Since I’m very much in “cognitive closure” mode and am immersed in the work of Colin McGinn, I thought I’d post this brief chat. Having read most of McGinn’s philosophy of mind, I couldn’t characterize his work better than Steven Pinker: “McGinn is an ingenious philosopher who thinks like a laser and writes like a dream.” Reading McGinn is akin to the pleasure that one gets from reading Nozick and Clark – fireworks and clarity!
For an excellent resource on this and related matters see the What Sorts of People website.
Mar 4th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
“FIFTY years from now I want people to be running to work,” says Hugh Herr, director of the biomechatronics group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Far from being some kind of motivational guru, Dr Herr hopes to achieve this using technology. His goal is to augment people’s limbs with what he calls a “mobility platform”, akin to a pair of magic trousers, that allows people to move quickly with minimal effort—like riding a bicycle, but without the bicycle. “They won’t need parking lots,” says Dr Herr. “People can run straight into their offices, remove their mobility platform, as if they were undressing, and then hang it right on their coat rack.”
It sounds implausible. Roboticists have struggled for decades to understand bipedal locomotion, and even today’s most sophisticated robots require huge amounts of energy and computer power to walk on two legs. But Dr Herr’s credentials are sound. He is a leading authority on the biomechanics of legs, and in the past decade he has made several advances in the development of artificial legs and assistive walking devices, or “orthoses”, enabling amputees to walk with a more natural gait than was previously possible.
As well as enhancing the lives of disabled people, Dr Herr’s work on exoskeletons—the precursors of his planned mobility platforms—could make life easier for able-bodied people, too. By contrast with the bulky, cumbersome exoskeletons featured in science-fiction movies like “Aliens” and “Avatar”, or those being developed for military use, Dr Herr’s devices are smaller and lighter, and will require much less power. This will, he hopes, allow people to walk and run greater distances, or carry heavier loads, than they would otherwise be able to.
Dr Herr’s interest in the biomechanics of walking stems from his own personal experience. He is a double amputee, having lost both his legs below the knee after a climbing accident in 1982, at the age of 17. At the time he was regarded as one of the best climbers in America. But after ascending a 200-metre wall of ice on Mount Washington, in New Hampshire, Dr Herr and his climbing partner Jeff Batzer found themselves caught in a blizzard. Blinded by the snow, they became lost in the wilderness as they struggled to find their way to safety. By the time they were rescued, more than three days later, they were both suffering from severe hypothermia and frostbite. “We were in pretty bad shape,” Dr Herr recalls. He had both his legs amputated below the knee and Mr Batzer lost a leg, the toes from his remaining foot and all the fingers from his right hand.
“Climbing was my life’s passion,” says Dr Herr. Angry with the mistakes he’d made on Mount Washington, he was determined to rebuild his life and prove to himself that he could climb responsibly once again. Within just a few months he was out climbing once again, wearing a pair of temporary legs made of plaster that could, he was warned, easily fracture. “I think my family saw it as great therapy,” says Dr Herr. “They were probably more frightened that I would become frustrated and depressed if I hadn’t been able to climb again.” He is certain if he hadn’t got back on the rock he would be a very different person today. Driven on by the desire to create better legs for himself he has spent the past three decades turning his loss into a personal gain that has also benefited many others.
He began by customising his new artificial limbs so that they were optimised for climbing. “I realised I didn’t need a rock climbing shoe—I could just bond climbing rubber right to the artificial foot,” he says. Convinced that artificial limbs could be improved further, he started to make his own. “I studied tool-and-dye at school so I knew my way around tools,” says Dr Herr. His efforts resulted in a dedicated pair of limbs that could be adjusted for different types of climbing, and could even have their length extended or reduced to match the demands of the wall. As a result he was soon climbing at an even higher standard than before the accident, and certainly better than the vast majority of able-bodied people.
Having created better legs for moving vertically, he turned his attention to ordinary, horizontal locomotion. He studied physics at university, on the basis that it would provide a good foundation for designing prostheses. His first focus was to make artificial limbs more comfortable to wear. By his senior year he had been granted his first patent, for a socket interface that used a series of bladders to compensate for the wide variation in the shapes of different people’s residual limbs. Over the next few years, as he studied for a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at MIT and a PhD in biophysics at Harvard before returning to MIT as a postdoctoral fellow, Dr Herr worked on a novel knee-joint mechanism.
