Despite the repeated claims of rhetoricians like yourself, there seems no evidence that world of things cares about your arguments or your metaphors.
If this claim is one I've repeated endlessly, as you say, I daresay you should have no problem at all citing a single instance in which I've actually said it, eh?
I quite agree with you that the world has no preferences in the matter of the descriptions humans deploy to cope with it -- this is why I repudiate naive correspondence views of truth as vestiges of religious superstition.
You will find plenty of examples of arguments on this theme that I've written and posted here on Amor Mundi anthologized under the heading Pluralist Reasons Against Authoritarian Reason.
I mention all this because your polemical hyperbole on this point threatens to paint you (or possibly more straightforwardly reveal you) to be a rather careless reader and possibly not at all bright.
You'll forgive me if I propose the rather contrary suspicion that this is an instance of pretty common or garden variety projection on your part, that in fact it is you who thinks the world cares about your pious parochial version of science, your pet computer-science projects, the imaginary futurological outcomes that you believe have delivered to you and a marginal handful of ill-treated ill-understood Elect the Keys to History itself, that you're on the world's side as well as on the side of history as everybody will see some day, you'll see!
What likely offends you is that you mistake my own pragmatism in matters of instrumental belief and my critical approach and rhetorical sensitivity in matters of moral, aesthetic, and political belief as stances positioning me as some sort of antagonist in some sectarian squabble for God's Ear, or at any rate the Ear of Nature's God as the Deists would put the point. As witness, the following, as you soldier on:
The world is made of stuff, stuff which follows certain rules, rules of which we know some, but not all. Within the frame of those rules, within the bounds humanity has already learned to manipulate, horrible and wonderful things are possible. Plagues and People, Nukes and Stars are all permitted by nature, and your arguments don't change any of that, nor even address it.
Blah blah blah. You sound like a Randroidal simpleton. Look I hate to break it to you, soopergenius, but nobody really disputes any of this on this sort of facile level. How annoying you priestly types are, forever fancying yourself cosmic representatives just because you've grasped a few elementary insights about the stability of middle-scale furniture in the world that nobody but literal loons -- and not all of them -- dispute.
It's true, I wouldn't affirm the rather personalizing metaphors -- yes, pet, it's metaphors doing the heavy lifting in your account, even though you fancy yourself a he-man with no truck with frilly figures -- framing the susceptibility of the world to useful and edifying description as "rule-following" or things being "permitted." In such utterances I tend to hear the vestigial echo of the Sky Daddy whose good boy you mean to be by being a good scientician, hoping for a nice pat on the head, and a nice immortal angelic (or, presumably, robotic) body in the fullness of time, no doubt, or some comparable infantilism.
But in broad brush strokes, if you are declaring the usual tedious insipidities about what a relativist I am or how I think the world is a figment of imagination or some bland spread of goo awaiting linguistic determination, I'm sorry to say all this hysteria derives from the fact that you don't know how to read very well, or because you are simply a bit of a dullard in the usual manner of cocksure fundamentalists. If you think anything I've said calls any of these preschool vacuities about the useful describability and predictability of the world into question you need to get back to your books, lamb, and quick.
Rhetoric is a tool for convincing people, sometimes of truth, sometimes of falsehood. But it is not a tool for uncovering truth.
I'm not going to get into a pissing contest with you over who best understands what rhetoric is -- a subject I teach Berkeley undergraduates with reasonable success, you may remember.
If you really want to convince me your cock is the most impressivest in the land by all means send me a pic -- I like big dicks. I also rather like James's pragmatic definition of truth as "the good in the way of belief," where a plurality of goods yields a plurality of modes of warranted assertion and rationality is a matter not only of properly applying the criteria of warranted assertibility to determine the best candidates for belief among those presently on offer but also of having the sense to determine which family of criteria of warrant apply to the mode that best fits the circumstances at hand.
