Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, April 27, 2009

A Little Determinism, Reductionism, and Superlative Aspiration, and We're Off to the Races!

Upgraded and adapted from another exchange with "Extropia" in the Moot:
the fact that human beings would be prone to disease and injury caused by accident pretty much guarantees the eventual rise of medical science. We would rediscover antibiotics and anesthesia.

The more general point that disease provokes its address seems true enough, but as for the "eventual" discovery of antibiotics and anesthesia I thoroughly disagree there was any kind of inevitability of their discovery or the order of their discovery vis-a-vis other discoveries.

I'm not a technological determinist, I do not agree that there was any "natural" inevitability about the discoveries humans made nor their dissemination nor their application, since I understand the contingent historical, socioeconomic, and cultural dynamics in play in such processes.

One of the reasons I prefer the awkward phrase "technodevelopmental social struggle" over the term "technology" is because it reminds us and helps us to resist the temptations to retroactively invest technoscientific contingencies with inevitability and confuse our limited knowledge in the present (usually invested with deeply prejudicial desires) as a key to "The Future."
the wish that death could be cheated; that one could hold onto the vitality of youth indefinitely. It seems to me that, so persistent is this wish, medical science is bound to be rediscovered if history were run again

That's like saying people feed themselves when they are hungry because they are closeted techno-immortalists or indulging in the wish-fulfillment fantasy of discovering the fountain of youth every time they quench their thirst. Neither is true. Understanding, remedying, and curing diseases -- which, indeed, looks likely soon to include the remediation and cure of some conditions hitherto connected with aging -- isn't about techno-immortalization, "cheating death" (an expression saturated in adolescent religiosity to my eyes), or the invulnerability or eternalization I describe as the super-predicate of superlongevity in the superlative schema. You are hyperbolizing science into a profoundly unscientific sub(cult)ural aspiration for personal transcendence again.
Another technology that is very likely to be re-invented is the computer.

You think an analogue computing device arising out of Greek, Roman, or pre-Euro-modern Chinese civilization would have been morphologically the same, arising out of a water clock or an abacus or who knows what, as an industrial age computer; that it would acquire the same historical associations; that it would be freighted with the same figures and frames and aspirations, such that in every case "the computer" arriving in its "present" would mean the same thing to you as "a computer" does to you now? You think it would inspire the same intuitions and hopes?
Mathematics is so important to science, and a machine that can calculate is such a useful tool for maths (and science) that computers' reinvention is almost certain to happen.

Well, I disagree, or at any rate I disagree how detailed a developmental trajectory you can claim to be entailed by this usefulness. Necessity may be the mother of invention but it is very contingent indeed which necessities seem susceptible of intervention and to which ones we are reconciled, so invention has at least two mommies.
How the brain does what it does has fascinated us for millenia and I cannot imagine us losing that fascination. Therefore, the eventual rise of cognitive computing is a given,

"Therefore"?
because humanity is bound to gather data on how the brain works and use that to design and build computers that are brainlike.

"Brainlike"? Like? Just how "brainlike"? You can say the feedback of a steam release valve is "brainlike" if you want. You can say a bee hive is "brainlike." You can say cauliflower is "brainlike." You can spend the rest of your life delineating the ways in which a soup can is "like" a cereal box. Everything is indefinitely like and unlike everything else, what matters are the determination and communication of salient similarities and differences. And salience is a crucially normative, and therefore plural and contingent, rather than factual matter.

I don't agree there is anything remotely inevitable in the obsession of so many information and computer "science" people with entitative, agentic "artificial intelligence," I consider it an unfortunate accidental association yielding a deranging constellation of narrative frames and figures that at this point amounts to something like an ideology or a religious faith with endless bedeviling implications. I sympathize with Jeron Lanier's critiques of "cybernetic totalism" on this score, to cite somebody who speaks something like language you will likely take more seriously than my own.

