Shunya's Notes

Dreyfus on Second Life

In this terrific article, Prof. Hubert Dreyfus looks at Second Life, a 3-D virtual environment "filled with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity" that "offers its 'residents' a chance to invent a whole new life for themselves. Can it deliver on that promise?" This is also somewhat related to the issues I focused on in my recent article, "The Dearth of Artificial Intelligence." 

Of the more than 11 million people signed up as "residents" of Second Life, roughly half a million spent at least an hour a day in that world in December. Through avatars they create to represent themselves, residents visit art galleries, shop for virtual goods, go to concerts, have cybersex, worship, attend classes, have conversations, and buy and sell real estate. Residents also design clothing and buildings, write poems and books, compose music, and make paintings and movies. Others enjoy the way Second Life allows them to meet and converse with people all over the world. It's left to the participants to work out how realistically they present themselves. The Vatican has taken on the task of saving souls there, and Sweden has opened a virtual embassy to sign up residents to become real-life tourists in Sweden.

Second Life isn't a game. There is no overall goal and no way of ranking your success.... [it] offers the possibility of a virtual world that is more exciting than the real one. But at what cost?

More here.  If you liked this, check out why Dreyfus thinks Kierkegaard would have hated the Internet (via Peony).

The Dearth of Artificial Intelligence

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has attracted lots of comments.)

As a graduate student of computer engineering in the early 90s, I recall impassioned late night debates on whether machines can ever be intelligent—intelligent, as in mimicking the cognition, common sense, and problem-solving skills of ordinary humans. Neural network research was hot and one of my professors was a star in the field. Scientists and bearded philosophers spoke of ‘humanoid robots.’ A breakthrough seemed inevitable and imminent. Still, I felt certain that Artificial Intelligence (AI) was a doomed enterprise.

I argued out of intuition, from a sense of the immersive nature of our life in the world—how much we subconsciously acquire and summon to get through life, how we arrive at meaning and significance not in isolation but through embodied living, and how contextual, fluid, and intertwined this was with our moods, desires, experiences, selective memory, physical body, and so on. How can we program all this into a machine and have it pass the unrestricted Turing test? How could a machine that did not care about its existence as humans do, ever behave as humans do? In hindsight, it seems fitting that I was then also drawn to Dostoevsky, Camus, and Kierkegaard.

My interlocutors countered that while extremely complex, the human brain is clearly an instance of matter, amenable to the laws of physics. Our intelligence, and everything else that informed our being in the world, had to be somehow ‘coded’ in our brain’s circuitry, including the great many symbols, rules, and associations we relied on to get through a typical day. Was there any reason why we couldn’t ‘decode’ and reproduce it in a machine some day? Couldn’t a future supercomputer mimic our entire neural circuitry and be as smart as us? They posited a reductionist and computational approach to the brain that many, including Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett, continue to champion today. Just three months ago, Dennett declared in his sonorous voice, “We are robots made of robots made of robots made of robots.”

But despite the big advances in computing—for example, today’s supercomputers are ten million times faster than those of the early 90s—AI has fallen woefully short of its ambition and hype. Instead, we have “expert systems” that process predetermined inputs in specific domains, perform pattern matching and database lookups, and learn to adapt their outputs algorithmically. Examples include chess software, search engines, speech recognition, industrial and service robots, and traffic and weather forecasting systems. Machines have done well with tasks that we ourselves pursue, or can pursue, algorithmically, as in searching for the word “ersatz” in an essay, making cappuccino, or restacking books on a library shelf. But so much else that defines our intelligence remains well beyond machines, such as projecting our creativity and imagination to understand new contexts and their significance, or figuring out how and why new sensory stimuli are relevant or not. Why is AI in such a braindead state? Is there any hope for it? Let’s take a closer look.

The Minds of Machines

From Philosophy Now, here is Nicholas Everitt's instructive review of a book on the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by Matt Carter, whose "main concern is to outline and defend the possibility of a computational theory of mind."

[A major reservation Everitt has with this book] is a matter of substance. Computer programs operate on purely ‘syntactic’ features – ultimately speaking, they depend upon the physical form of the inputs, transformations and outputs. By contrast, human thought is always a thought about something, it represents something, it has a content. It displays what philosophers call ‘intentionality’. One central problem for artificial intelligence is how to get aboutness into computer programs – how to get semantics out of syntactics.

More here. (Stay tuned for a major new essay on the philosophy of AI by yours truly — arriving 22 June.)

Rawls vs. Confucius

Here is a thought-provoking study by Erin Cline that compares the political philosophies of John Rawls and Confucius (Kongzi):

Over the past two decades, a number of studies comparing Chinese and Western views of political philosophy have painted a picture of radically different approaches and theories. Some authors argue that while modern liberal Western theories are focused on rights, justice, equality, and freedom, Chinese Confucians are largely unconcerned with the received topics of Western political philosophy.... They also tend to argue that, while the assumption of atomistic individualism represents a fatal flaw in liberal theory, the Confucian view offers us a superior alternative partly because it takes seriously the view that family and community relationships constitute our identity. These studies have helped to highlight the way that philosophical traditions can provide insight into different cultural and historical concerns, as well as the need to take seriously the role of the family in the basic structure of society. However, some of these studies have neglected the diversity of views represented in both the Confucian and Western liberal traditions. They also tend to leave those who do not think the liberal tradition is fatally flawed wondering what can be gained from comparative studies of Chinese and Western sources.

In this article I aim to show that there is much more to be said about political philosophy in the Confucian and Western liberal traditions, especially when it comes to moral psychology and the development of political virtues.

More HERE. If you think the essay is too long, at least read the two concluding paragraphs below.

On the Measure of All Things

Chris Schoen on how very radically the human self participates in its own creation. Essential reading for all philosophers of science.

Is it possible that our understanding of the world expands and develops not before we describe it, and not because we describe it, but as we describe it? This seems much more plausible than the Darwinian explanation, in which we are in constant stenographic response to a world of given stimuli; and because the latter has us spinning our wheels, culturally, over alleged biological imperatives from a world long past, the possibility that we particpate in our description of the world also seems much more likely to allow some actual evolution of thought, philosophical, scientific, and moral.

More here. And here is an another good one by Chris.

Atheistic Materialism in Ancient India

(Cross-posted as my new column on 3QuarksDaily, where it has received many comments. Also see a new announcement about the 3QD annual blog awards, the first one for the best science blog post. Nominate your favorites today.)
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Various societies at different times have dazzled with their bursts of creative and intellectual energy. Historians have a penchant for dubbing them Golden Ages. Examples include the Athens of Herodotus, the Baghdad of Haroun al-Rashid, and the India of the Buddha. But though India has long been famous for its "ancient wisdom", the few historical sources that survive shed woefully inadequate light on the Buddha's society. By contrast, far better portraits of classical Greece and Abbasid Baghdad are available to us.

Still, evidence at hand suggests that around 600-500 BCE, in parts of the Indo-Gangetic plain of north India, people were asking some very bold and original questions: What is the nature of thought and perception? What is the source of consciousness? Are virtue and vice absolute or mere social conventions? Old traditions were under attack, new trades and lifestyles were emerging, and urban life was in a churn, reducing the power of uptight Brahmins.

Philosophical schools flourished in a marketplace of ideas, and included chronic fatalists, radical materialists, self-mortifying ascetics, die-hard skeptics, cautious pragmatists, saintly mystics, and the ubiquitous miracle mongers. "Rivalries and debates were rife. Audiences gathered around the new philosophers in the kutuhala-shalas—literally, the place for creating curiosity—the parks and groves on the outskirts of the towns.... The presence of multiple, competing ideologies was a feature of urban living."[1] It was also an age of nascent democratic republics, which, like Athens later, did not ultimately survive the march of monarchy and empire.[2]

Asian Food for Thought

Growing up in India, I ate meat only a handful of times until I left home for college. My mother, a moderately pious Hindu, had a deep aversion to eating animals and wouldn’t allow meat in her kitchen (I also remember her kindness and sympathy towards the ragged animals that shared our city streets: cows, dogs, horses, goats, cats, donkeys, and even occasional elephants and camels). My father was vegetarian for the most part, except when, on rare occasions, he pretended to enjoy a few morsels of meat. I think he did this despite himself, mostly to project the public image of an adventurous, cosmopolitan man. If no one were looking, I’m sure he would have picked a vegetarian option ten times out of ten.