You sound to me a bit like a blusterer whose confidence stems in no small part from a reductionist insensitivity to the plurality of modes of reasonable belief in play in human life, with the consequence that you tend to misconstrue quite a lot of what you feel surest of.
You seem to carry an anti-science agenda with you,
Nothing could be further from the truth. It might be an instructive exercise for you to devote some sustained attention to those moments in which you find yourself thinking science "threatened" by some utterance or other of mine, and asking yourself what work your personal vision of "science" is doing for you that you would respond in this way.
which I guess is understandable in some circles.
Yes, yes, yes, we all know that I'm an effete elite aesthete, a muzzy headed emotionalist clinging to my poetry and my relativist postmodernist theory word salads, and I shouldn't worry my pretty little head about the hard science stuff sooperbrained hard science guys like you are working on in the really for real world.
How lucky for science that a circle-jerk of computer geeks who expect a superintelligent Robot God with nanobots at its command will soon deliver them immortal comic book superhero bodies and treasure caves is there to protect science's integrity from the likes of secular pragmatic humanists like me!
I would be flabbergasted by the spectacle of claims so arrogant spouted by a person so clueless if I weren't so accustomed to hearing this sort of thing from Robot Cultists by now. Why is it always the self-declared smartest boys in the room -- who turn everything they touch to shit?
But it doesn't make you even a little bit right.
Bored now. It was amusing while it lasted, though. Thanks.
2 comments:
Dale wrote:
> An exchange with a Brave Anonymous interlocutor in the Moot:
>
> > Despite the repeated claims of rhetoricians like yourself,
> > there seems no evidence that world of things cares about
> > your arguments or your metaphors. . .
> >
> > The world is made of stuff, stuff which follows certain rules. . .
> > Nukes and Stars are all permitted by nature, and your arguments
> > don't change any of that, nor even address it.
> >
> > Rhetoric is a tool for convincing people, sometimes of truth,
> > sometimes of falsehood. But it is not a tool for uncovering truth.
> >
> > You seem to carry an anti-science agenda with you, which I
> > guess is understandable in some circles.
It's hard not to be sure, sometimes, that one has nailed
the Secret Identity of an occasional voice among these Brave
Anonymice. ;-> Be that as it may. . .
Robin Zebrowski commented in an earlier thread
("My Unfairness to the Robot Cultists"):
> I see why Dale just points and laughs and calls names
> when these are the sorts of understandings (for lack
> of a better word) that you people have of science.
> The human body doesn't HAPPEN to have a mind. The body
> is the fundamental piece of hardware that makes
> OUR SORTS of minds at all possible. If you can't see
> that computation in the void that just HAPPENS to be
> instantiated on some machine or other is the same
> thing as dualism of mind and body, then you really should
> probably go back to Philosophy 101, Biology 101, and
> throw in a Critical Thinking course while you're at it.
>
> It's hard to engage anyone in serious discussions of logical
> and physical possibility when they live in a fundamentally
> different world than I do. . . .
> You jump into physiology and philosophy as though you've
> read a few popular science books and now you're ready to
> take over the world.
Once upon a time (nearly a decade ago -- how do flies tell time?)
I had an e-mail exchange, perhaps with this very same
Anonymouse, or maybe just with somebody a lot like him.
I was trying to make a case (from an admittedly non-expert's
point of view) about how much of the discussion about AI
(in particular, about the "ethics" of "friendly AI")
in singularitarian circles seemed rather naive to me, and
used frames and metaphors that sophisticates in the field itself
had left behind long ago.
This was part of my side of the conversation:
"You seem. . . to approach ethics as a turn of the
(last) century mathematician or logician manque would have,
or as an even more antique "moral philosopher" would have.
[My interlocutor had written] 'I'm always discussing a successive
approximation to *something* . . . the state of a preexisting
objective morality. . . Suppose I ran myself as a simulation for a
trillion years of increasing intelligence, thinking about morality.
At the end of this time is something that is the target.'
