Deductive, My Dear Watson
28/02/11 21:32 Filed in: Human Nature
Have you heard of the robot that beat the best Jeopardy player? You know, scientists are getting closer and closer to making thinking computers -- turning robots into humans. It’s all over the news, in the movies, in the science-fiction. Robots that can think, interact in the world, do everything we can do -- well, soon, anyway. In the next fifty years.
Yet, robots, no matter how advanced they get, will be unable really to do what human beings do. Stanley Fish summarizes some of the argument from the philosopher Hubert reyfus on this point:
What computers can’t do, we don’t have to do because the worlds we live in are already built; we don’t walk around putting discrete items together until they add up to a context; we walk around with a contextual sense — a sense of where we are and what’s at stake and what our resources are — already in place; we inhabit worldly spaces already organized by purposes, projects and expectations. The computer inhabits nothing and has no purposes and because it has no purposes it cannot alter its present (wholly predetermined) “behavior” when it fails to advance the purposes it doesn’t have. When as human beings we determine that “the data coming in make no sense” relative to what we want to do, we can, Dreyfus explains “try a new total hypothesis,” begin afresh. A computer, in contrast, “could at best be programmed to try out a series of hypotheses to see which best fit the fixed data.”
Human beings are born - thrust - into a world, but, more important, we come already experiencing the world. That experience is shaped by our drives, our interests, all the many things that go into shaping the kind of persons we are and the sort of motives that we have. We have context.
Context entails, as Dreyfus explains in his book What Computers Still Can’t Do, and what Fish gets at in his article, meaning and intention which are responsive to the changes in the context and in our understanding of the context. If I walk into my dark house and someone jumps out at me, my reaction depends on my context. Is it my birthday or am I a retired spy? Functioning without context leaves us seeking the context. Think of any movie you’ve watched with a plot-twist. The protagonist has one context in mind or mat be seeking the context for what happened -- The Bourne Identity is an example of the latter kind of film -- and then he finally settles on the right interpretation to make all the pieces fall into place.
Computers lack context partly because they lack drives, partly because they lack purpose, partly because they lack biology. All of these things are central to being human -- or being animal. What computers can show us is how important our animal nature is to our free will and the meaning of our lives.
Yet, robots, no matter how advanced they get, will be unable really to do what human beings do. Stanley Fish summarizes some of the argument from the philosopher Hubert reyfus on this point:
What computers can’t do, we don’t have to do because the worlds we live in are already built; we don’t walk around putting discrete items together until they add up to a context; we walk around with a contextual sense — a sense of where we are and what’s at stake and what our resources are — already in place; we inhabit worldly spaces already organized by purposes, projects and expectations. The computer inhabits nothing and has no purposes and because it has no purposes it cannot alter its present (wholly predetermined) “behavior” when it fails to advance the purposes it doesn’t have. When as human beings we determine that “the data coming in make no sense” relative to what we want to do, we can, Dreyfus explains “try a new total hypothesis,” begin afresh. A computer, in contrast, “could at best be programmed to try out a series of hypotheses to see which best fit the fixed data.”
Human beings are born - thrust - into a world, but, more important, we come already experiencing the world. That experience is shaped by our drives, our interests, all the many things that go into shaping the kind of persons we are and the sort of motives that we have. We have context.
Context entails, as Dreyfus explains in his book What Computers Still Can’t Do, and what Fish gets at in his article, meaning and intention which are responsive to the changes in the context and in our understanding of the context. If I walk into my dark house and someone jumps out at me, my reaction depends on my context. Is it my birthday or am I a retired spy? Functioning without context leaves us seeking the context. Think of any movie you’ve watched with a plot-twist. The protagonist has one context in mind or mat be seeking the context for what happened -- The Bourne Identity is an example of the latter kind of film -- and then he finally settles on the right interpretation to make all the pieces fall into place.
Computers lack context partly because they lack drives, partly because they lack purpose, partly because they lack biology. All of these things are central to being human -- or being animal. What computers can show us is how important our animal nature is to our free will and the meaning of our lives.
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Individual or Society: The Chicken and Egg Question
08/02/11 19:31 Filed in: Human Nature
Much of what I’ve been reading lately has focused on the common good and on the nature of society. Essential to these discussions is the question of the priority of the individual or the state. That is, is the individual anterior to -- logically at least -- society or the state so that the state must be limited in what it can demand or impose upon citizens; or is the state anterior to -- logically speaking -- the individual so that there are no limits on what it can demand of citizens.
The answer is both/and or neither/nor.
If we look at ourselves through the lens of evolution, we come to understand that human beings -- homo sapiens -- evolved as members of cohesive groups. We see the same pattern in all the great apes, except for the orangutans who forage for food in solitude and are much less aggressive than homo sapiens or other apes. If we want to understand our own nature, then, we have to put our species-specific nature in discussion with this evolutionary past. I do not mean this to follow the pattern of evolutionary psychology which tries to discover deep-seated genetic imperatives in our biology that we gained and haven’t lost since the emergence of homo sapiens on the African plains. Rather, I mean that we have to understand our biology -- which includes our evolution -- if we want to understand the kinds of creatures we are -- individuals with free choice.
If we speak of individuality, then, we must understand how individuality arises among a social creature like the great apes. It cannot be something divorced from that sociality, for it is the sociality that makes for individuals to develop identities. We cannot, of course, deny that these social groups are constituted by individuals.
Which brings us to the chicken and the egg. We cannot ask what came first, the individual or the society without leading us into the circular question of the chicken and the egg. Neither can be understood without the other; which means neither can exist without the other.
Individuals and societies are mutually constitutive elements.
Which means, at the political level, that societies can demand much of the individuals that belong to them and that individuals can place limits on what societies can demand. This position is the most realistic and the most liberating philosophies for it recognizes that we human beings determine our social existence through our free choices, and that we accept that society shapes the choices available to us.
When we speak of the common good, then, we can say both that the common good can be characterized independently and antecedently to individual interests and yet that the common good includes the full development of each and every member of society.
The answer is both/and or neither/nor.
If we look at ourselves through the lens of evolution, we come to understand that human beings -- homo sapiens -- evolved as members of cohesive groups. We see the same pattern in all the great apes, except for the orangutans who forage for food in solitude and are much less aggressive than homo sapiens or other apes. If we want to understand our own nature, then, we have to put our species-specific nature in discussion with this evolutionary past. I do not mean this to follow the pattern of evolutionary psychology which tries to discover deep-seated genetic imperatives in our biology that we gained and haven’t lost since the emergence of homo sapiens on the African plains. Rather, I mean that we have to understand our biology -- which includes our evolution -- if we want to understand the kinds of creatures we are -- individuals with free choice.
If we speak of individuality, then, we must understand how individuality arises among a social creature like the great apes. It cannot be something divorced from that sociality, for it is the sociality that makes for individuals to develop identities. We cannot, of course, deny that these social groups are constituted by individuals.
Which brings us to the chicken and the egg. We cannot ask what came first, the individual or the society without leading us into the circular question of the chicken and the egg. Neither can be understood without the other; which means neither can exist without the other.
Individuals and societies are mutually constitutive elements.
Which means, at the political level, that societies can demand much of the individuals that belong to them and that individuals can place limits on what societies can demand. This position is the most realistic and the most liberating philosophies for it recognizes that we human beings determine our social existence through our free choices, and that we accept that society shapes the choices available to us.
When we speak of the common good, then, we can say both that the common good can be characterized independently and antecedently to individual interests and yet that the common good includes the full development of each and every member of society.