Philosophy 101D

I found the video of the telepathic monkey!

I am still puzzled by the idea that people are still siding with Dreyfus in the debate about the Internet and technology. I mean no offense to anyone who is sided with him, but I find flaws in any and all arguments that he makes. The entire first chapter covers the idea of Hyperlinks and their poor functionality on the Internet. Dreyfus argues that Hyperlinks are a threat to the way we live and the way that we get our information. He brings up the point that libraries are well organized and pieced together in groups according to what they are about, and that Hyperlinks are randomly assembled and have no real interconnection. However, Dreyfus states that the organization of Hyperlinks on the Internet is a threat to the way that we ind information,but he never states exactly how. Dreyfus merely expresses his frustrations with the way that the Internet works. Furthermore, the use of any noteworthy search engine eliminates the need for any sort of organization.
An argument that has been brought up in class and also in other posts that I have read is that over use of the Internet causes isolation and an increasing lack of need or want for human interaction. I agreed that this was possible to a certain extent for a while and could see it in examples of kids playing games online and doing nothing else. Clark makes a very strong argument against this in chapter 6 when he states “According to a University of Warwick (UK) study, heavy Internet surfers are more likely not less to belong to some real-world community group, and less likely to spend time passively watching TV. Talking to others on the Internet encourages, it seems, the appreciation that we can get together with like-minded folk and actually make a difference in the world. This goes directly along with the idea of the Internet as a shoe and not a crutch.

I was sent this video by a student I had last semester. Feel free to leave a comment!

Click the link below to see all the videos shown during last week’s movie screening. Comments are appreciated!

Continue Reading »

This whole semester has been building up to a serious philosophical discussion of the internet. People use the internet all the time, but know very little about it. So to get you psyched up for the discussion, you should watch this video:

Previously, I was unsure about which philosopher I agreed with. After the class debate today, I am leaning towards Gehlen’s ideas. A few of Gehlen’s ideas are that technology is a tool that helps us in this world, humans need to accomplish tasks and technology assists us, and humans and technology are neutral. The reason why I agree with Gehlen’s ideas is because in this world we need technology to survive. The technology can range from very simple examples such as a fishing spear to more modern examples such as water filtration devices. Without these devices, survival would be challenging. Many individuals today would say that a fishing spear can’t count as technology. It is not something mechanical or computerized (our definition of technology in modern days). However, technology is nothing more than a creation by man. Thus, it can be concluded that the fishing spear, which is a device created by man, is a very crude form of technology. Additionally, it can be said that a lot of todays technology is just for convenience (laptops, cars, cell phones). I would agree in the sense that we can do without these examples, but since we are already used to using them, it would seem as if our life has a piece missing to it.

Heidegger’s idea is that we are chained to technology. I stand in the middle of this argument. On one side it can be said that we are chained in the sense that we are always using the technology that we possess. Most of us own cell phones and laptops here on campus. Why would we not utilize this technology to make our lives easier? We can instantly call or e-mail a friend instead of having to walk all the way to their dorm and talk to them. On the flip side we are not necessarily chained to technology. Technology in a sense opens our world. We have the luxury to travel to different places, check out news and sports wherever our current location may be, and discover the other side of the world with just clicks of a mouse. Additionally, technology allows us to see how we can further advance our life and make it much more enjoyable and convenient.

I’m really not too sure where I stand on the Heidegger vs. Gehlen debate because there are points that I agree and disagree with for both sides. I do agree with Heidegger that man is not fundamentally linked to technology. Instead, man is constantly seeking to learn new things about the world, and ways of interacting with the world, and technology happens to be one way with which we explore the world. For Gehlen, technology is essential for man’s survival, and therefore man must make use of the resources available to help him survive. The problem here is that there is no cut off point. Gehlen does not make a point of saying we should make use of only what we need to survive, and then leave the rest of nature to itself, but encourages us to keep taking and taking because that’s just what we do. Heidegger on the other hand, recognizes a danger in the way we make use of our technology, and how we view the world. He says that as long as we view ourselves as god over nature , we will never be able to understand ourselves. I’m not sure how much of this I agree with. I do agree that we need to limit our technological activity with natural resources, not because I’m an environmentalist, but for the selfish reason of wanting there to be enough to go around for humans in the future. Heidegger makes a point of saying that we should not view everything as being put on earth for humans. Well, maybe it wasn’t put here only for humans, but it is still here regardless, so by using it we are simply making use of the resources around us. Maybe my selfish view on this topic is a perfect example of what Heidegger is warning against, but I think that many people would think the same way. It is apparent that our society as a whole believes man to be superior to nature and animals, so Heidegger’s warnings seem to be a little too late to turn around man’s view in that regard.   

