A revolution in our sense of self
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
His description of GOFAI also doesn't ring true to me, but maybe that's a matter of interpretation.
Why is it so hard to admit ignorance? Especially in a culture claiming to vaunt science (especially here, I would have thought), whose very basis is admission of the limits of the egoistic individual to cognise reality?
After a couple of centuries of incredibly promising empirical work in so many fields, it should be really, really easy to say or write “I’m not sure”. The following step (“how can we devise a way to ask nature what’s true here”) may well be a matter for specialists. But one might have hoped the initial questioning open stance would have seeped, just a little, into the culture by now. We have a long way to go.
There is a lot of cultural superiority wrapped up in why we can't admit ignorance. In the west we believe in cavemen. We think people with spears and grass skirts are "lesser" civilizations. Even if you are the least bigoted person in the west you still feel a sense of cultural pride that you live in a world ruled by the scientific method and not by gods. You pity the natives because they lived and died and created no objective truth, they left no enduring mark on humanity. In terms of human progress they are the before and we are the after. "Cultural relativism" is a phrase many people have no time for in the west. We shouldn't long to live like the "noble savage" but I think we have serious problem in the west appreciating our cultural reality isn't the one true cultural reality.
The author could help by retracting his prophecy:
>The amazing creativity of your brain, as it helps us improvise our way through daily life, won’t be replicated in silicon in the near future, perhaps never.
He's claiming to know the unknowable here. Indeed, it's possible that AGI has already been implemented on silicon chips and we just haven't heard about it yet.
This keeps on going, apparently trying to ascribe self to the characters in the author's imagination. They seem to be terrified of the idea that the self is alone within the body and in response invent an elaborate fiction for why 'self' doesn't exist. - A common fear, but I suppose they are brave for exposing it even in part.
There's also the idea that thoughts don't come from the ego, or the self, or what-have-you; the idea that the "I" does not have thoughts, that perhaps thoughts are randomly generated and something compels us to follow one thought or another, so that we think an "I" is having a thought.
It is "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel. It is explores the experience of self. Even the opponents of this viewpoint call it "the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness." (wikipedia).
A behaviourist has the hammer of behaviour, and is trying to treat the mind as his nail. But he missed the mark right from the outset, for me.
I don't think his defence of human creativity is on strong grounds either. Association and generative application of patterns are pretty key to creativity to my mind; what we lack is a high enough tower to properly guide intention in our pattern systems, primarily because of the inefficiency in training I suspect.
That needs quite a bit of extra nuance. Certainly, our brains don't actually find optimal solutions. We do not reliably maximize some utility function. Instead, it seems our behavior can be explained much like some recursive approximate optimization algorithm.
In this version, we have some utility function, and we do our best to optimize it. Each step being made with the presumption it will indeed optimize. But at that point, it becomes a lot harder to justify that such a utility function exists. Especially because you need concepts like 'intent' or 'belief'. But those are terms of human behavior, reducing human behavior to human behavior isn't very helpful.
There are arguments that go around this. One can say that 'intent' or 'belief' come from our creator. Or, one can say these are the results of evolution. It should be noted that going from evolution to 'intent' and 'belief' is really non-trivial. As such, one might consider that perhaps, explaining humans as 'optimizing some utility function' isn't the best theory.
Personally, I happen to believe the story of 'intent' arising from evolution, but it isn't clear-cut.
This thinking is reducing "human behavior to human behavior" in the sense that you'd still be using the language of intents. But if we determine intent through empirical analysis of behavior and inference of the utility function, then the content of that intent may be very very different from what we express verbally.
This doesn't mean humans are irrational, just that there's a mismatch between our true goals and our verbally stated goals.
Now inference of the utility function doesn't have to depend on an assumption of perfect optimization (it could be a softmax policy or something like that). Nor would it have to be trivial: to prevent trivial solutions I think you'd have to make strong assumptions about the space of plausible utility functions, such as simplicity assumptions, or maybe evolutionary assumptions.
Sounds like a cool PhD project.
A more productive approach is to take the author's specific statements and reasoning, and see where you disagree. There is something in almost every paragraph that I think is at least debatable, but I don't see a clear denial of qualia - at most, he may be suggesting that they may not be what they seem.
Or that they are crude approximations of more fundamental neural activations. Like how clouds follow the laws of physics.
edit: (i seem to be restricted from posting)
i m not claiming clouds are an illusion, that's a strawman, but that studying the shape of clouds is the wrong way to go about physics.
I also don't understand the arguments for 'inner life'. as far as neuroscience of the brain is concerned that's an interpretation of brain dynamics. It has been given too much undeserved attention in philosophy imho. Inner life is defined as opposed to what? outer life ? as far as the brain is concerned there is no external world, it processes neural signals that are generated entirely inside the organism, sometimes in response to external stimuli like light. Why would it be impossible for it to process the neural activity of itself the same way that it processes the neural activity of the retina.
I don't understand this need that behaviorists have to not just set the inner life aside but to claim that it doesn't even exist. It clearly does. It's the one thing each of us knows with utmost certainty. Just because there might be an explanation for it based on more fundamental principles—principles which, I might add, we are nowhere near understanding—doesn't mean it's not real.
Studying clouds may not be a productive way to explore physics, but it is absolutely a productive way to explore clouds! Such study may very well be informed by physics, but the study of clouds (and related phenomena) is a field in its own right.
All of that is to say that I don’t find statements like “X is just <some underpinning of X>” to be particularly consequential, even if such a statement is true. The higher-level phenomenon is still worthy of study in its own right.
>One crucial clue that the inner oracle is an illusion comes, on closer analysis, from the fact that our explanations are less than watertight. Indeed, they are systematically and spectacularly leaky. Now it is hardly controversial that our thoughts seem fragmentary and contradictory.
The author may be accurate in stating that his thoughts and "explanations" are fragmentary and contradictory - but that doesn't mean the thoughts of everyone are. Indeed, logical consistency among one's thoughts, positions, and expositions is, to me, the most important standard when it comes to judging "intelligence".
>I can’t quite tell you how a fridge works or how electricity flows around the house. I continually fall into confusion and contradiction when struggling to explain rules of English grammar, how quantitative easing works or the difference between a fruit and a vegetable.
Clearly QE and rules of grammar aren't the only thing this author is confused about. Perhaps the author shouldn't pretend (even to himself) to understand things that he doesn't and he won't end up rationalizing and inventing fantasies to fill in the gaps in his knowledge. There's nothing wrong with acknowledging, whether to yourself or others, that you don't know how something works. Everyone has gaps in their knowledge - the world is a big place, its impossible to know everything. The difference lies in people who come to grips with their limits and abilities, and think rationally about them, and people who float through life without giving anything much "deep thought", and instead simply "wing it", and end up (like the author) constantly generalizing and making rationalizations about whatever is currently in front of their nose.
Yes. Thank you.
Does the author think nobody knows how a fridge works, and actually there is nothing to know?
I recognized immediately in the metaphor of “selves as fictional characters” that the author would be arguing we are all “spin all the way down” — just stories we tell ourselves.
If you work on stripping away the stories, you will find there is a “you” underneath, after all.
A lot of the things we tell ourselves are not true, but that doesn’t mean there is no truth of the matter. You can even ask yourself, when you are telling yourself a story, is that really true? And you may find yourself answering, “Well, no...” You have to at least believe in yourself (so to speak) to make progress in knowing yourself, getting along with yourself, and loving yourself.
If Nietzsche were alive today, he would substitute 'god' for 'self' and would declare "Self is dead". Philosophers of mind have spent the latter part of the 20th century arguing about their intuitions despite contradictory evidence and really not much progress has been made apart from getting in arguments with the 'explanationists' like Dennett. But it could spark a whole new set of questions if they shifted focus from the elusive self back to the whole (which, ironically would revive god).
It actually reminds me of adversarial networks (like AlphaGo), you could also ask why there should be two networks that encode good game states, isn't it a waste? Maybe each network knows something that the other doesn't.
Likewise, in our minds, maybe sometimes the decision-making network produces such crap that it needs to be tested first on a fictional model human, our own sense of self, before it can be vetted enough to be sensible to be actualized on the environment and other people.
That’s right, treating humans as if they have human traits like beliefs and intentions.
1) What is a "self"?
2) What is a "rich inner world"?
Define these and all your problems will go away. A lot of the time these terms are diffuse metaphors for a collection of things, so it's not surprising you can't find them.
> But did she really want to die?
