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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