I must say that it is classic the way you proceed from an assumption of technological determinism conjoined to a privileging of mathematical calculation and then move straight away to "inevitable" computers and brain modeling and the insinuation that the pony of techno-immortalization via "mind uploading" straightforwardly "follows." If I reconstructed your discourse this way in the abstract, you would decry my facile parody of a hard he-man science I am too literary to grasp, but then you simply reproduce the trajectory yourself completely oblivious to your own entrapment in your propositional and figural entailments. It's as if you are incapable of thinking what you are doing, so preoccupied are you with calculating out your givens.
anything that fulfills persistant wishes stands a good chance of being discovered or invented, provided A) solutions exist and B) we have time enough to work out what those solutions are

There is nothing in the wish itself that informs you as to "A", and "B" doesn't specify a timescale and so there are no ponies in it for Robot Cultists even when you clap with all your might.

You go on, rather refreshingly, to admit that nobody knows enough in the present to earn certainty about future technodevelopments and even admit that futurology is weighted down with hype and scam artistry and fringe loonies (your phrases, this time).

I agree with the tradition of pragmatic philosophy that we can best determine the substance of this admission on your part by observing your subsequent conduct. If you continue to indulge in such speculation to the exclusion of more qualified claims legible in terms of consensus science, or indulge it outside of sf fandoms that don't pretend to be policy think-tank or activist organizations, if you continue to identify as a member of a "movement" suffused with precisely the hype, scam artistry, and fringe loons you here disdain, we will know just what to make of the reasonable noises you find yourself making now, when backed into a corner by somebody who sees very clearly what superlative futurology is actually all about and what it is trying to get away with.

11 comments:

jimf said...

> > [H]umanity is bound to gather data on how the brain works
> > and use that to design and build computers that are brainlike.
>
> "Brainlike"? Like? Just how "brainlike"? You can say the feedback
> of a steam release valve is "brainlike" if you want. You can say
> a bee hive is "brainlike." You can say cauliflower is "brainlike."

"Shiny toys--right on time
Shiny toys--right on time
Shiny toys. . .

Shiny toys, when it's over
Don't you hate to have to put your toys away? ..."

-- Joni Mitchell, "Shiny Toys", in _Dog Eat Dog_


In a review of an SF novel (_The Multiplex Man_ by
James P. Hogan, 1992) which I once posted to the Extropians'
mailing list, I quoted with approval a character's speech in
the book on p. 174:

"It's funny how people are always finding that the mind
works like their latest technology. It never does, of
course, but it shows how they always think that the
latest technology must be the ultimate. At one time the
brain was an elaborate telephone exchange of nerves going
in and out. Then, after servomechanisms were developed,
it worked by feedback loops and error signals. And then
after that, naturally, it had to be a computer."


I've since encountered essentially the same observation
in a number of other places:

"Ethics of Human Speciation: Sapience, Intolerance and Volitional Freedom",
by Reilly Jones ( http://home.comcast.net/~reillyjones/speciation.html ):

"Humans-as-Computer Metaphor is Appearance not Reality

The idea that we are hepped-up computers is strictly fashion.
The scientific community has a long and somewhat vain history of
picking whatever technological marvels are current to be the model
of human consciousness; from clocks to heat engines to cybernetic
feedback loops to powerful CPUs. The more historical overview you
can achieve of the Western scientific enterprise, the more silly
this tendency looks."


Usenet post by Usenet curmudgeon Mikhail Zeleny,
replying to Fiona Oceanstar
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1991Nov15.160741.5495%40husc3.harvard.edu

From: Mikhail Zeleny (zeleny@walsh.harvard.edu)
Subject: Re: Daniel Dennett (was Re: Commenting on the posting
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books, sci.philosophy.tech, comp.ai.philosophy
Date: 1991-11-15 14:16:41 PST

> I read enough mind-brain books, that I'd like to
> hear other people's guidelines for telling the wheat
> from the chaff.

My guideline is very simple: if you see someone offer a reductive argument
purporting to explain the properties of mind, such as consciousness,
cognition, and intentionality, in terms of the alleged computational
properties of the brain, you may conclude that he is a charlatan or an
ignoramus. This conclusion might be justified historically, by observing
the earlier attempts to explain the functioning of human mind by reference
to the capabilities of the dominant contemporary technology (e.g. clockwork
mechanisms, chemistry, steam engines, etc.). . .


