Unpersuaded

We can't all be experts in everything – this idea marked my philosophical starting point as I launched headlong into Will Storr's 2014 book The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science. It is inherent to human temporal finitude that even the very best of those lucky enough to have received advanced education will have only enough time to become experts in a few areas, if any at all. As individuals, a necessary consequence of our inevitable participation in more activities than we can personally and deeply understand is that we end up making use of knowledge that has been generated by others. Today's technology has gifted us with the opportunity to be flooded by the knowledge of others in any subject we should choose at the mere click of a button. However, technology has also proliferated opportunities for forgery, allowing frauds and scammers to fool the public into accepting and even purchasing their false, underdeveloped "knowledge". It would be no understatement to say that the task of identifying reliable information has become a defining challenge of our time.

A benefit of relegating the generation of knowledge to society at a whole is that each person is then relieved of the burden of keeping it all in mind. Modern knowledge-building has largely been taken from the hands of individual intellectuals and trusted to networks or institutions like science that produce new facts at a rate never before seen in human history. That is not to say that there are no longer knowledgeable individuals, certainly there are, and we have developed an increasing number of cognitive heuristics to identify them when researching new ideas. Signals of expertise include pieces of paper that indicate achievement in the most rigorous institutions of learning, publications in journals that are meticulously reviewed by other experts, and competitive success in the development of products for markets where truth dominates falsity. Heuristics and signals help lead us to good information quickly; that is, to the most reputable people and institutions that have developed knowledge that we would like to make use of despite our inability to create it on our own. Our society depends on the success of these people and institutions, and the comfort with which we repeat the simple, standalone facts we learned in school (which often took loads of time, money, and brilliance to generate) reflects our confidence that they are indeed functioning well.

Psychology as Moral Evasion

I spontaneously picked up Theodore Dalrymple’s “Admirable Evasions – How Psychology Undermines Morality” as an Amazon suggestion because I was grabbed by the subtitle. “Finally,” I thought, “someone to bridge the gap between the psychological description of behaviour and the moral prescription of behaviour”. I’ve made no secret of my amateurish fascination with both pop-psychology and moral philosophy, and it’s always seemed obvious to me that each was lacking the other in its attempt at explanatory completeness. A good combination of the two should provide knowledge of how and why we act and suggest the best ways of responding to that knowledge. Unfortunately – and this has been the struggle with every science that encroaches on morality – the two domains of inquiry seem to operate in different realms, under distinct and incompatible assumptions.

Behavioural psychology takes a cause-and-effect perspective of human behaviour, where the action of the subject is the termination of a long chain of events both inside and outside the body, events which can be identified and used to predict future action. Moral philosophy takes the individual as the starting point of decision-making and places value on the contribution of this individual to the resulting action, enabling what we call moral responsibility. The contradiction between the two modes of thinking should be clear: if behaviour is primarily a product of extenuating circumstances then the contribution of the individual can be shrunk to the point that is disappears; alternatively, if the moral agent is to be held fully responsible, his behaviour should not be predictable by forces outside of those he marshals to make the choice to act. This contradiction has itself been challenged, and I hope to write about the efforts to dissolve it another time. However, I’ve yet to come across what I would consider a seamless resolution.

I googled Dalrymple after placing the order for his book and experienced a moment of apprehension. His list of previously published titles, including but not limited to “Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass,” “In Praise of Prejudice,” and “Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality” triggered the alarm bells of my Left-leaning intuitions. I read about his earlier career as a prison doctor and psychiatrist and wondered how this might have influenced his moral opinions. The book's arrival presented yet another concern – at a slim 119 pages it was hardly long enough to do justice to the title. Nevertheless, I jumped in excited to discover some miraculous turn of phrase that would both assuage my suspicions about the author and illuminate some aspect of the aforementioned conflict that I had missed.

Questions about the Self

Seeing as how I’m all about learning things and being challenged by new ideas (hence this blog), at some point last year I figured I should be doing this stuff in real life too. I searched around my local community for some sort of philosophical discussion group, and although I was surprised at the slim pickings in this supposedly intellectual region, I did end up finding a small group of like-minded people with whom I've been sharing some very enlightening discussions for the past half a year or so. The organizer of the group recently emailed me asking if I would be willing to lead the discussion for the upcoming topic “What is the Self?” and I happily agreed. Here I’ll sketch out some ground I’d like to cover at the meet-up and try to raise some questions that should generate an active discussion.

Contemplating the necessary components.

The first question in any debate about such a nebulous topic is a pedantic one: how do we define our terms? Defining the self can be a cumbersome task though; somewhat like explicating the function of “the” in a sentence, the explanation is disproportionately more difficult than the usage. I thought a better way to get people comfortable talking about themselves would be to flip the question and ask what they would have to lose in order to not be themselves any longer – in other words, what would have to happen for you to become someone else?