This work, which was eventually commercialised as the Rheo Knee, used a magnetorheological (MR) fluid—a fluid whose viscosity can be controlled by applying a magnetic field—to act as a variable damper, and thus create a more natural knee swing. Traditionally, artificial knee-joints use hydraulic damping, which presents more angular resistance to fast rotational motion than to slow motion. A joint with a computer-controlled “smart” MR fluid, by contrast, can present a more even resistance, allowing for a more natural gait and enabling a prosthetic leg to adapt the knee swing as the wearer’s gait changes. The joint can also be more easily tuned to meet a particular user’s needs.
Having improved upon existing artificial knees, Dr Herr decided that designing radically better prostheses and orthoses required a return to first principles, and a greater understanding of how human limbs work. “It’s surprising to most people that we, the human race, do not yet understand biological walking,” he says. It turns out to be complex and often counter-intuitive. In many respects walking should be an inefficient process, but because of the way the human body is designed, it is quite the opposite, says Dr Herr. Although effort is required to bend a joint or flex a muscle, the body is able to recycle much of the energy expended through spring-like tendons and elegantly arranged muscles. There is a constant shuffling, as potential energy is transformed into kinetic or elastic energy, and then back again. “That’s why, when you walk, it’s so economical and uses so little energy,” he says.
With most prosthetic devices, including the Rheo Knee, much of the energy put into them by the body is lost, rather than being recovered. With this in mind Dr Herr went on to develop, in 2003, the first powered ankle-foot orthosis—a device designed to fit around the ankle joint of someone with walking difficulties, such as a stroke patient. It provides active correction, ensuring that the foot flexes in the right way, and is used to teach a patient how to walk again. Then in 2007 Dr Herr took this a step further by incorporating assistive power into an artificial leg, or prosthesis. The result, the PowerFoot One, will be launched this year by Dr Herr’s spin-out company, iWalk, and will be the first powered artificial leg on the market.
The PowerFoot One uses motors, springs, sensors and an elaborate control system to emulate the energy-transfer mechanisms of the foot and ankle at each stage of a stride. It adapts to different terrain angles and different gaits, can tell whether the user is going up or down stairs, and increases both speed and stability. It will even hang naturally when the user crosses his legs. “Some of our patients actually start to cry when they use it,” says Dr Herr. The powered mechanism, which will require daily recharging, creates a natural gait and ensures that no “metabolic cost” is imposed on the wearer, he says.
The question of metabolic cost was highlighted by the case of Oscar Pistorius, the South African double-amputee sprinter who runs using blade-like prosthetics made of carbon fibre. In 2007 he was banned from trying to qualify for the 400-metre race at the 2008 Beijing Olympics by the International Association of Athletics Federations. The IAAF argued that his prosthetics gave him an unfair advantage by enabling him to run at a much lower metabolic cost—in other words, with much less effort—than an able-bodied person. Dr Herr was brought in by Mr Pistorius’s legal team to argue against this claim. With less than a month to prepare a defence, Dr Herr and his colleagues Rodger Kram and Peter Weyand carried out tests to demonstrate that Mr Pistorius’s prosthetics, which are not powered, do not enable him to run with less effort. As a result the decision to ban Mr Pistorius was overturned. (In the event, he did not qualify for the South African team and did not compete in Beijing.)
The science is still very immature when it comes to assessing whether prosthetics provide an advantage, says Dr Herr, though the evidence so far suggests that they do not. “We want to get the science done,” he says, “because the next time Oscar or anyone else wants to compete against people with intact limbs, there will be certain people in the world who will claim augmentation—so we need to be prepared for that.” He would like to produce prosthetics that can emulate biological limbs so precisely that they ensure that the likes of Mr Pistorius are neither advantaged nor disadvantaged.
Although Mr Pistorius’s unpowered prosthetics do not provide any metabolic advantage, there is no reason why powered prosthetics, or exoskeletons worn by able-bodied people, cannot do so. Indeed, with his latest work on exoskeletons, Dr Herr is moving in this direction. His latest powered exoskeleton, which in effect helps carry the wearer, has already been shown to reduce the metabolic effort involved in hopping by 30% (the tests for running have not yet been completed). And it does not require much energy to work: in its current form the exoskeleton has just two small clutches which only draw a quarter of a watt of power each. “That’s negligible,” says Dr Herr. He plans to add regenerative capabilities to the exoskeleton, so that it will require little or no power when moving on level ground.