Usenet post by SF author S. M. Stirling
http://www.google.com/groups?selm=20000330040451.03525.00005408%40ng-cm1.aol.com

> But computers are not just another technology; they are a new paradigm, a new
> way about thinking about the relationship between humans and nature.

No, actually, they're just another technology.

Comparing minds to computers is a metaphor. In the 18th century, they used to
compare human beings to clockwork. That was a metaphor, too.

SF often 'literalizes metaphors'; however, one should avoid doing this in real
life as it leads to misunderstanding."


Norbert Wiener, _Cybernetics_ (1948):

"At every stage of technique since Daedalus or
Hero of Alexandria, the ability of the artificer
to produce a working simulacrum of a living
organism has always intrigued people. This desire
to produce and to study automata has always been
expressed in terms of the living technique of
the age. In the days of magic, we have the bizarre
and sinister concept of the Golem, that figure of
clay into which the Rabbi of Prague breathed in
life with the blasphemy of the Ineffable Name of
God. In the time of Newton, the automaton becomes
the clockwork music box, with the little effigies
pirouetting stiffly on top. In the nineteenth
century, the automaton is a glorified heat engine,
burning some combustible fuel instead of the glycogen
of the human muscles. Finally, the present automaton
opens doors by means of photocells, or points guns
to the place at which a radar beam picks up an
airplane, or computes the solution of a differential
equation.

Neither the Greek nor the magical automaton lies
along the main lines of...development of the modern machine,
nor do they seem to have had much of an influence on
serious philosophic thought. It is far different
with the clockwork automaton...."

Extropia DaSilva said...

'Understanding, remedying, and curing diseases -- which, indeed, looks likely soon to include the remediation and cure of some conditions hitherto connected with aging -- isn't about techno-immortalization, "cheating death" (an expression saturated in adolescent religiosity to my eyes), or the invulnerability or eternalization I describe as the super-predicate of superlongevity in the superlative schema'.

In an earlier reply I stated flatly that achieving immortality is not possible. I assumed you would therefore understand that when I said the wish to cheat death would invariably steer medical science towards finding ways to prevent aging, I only meant that age-related causes of death would be eliminated BUT NOT DEATH ITSELF.

'The more general point that disease provokes its address seems true enough, but as for the "eventual" discovery of antibiotics and anesthesia I thoroughly disagree there was any kind of inevitability of their discovery or the order of their discovery vis-a-vis other discoveries.'

Ok. But do you agree that some discoveries are more likely to happen than others if history were to be rerun, and that antibiotics and anesthesia are very likely to be rediscovered for pretty obvious reasons?

"Brainlike"? Like? Just how "brainlike"? You can say the feedback of a steam release valve is "brainlike" if you want. You can say a bee hive is "brainlike." You can say cauliflower is "brainlike."

Imagine we wanted to construct a machine that could replace the heart. Firstly, we would need to determine what kind of machine the heart is most like. Ok, how about:

'the heart is like a pump'.

Now, imagine a skeptic comes along and says 'rubbish! The heart is not a pump! If I remove your heart and replace it with a bicycle pump that would be useless. So that is your theory shot down ner nerny ner ner'.

Clearly not. We are not saying any old pump would suffice. We are saying a pump built around the reverse-engineered principles of design of the human heart would function like a human heart.

Now, the brain is not a pump. Thinking in those terms would get you nowhere. But thinking of the brain in terms of it being a computer does get you somewhere. Again, it is no good saying 'puh! my PC is not like a brain' because the argument is NOT 'any old computer will do'. The argument is 'a computer designed around the reverse-engineered principles of design used by the brain would function like a brain'.

The argument could be wrong. Rodney Brooks noted that, throughout history, we have compared the brain to whatever happened to be the most sophisticated machines at that time. Obviously, that is currently the computer. But maybe the brain is not any kind of computer? Maybe thinking of it in such terms won't get us very far?

'I must say that it is classic the way you proceed from an assumption of technological determinism conjoined to a privileging of mathematical calculation and then move straight away to "inevitable" computers and brain modeling and the insinuation that the pony of techno-immortalization via "mind uploading" straightforwardly "follows."

I certainly did NOT say computers were 'inevitable,' I said 'another technology that is very likely to be re-invented is the computer'.

'Very likely' is not to be confused with 'absolutely certain'.

I did say that the rise of cognitive computing would be a given, but I did not say it would be straightforward or simple. Nor did I say mind uploading is straightforward or simple or even possible.

In fact, referring back to my argument I did not say anything like 'computers would inevitably be built and the mind is bound to be uploaded into them sooner or later'. I only mentioned uploading when I talked about that paper which found a correlation between its advocates' average life expectancy and their estimate for when it would be practical. Most people would have realised I was being skeptical. You, though, seem to always selectively quote or distort whatever I say so that I conform to your stereoptypical robot cultist.

Just to be clear, though, I am no naysaying skeptic. I believe in the possibility of transhumanism, intelligent robots and mind uploading (but I do not believe the uploaded mind is a continuation of the self). Call me a lunatic all you like. I do not care.

Giulio Prisco said...

Extro dearest, I think you are wasting your time. You can say the most reasonable things like 2+2=4, but our host and his disciples will claim that you said 4+4=2, and call you an "eugenicist" or other names of equal relevance to the matter. There is just no way to explain something to someone who does not want to understand. Better come here for fun every now and then, but without taking the "discussion" seriously.

jimf said...

> [D]o you agree that some discoveries are more likely to happen
> than others if history were to be rerun. . .

That's a very interesting question, and nobody has a clue as to
what the answer might be.

Some people, e.g., Robert Wright in _Nonzero: The Logic of Human
Destiny_, have made arguments to the effect that history has a
"direction" (and he's not the first).

These arguments are optimistic, and make you feel good, but for
that very reason should probably be treated with particular
skepticism. I'm not a historian -- I read books like Wright's
for pleasure and leave the serious scholarship to the experts.

Similarly, in the case of astronomical, geological and evolutionary history,
the history of the universe and the history of life on earth, you get
people like Stephen Jay Gould arguing that there's no reason whatever to believe
that if the "movie" of history were started over again, you'd
end up with anything like human intelligence.

And you get other people like Simon Conway Morris, Cambridge paleontologist
and Fellow of the Royal Society, in _Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans
in a Lonely Universe_
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521827043 )
which, while making a case for the ubiquity of
convergent evolution, manages to suggest, ever so gently,
that there's something about the universe which makes
such convergence, and something like human intelligence, inevitable.

I was a bit taken aback that there are still reputable
paleontologists who believe in God. Morris tips his hand
a little more by quoting (in a biology
book!) from C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. ;->

But nobody knows for sure.

Dale Carrico said...

In an earlier reply I stated flatly that achieving immortality is not possible.Like some other laughably would-be suave PR flacks for the Robot Cult you like these days to substitute for the word "immortality" words like "indefinite lifespan" and "extreme longevity" designed to give you the same wish-fulfillment payoff while getting you off the hook of their obvious transcendentalizing pseudo-scientific hyperbole. I'm not fooled. Sorry, no pony for you.

I certainly did NOT say computers were 'inevitable,' I said 'another technology that is very likely to be re-invented is the computer'. 'Very likely' is not to be confused with 'absolutely certain'.More proffering up of dime-thin differences to sell your wish-fulfillment fantasizing to the rubes (likely yourself included). From where in your ass did you pull the "data" on the basis of which you made this "serious calculation" of "very likelihood" but not quite "absolute certainty"? And what impact does this so-called diminution of certainty have on the amount of time you devote nonetheless to handwaving about this "very likelihood" that isn't "absolute certainty"? I am not fooled by these facile PR gambits. Clap louder, li'l Robot Cultist, your pony is just bound to come!

you agree that some discoveries are more likely to happen than others if history were to be rerun, and that antibiotics and anesthesia are very likely to be rediscovered for pretty obvious reasonsWell, that's it. I won't talk to you until you show some signs of actually thinking about what I have said. You're wasting my time now, not to mention that I've already made all the jokes that provide entertainment value from this particular form of idiocy.

You... always selectively quote or distort whatever I say so that I conform to your stereoptypical robot cultist.... I believe in the possibility of transhumanism, intelligent robots and mind uploading (but I do not believe the uploaded mind is a continuation of the self). Call me a lunatic all you like. I do not care.Impossible to parody.

Dale Carrico said...

The incomparably idiotic stylings of Holy High Pontifex of the Order of Cosmic Engineers:

Extro dearest, I think you are wasting your time. You can say the most reasonable things like 2+2=4,

...or that your organismic brain can be migrated into cyberspace or into a shiny robot body and thus immortalized to live in a virtual or nano-slave-botic treasure cave in the company of history-shattering superintelligent Robot Gods...

but our host and his disciples

...people who agree with him on some questions while refraining, unlike we ourselves, from heading and championing literal membership organizations declaring themselves to be "movements" and "-isms" with shared "principles" delineated in online manifestos for all to see...

will claim that you said 4+4=2,

...especially if you said it...

and call you an "eugenicist" or other names

...like when some of us declare there to be no difference between deafening a child with a poker and a deaf person selecting for deafness in a wanted child before birth because deafness is harm by definition, or when some of us declare all neuro-atypicality as inherently non-optimal, or when some of us declare that the mere fact that nonhuman animals exhibit non-human intelligence would constitute an ethical duty to "uplift" them into human-conformity if we could...

There is just no way to explain something to someone who does not want to understand.

It's true, Giulio, you'll just have to pray for us sinners who just stubbornly refuse to recognize the Robot God as our lord and savior despite the flat-out manifest obviousness of the truths to which you cling in your faithfulness.

Better come here for fun every now and then, but without taking the "discussion" seriously.Mm hm.

jimf said...

> . . .our host and his disciples. . .

Dale is actually **my** disciple, you know! ;->

No, I'm afraid neither of us is the other's "disciple".

I do, however, imagine in my Grinchy little heart that
I might have had some role in nudging Dale in the direction
of giving up pussyfooting and playing nicey-nice with the >Hist
crowd, and just letting his Joan Rivers view of the Emperor's
fashion sense loose on the Web.

Anonymous said...

> My guideline is very simple: if > > you see someone offer a reductive >argument
>purporting to explain the >properties of mind, such as >consciousness,
>cognition, and intentionality, in >terms of the alleged computational
>properties of the brain, you may >conclude that he is a charlatan or >an ignoramus.

Jimf, you are wrong.

Consciousness, cognition, and intentionality can, must, and will be understood on reductionism ground.

And regarding the consensus science, it IS the opinion on consensus science.

- Mir

Dale Carrico said...

Consciousness, cognition, and intentionality can, must, and will be understood on reductionism ground.Mir -- the repudiation of reductionism in the sense I mean is not an embrace of supernaturalism, but a simple -- and almost universally conceded -- reminder that one cannot derive ought from is, coupled with the reminder -- unfortunately far from universally conceded -- that ought is nonetheless indispensable to human flourishing.

That life, intelligence, freedom are not supernatural but natural phenomena suggests that they are, indeed, susceptible of natural analysis. But this is certainly no justification for treating our own conspicuously preliminary understandings of life, intelligence, freedom -- or, better yet, essentially figurative formulations that scarcely even pretend to factuality (or consensus, whatever your protests to the contrary) except to their faithful -- as already adequate to these phenomena when they palpably are not adequate, just because it is not logically impossible that eventual understanding may become adequate.

jimf said...

> Consciousness, cognition, and intentionality can, must, and will
> be understood on reductionism ground.
>
> And regarding the consensus science, it IS the opinion on consensus
> science.

The quotation you're responding to (whose source is actually one
Mikhail Zeleny) was:

"a reductive argument purporting to explain the properties of mind
in terms of the alleged **computational** properties of the brain"

(**italics** mine).

This may indeed be (and was probably even more so 30 years ago)
a de facto prejudice on the part of many people who consider
themselves "scientifically minded" (and particularly among
those actual scientists and technicians who have little interest
in biology), who read a lot of science fiction, and who are
what Jaron Lanier calls "cybernetic totalists".

It is **not** the opinion of "consensus science".

It is, rather, what a friend of mine calls a "party question"
(by which he means, as in "political party", not as in the
sort of question that people discuss at parties ;-> ).

It is a prejudice whose plausibility (such as it ever was)
is probably well past its peak.

Dale Carrico said...

Well put, Jim.