Becoming someone else is an idea that makes me uncomfortable to think about. I like me and would prefer to continue being me for as long as possible. But I don’t need to look too far into the past to find someone who occupies not only all of my familiar places but even my body, someone who I hesitate to identify as me. I recognize that at one point this person was me, but whoever he was is distinct from the me that exists currently. Becoming someone else is evidently something I've done before, probably several times at least, and yet it’s something I look forward to doing again with trepidation. On the other hand, some changes seem desirable; for example, I will be in some very subtle way different after the meet-up discussion of this topic – hopefully more informed and knowledgeable. This change doesn't seem as problematic because something necessary is maintained: the periphery is affected but the core remains the same.

Ex Machina - Exploring Artificial Consciousness

"In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains, 
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows, 
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame, 
The good deeds a man has done before defend him."
- Bhagavad Gita

About half a year ago I was roaming though movie trailers on YouTube and was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Ex Machina, an AI thriller set to be released in early 2015. Opting to check it out in theaters over its conceptual competitor Chappie, I waited patiently for the limited release to expand into my area. Finally it did, and I’m happy to say the film didn't disappoint – a simple plot and a very complex machine made for quite a fun time. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

The film begins with tech employee Caleb Smith winning a contest to visit who is presumably his company’s founder, Nathan, in order to put a new technological breakthrough to the test. The breakthrough is the first functional artificial general intelligence (AGI), and the test is a variant on the famous Turing test – in this case, our lucky lad is to spend a short period of time each day speaking with the AI in order to decide whether or not he thinks it is conscious. Caleb is flown via helicopter to the remote and secluded research facility, where his nonchalant boss encourages him to relax his nerves and treat their time together as time between two normal guys.

An artificial general intelligence is essentially a computer that can successfully perform all of the operations of human cognition. The film’s AI, named AVA, is composed of a gel brain installed into a robot that resembles a human female in shape and function. She (never “it”) is locked within her own section of the facility, consisting of a make-shift bedroom and a corridor leading to the room where the interviews take place. Caleb is able to speak to AVA from the other side of a thick glass wall, and although their first conversation is charming and friendly we get our first ominous undertones as he notices a conspicuous crack in the glass on her side.

Dennett on Consciousness II – And then What Happens?

In Part I I described the introduction of philosopher Dan Dennett to the University of Waterloo for Brain Day, an annual event featuring a panel of speakers with specialty areas in the cognitive sciences. I then began to summarize Prof. Dennett’s talk, introducing the controversial concept of “philosophical zombies” and Dennett’s nonplussed reaction to them. I finished by describing an afterimage effect that seemed to have implications for the way we habitually think about consciousness. In this post, I’ll follow up with said implications and summarize the remainder of the talk – including what Dennett claims to have added to his approach with a small part at the end. Keep in mind that I’m not quite an expert on this stuff, but I’ll do my best to make the relevant points clear and explain why they’re significant.

Gazing at the discoloured American flag for any length of time caused a properly coloured afterimage to appear on the following blank slide. Dennett’s question – where is the red stripe? – seemed to provoke the answer “in our minds!” but he clearly found this answer dissatisfying. It became immediately obvious to me and everyone else in the room that the red stripe was not in the world itself, since it faded away over time and couldn’t be produced without proper preparation. It was equally clear that if the red stripe was only in our minds that it no longer existed strictly as a red stripe. This is my best guess for what Dennett intended to convey with this exercise, because it acted as a good segue to his next example. It also brought to light his immediate dismissal of “objects of consciousness,” since he never entertained the possibility that the red stripe existed in our consciousness (or experience, or qualia). (I’ll come back to correct this assumption if the video footage reveals something that I’ve missed.)

Dennett on Consciousness I - The Hard Problem

I couldn’t have imagined when I woke up this morning that in a few hours I’d be standing face-to-face with Dan Dennett, but a particularly observant girlfriend and some quick travel arrangements procured for me that lucky opportunity. Dennett gave an hour-long talk at the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience (CTN) at the University of Waterloo, where I was seated happily in the centre of the audience. The title of the talk was “The Hard Problem of Consciousness: What Happens Next?” and it offered a very concise and informative snapshot of Dennett’s ideas about consciousness with a small new addition. I was vaguely familiar with Dennett’s position from reading his tangential book on free will, Freedom Evolves and sifting through his newer Intuition Pumps, but it’s always nice to hear ideas from the thinkers themselves, and even more pleasant in a public forum of curious non-experts.

Like every philosophical problem that’s existed since antiquity, the literature on consciousness is enormous and intimidating. I’ve been aware (in whatever sense you like!) of the basic philosophy of mind problems for almost a year and I can’t say I’ve made super meaningful progress on any of them. Are we made of two kinds of things, or just one? If one, why do I feel like a “self” independent from my body? If two, how do they interact? The PEL podcast on the subject is a great introductory resource and it features a range of positions with fundamental disagreements even among the hosts. Another helpful video is hosted on YouTube by the CTN and features a talk given last year by Owen Flanagan, esteemed naturalist and author of The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized. Interestingly, other famous philosophers with whom I agree about one or two things seem to hold diametrically opposed positions on this issue (Nagel vs. Dennett, for example), so I’m hoping that today’s experience and a few accompanying blog posts can help clear things up for me.