being stronger and more choleric, 2 but he never bothered to look in Mrs. Aristotle's mouth to verify his theory. Similarly, AI has developed as an almost entirely synthetic enterprise, quite isolated from the complementary, analytic study of the biology of natural intelligence represented by psychology and the neurosciences. To a biologist, the AI approach to the study of intelligence seems like a strange way of trying to understand the brain, which is, after all, at the basis of human intelligence. Nonetheless, biologists and computer scientists for the most part share the monistic view that mental events, including the manifestations of intelligence, necessarily reflect the activity of neurons in the brain.
