Alexander Waugh’s The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War reviewed in the latest The New Yorker.
I cannot play when you are in the house, as I feel your skepticism seeping towards me from under the door!
Ants
A human brain has 10,000,000,000 cells so a colony of 40,000 ants has collectively the same size brain as a human. If the human population is 6,760,000,000 (2009) and the ant population is 1 quadrillion 1,000,000,000,000,000 (1999). If my mathematics is correct the brain cell count of the ant population is nearly 4 times that of the human population. How’s that for some useless information?
Metal Guru
The latest issue of Philosophy Now features a collection of articles on “machine morality”.
The Challenge of Moral Machines
Wendell Wallach tells us what the basic problems are.
Four Kinds of Ethical Robots
James H. Moor defines different ways in which machines could be moral.
How Machines Can Advance Ethics
Susan Leigh Anderson and Michael Anderson relate how their attempts to build ethical machines have advanced their understanding of ethics.
Machines and Moral Reasoning
Thomas M. Powers on how a computer might process Kant’s moral imperative.
Will Robots Need Their Own Ethics?
Steve Torrance asks if robots need minds to be moral producers or moral consumers.
A Constitution of Minds
In today’s Boston Globe Mickey Edwards reviews Cass Sunstein’s latest book A Constitution of Many Minds. Though I haven’t read the book, Edwards’ rather snippy and ill-informed review calls for some comments.
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If “A Constitution of Many Minds” reveals anything, it is that its author may teach about constitutionalism but he is at heart a political philosopher.
Is one to infer that on Edwards’ view this counts against Sunstein? If so, that would be perverse. The Federalist is deeply philosophical deriving many ideas from Locke and the novel circumstances of the emerging American republic.
Sunstein sees the law not as something that is but as something to be divined, in the first case by considering what is “traditional,” in the second through a populist lens, and in the third as a cosmopolitan, a man of the world. In Sunstein’s view, the Constitution is not law but more like a suggestion, which we are free to ponder in the light of our own preferences either as to outcome or method of deduction.
Two points. One is never free to arbitrarily ponder – an interpretation has to be plausible and still must answer to some epistemic standards. Second, no-one in these contexts “deduces” anything. One enters into a “flow of sympathy” and makes inferences that are at best probabilistic.
We thus find ourselves in these pages weighing not what the Constitution itself actually permits or prohibits, but such questions as what Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, and Friedrich Hayek, none of them American and none of them constitutional scholars, might propose.
Is he suggesting a policy of protectionism in the world of ideas and the life of the mind? That would be preposterous. These first order thinkers have a great deal to bring to constitutional scholarship. Constitutional scholars worth their salt are philosophically inclined – it is a philosophical notion!! This is as true for modern writers such as Dicey, Hart, Raz (non-Americans I might add) and classic writers such as Locke and Montesquieu.
Rather he assumes that it is the courts’ role to determine what, in the light of modern standards, should have been meant. He does not defend that view; he simply takes it for granted.
This is ill-articulated. No-one can ever make a claim for what it should have meant, cast in stone for all time. This would be fundamentalism and foundationalism as its vulgar worst. Even religious scripture is amenable to interpretation for new contexts. If a text doesn’t have the seeds for its own relevance down the line, then it probably doesn’t embody any worthwhile wisdom and is dead on the page.
The problem with Sunstein’s approach is that it would subject us to a government of caprice.
Dynamicism does not entail arbitrariness. One is always dealing with a reflective tradition, not an inert pattern of habitual behavior.
Sunstein is particularly fond of the Condorcet Jury Theorem. The CJT holds that if one assumes that on any question each person in the pool of respondents will have a 50 percent or higher chance of being right, the collective judgment of the group as a whole will be much more nearly right than that of any individual participant. Sunstein finds this a fine argument for interpreting the Constitution in accordance with the prevailing public will. But who, or what, defines what is right? That’s a special concern in a nation with a Constitution that allows the majority to choose its governors but quite rigorously protects the rights of the minority against the majority will.
In matters of collective intentionality Sunstein is not deep – he ain’t no Christian List! But he is not wrong either. He is a clever guy: his legendary industriousness doesn’t show him off at his best. But if one is playing the public intellectual card, clever is viewed as coextensive with deep. But discussion of this is not salient to the issues at hand.
But it’s a book for a theoretical study of political philosophy, not for a serious consideration of how judges ought to act in a society governed by a Constitution with a purpose (not only to empower government but to constrain it; to give voice to the people but within limits).
The notions of power, authority, sovereignty, law, justice, equality, rights, property, freedom, democracy, and public interest are philosophical. There seems to be a tension in Edwards’ demands. What’s the point of having judges if all one has to do is to tick off, much like a recipe, whether something meets constitutional propriety or not? The USA is not the USA of 50 years ago, it is not the USA of 150 years ago – but it is still recognizably the USA, displaying its constitutional virtues (and failings). Neither a true conservative nor a true liberal could not accept Edwards’ bloodless procrusteanism.
Billion Dollar Brain
For my amusement – showing my age, eh? Apparently the “brain” was represented by Honeywell 200 consoles.
The cover of Deighton’s novel is far superior (and much more sinister) than the film’s posters.
Alva Noë Interview
Clark’s reply to Fodor
This hot off the press. Jerry Fodor, you may recall, reviewed Andy Clark’s latest work Supersizing the Mind in the London Review of Books. In the latest issue, Clark uses the Letters section to respond. As this is a general link I paste in Clark’s letter below.
Letters
Vol. 31 No. 6 · Cover date: 26 March 2009
Where is my mind?
From Andy Clark
Jerry Fodor’s amusing, insightful, but fatally flawed review of my book, Supersizing the Mind, seems committed to the idea that states of the brain (and only states of the brain) actually manage to be ‘about things’: to ‘have content’ in some original and underived sense (LRB, 12 February). ‘Underived content,’ he says, ‘is what minds and only minds have.’ That’s why, as Fodor would have it, states of non-brainbound stuff (like iPhones, notebooks etc) cannot even form parts of the material systems that actually constitute the physical basis of a human mind. But just how far is he willing to go with this?
Let’s start small. There is a documented case (from the University of California’s Institute for Nonlinear Science) of a California spiny lobster, one of whose neurons was deliberately damaged and replaced by a silicon circuit that restored the original functionality: in this case, the control of rhythmic chewing. Does Fodor believe that, despite the restored functionality, there is still something missing here? Probably, he thinks the control of chewing insufficiently ‘mental’ to count. But now imagine a case in which a person (call her Diva) suffers minor brain damage and loses the ability to perform a simple task of arithmetic division using only her neural resources. An external silicon circuit is added that restores the previous functionality. Diva can now divide just as before, only some small part of the work is distributed across the brain and the silicon circuit: a genuinely mental process (division) is supported by a hybrid bio-technological system. That alone, if you accept it, establishes the key principle of Supersizing the Mind. It is that non-biological resources, if hooked appropriately into processes running in the human brain, can form parts of larger circuits that count as genuinely cognitive in their own right.
Fodor seems to believe that the only way the right kind of ‘hooking in’ can occur is by direct wiring to neural systems. But if you imagine a case, identical to Diva’s, but in which the restored (or even some novel) functionality is provided – as it easily could be – by a portable device communicating with the brain by wireless, it becomes apparent that actual wiring is not important. If you next gently alter the details so that the device communicates with Diva’s brain through Diva’s sense organs (piggybacking on existing sensory mechanisms as cheap way stations to the brain) you end up with what David Chalmers and I dubbed ‘extended minds’.
There is much more to say, of course, about the specific ways that non-implanted devices (iPhones and the like) might or might not then count, in respect of some enabled functionality, as being appropriately integrated into our overall cognitive profiles. Fodor seems to believe that such integration is impossible where parts of the extended process involve what he describes as the ‘consultation’ (and then the explicit interpretation) of an encoding, rather than the simple functioning of that encoding to bring about an effect. This kind of consideration, however, cannot distinguish the cases in the way Fodor requires. Think of the case where, to solve a problem, I first conjure a mental image, then inspect it to check or to read off a result. Imagining the overlapping circles of a Venn diagram while solving a set-theoretic puzzle, or imagining doing long division using pen and paper and then reading the result off from one’s own mental image, would be cases in point. In each case we have a process that, while fully internal, involves the careful construction, manipulation and subsequent consultation of representations whose meaning is a matter of convention.
As a final real-world illustration, consider the trials (at MIT Media Lab) of so-called ‘memory glasses’ as aids to recall for people with impaired visual recognition skills. These glasses work by matching the current scene (a face, for example) to stored information and cueing the subject with relevant information (a name, a relationship). The cue may be overt (consciously perceived by the subject) or covert (rapidly flashed and hence subliminally presented). Interestingly, in the covert case, functionality is improved without any process of conscious consultation on the part of the subject. Now imagine a case in which the same cueing is robustly achieved by means of a hard-wired connection to the brain. Presumably Fodor would allow the latter, but not the former, as a case of genuine cognitive augmentation. Yet it seems clear that the intervention of visual sensing in the former case marks merely an unimportant channel detail. The machinery that makes minds can outrun the bounds of skin and skull.
Andy Clark
University of Edinburgh
Hayek: May 8, 1899 – March 23, 1992
Oops, forgot to publish this two days ago!
Merging of Mind and Machine
Liberal Education – Again
I see that Martha Nussbaum is weighing in on the liberal education debate. The debate, crudely put, asks whether education should be instrumental – i.e. merely training up students to serve an economic imperative – or is there another deeper aspect to education, an intrinsic aspect, that inducts students into the postulates of our and others’ culture. I, for one, don’t see these positions as being mutually exclusive, though I’d give some prioricity to the latter. Nussbaum is a very serious-minded writer: I look forward to this work.
This from Nussbaum’s agent’s website:
University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: A Plea for Liberal Education, calling for the recognition that education, as the center of both our ethics and our arts, cannot merely be about becoming smart or productive, but must be about becoming a true citizen of the nation and the world.
Speaking of Nussbaum, check out the discussion of emotion with the “Click and Clack” of philosophy – the wonderful John Perry and Ken Taylor on their Philosophy Talks.
manwithoutqualities 