This question, again, only gains complexity if you do not properly define what you're asking. What does "really want to die" mean? Create a definition, such as "a person really wants to die if they have been contemplating suicide for the past 6 months", and, again, your troubles disappear. If you don't know if Anna had such a desire for 6 months, then you're just lacking information. Nothing magical.
Philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc., are complicated precisely because they are vague enough fields that we still need to look at them through an intuitive lens a lot of the time, rather than the plain logical lens. It just comes with the territory. All it means is that we do not understand the field very well.
> But, as likely as not, Anna will be as unsure as anyone else about her true motivations.
This is not interesting. All that is happening here is that the entity in question does not have the hardware needed to understand its own hardware. A car doesn't understand itself, either. And humans do not fully understand their brain. Most entities are like this. This doesn't meant the car is magical and non-understandable, it just means there's no need to keep the hardware and its own understanding at the same level of complexity. Don't ask the car how it works, ask someone smarter, the human. Don't ask the human how it works, as someone smarter, the world.
> Why this sofa? Why Bach, not Brahms? Why this choice of career? Why children or not? Why evolution, not creationism? How does a bicycle work, or a violin, or a currency? And each justification can be buttressed with further justifications, caveats and clarifications, and each of these be defended further, seemingly without end.
I wouldn't mix these things up. Most people don't introspect much, and most people adapt to their environment. You will have a lot of issues socially if you don't have some simple answer to a question like "why this choice of career". You're generally conditioned to pick a tribe, so what you believe in can be important. Basically, these justifications have arisen due to pressure to create them, they're entirely unrelated to the "self". Saying "I don't know why I like this sofa" is not fashionable, even if it's very much the truth. And there's nothing wrong with that: we don't understand our hardware, which is fine.
Understanding of diffuse things like "currency" is, if anything, one of the more impressive functions of the brain that I'm not sure how long it will take for AI to replicate.
His point is that the terms for "wanting to die" cannot be defined, and from there concludes that "wanting to die" isn't really a feeling within us.
He can't clarify his terms because, for some reason, he has taken a disliking to interpretation.
ps: same tactics applied to this comment, minus optical illusions
Of course the mind is irrational. And of course our sense of self is an illusion. That does not imply lack of depth. Depth in the mind is precisely NOT based on reason. It is all dynamic; chaotic in the mathematical sense. There is no "theory of mind" and there is no philosophy that could explain the self or the mind because it is in a way an abyss, full of elements of time, emotion, sensory input, and randomly arising thoughts that may or may not originate from the "self".
That doesn't mean we should dispose of philosophy altogether. Philosophy and psychology are moved by and created in the energy of the era. It is important to continuously reevaluate what we think the mind is because it is representative of how we see the world. And here we have a theory of mind in our author's little article too.
I see nothing in this article other than an exemplary case of being able to explain something in any way you wish.
I've heard this, several times, from "new age" as well as "scientific" type-of people. I still don't understand what people mean by this... would it be possible to explain in a bit more detail?
In the case of the self, we build a model of what we are based off of data we gather from introspection and from people who are close to us. But this model is constantly in flux, and can never be said to actually reach the true self (if there is a true self-- and perhaps there is, but maybe it is always changing).
Nonetheless, we rely heavily on our sense of self. This sense helps us make hard decisions because we want to keep our actions in line with who we think we are-- we need that structure to survive. So, even though it can't be said to be real in any objective sense, we treat it as though it were real and we let it guide us to the point that most of the time we do think it's real. That's the illusory aspect.
You can really bring this over into anything you perceive. An object? Well, no. The object is not really distinct from the air surrounding it, except that we treat mass and visual outline (which is also an illusion created by our visual cortex) as indicators of being "separate", even though in the strictest sense the object is completely entangled in the environment of molecules, atoms, quanta, etc.
He is critical of how mathematics is currently taught from "first principles" and proofs rather than from a more intuitive body/metaphor perspective. He believes proofs are in many ways academic gatekeeping. His final chapter explains Euler's identity using only the intuitive metaphors he built up in previous chapters.
There's another argument (which I think your parent is referring to) which says that the thing that's doing the modeling is the very thing that's being modeled, so it's impossible to separate the data from the model. The radical conclusion people have come up with is that therefore there is no difference between the model and the data. What we perceive to be the model is actually the data, that there is nothing outside of the data because there can't be.
I haven't been able to decide if this is profound or incoherent.
Certain modes of thinking, like abstract thought and reasoning, can only draw on these models, so in that limited scope, the only a available data is the models — which there are more of than we could ever attend to exhaustively. In other states of mind, there is all kinds of other data.
"...men believe that themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby these actions are determined." Spinoza, Ethics
In spite of this I wrote, I'm not sure if I understand very well the 'self is an illusion' argument, I may be misunderstanding something.
I cannot say if what these guys said is true or if they were psychotics.
As sensors improve, new theory may be needed to explain observations.
You admit this in one paragraph, but pretend it doesn't matter...
> It is important to continuously reevaluate what we think the mind is because it is representative of how we see the world.
...and then in the next paragraph, you're talking about "reevaluating" as if that has any meaning if there is no rationality.
If you've eschewed rationality, you're not evaluating facts--facts can only be established through rationality, be it observation or logic. A philosophy which eschews rationality is fine, I suppose--it's a creative process which can be entertaining just like any sort of fiction or art. The problem is that you're both eschewing rationality and claiming facts which can only result from rationality. It's just a special pleading to try to present your creative ideas as fact without having to prove them as fact through rationality, and I'm not fooled.
We exist in a reality that is inherently chaotic. We can approximate but never reach. But our approximations help us move around, because as we can see the chaos also has some kind of structure (think of the Lorenz attractor). We can't explicate the structure, but we can certainly create our own structure-- which is where rationality comes in. If we constantly re-evaluate the mind, we constantly build new structures which are adaptive to the energy of the era in which we conceptualize, and we are better suited to continue to create within this reality.
Yes, obviously models can be useful approximations of reality. I'm not rejecting all models, I'm rejecting the models which do a poor job of approximating reality.
But if they're too inaccurate, they aren't useful. The point here is that the coherent, singular "self" model of reality is too inaccurate to be useful any more. Neuroscience has demonstrated the idea of a coherent, singular self to be wrong. When we're asking questions like at the beginning of the article ("Did Anna Karenina really want to die?") the singular, coherent model of self isn't useful.
This shouldn't be taken as a criticism of those who believed in the singular self before neuroscience. They created hypotheses, and the experiments which tested those hypotheses and resulted in our current understanding of the self would not have happened without their work. We can remember them as history. But we can't treat these disproven hypotheses as equally valid to more nuanced understandings of the self, out of some sort of nostalgia for philosophy.
This isn't a rejection of the practice of modeling reality, it's a rejection of the models which our understanding has grown beyond, in favor of more accurate models.
What are you trying to say, exactly? It seems you are trying to argue with me but haven't found anything concrete to latch onto.
I am saying we should dispose of philosophy as it pertains to modeling the self, because the models of self which philosophy has given us have long outlived their usefulness.
This view may find some resonance with Buddhist philosophy and psychology.
If by the use of the word mind, you are referring to some specific thing, then me defining what you refer to is simply restating your definition of that thing.
Most conversation of mind thus end up in semantic debates or system of beliefs.
Like you say, until we can objectively observe a representation of the self in the brain, and label it mind, then the mind isn't a real thing.
Now you can imagine a thing which you have not observed, believe it to exist, and call it mind. That's where you start debating beliefs, which is a futile exercise.
I thus like to define the mind as the subset of my brain which generates my inner voice. And the self is the set of things my mind groups under it, for example when I say "I". Self is thus a moving target defined by my mind. Mostly an imaginary construct therefore.
EDIT: i seem to be restricted from replying further:
We can discuss everything, but the argument goes in circles around non-duality, hard problem of consciousness, subjective experience, and keeps moving the goalpost of the "mind" to increasingly subjective and impossible to examine-or-falsify definitions. We can equally discuss about any kind of fiction.
You also have another beast: define "definition" and "objectively". Those are not concrete entities that can be probed in the real world, they are convenient shortcuts to our mental processes that may well be flukes.
None of these are really based off of reality. They work in reality, but that doesn't mean anything.
A visceromotorically allostatic predictive regulator of sensorimotor contingencies.
I mean no offense, but unless you are an expert in the field, how can you state so strongly that "of course there is no theory of mind?"
Also, at the time of this comment the parent is is the top comment. I ask those who upvoted: Why?
If we're going to maintain a high quality of discourse on this website, we have to stop upvoting comments just because they sound good. I'm not asking for a full CV from every poster, but when you boil down one of humanity's greatest unsolved mysteries to an unqualified one-liner, I expect some evidence.