Please leave a comment by Thursday for participation credit for this week. I’m giving you extra time on account of the midterm.

Questions and Prompts:

• Is Kline’s four part definition of technology complete? Is it comprehensive? Are the distinctions between the four parts clear? If not, can you give counterexamples that don’t fit his definition?
• Is technology a uniquely human activity? Is it a central pattern of human behavior? Are the results of human technological activity ‘non-natural’?
• Can animals use technology, in any sense of Kline’s definition? Can animals innovate?
• Is there a real distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that?
• Is technology always subservient to man’s will? In other words, does technology always do what we want, when we want it? Does nature? Would Marx answer these two questions differently?
• Is our history the history of instruments? Perhaps more broadly, is our history the history of techne?
• Are there labor songs?

Animal Cognition: Bring Me My Spear

A more fundamental issue lurks in the use of that verb ‘adds up’. Human achievements are not just additive: they are often multiplicative. Thus, it is not just that all human groups make tools, hunt animals and show cooperative action: rather, they make tools and they cooperate in order to hunt better. It is not just that all human groups show occasional intercommunity violence, cultural differences and use of referential communication: critically, their intercommunity violence is based on cultural differences to which they make frequent reference. Chimpanzees use tools to collect social insects and break hard nuts, but they hunt mammals with their bare hands and jaws; many chimpanzees may go hunting at once, but convincing evidence of cooperative hunting has been hard to find. And those behavioural differences ascribed to chimpanzee culture do not motivate any discrimination, even though chimpanzees can show xenophobic attacks on neighbours. A sceptic might therefore still wonder whether the accumulation of apparently human characteristics is any more than one might expect when a highly social, large brained mammal is studied as exhaustively as the chimpanzees has been. Perhaps the resemblance to our own culturally based technological progress is, after all, superficial?

But now, for the first time, chimpanzees have been seen making tools in order to hunt. As they report in this issue of Current Biology, Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani watched chimpanzees at Fongoli, Senegal, hunting for lesser bushbabies or galagos Galago senegalensis: small, agile and strictly nocturnal prosimian primates that spend their day hidden in tree holes. Systematically, chimpanzees fashioned sharp stick tools before trying to catch galagos. Typically, a chimpanzee would break off a living branch, trim off its leaves and side-branches and often the ends as well; and sometimes it would sharpen the stick with one or many bites of the incisors. The result was a sharp stick of 50–100 cm length, with which it could probe into tree cavities. When chimpanzees make probe tools to extract insect prey, like Campanotus ants or Macrotermes termites, the tool is designed to enter holes too narrow for a chimpanzee’s finger or hand. But in the case of galago hunting, the tree cavities were wide enough to admit a whole arm. Here the function of the tool seems to be to spear the resting animal, presumably to immobilise it for capture.

Reported by the BBC: Chimpanzees ‘hunt using spears’

Here’s a good, though old, Discover Magazine article about self organizing, evolved machines that is worth a read.

Evolving a conscious machine

Strangely, Thompson has been unable to pin down how the chip was accomplishing the task. When he checked to see how many of the 100 cells evolution had recruited for the task, he found no more than 32 in use. The voltage on the other 68 could be held constant without affecting the chip’s performance. A chip designed by a human, says Thompson, would have required 10 to 100 times as many logic elements—or at least access to a clock—to perform the same task. This is why Thompson describes the chip’s configuration as flabbergastingly efficient.

It wasn’t just efficient, the chip’s performance was downright weird. The current through the chip was feeding back and forth through the gates, swirling around, says Thompson, and then moving on. Nothing at all like the ordered path that current might take in a human-designed chip. And of the 32 cells being used, some seemed to be out of the loop. Although they weren’t directly tied to the main circuit, they were affecting the performance of the chip. This is what Thompson calls the crazy thing about it.

Thompson gradually narrowed the possible explanations down to a handful of phenomena. The most likely is known as electromagnetic coupling, which means the cells on the chip are so close to each other that they could, in effect, broadcast radio signals between themselves without sending current down the interconnecting wires. Chip designers, aware of the potential for electromagnetic coupling between adjacent components on their chips, go out of their way to design their circuits so that it won’t affect the performance. In Thompson’s case, evolution seems to have discovered the phenomenon and put it to work.