[And I replied] That's one of the points on which we diverge,
I think. See, I don't believe these things are
capable of being worked out by one mind in
isolation. I don't see any conceivable series
of isolated logical iterations converging to
that hypothetical target. Any more than language
can have "meaning" with respect to the mind of
just one person. I see both "meaning" and "morality"
as being worked out in a web of interacting minds.
Sure, this web may get bigger. In Olaf Stapledon's
_Star Maker_, it eventually encompasses the entire
cosmos. **Then** you can start talking about the
ultimate "Target".
But I just don't see how an individual human
mind can pre-compute such ultimate targets
on its own (or any **individual** mind, thinking
about it for however long). This is certainly
no original insight on my part, BTW; I believe
it's been a trend in philosophy for the past
century, and I've just absorbed the "networked"
point of view from my reading. I think
it's a bare possibility that you, in fact,
have some sort of insight on this issue that
goes against the overall direction of
contemporary thought, but is nevertheless
true. But I'm inclined to doubt it.
I see AIs as being "friendly" because they
are, ab initio, part of the webwork of human
culture (that means they'd better not be able to
acquire power too fast, any more than a
four-year-old should be able to get hold of
daddy's gun)."
Out of the blue (it seemed to me) my interlocutor replied
"[Your attitude] forms part of the Standard Social Sciences Model
in which you, like so many others, are still mired. I prescribe
Tooby and Cosmides's 'The Psychological Foundations of Culture',
from _The Adapted Mind_."
Say. . . what? I had been positioned on one side of
an academic debate that itself was becoming rather out
of date (I guess the last time it was big news was
during the "sociobiology" wars of the 70's). I was also
being branded, subtly or not-so-subtly, as a "left-winger"
in some sense of the term. What did any of this have
to do with AI, I wondered at the time?
Now I realize that it has a lot more to do with politics, or
maybe it's more accurate to say political **temperament**,
than I was willing to credit at the time.
It's an old, old clash of world-views, which William James
wrote about a century ago:
-----------------------------------------
"The history of philosophy is to a great extent
that of a certain clash of human temperaments.
Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some
of my colleagues, I shall have to take account
of this clash and explain a good many of the
divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever
temperament a professional philosopher is, he
tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact
of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally
recognized reason, so he urges impersonal
reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament
really gives him a stronger bias than any of his
more strictly objective premises. It loads the
evidence for him one way or the other, making for
a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view
of the universe, just as this fact or that
principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting
a universe that suits it, he believes in any
representation of the universe that does suit it.
He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key
with the world's character, and in his heart
considers them incompetent and 'not in it,' in
the philosophic business, even though they may
far excel him in dialectical ability.
Of course I am talking here of very positively
marked men, men of radical idiosyncracy, who have
set their stamp and likeness on philosophy and
figure in its history. Plato, Locke, Hegel, Spencer,
are such temperamental thinkers. Most of us have,
of course, no very definite intellectual temperament,
we are a mixture of opposite ingredients, each
one present very moderately. We hardly know our
own preferences in abstract matters; some of us
are easily talked out of them, and end by following
the fashion or taking up with the beliefs of the
most impressive philosopher in our neighborhood,
whoever he may be. But the one thing that has
counted so far in philosophy is that a man should
see things, see them straight in his own peculiar
way, and be dissatisfied with any opposite way of
seeing them. There is no reason to suppose that
this strong temperamental vision is from now onward
to count no longer in the history of man's beliefs.
Now the particular difference of temperament that
I have in mind in making these remarks is one
that has counted in literature, art, government,
and manners as well as in philosophy. In manners
we find formalists and free-and-easy persons.
In government, authoritarians and anarchists. In
literature, purists or academicals, and realists.