The only times I ate meat was when my older sister brought home a chicken or mutton (goat meat) dish from a friend’s place, or cooked it herself on a Sunday morning on a kerosene stove in our courtyard. When she cooked, my task was to procure the meat. I would bike up to the butcher’s shop and await my turn, squeamishly eyeing the goat carcasses hanging on hooks, and gallantly ask the man for ‘the best cuts,’ to which he always replied, ‘only the best for you, son.’ Washing and cleaning the meat, I felt a strange exhilaration—I saw it not as food but as the flesh and bone of a dead animal, hacked to bits just hours ago. Mother allowed my sister to use only the most beaten down utensils from her kitchen and later instructed the maid to scrub them clean thrice as long.

Still, my parents encouraged us, holding meat to be salutary for growing kids. Their attitude later struck me as similar to Gandhi’s own during his early struggle and experimentation with eating animals. Gandhi saw meat as a contributor to the enviable vigor, material progress, and sturdier physiques of people from the West, while battling his own and his society's traditional dispositions against it.

I was introduced to eating fish and prawns in college. Thereafter, living outside India, I began eating other animals too—cow, pig, turkey, crab, squid, etc. I had non-vegetarian food several times a week and it became a key part of my cooking repertoire—I acquired a bevy of fans for my spicy lamb curry and barbequed chicken. On my travels, I even sampled lobster, shark, snail, venison, guinea pig, and wild boar. But in the ensuing years my meat intake began to decline. I came to relish it less and less. About eight years ago, I gave up eating mammals, and now almost always choose vegetarian. Long live tofu, beans, lentils, and the huge range of Indian vegetarian cuisine.

Being Liberal in a Plural World

Last month I started writing a guest column on 3QuarksDaily every fourth Monday. My second article, Being Liberal in a Plural World, appeared there today (included below). It synthesizes a number of my earlier posts on topics like human rights, Asian values, pluralism, relativism, and liberalism. The inaugural article was Marco Polo's India.

Dreyfus on Heidegger

Heidegger's Being and Time is among the most profound philosophical works of the 20th century, but the man retains a controversial image—a cold genius without heart or fellow feeling, and a great capacity to delude himself (despite the centrality he placed on "authenticity" in his magnum opus). One might even forgive his anti-semitism, intellectual support of Hitler, and membership of the Nazi party to its very end, were it not for his perverse lack of an apology or remorse later in life (d. 1976). Indeed, he does violence to the literal meaning of the term 'philosopher', i.e., 'lover of wisdom'. Notably, Heidegger's works also happen to be utterly devoid of ethical concerns, preoccupied as he was with "pure insight".

And insight he had aplenty, leading to a revolutionary new way of thinking about how human beings are related to the world. Interest in Heidegger has grown enormously in recent decades, starting with attempts to rehabilitate him by none other than Hannah Arendt, his former student and a Jew who fled Nazi Germany and later migrated to the US, and with whom he once had a passionate affair (read Mark Lilla's article in the NYRB on this astonishing story—subscription is required; psssst! email me if you want the article's text). But for an overview on Heidegger first, check out this BBC film on his life and philosophy, which also talks about his relationship with Arendt: clip1, clip2, clip3, clip4, clip5, clip6.

Here is an illuminating talk from the early 80s between Bryan Magee and Hubert Dreyfus, a leading Heidegger scholar from UC Berkeley. The conversation traces the roots of existentialism from Husserl, to his pupil Heidegger, to the "brilliant misunderstanding of Heidegger" by Sartre (and his waning reputation), to Merleau-Ponty, to Heidegger's enormous impact on almost every contemporary academic discipline. The talk is spread over five clips: clip1, clip2, clip3, clip4, clip5 (clip1 shown below). 

Those interested in further pursuing Heidegger may wish to listen to the full audio of Dreyfus's 2007 Fall course on Heidegger's Being and Time at UC Berkeley (~25 hours of podcast). A good teacher and expositor of Heidegger, his classes seem to be always oversubscribed.

Searle on Wittgenstein

In this video (likely from the early 80s), Bryan Magee talks to John Searle about the ideas and legacy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who I'd say is among the top three western philosophers of the 20th century to have influenced me most (besides Foucault, who could be seen as "applied Heidegger," and Berlin). This relatively accessible conversation covers Wittgenstein's early work, the Tractatus, as well as his posthumously published, Philosophical Investigations. The talk is spread over five clips of about 7-10 minutes each: clip1, clip2, clip3, clip4, clip5. Enjoy.