It was also possible that the cells were communicating through the power-supply wiring. Each cell was hooked independently to the power supply; a rapidly changing voltage in one cell would subtly affect the power supply, which might feed back to another cell. And the cells may have been communicating through the silicon substrate on which the circuit is laid down. The circuit is a very thin layer on top of a thicker piece of silicon, Thompson explains, where the transistors are diffused into just the top surface part. It’s just possible that there’s an interaction through the substrate, if they’re doing something very strange. But the point is, they are doing something really strange, and evolution is using all of it, all these weird effects as part of its system.

In some of Thompson’s creations, evolution even took advantage of the personal computer that’s hooked up to the system to run the genetic algorithm. The circuit somehow picked up on what the computer was doing when it was running the programs. When Thompson changed the program slightly, during a public demonstration, the circuit failed to work.

All the creations were equally idiosyncratic. Change the temperature a few degrees and they wouldn’t work. Download a circuit onto one chip that had evolved on a different, albeit apparently identical chip, and it wouldn’t work. Evolution had created an extraordinarily efficient, utterly enigmatic circuit for solving a problem, but one that would survive only in the environment in which it was born. Thompson describes the problem, or the evolutionary phenomenon, as one of overexploiting the physics of the chips. Because no two environments would ever be exactly alike, no two solutions would be, either.

Cases like this seem to justify Turing’s argument that ‘machines can sometimes surprise me’, though Turing was quite far from thinking along these lines.

Excellent article from NYMag:

Kids, the Internet, and the biggest generation gap since Rock and Roll

And after all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and naïve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least that might be true for someone who has grown up “putting themselves out there” and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks worth it.

Shirky describes this generational shift in terms of pidgin versus Creole. “Do you know that distinction? Pidgin is what gets spoken when people patch things together from different languages, so it serves well enough to communicate. But Creole is what the children speak, the children of pidgin speakers. They impose rules and structure, which makes the Creole language completely coherent and expressive, on par with any language. What we are witnessing is the Creolization of media.”

That’s a cool metaphor, I respond. “I actually don’t think it’s a metaphor,” he says. “I think there may actually be real neurological changes involved.”

I have firm beliefs that machines can in fact think. During the debate today it seemed that the two different sides were not arguing about the same thing and I think that this stems from our having not defined what exactly thinking is. The Oxford American Dictionary defines think as “the ability to judge or consider,” and I find this definition to be a good one because it covers all forms of thinking. Does a machine not judge or consider? The answer is yes; everything it does involves one, or in most cases many, considerations. When a computer outputs something, that output is based on things that it is already programmed to know. The computer knows many things, but it outputs one thing specifically based on the judgment and consideration of all the things that it knows. Humans think in the same way in that we make our decisions based on judgment and consideration of our previous experiences. If humans perform the action of thinking in the same way that computers perform, how can one not consider computers thinking things?

There is only one argument that I at one time felt held any water against the idea that machines think, and that is the argument of Lady Lovelace. Lovelace says that “the analytical engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.” To this one can argue that a machine can be programmed to originate things, but for the sake of proving a point, I will pretend they cannot. To say that machines do not originate anything is not to say that machines do not think. I can think of or about many things without originating anything at all. The fact of the matter is that machines still go through a definite process in making decisions and by this process, they are indeed thinking.

One thing not covered in any of the arguments about artificial intelligence, is the ethics and need for this technology. While it is interesting to know how far human capabilities go as far as engineering something so complex, does this technology provide anything else for the human race?

First of all, artificial intelligence seems to have stemmed from the questions that have long been discussed about what human intelligence is and how it operates. The quest for figuring out how to program a computer to complete human tasks or mimic human behavior, is just part of exploring how our own intelligence works. When it comes to this though, does exploring wires, energy, programming, and rule-based functions really relate to how the human brain works? We still don’t know for sure what is happening in our brains, so how can we compare our brains with how AI technology works? As brought up in the arguments for God’s existence, the strength of this argument is based on how closely related the two systems are (which in this case is very debatable).

If artificial intelligence stems from the ideas of solving how the human mind works, we know why AI has ever come up and is being pursued. But have we ever thought of the ethics behind the decisions we make in this pursue? After we figure out how to make a computer or robot act exactly like a person, what do we do with this technology? Are we going to use them for maintaining jobs that no one wants to do anymore? This would give us more leisure time, but at the same time people can lose jobs to these robots. If they are not used for that, they might be used for companionship. There are robots being made that can recognize facial expressions, etc. If we have these computers that act just as friends, aren’t they really just restraining us from having normal contact with other humans. Our society is already governed heavily by technological mediums. The Internet (and even cell phones), the most recent medium in keeping people in touch with the ‘world’ and loved ones, just makes us prisoner to our own technology. If artificial companions come from this research in AI, we are motivating people to interact less with other humans around them and more with technology. Not good. These are only a few ethical concerns that I have been thinking about when it comes to advancements in artificial intelligence.

