However, Hill was also not especially taken by the reasons I provided for expecting such developments either. Hill’s suggestion is that the best reasonable argument you could construct from my original considerations was fallacious. Though, Hill is quick to point out that I didn’t take myself to be constructing an argument: “… not to claim that Eliasmith really argues for the emergence of artificial minds” (this collection, p. 4).
Nevertheless, her analysis is that what I have provided is best understood as a petitio principii (aka circular argument): “this means that the conclusion drawn at the end of the argumentative line is identical with at least one of the implicit premises” (Hill this collection, p. 4). Unfortunately, the technical analysis offered (p. 5) is a non sequitur (i.e., there is no logical connection between the premises and conclusion). Regardless, one fallacy is as embarassing as the other.
However, I’d like to suggest that if we wanted to recast the original paper as a logical argument, then a simple modus ponens will do: if we have a good theory and the technological innovations necessary to implement the theory, then we can build a minded agent. We have good (and improving) theory and will have the proper technological innovations (in the next 50 years), therefore we will be able to build a minded agent (in the next 50 years). Indeed, most of the paper is arguing for the plausibility of these premises.
More to the point, however, I think that we can take this as an object lesson for when logical inference is really just the wrong kind of analysis of a paper. Instead of trying to provide a logical argument from which the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises, I am providing series of considerations that I believe make the conclusion likely given both the current state of affairs, and expected changes. In short, I think of the original paper as providing something more like a series of inferences to the best explanation: all of which are, technically, fallacious; and all of which are directed at establishing premises.