This sort of device is primarily aimed at improving distance rather than speed, says Dr Herr. Wearing it enables you to walk or run with less effort, so it will improve your marathon time (because you will not get tired so quickly over long distances) but will not enable you to sprint any faster than your existing top speed. “Think of it as a bicycle for your legs,” he says. “A bicycle profoundly augments human locomotion in terms of human metabolic rate and speed, and yet it requires zero energy itself.”
Dr Herr plans to add regenerative capabilities to his prosthetic devices, such as the PowerFoot One. After all, one advantage of having artificial limbs is that you can upgrade them. And for Dr Herr, there will always be room for improvement in the speed, stability and energy-efficiency of his legs. “When I’m 80 I want the artificial part of my body to be completely superior to the biological part,” he says. It is a distant goal, but he has already taken several steps in the right direction.
Here is a review article I came across in The Economist. Having read Camus in my youth knowing little about his life and even less about his philosophical perspective, time permitting I’m inclined to rediscover him (I was taken by Visconti’s adaptation of L’Étranger). And anyone sidelined by Sartre (a fate to befall the great Raymond Aron as well), is worthy of admiration.
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Albert Camus, 50 years on
Jan 7th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
Albert Camus: Solitaire et Solidaire. By Catherine Camus. Michel Lafon; 206 pages; €39.90. Buy from Amazon.fr
Les Derniers Jours de la Vie d’Albert Camus. By José Lenzini. Actes Sud; 144 pages; €16.50. Buy from Amazon.fr
Albert Camus, Fils d’Alger. By Alain Vircondelet. Fayard; 396 pages; €19.90. Buy from Amazon.fr
Albert Camus. By Virgil Tanase. Gallimard; 416 pages; €8.10. Buy from Amazon.fr
WHEN Albert Camus was killed in a car crash 50 years ago on January 4th, at the age of 46, he had already won the Nobel prize for literature, and his best-known novel, “L’Etranger” (“The Stranger” or “The Outsider”), had introduced readers the world over to the philosophy of the absurd. Yet, at the time of his death, Camus found himself an outcast in Paris, snubbed by Jean-Paul Sartre and other left-bank intellectuals, and denounced for his freethinking refusal to yield to fashionable political views. As his daughter has said: “Papa was alone.”
Today, by contrast, the French are proud to consider Camus a towering figure, while Sartre’s star has faded. Even President Nicolas Sarkozy, from the political right, has proposed transferring the writer’s remains from Provence to the Panthéon in Paris. Several new books mark the anniversary of his death, including an elegant illustrated volume by Catherine Camus, one of his twin children and custodian of her father’s estate.
The reader in search of literary criticism, or even the origins of absurdist thought, will not find it in the three new biographies. That by José Lenzini, a French former journalist, is the most unusual, retracing Camus’s last journey from Provence to Paris as a series of imaginary flashbacks through his life. The other two are more conventional but both finely drawn, digestible portraits of the football-playing “little poor child”, as Camus called himself, from Algiers, who came to leave such a mark on literature and moral thought.
A double haunting presence looms throughout all the books: that of Algeria, where Camus was born, and of his mother, Catherine. Before he was a year old, the infant Albert lost his father, an early settler in French Algeria, in the battle of the Marne. His mute and illiterate mother, and her extended family, raised her two sons in a small flat in Algiers with neither a lavatory nor running water. Alain Vircondelet writes movingly of the “minuscule life” in the apartment with nothing: “those white sheets, his mother’s folded hands, a handkerchief and a little comb.” Her purity and silent dignity marked her son, as he struggled to confront his own shame at such poverty—and his shame at being ashamed. “With those we love,” he once said of her, “we have ceased to speak, and this is not silence.”
That the young Albert went to the French lycée, and then to university in Algiers, was thanks to two inspiring teachers with whom he kept in touch throughout his life; he dedicated his Nobel prize to one of them. Camus began writing, as a reporter and dramatist, in a land that was then part of France—and yet apart. His was the solitude, self-doubt and restlessness of dislocation and displacement. The young man who emerges from Virgil Tanase’s biography in particular is seductive, funny and loving, but constantly on the move: between the raw, sun-drenched Mediterranean and cramped, grey Paris, ever in search of respite from crippling bouts of tuberculosis, as well as comfort from the various women he charmed and loved with a passion.
History finds Camus on the right side of so many of the great moral issues of the 20th century. He joined the French resistance to combat Nazism, editing an underground newspaper, Combat. He campaigned against the death penalty. A one-time Communist, his anti-totalitarian work, “L’Homme Révolté” (“The Rebel”), published in 1951, was remarkably perceptive about the evils of Stalinism. It also led to his falling-out with Sartre, who at the time was still defending the Soviet Union and refusing to condemn the gulags.