Because of class, I’ve been thinking about this movie lately, so I thought maybe we could talk about it.

Bicentennial Man is about a robot named Andrew that starts to display several human-like qualities and his quest to join humanity.

There are several scenes which illustrate the difference between human thought and computer thought.

In one scene, he carves a horse figurine out of driftwood for the little girl. The father asks where he got the horses design from. Andrew says that he didn’t get the designs from anywhere. He just saw the horse in his head, and chipped away the pieces of wood that wouldn’t be part of the statue. The family takes this as one of the many signs that Andrew is not a typical robot. Creating his own design takes creativity and intentionality.

Most of the comedy in the movie comes from Andrew’s initial lack of understanding jokes and language. When the oldest girl says that the chicken “sucks” or tells him to jump, he takes everything literally. When Andrew tries to tell jokes to the family, he rattles off the sentences without pausing between the set-up and punchline and without pausing for laughter. The semantic use of language and comedic timing are both qualities of the mind that only humans can have. Eventually, Andrew will learn to use both, but that’s only because in this fictional world, there’s “just something different” about him.

Has anyone else seen this movie?

I thought this article was interesting, especially considering our latest topic in class. Apparently Japanese scientists have created a robot that can “taste” food.
Japanese unveil robot wine steward

This reminded me of “The Robot Reply” which is part of the Searle article. The argument is: if we put a computer inside a robot which apparently perceives the world around it (through seeing, doing, tasting, etc.) couldn’t we say that the robot really has the ability to understand? Searle says no, because the robot is still just manipulating symbols and facts.

All right, imagine this…. the total Turing test. Scientist build what they claim is an intelligent robot. It can decently carry on a conversation. It can see using cameras and scanning devices. It can taste with a more evolved version of the technology described in the article above. It can also detect sound, touch, and smell.

So… does this robot have a mind like we do?

My instinct tells me no.

The artificial intelligence tests we’ve discussed the most frequently are chess and using language. I don’t think either one of these is particularly good for comparing a computer to the human mind. Chess is a closed, formal system which the computer can play with probability and calculations. Even language can be sort of calculated, because of the structure that comes with grammar. The computer could pick out key words and arrange appropriate responses according to the Subject- Verb- Object foundation.

I think a better test would be analyzing a painting.

Take the robot I’ve described and tell it to say what it thinks the painting means. The robot sees the picture through the camera lens. It scans the painting from top to bottom, picking up on colors, lines and space. Assuming the picture isn’t abstract, the robot might be able to tell you if the subject is a woman, a building, etc.

The robot also might have certain information about paintings and symbolism programmed in, such as: blue is used in sad paintings, or a + shape might somehow allude to crucifixion; but, I don’t believe a robot could ever give an interpretation on what the painting might symbolize, or for that matter, decide whether or not the painting is beautiful. The thought process is too subjective. These decisions can’t be made with the manipulation of symbols.

I realize I’ve given somewhat of an “X- factor” response, but analyzing art is somewhat different from some of the other X-factors listed by Turing. Some of the examples he gives include: falling in love, caring, enjoying strawberries and cream, and having a sense of humor. I agree with Turing’s critics that the human mind is somewhat needed for these abilities, but they don’t necessarily have anything to do with the kind of intelligence that artificial intelligence tries to replicate. Learning art, however, most definitely requires intelligence…. the kind of intelligence computers simply cannot have.

Thoughts on this?

On page 22 of the course packet, Haugeland says “It might seem that, in principle, simulation must be possible anyway, because rats are made of atoms, and each atom obeys known equations. But such a principle is utterly out to lunch.”

Well, we don’t have simu-rats, but we are getting close. Here’s a link to research being done on this very campus:

Researchers simulate complete structure of virus–on computer

When Boeing and Airbus developed their latest aircraft, the companies’ engineers designed and tested them on a computer long before the planes were built. Biologists are catching on. They’ve just completed the first computer simulation of an entire life form – a virus.
…

A computer program was used to reverse engineer the dynamics of all atoms making up the virus and a small drop of salt water surrounding it. The virus and water contain more than a million atoms altogether.

The necessary calculation was done at Illinois on one of the world’s largest and fastest computers operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

To continue from a previous thread, here are two more videos showing machines in an anthropocentric light.

Here’s another commercial by Wes Anderson you may have seen before:

This next video is very special to me. It’s by David Cronenberg, and I will probably show it again in a future screening:

We are a few weeks away from a discussion of technology, but I thought I’d flag this commercial for later discussion: