Why philosophers should care about computational complexity (2011)

The other part of the thought experiment, apart from imagining the room, is to imagine how complex the turing test might be.

When people imagine what a Turing Test conversation would look like, they frequently underestimate the conversation. I find Dennet's example of an imaginary Turing Test from Consciousness Explained to be a good counterexample:

Judge: Did you hear about the Irishman who found a magic lamp? When he rubbed it a genie appeared and granted him three wishes. “I’ll have a pint of Guiness!” the Irishman replied and immediately it appeared. The Irishman eagerly set to sipping and then gulping, but the level of Guiness in the glass was always magically restored. After a while the genie became impatient. “Well, what about your second wish?” he asked. Replied the Irishman between gulps, “Oh well, I guess I’ll have another one of these.”

CHINESE ROOM: Very funny. No, I hadn’t heard it– but you know I find ethnic jokes in bad taste. I laughed in spite of myself, but really, I think you should find other topics for us to discuss.

J: Fair enough but I told you the joke because I want you to explain it to me.

CR: Boring! You should never explain jokes.

J: Nevertheless, this is my test question. Can you explain to me how and why the joke “works”?

CR: If you insist. You see, it depends on the assumption that the magically refilling glass will go on refilling forever, so the Irishman has all the stout he can ever drink. So he hardly has a reason for wanting a duplicate but he is so stupid (that’s the part I object to) or so besotted by the alcohol that he doesn’t recognize this, and so, unthinkingly endorsing his delight with his first wish come true, he asks for seconds. These background assumptions aren’t true, of course, but just part of the ambient lore of joke-telling, in which we suspend our disbelief in magic and so forth. By the way we could imagine a somewhat labored continuation in which the Irishman turned out to be “right” in his second wish after all, perhaps he’s planning to throw a big party and one glass won’t refill fast enough to satisfy all his thirsty guests (and it’s no use saving it up in advance– we all know how stale stout loses its taste). We tend not to think of such complications which is part of the explanation of why jokes work. Is that enough?

Dennett: “The fact is that any program that could actually hold up its end in the conversation depicted would have to be an extraordinary supple, sophisticated, and multilayered system, brimming with “world knowledge” and meta-knowledge and meta-meta-knowledge about its own responses, the likely responses of its interlocutor, and much, much more…. Maybe the billions of actions of all those highly structured parts produce genuine understanding in the system after all.”

More intuitively: our words are things which do things in the world. When we acquire them we do so by being embedded in the world. When we use them we use them to change the world. (Largely).

If a child in a cupboard reading a textbook out-loud could fool a chemist that the child understood chemistry, it doesn't mean they do. In the end, you need to turn on that bunsen burner.

The chinese room needs to be taken super-literally: does the person just doing a "hash-table lookup" on "the right answers to pre-prosed questions" actually understand.

To me its incredibly obvious that they do not. This does not establish that, eg. cognition, does not involve computational hastable-like processes. I think it does establish that propontents of a naive computationalism have an incredibly big challenge.

The challenge is to specify the environment computationally, since that is the only means by which the computer itself can be sufficiently embedded and actually understand anything.

The issue here is that if "computer" isnt just a trivial property it has to include, eg., measurability, determinism, etc. Properties that reality lacks. Reality isnt a computer.

Starting with the chinese room one /can/ supplement sufficiently until we reach searle's conclusion.

But first you have to establish this is true.

I don't see any sense in which these aren't different, unless perhaps you're introducing some separate cosmological "Boltzmann brain"-style argument that all possible finite results of all halting algorithms will arise or have arisen due to random fluctuations. But in that case you've got a whole new set of assumptions to address.

Just because we don’t tend to recognize one without the other doesn’t mean they necessarily have a causative relationship.

Paraphrasing from memory: he pins "cogito ergo sum" on the assumption that objective knowledge is possible. That assumption is built atop imagining an alternative: an evil demon has full control over his senses and feeds him whatever it wants to (essentially, the 'Matrix hypothesis'). His solution to this concern? "A loving God wouldn't create a universe that banal and meaningless."

It's only a proof if you accept the postulate that objective reality is correlated with experience.

All academic literature is specialist literature. If you aren’t trained in the field you likely won’t understand it. It’s totally reasonable to me that a STEM person would have no idea what this abstract is saying just as a Humanities person probably couldn’t make heads or tails of the abstract of a dissertation on category theory or on a particular branch of computer science.

I find it funny that STEM folks always go after humanities academics for being obtuse when its just a matter of the pot calling the kettle black—dense STEM research and theory uses language that’d be considered equally obtuse to the untrained reader.

Not sure you could satisfy the "open minded" part of that if you are coming from this close minded starting place!

Whenever I come across something I don't understand, I will try to figure it out. If it seems utterly weird, that's even more motivation to figure it out! I really can't imagine this mode of thought where you read something, do not immediately grasp it, and then feel that somehow it's wrong/bad/obscurantist. Like, how do you learn anything at all?

Side note but its funny people throw around "sophistic" in contexts like this. In Plato's time, sophists were precisely the ones to appeal to common intuitions, for money. It was Socrates who came along and said philosophy began with wonder, and demonstrated this by intentionally confusing people in order to break them out of modes of thought that were deeply embedded.

First of all, although it uses some precise vocabulary, this abstract does not seem to have the particular blandness of much academic writing (I definitely agree that poor writing is often easy to find in all branches of academy). One little proxy to look at is the overuse of nominalization (i.e. using a noun form where a verb form could work). And not all nominalization is bad. The word "nominalization" is actually self-describing.

For example, perhaps we could "clean" this passage (my quote is a fragment of a participle phrase at the end of a sentence)

>... , their thematic and formal interconnections enacting both the repetitions of trauma and the necessary revisions of historiography, identity, and recovery.

into a new independent clause:

> They formally and thematically interconnect, repeating and necessarily revising how one presents history,self-identifies, and recovers.

But this "fix" might blur the original meaning in critical ways. For example, who now is this "one" being spoken of? That seemed to me to be the best option, over the worse pronouns "you" and "we" (which would be speaking for someone else). The original phrases avoid this entity identification, focusing instead on the general action.

I also removed enact, but what if these texts really do "enact" a revision? This "creation upon creation" of the an action seems in-line with the concept of a palimpsest, which is a repurposed book (I'll speak more on the palimpsest after I dissect my awful revision). Then, I completely butchered the last concepts. To present history is only one aspect of the general practice of historiography. Revising an identity is not the same as self-identifying (and, again, who is this self?). To recover matches with the action of recovery more closely, but using the verb would destroy the sentence's parallelism. Hopefully, this example demonstrates the great difficulty of using precise language with heavy, complex concepts.

On to the subject itself, using the word "palimpsest" doesn't seem obscure. Perhaps the author's central thesis is that the works that she studies have repurposed old texts or old memories of trauma again and again. This seems like a suitable metaphor. Or, maybe palimpsest has a special technical meaning in her body of scholarship.

And the abstract does carefully lay out the scholarly tradition that the paper follows, going chapter by chapter. Readers familiar with the works she mentions will probably be happy for this guided summary. Readers not familiar, like me for almost all the names, may not even be part of the intended audience.

Lastly it seems like she uses two different authors to explore her own scholarly interests in trauma, gender, sexuality, and self. These seem like great things to study, and very complex indeed. Even if these themes were not on the minds of the authors who are the subject of this paper, these authors nevertheless do live in the world, and their work necessarily incorporates fragments of inherited thought (like how you and I speak English, whose development we had nothing to do with). Maybe this paper finds some unexpected connections.

> that it makes me wonder if the people into this stuff simply have nervous systems that are wired a bit differently

I don't know anything about nervous systems.

But in these kind of works, there are not any exact answers. You cannot say `gcc gender-paper.c` and find out if it compiles. Instead, these ideas have to be written about and discussed against a wider body of thought. And there's probably some element of judgement and metaphor required to think this way. And the ideas in these works in fact do slowly disseminate and affect society.

That's my spiel. I typed it up because I see these kind of comments often, and I wanted to put a good response on record.

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I also don't believe there is zero obscurantism in the humanities, by the way. Shitty research happens everywhere. But, every time the humanities gets slammed as being particularly soft, it seems like the reader forgets all the articles on the front page about falsified scientific results, unreproducible research, political machinations to get tenure, outright grift, etc.

This is laughable. Most of our culture was once philosophy, and I sure don't know whose. If you define philosophy as “that which has not escaped the realm of theoretical philosophy”, then sure. But we use practical philosophy every day!

If you’re a philosopher, you’re generally trying to look at things from a general enough perspective that you might argue for a radical shift in the way we do things and call out the assumptions that are otherwise taken as axioms of the field—the water we swim around in.

If you’re a practitioner, you’re focused on swimming. Core axioms and prevailing theory are your presuppositions—you’re just focused on getting things done within the confines of the prevailing theory/framework, perhaps nudging it every so often in particular directions based on new discoveries—its quite rare that a working scientist sparks an actual theoretic revision and becomes the next Einstein (see thomas Kuhn).

So yes, philosophers are totally useless when it comes to getting practical stuff done because that’s generally not the space they are attempting to help with or illuminate.

There's no inherent tension between science and philosophy; even Meermin's "shut up and calculate" is a philosophical position (instrumentalism), to say nothing of the philosophical, scientific and mathematical contributions of e.g. Poincaré, Helmholtz, Mach, Duhem, Peirce, Leibniz, Von Neumann, Jaynes etc. Even modern Anglo-American physicists contribute to and draw a lot from philosophy, e.g. Wheeler and Paul Anderson.