"Are We Automata?" by William James (1879)
psychclassics.yorku.ca
psychclassics.yorku.ca
These arguments aren't new.
This is good argument for why tech/science/stem need to read history, or 'older' science history. To at least be familiar with the science that has come before, either to know what was discarded, to be familiar with past dead ends, or forgotten knowledge that could still have value.
A lot of the AI spurred arguments in the last year seem like so much re-hashing since they were being discussed in 1879.
Even now, I see basic refusal to engage with this extant literature, and a strong preference to just making shit up as if it's the first time anyone has anything interesting to say on these matters. Again, embarrassing. The industry is totally unprepared on an intellectual basis to wrestle with these issues.
It goes back to the old quote ~ "Stephen Hawking famously wrote that “philosophy is dead” because the big questions that used to be discussed by philosophers are now in the hands of physicist" And then the follow up, "physicists then proceed to re-invent bad philosophy"(unknown).
The math behind the stealth bomber sat on a bookshelf for decades before someone realized what it could be used for. In STEM education, there should be some attempt at a 'rear view mirror', to know what has come before. AI is just the latest obvious area.
Additionally math courses for the non-stem majors that focus more on the history and importance of something, say the quadratic formula, instead of applying it/remembering it without much context from where it came from could help out a lot of non-stem majors with their math requirement.
However I think it boils down to interest and a degree of time whether or not someone in a stem field feels compelled or not to pay attention and learn where their math tools come from or the experiments that built the respective sciences.
That is, I've found while stem classes may not focus on the above, they do cover it and for the more enthusiastic and self motivated student right there in their books to read about.
I've also found professor's that love this stuff too, which I've found pleasure in them sharing these stories when they can.
You should ask yourself where this arrogance stems (so punny) from. Although you could argue that the liberal arts/humanities are stifled by leftist worldviews, which is true, I also believe that the study of the humanities is the one thing that created the societal structures -like democracy and education- that we cherish today and I believe they will be crucial for a nice non-authoritarian future. And the ideological pressure to discredit the humanities is something that I believe comes from a pro-authoritarian, conservative side of the political field.
¹STEM-educated (molecular biology, with a focus on computational analysis)
I mean, I'm suspicious of individuals who can't hack it in general, too, but not sure how that's relevant.
I’m skeptical of the latter, not the former, if that helps clarify my position.
We can just wing it, if we don’t care about things like absolute truth or sticking to something logical.
There are many works that find new ideas or are really thorough, combing through the breadth of human experience.
It is useful for people to spend their lives analysing these concepts and ideas. Their discourse can then be synthesized into new thoughts that will shape our societies. Do you think the laws you live by, the governmental structures, the way people treat each other, the structures of our societies would be like this without the studies of the humanities?
SDEs should double down on soft skills now, since these are as useful with LLMs as with people.
What does this refer to?
They were likely all dead before you were born.
Do you know some things about the Manhattan Project, Bell Labs, Bletchley Park, the Apollo Project, the Gutenberg press, the invention of carbon steel?
That’s history.
I’ll go further. If I said ‘he was referencing Science, not science’ would that make any sense?
I was a CS professor for a long time. Like many of my STEM colleagues, I taught the history of the ideas in my discipline as an intrinsic and important part of the curriculum. It’s also good pedagogy, since the long process of getting closer to the truth or developing more powerful technology is part of the toolbox we are trying to impart.
It's not a deeper point.
Of course science has its own history and that history is examined (sometimes) in the course of scientific education. That's not what's at issue.
What's at issue is that History as a subject and other Humanities disciplines are systematically devalued in STEM disciplines and by scientific cultural mouthpieces and participants in STEM endeavors.
I'm not sure I would phrase it as STEM itself devaluing non-stem (I mean it's an acronym for subjects) but, rather society in general devaluing these, example, how hard is it go out, get a philosophy degree, and practice/write that and live comfortably with that occupation (no external sources of income). History/Literature seems to be much the same
Carl Sagan would have been a much better steward for science today, as he had a very healthy respect for the relationship between science and humanities and the latter's value for understanding our world.
This dangerous rift goes back even further. See C.P. Snow's lecture "The Two Cultures".(1)
EDIT: Not sure how this slipped my mind, but Sean Carroll is exactly the kind of representative of the syncretic relationship between sciences and humanities that ought to be the default, rather than the exception.
2. He has been quoted saying, "What they teach in the humanities is not 'skepticism' or 'critical thinking.' It's mental masturbation disguised as critical thinking"[5].
3. Tyson warned that philosophy "can really mess you up" and has implied that philosophy does not progress in the way science does[5].
4. His attitude towards philosophy has been characterized as science-defeating by some, as it dismisses the role of philosophy in addressing moral and aesthetic questions that science cannot answer[6].
5. Tyson's comments have sparked discussions and defenses of the humanities and philosophy, with critics arguing that his views are overly simplistic and do not represent the true value and diversity of philosophical inquiry[1][4][5][6].
[1] Neil DeGrasse Tyson is Wrong about Philosophy https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2014/05/13/neil-degrasse-tyso...
[2] An Open Letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2521di/an_open_...
[3] Neil deGrasse Tyson and the Value of Philosophy https://www.huffpost.com/entry/neil-degrasse-tyson-and-the-v...
[4] Why Does Neil deGrasse Tyson Hate Philosophy? https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2014/05/22/why_doe...
[5] Please Save Me from Neil DeGrasse Tyson https://humanitiescenter.byu.edu/please-save-me-from-neil-de...
[6] Neil deGrasse Tyson and the value of philosophy - 3 Quarks Daily https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/05/neil-degrasse-...
[7] Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Scientism and the Scapegoating of Philosophy http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.com/2014/05/neil-deg...
[8] Maybe Neil DeGrasse Tyson Should Embrace The Humanities More https://terribleminds.com/ramble/2018/03/06/maybe-neil-degra...
[9] Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins on how philosophy has ... https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2554xu/neil_deg...
[10] 225 thoughts on “Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy” https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/06/23/physici...
[11] Neil deGrasse Tyson is wrong to dismiss all of philosophy, but he may have a point on some of it https://selfawarepatterns.com/2014/05/14/more-thoughts-on-ne...
[12] Neil deGrasse Tyson and Philosophy: The Voice and Never-Was of Science Insults the Foundation of All Intellectual Thought https://milliern.com/2014/05/31/neil-degrasse-tyson-and-phil...
For example, if a new exo-planet were found to have a certain chemical make up that our current understanding didn't agree with, that would go back to theoretical physics and mathematics, where they might discover a way to better describe the discovery. That then becomes a new model that allows us to recognize a new pattern of solar system formation, etc etc.
There's a practical application to STEM work. In what way is there a practical application in philosophy? Is it isolated to educating people on broader more complex thought?
Without those principles, people are often left with "I am just doing my job" and "this is what any person would do, right"?
Whereas a lot of us won't do certain things because, say, if everybody did them they'd be self contradictory (Kant) or when we look at the overall utility of dumping toxic waste into a river we might it has some larger negative consequences for society (Mill).
The point is someone has to start somewhere, and frequently philosophy is the field that tackled open ended questions. Once the questions get 'solved', it gets spun off into another branch of science.
Philosophy is the startup of science, the leading edge. Once it become a 'common' ordinary science, it gets re-named, re-packaged as 'the accepted way'.
It is happening a lot right now, because so many STEM people building AI are suddenly arm-chair philosophers coming up with 'new' questions, that are really 'old'. So the whole field is re-discovering philosophy.
Neither of them has said anything like this. Hawking's "philosophy (metaphysics) is dead" is a narrow point about the relevance of philosophy to basic theorizing about nature. NDT said something along the lines of he doesn't have time for questions like "what is the meaning of meaning". Neither can be reasonably construed as denigrating humanities. There have been a lot of folks on the other side who have put words into the mouths of these two for the sake of self-promotion. It's created a very warped perspective on what Hawkings and NDT actually believe.
https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2014/05/12/neil-degrasse...