Camus left Algeria for mainland France, but Algeria never left him. As the anti-colonial rebellion took hold in the 1950s, his refusal to join the bien pensant call for independence was considered an act of treason by the French left. Even as terror struck Algiers, Camus was vainly urging a federal solution, with a place for French settlers. When he famously declared that “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice,” he was denounced as a colonial apologist. Nearly 40 years later, Mr Lenzini tracked down the Algerian former student who provoked that comment at a press conference. He now confesses that, at the time, he had read none of Camus’s work, and was later “shocked” and humbled to come across the novelist’s extensive reporting on Arab poverty.
The public recognition that Camus achieved in his lifetime never quite compensated for the wounds of rejection and disdain from those he had thought friends. He suffered cruelly at the hands of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and their snobbish, jealous literary clique, whose savage public assassination of Camus after the publication of “The Rebel” left deep scars. “You may have been poor once, but you aren’t anymore,” Sartre lashed out in print.
“He would remain an outsider in this world of letters, confined to existential purgatory,” writes Mr Lenzini: “He was not part of it. He never would be. And they would never miss the chance to let him know that.” They accepted him, says Mr Tanase, “as long as he yielded to their authority.” What Sartre and his friends could not forgive was the stubborn independent-mindedness which, today, makes Camus appear so morally lucid, humane and resolutely modern.
Here’s a review by Robert West of Ron Sun’s (Ed.) book that has been very useful to me (I mean that I have already been using the book): Rob West’s review will better articulate the book’s virtues. (Reference books are notoriously difficult to review – a job admirably well done by Rob West).
Abstract:
Computational psychology refers to the effort to create computational mechanisms that, in some way, mimic mechanisms within the brain. More specifically, the goal in creating these mechanisms is to show that they can systematically reproduce patterns of human behaviour elicited under specific conditions. From this it is inferred that these mechanisms bare some similarity to the brain mechanisms that produced the human behaviours. In most cases this involves mimicking the results of psychology experiments, although it is good to see in this book, two chapters discussing the application of this approach to non experimental areas (multi agent social interactions and cognitive engineering).
Here’s a nice rendering by Mary Campbell of a photo of Oakeshott given to me by his son Simon (the photo was taken at Caius circa 1933). Speaking of Oakeshott, the following must rate as the most bizarre invocation of Oakeshott I’ve come across (Jewish Political Studies Review 19:1-2, Spring 2007).
Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990) was a leading British social and political theorist, often credited as a father of libertarian thought.
Even on the most generous of interpretations “father of libertarian thought” is so off-beam. We know Oakeshott took issue with libertarianism in no uncertain terms. Who conceives of Oakeshott in these terms? I’d like to know. And again:
As to openings, Oakeshott, unlike many other philosophical defenders of the free society, has a generous appreciation for the category of tradition. Although his political thought is often associated-no doubt simplistically-with libertarianism, he afforded traditional ways of life considerable scope in the conduct of a humane society.
A traditionalist (assuming Oakeshott to be one) cannot accept the spontaneous unforseen consequences of an absolutely free-market. It would be corrosive of tradition!! This is not to say that the free-market doesn’t have an important role to play for Oakeshott – or that tradition itself is not a spontaneous phenomenon – but to so brazenly claim that Oakeshott is associated with libertarianism is absurd. I know of no theorist who makes that claim.
Although somewhat overshadowed in life by his more famous contemporaries Isaiah Berlin, Friedrich Hayek, and Karl Popper, Oakeshott, not least on account of his profound and astonishingly elegant prose, bids fair to displace them in death.
That’s quite an optimistic claim – at best Oakeshott might take his place next to these titans – but displace them? This is hagiography.
Last,
Oakeshott’s thought, however, has hardly been taken up by Jewish philosophers. Although political theorists who are Jews, such as Josiah Lee Auspitz or Efraim Podoksik of the Hebrew University, have worked on Oakeshott, there have been no diligent attempts to mine Oakeshott for the purposes of Jewish thought. Nor have Jewish thinkers engaged him in philosophical conversation. This is regrettable, for Oakeshott offers a number of promising openings and provocations for contemporary Jewish thought.
Though a significant chunk of those who have written on Oakeshott are Jewish, this fact has no salience at all. Can only “Jewish” scholars plausibly claim expertise in Jewish philosophy? Ridiculous.
How unusual is this? A mainstream analytical philosopher on a talk show. Dancy seems more at ease than I remember him in Reading but is still somewhat flummoxed by the inherent flippancy generated for entertainment context. A tough gig I suppose. His early work concerned epistemology but is now best known for his ethical particularism.
I heard through my chum David Livingtone Smith who heard through Leiter that Anthony Flew had died a few days ago. I recall Flew to be a most generous fellow. We corresponded by snail mail to his residence in Reading (I still have the letters). I was of the mind to invite him to the inaugural Oakeshott conference at the LSE thinking he’d be a fine chairman for the philosophy of education panel. When I spoke with him he said that he’d be delighted so long as I paid for his train and cab fare, which of course I was happy to do. In our discussions we never spoke about philosophy of religion (it seems that his turning from atheism to theism is unfortunately what he is being remembered for). As I indicated in a previous posting we talked about Ryle, Gellner, Language and Logic, and the “No True Scotsman” fallacy.
Times obituary
The Philosopher’s Magazine (reminiscences)
Here are two articles brought to my attention by my collaborator, a senior member of HSI engineering at Lockheed Martin. Extended mind is making its way into what one may think is an unlikely area. It’s not. Andy Clark’s cyborg is very much part of HCI – an example being a pilot’s helmet display. The emphasis in these articles, however, is on network theory.
The Network Extended Mind
Paul R. Smart, Paula C. Engelbrecht, Dave Braines, Mike Strub and Cheryl Giammanco
Abstract:
Whereas the traditional view in cognitive science has been to view mind and cognition as something that is the result of essentially inner, neural processes, the extended cognition perspective claims that at least some human mental states and processes stem from complex webs of causal influence involving extra-neural resources, most notably the resources of our social and technological environments. In this chapter, we explore the possibility that contemporary and near-future network systems are poised to extend and perhaps transform our human cognitive potential. We also examine the extent to which the information and network sciences are relevant to our understanding of various forms of cognitive extension, particularly with respect to the formation, maintenance and functioning of extended cognitive systems in network-enabled environments. Our claim is that the information and network sciences are relevant on two counts: firstly, they support an understanding of the mechanisms underpinning socially- and technologically-mediated forms of cognitive extension; secondly, they serve to guide and inform engineering efforts that strive to enhance and expand our cognitive capabilities. We discuss the relevance and applicability of these conclusions to current and future research exploring the contribution of network technologies to military coalition operations.
The Extended Mind and Network-Enabled Cognition
Paul R. Smart, Paula C. Engelbrecht, Dave Braines, James A. Hendler and Nigel Shadbolt
Abstract:
In thinking about the transformative potential of network technologies with respect to human cognition, it is common to see network resources as playing a largely assistive or augmentative role. In this paper we propose a somewhat more radical vision. We suggest that the informational and technological elements of a network system can, at times, constitute part of the material supervenience base for a human agent’s mental states and processes. This thesis (called the thesis of network-enabled cognition) draws its inspiration from the notion of the extended mind that has been propounded in the philosophical and cognitive science literature. Our basic claim is that network systems can do more than just augment cognition; they can also constitute part of the physical machinery that makes mind and cognition mechanistically possible. In evaluating this hypothesis, we identify a number of issues that seem to undermine the extent to which contemporary network systems, most notably the World Wide Web, can legitimately feature as part of an environmentally-extended cognitive system. Specific problems include the reliability and resilience of network-enabled devices, the accessibility of online information content, and the extent to which network-derived information is treated in the same way as information retrieved from biological memory. We argue that these apparent shortfalls do not necessarily merit the wholesale rejection of the network-enabled cognition thesis; rather, they point to the limits of the current state-of-the-art and identify the targets of many ongoing research initiatives in the network and information sciences. In addition to highlighting the importance of current research and technology development efforts, the thesis of network-enabled cognition also suggests a number of areas for future research. These include the formation and maintenance of online trust relationships, the subjective assessment of information credibility and the long-term impact of network access on human psychological and cognitive functioning. The nascent discipline of web science is, we suggest, suitably placed to begin an exploration of these issues.
Seeing What You Mean
Knowledge Has Always Been Networked
Behaviourism vs. Phenomenology
The metaepistemology of knowing-how
The New Theories of Moral Sentiments
Nature, nurture and liberal values
Andy Clark – “Do Thrifty Brains Make Better Minds?”
The neuroscience of happiness
Patricia Churchland
Enaction and Dance