In art, classics and romantics. You recognize these
contrasts as familiar; well, in philosophy we
have a very similar contrast expressed in the pair
of terms 'rationalist' and 'empiricist,'
'empiricist' meaning your lover of facts in all
their crude variety, 'rationalist' meaning your
devotee to abstract and eternal principles. No one
can live an hour without both facts and principles,
so it is a difference rather of emphasis; yet it
breeds antipathies of the most pungent character
between those who lay the emphasis differently; and
we shall find it extraordinarily convenient to express
a certain contrast in men's ways of taking their
universe, by talking of the 'empiricist' and of
the 'rationalist' temper. These terms make the contrast
simple and massive.
More simple and massive than are usually the men
of whom the terms are predicated. For every sort of
permutation and combination is possible in human
nature; and if I now proceed to define more fully
what I have in mind when I speak of rationalists
and empiricists, by adding to each of those titles
some secondary qualifying characteristics, I beg you
to regard my conduct as to a certain extent arbitrary.
I select types of combination that nature offers
very frequently, but by no means uniformly, and I
select them solely for their convenience in helping me
to my ulterior purpose of characterizing pragmatism.
Historically we find the terms 'intellectualism'
and 'sensationalism' used as synonyms of 'rationalism'
and 'empiricism.' Well, nature seems to combine most
frequently with intellectualism an idealistic and
optimistic tendency. Empiricists on the other
hand are not uncommonly materialistic, and their
optimism is apt to be decidedly conditional and
tremulous. Rationalism is always monistic. It starts
from wholes and universals, and makes much of the
unity of things. Empiricism starts from the parts,
and makes of the whole a collection -- is not averse
therefore to calling itself pluralistic. Rationalism
usually considers itself more religious than empiricism,
but there is much to say about this claim, so I
merely mention it. It is a true claim when the
individual rationalist is what is called a man of
feeling, and when the individual empiricist prides
himself on being hard-headed. In that case the rationalist
will usually also be in favor of what is called free-will,
and the empiricist will be a fatalist -- I use the
terms most popularly current. The rationalist finally
will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while
the empiricist may be more sceptical and open to
discussion.
I will write these traits down in two columns. I think
you will practically recognize the two types of mental
make-up that I mean if I head the columns by the titles
'tender-minded' and 'tough-minded' respectively.
THE TENDER-MINDED..................THE TOUGH-MINDED.
Rationalistic (going by............Empiricist (going by
'principles'),.....................'facts'),
Intellectualistic..................Sensationalistic
Idealistic.........................Materialistic
Optimistic.........................Pessimistic
Religious..........................Irreligious
Free-willist.......................Fatalistic
Monistic...........................Pluralistic
Dogmatical.........................Sceptical.
. . .
Each of you probably knows some well-marked example
of each type, and you know what each example thinks
of the example on the other side of the line. They
have a low opinion of each other. Their antagonism,
whenever as individuals their temperaments have been
intense, has formed in all ages a part of the philosophic
atmosphere of the time. It forms a part of the
philosophic atmosphere to-day. The tough think of the
tender as sentimentalists and softheads. The tender
feel the tough to be unrefined, callous, or brutal.
Their mutual reaction is very much like that that takes
place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population
like that of Cripple Creek. Each type believes the
other to be inferior to itself; but disdain in the
one case is mingled with amusement, in the other it
has a dash of fear."
-- William James, _Pragmatism_ (1907)
Lecture 1, "The Present Dilemma in Philosophy"
http://www.4literature.net/William_James/Pragmatism/2.html
-----------------------------------------
So no, it wasn't the SSSM ("Standard Social
Science Model" -- Franz Boas, Margaret Mead,
the 1952 UNESCO agreement, etc.) that was the root of
my disagreement with my singularitarian interlocutor.
It was something **much** older.
It was the difference in temper between what James
called the "rationalist" (or "monist"), and the
pragmatist (or "pluralist").
"Singularitarianism", so-called, posits that an
AI, bootstrapping itself into "superintelligence",
will leapfrog over all doubt and uncertainty and
difference of opinion, and realize the monists'
dream. Become God in His attribute of Omniscient
Intellect, in other words. A dyed-in-the-wool
pragmatist (one of the targets of the righteous
contempt of Ayn Rand ;-> ) might find that idea both
distasteful **and** implausible.
Another quote:
-----------------------------------------
"In one of his most famous essays, Isaiah Berlin quotes a fragment
from the Greek poet Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things,
but the hedgehog knows one big thing’ (Berlin, ‘The Hedgehog and the
Fox’, in _Russian Thinkers_, ed. H. Hardy [1978]).
The contrast is a metaphor for the crucial distinction
at the heart of Berlin’s thought between monist
and pluralist accounts of moral value. According to monism, a
single value or narrow set of values overrides all others, while on
the pluralist view human goods are multiple, conflicting and
incommensurable. Monism, Berlin believes, harbours political
dangers that pluralism avoids. While the great authoritarian visions
of politics have all rested on monist foundations, pluralism is
naturally aligned with toleration, moderation and liberalism. . .
In the last section of ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ [in _Four Essays
on Liberty_ (1969)], Berlin makes explicit a theme
which he had often hinted at before — his notion of value
pluralism and its political implications. The roots of Soviet
totalitarianism include positive liberty but they go deeper. Beneath
the notion of the true self is the broader idea of a single,
universally valid moral system: moral monism. This has been the
dominant ‘perennial philosophy’ of the West since the Greeks. But
Berlin argues that monism is false. The values and purposes of
human beings, although universal in part, are multiple, potentially
conflicting, and incommensurable. They are so radically distinct
that there is no common measure by which they can be ranked in a
universal system that will resolve all conflicts.
Consequently there can be no perfect society in which all
human values are realised simultaneously. What stands in the way
of moral and political perfection is not conflict between good and
evil, but conflict between good and good. The political lesson of
value pluralism, according to Berlin, is strongly anti-utopian and
broadly liberal. If moral perfection is impossible, then so too is
political perfection; hence the Marxist dream of the final
harmonisation of social forces and human interests at the end of
history is just that — a dream. The reality we must face is of
awkward, sometimes tragic choices, and inevitable, and reasonable,
disagreement over what those choices should be. The politics of
pluralism will accommodate those choices and disagreements
rather than trying to transcend them. Politically, therefore, value
pluralism points in the direction of freedom of choice, toleration
and moderation: the values of liberalism.
Since the 18th Century, however, moral monism has been
powerfully reinforced by the scientism characteristic of the
mainstream of the French Enlightenment. The Parisian philosophes
were the ancestors of the Oxford logical positivists. Berlin’s
attitude to the Enlightenment is consequently highly ambivalent.
He is strongly committed to its values of individual liberty and the
reasoned questioning of prescriptive practices. But he is also
deeply suspicious of the Enlightenment fixation on the natural
sciences as the model for all knowledge: its coldly objective view
of human behaviour, its lack of historical sensitivity and blindness
to the virtues of past civilisations, and its glib faith in a linear
pattern of progress in human affairs, a faith which at the extreme
embraces the notion of a perfected society in which all human
goods are realised wholly and simultaneously. The Enlightenment
stands for freedom but also for the scientistic utopianism that has
betrayed freedom in the communist world of the 20th Century."
"Hedgehog and Fox", a review article
by George Crowder, Flinders University
_Australian Journal of Political Science_
Vol. 38 No. 2 (July 2003), pp. 333–77
http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/onib/crowderrev.pdf
-----------------------------------------
Dale said: "Bored now. It was amusing while it lasted, though. Thanks."
Hey, don't feel bad Dale, I got bored before I was even half-way through what I was typing. I do that a lot when talking to self-proclaimed fundamentalist expertists (of the evolution-denying, True Blue Biblical Creationism upholding variety, rather); most of the time I don't even get around to responding to the particularly vapid diatribes and painfully pornographic displays of pure, uncut, hardcore Reality-penetrating Ultimate Insight™. I guess it's somewhat different when you have a blog and people come to you with for validation in their insecurities.
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