As far as I can tell, he doesn't say one charitable thing, and more, his attitude comes off as smug and arrogant.
What NDT is guilty of in the minds of so many of the commentators is not having what they consider due reverence and deference to philosophy. What none of the responses do is justify the supposed reverence scientists and popular culture more broadly should have. The points about philosophy being dead in the context of describing the physical world appear to be true. The point about philosophy not making progress (understood in the way that science makes progress) appears to be true. If the only claim to value one can make is for activity that happened centuries ago (being the forebearer to science), then philosophy truly is dead. While Pigliucci's points in defense of philosophy are true, they still don't tell us why anyone outside of philosophy should care about philosophy.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a philosophy hater. I quite enjoy philosophy, I read an awful lot of it. But this is because I like puzzles and I like navigating conceptual spaces and gaining deep understanding. But this isn't all that relevant to most people's lives. You want people to care about philosophy, you need to be relevant to them. Philosophy is failing at being relevant.
I don't see how any of that negates the effect of one of science's pre-eminent public advocates bad mouthing philosophy and the humanities. People hear this and take it at face value. It informs their opinions. It shapes their lives. And it's his purpose to shape people lives. He is partially responsible for the proliferation of similar views throughout the intellectual ecosystem. On this point, he is being irresponsible and ignorant. He ought to have and communicate more nuanced views of the world.
I am having a lot of trouble understanding how their is anything but a tortured defense of his behavior on this front.
Philosophy doesn't deserve deference or respect simply because it's an academic discipline. We've been far too deferential to questionable disciplines and their practitioners, and the academy is in bad shape because of it. Disciplines should be constantly challenged and expected to offer full throated defenses of their merits. If philosophy wants to be valued, it needs to actively demonstrate it's value. if the only thing it can do is get defensive when someone says something negative publicly about it, we might as well just shut it all down now because there's truly nothing left.
It's got nothing to do with what philosophy can't take.
The context of this conversation: science is not self-sufficient to be a force for good in this world without the aid of the humanities.
Scientism is naive and self-undermining.
Not what this discussions is about at all.
That is some straw man rhetoric.
That actual point was "Hey STEM people, you are talking in circles yourselves, and re-inventing the wheel, maybe checkout what some other fields have already studied"
There are two hypotheses: one is that consciousness is essentially a computation, the other that it is an unknowable stuff. Philosophers spend time talking how one or the other hypothesis "feels right" to them. Scientists try to see what results can be obtained through computation.
Now we got to the point where we have automaton talking. Still very very far from understanding how brain works, but an interesting discovery on the way to it. Meanwhile, what philosophers have to say is still as uninteresting and irrelevant as it was in 1879...
Similarly progress in understanding AI will come from people who actually build and experiment with AI, or with brains.
As for ethics, i don't see how is it relevant.
Do you realize that physics requires the adoption of a philosophy? Physics addresses problems that are effectively easy. Physicists have tools, such as mathematics, at their disposal and can make wildly simplifying assumptions.
Philosophers are often trying to address what the questions even are and then try to develop new tools to both explore the questions and their answers. Physics is downstream of philosophy.
In the example of question of consciousness, the point of view presented by William James here was obvious to people long before him. Scientific observation have shown the possibility of the alternative theory: that we are automata. We still do not have a definitive answer which one is correct, but philosophy have not contributed anything towards finding the correct answer. And the only progress we had in last 2500 years was due to science.
That's the point. And the converse is true as well.
Bwahh! Sick burn.
The humanities is not a monolith.
If you ask a philosopher in the analytic tradition, which is the tradition in which most of the philosophical world resides, they are likely to disagree with social constructivist views.
The Sokal affair was not some sort of isolated aberration, the truth is that enormous chunks of the humanities are worthless.
Many of the smartest people I have met, including some of the best programmers, have had non-STEM backgrounds. The push by the STEM industry has pushed universities to be STEM industry preparation and training centers. This, among other things, has greatly devalued non-STEM education. And even within STEM, there are subdisciplines that been devalued.
It's a shame, because many of the non-STEM disciplines that have been devalued are effectively systems disciplines that help train for understanding complex relationships and the effects of time and other effects on these relationships. So we are also devaluing those skills in favor of short-term STEM thinking.
Besides, science used to be very much a "thinkers" only thing, because only those people went into studies instead of just being laborers. These were people that would question and ponder the things you mention. These days, STEM is filled with factory widget repeaters that are taught to regurgitate the syllabus and apply it in context so they can be good workers.
This is exactly the kind of opinion that results from improper familiarization with the various sub-fields of the humanities. Is there bullshit? Yes. Is it typical? Absolutely not.
The great thinkers of the past aren’t necessarily outdated, in some ways they might still have things to teach us from beyond the grave that we didn’t really appreciate when they were alive.
True; the 1768-1774 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaquet-Droz_automata were implemented specifically because writing, music, and art were at the time accomplishments that distinguished upper classes from lower.
(their biggest weakness is that being analogue instead of digital, their programming is very sensitive to environmental changes)
The complexity of the nervous system and its ability to coordinate across distance, allows it to support more complex and bigger organisms, whether that organism is biological or political. Continuing with his analogy, the railroads and canals are the arteries and veins, supplying the raw materials and finished products, etc.
More tenuously, he also appears to make a kind of proto-evolutionary analogy (Darwin hadn't published but Lamarck had published decades before, by this point). And I even detect small hints of an antecedent to the concept of emergent complexity, and the notion of shared structures across biology, sociology, etc.
> The electric telegraph is thus the nervous system of this nation and of modern society by no figure of speech, by no distant analogy. Its wires spread like nerves over the surface of the land, interlinking distant parts, and making possible a perpetually higher co-operation among men, and higher social forms than have hitherto existed. [...]
> We are thus conducted to the result of the highest philosophy: that society in its form of organization, is human, and that it presents in its progressive development continually higher analogies with the laws of individual being. [...]
[1] https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101620765...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivk_irrH1WY
which means that there's probably a bunch of Gen Xers with this song still in their head somewhere (and since it's pretty catchy, some of HNs audience now).
Sure, but it is also important not to lend too much credence to these arguments, because they were devised from a position of ignorance. In particular, in 1879 we didn't have neurobiology, nor the theory of computation and complexity, and we barely had evolution. OoS had been published just 20 years before, and molecular biology was many decades in the future. There is value in studying Ptolemy and Aristotle too, but mainly to understand how they got things wrong.
Just saying, shouldn't ignore it either.
It is ok to study Plato or Leibniz, and realize it is historical background, and might spur new thoughts. We don't worship Plato as if that was the end of all thought. But lets not forget it, ignore it like it didn't happen, like all ideas today are new.
It's always fun to mention that many of the foundational ideas in the modern wave of machine learning & neural networks stem from work done in the 50s and 60s: perceptrons, backpropagation, stochastic approximation, etc. were all explored in depth back then.
It was only after compute power scaled up enough to apply these techniques practically that they became revolutionary. Really makes you wonder what things people are working on right now that will also need to wait 30 years.
But I take it to mean that the rest of the world is way more special than we’ve been giving it credit for.
But that doesn't mean we actually have free will, or aren't automata. Most of the time we are lulled into the "illusion" that we do, to some extent.
But then consider higher order systems like a forest or human society itself. Can those have consciousness or at least some sense of experience?
>Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-consciousness-...
>Scientific American on a philosophical grift: panpsychism
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/10/01/scientific-america...
>Is the Universe conscious? A panpsychism Q&A with philosopher Philip Goff
https://bigthink.com/13-8/panpsychism-universe-purpose-philo...
It's about putting yourself up on a pedestal while downplaying others.
Of course, at some point those "others" (be it peoples, genders, creatures, or machines) turn out to be as good or better at certain things than you are. And what do you do then? You won't have anywhere to go psychologically without devaluing yourself.
So then you end up shutting down avenues of thought that might otherwise have been productive.
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If you're interested in philosophy (especially epistemology), the pragmatists were a fascinating offshoot.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James
IMHO they were a reasonable response to the irreducible complexity that accreted as a result of applying increasingly specific and complex empiricism to questions far broader than it might be suited to. (E.g. How do we know anything?)
https://www.braggoscope.com/2010/05/13/william-jamess-the-va...
Obviously doesn’t replace reading the source material but it does articulate how ideas become encoded into a society.
PS: Hello to another Ethan, although we seem much more common these days.
One nit is that if I tab away from the page and tab back the highlighted area is wiped from the reader pane -- assuming I had unhighlighted it in order to start reading.
I am on mobile app at the moment so I don't have links for those extensions.
And yes, we have no free will. Not sure if that’s related to this piece.
Eg. If you take in real world visual input to a system that from that point on is deterministic the output of that system is now non-deterministic. Similar to how Shrodinger talked about the macro scale cat being alive and dead at the same time.
So the arguments that the neurons in the brain are deterministic or that the transistors in a computer are deterministic breaks down at the first introduction of real world input. The outputs of those systems actually aren't deterministic at all.
Even in rare cases where quantum effects are seen, such as photosynthesis, or radioactive decay, it's extremely localized. The fact that a plant's efficiency of conversion of light to chemical energy appears to use quantum effects doesn't affect the rest of the plant or turn it into some "Schrodringer's cabbage" thought experiment. We can still understand the rest of the plant in classical terms.
Even if it were to be discovered that neurons are sometimes (or even always for that matter) behaving randomly due to quantum effects, that would not mean that we have free will and are not automata. It would just mean we are non-deterministic automata.
This is where the entire problem with the thought that systems are deterministic or not comes into play. If there's a single photon that can hit a pixel on a sensor (or retina) or not and that ultimately has a cascading effect to make that larger object do something completely different or not then that larger object is non-deterministic as a whole. Yes as others have stated there's ways in which non-deterministic inputs can end up not mattering - the system has the same output. But there's also systems, eg. the cat in the box experiment, where the macro object ends up taking on the non-determinism of a single quantum event.
An AI that can behaive one way or the other based on what it read into the sensor input is absolutely as non-deterministic as that input. Likewise humans are as non-deterministic as their inputs. If a photon can hit your eye today and cause a flash of light that sets you on the path of doing something you otherwise wouldn't have done it doesn't matter if your neurons are essentially a machine or not. You are still non-deterministic. The focus on neurons being deterministic or not kind of misses the bigger picture. We absolutely live in a non-deterministic world and those inputs from this world cause ourselves to ultimately be non-deterministic.
This really gets down to the regularly discussed thought experiment of simulating a human. If you fully simulated a human with non-deterministic inputs everywhere you probably would indeed have a fully deterministic system. But that's just not how the real world environment a human is in behaves.
In the lab one can perhaps coax a few atoms near absolute zero into a superimposed state, but not a large room temperature object like a cat, so that particular thought experiment is just that - not an observed experimental outcome.
Is quantum randomness actually real, or just a reflection of an imperfect model of reality ?
In any case, isn't William James really just considering the issue of free will ? If the world, including ourselves, is just an automata evolving according to (say) Schrodinger's equation, then does it really make any difference if it's deterministic or not ? Even at a classical level the future is unpredictable due to chaotic dynamics, and from a subjective (presumably misleading) POV we have free will, regardless of what the reality is.
Just because some macro systems can be non-deterministic doesn't mean they all are. If you have non-deterministic binary inputs to an AND gate, do you really mean to say the AND gate is not deterministic?
The statistical effects that reliably turn individual gas molecule motion into PV=nRT, are just as reliable in biochemistry.
It turns out that -innocent, simple looking- finite state deterministic automata can actually be less predictable than the non-deterministic kind. (and it can get pretty wild! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2vgICfQawE )
But anyways, neurons don't even APPEAR to be acting randomly - they appear to obeying the laws of chemistry, and behaving in meticulously studied and well understood ways.
It's the behavior an emergence level or two up that can appear to be quite chaotic again.