Words are both precise and vague – so we can read into them more than is there, or read out of them the content we don’t like. Thus we take charge of the context by which we see the word as ‘this or that’ and then the world as ‘this or that’, to the exclusion of the reality that would challenge our beliefs.
Mike Laidler
Can a machine think? Can a thinking machine tell us something about ourselves – or does it need to ask its own questions?
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Abstract: The Turing test poses problems for explanation in supposing that different causes, synthetic and biological, can converge upon the same effect, namely intelligence. In particular, the recognisable change from cause to effect depends upon a capacity for recognition that cannot be subtracted from the appearance of intelligence or its explanation.
Historical background: Alan Turing was a pioneer in the field of Artificial Intelligence. In 1950 he devised a famous thought experiment as an objective means of assessing the equivalence between an intelligent machine and a human competitor: If an independent examiner, who can’t see whether he is dealing with a man or a machine, cannot discriminate between their performance, then it is reasonable to assume that the machine is intelligent, indeed thinking for itself, and that thinking and intelligence can be explained as a programme. Various advances have been made since then plus diverse claims about the prowess of thinking machines. There is an annual competition called the Loebner Prize which is broadly based on the Turing test. The 2014 competition was held at Bletchley Park and won by a machine called Rose, which was awarded a bronze medal. If a machine eventually passes the Turing test, a special prize will be awarded and the competition will end.
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Causality is a conundrum. Everything we know about atoms and molecules doesn’t tell us what comes next until we see what comes next. So it is by the nature of the effect that we are able to establish the nature of the causal properties of the atom – observable in the changes attributed to it. These attributions reassure us that the change is within bounds, but those bounds are discoverable by observation of the recurrent fact of the effect, not the continuing presence of the cause in its original state. So all we have really established is that things change, with implications for both the cause and the effect.
In fact all we see is change as a fact of change. The causality is a fact we have construed. Our causal proof is based on the fact that the cause came first, in its unchanged state, plus the ‘fact’ that there is nothing else to observe – save for the effect that results. But this observational framework is directly challenged when it comes to our understanding of our own thinking – because here the effect comes first, as an active observational prerequisite, and all the facts we can observe as causes can’t match the nature of the effect we seek to explain.
Likewise, we attribute consciousness to its causes knowing that any comparison is based on the change to consciousness – an effect that supplements the cause, meaning the cause is less than the effect – a difference that calls into questions the explanatory power of our causal proofs. However, the Turing test proposes a situation in which the difference disappears when comparing our version of thinking with an ‘intelligent machine’ – suggesting that if we can’t tell the difference we can dismiss it, and implying that we can also ignore the physical differences in its causes. Also, we can begin to understand the mind as a physical process, knowing that the Turing machine is an entirely material thing.
But what does the machine know? Is it aware that it knows – of knowing as a state of awareness? Is awareness no more than a physical process? Presumably an alert machine would recognise this much of itself and could simply tell us or show us, providing the answer from the material information in its operating systems and programmes – the corollary being that the reality equates to its physical activities, that there can be nothing more to our thinking, knowing and understanding. In this vein, the ‘change’ to awareness is seen as a feature and function of its physical causes; but it was the change to awareness that led us to identify this feature with its causes, and without the effect emerging as something else we have no cause to attach any function to the cause. Furthermore, the possibility of different causes, biological and synthetic, leading to the same effect also endorses the significance of the effect as a real change. Whichever way we look at the facts we can’t escape the fact that the special nature of our state of awareness is really its special nature as something else, which can’t be the nature of the cause as it was.
An explanatory gap lurks within our theories of where thinking comes from, as if its properties can and need to be known as the output of something else – to the point that we can also identify our awareness with that something else, in its cause. Current reasoning avers that we can’t really know what knowledge amounts to in ourselves, subjectively, without observing it objectively as an objective fact in the world, with the unknowing unconscious physical cause instated as the complete explanation. This is the same reasoning that subsumes the nature of the effect to that of the cause. Accordingly, reason itself is seen as belonging to the properties of an external world and as such gives our reasoning its authority. However, the universe is an unthinking fact occupied by a thinking fact – in one sense it can be seen to give the thinker their thoughts, but in another, very real sense, it cannot – for it has no thoughts to convey.
Even though science hasn’t explained the physical nature of consciousness ‘it’ remains sure that there is a physical explanation in its causes. But causality is a conundrum. It comes down to the fact that we know the conscious mind is possible, but we are expecting the impossible of it in trying to explain it away in the properties of something else that is less than conscious – in the unconscious causes of the physical world. These material proofs attempt to reconstruct the mind as an avatar, by which we might know it better. However, even the ‘thinking machine’ cannot show us what its thinking is really like without doing something really unusual, without joining us in the speculation over its own faculties and their origin – for it is evident that the reality is simultaneously one thing and another, being one thing as the cause and another as the effect. It appears that we introduce our own reasons for wanting the appearance of appearances to be a reality we must explain in terms of its insentient causes.
Mike Laidler
The insensible life is not worth living. Indeed the insensible life is but a semblance of living. We experience life as lived through its sensibilities. Those sensibilities grow into the fact of our awareness; however, the sensible life is determined by the reach of awareness rather than its grasp – for supposing to hold on to what we have been made aware of amounts to an artificial form of its true reality, a restricted and burdensome facsimile of its liberating enlightenment. And what hell waits upon the fabrication of awareness as something conscripted to our possession?
Mike Laidler
Can the logic that stems from the human mind be the test of reality, or is reality bigger than us? Is there a universal logic built into the workings of the universe by which we are able to define and relate to it? Is this the same universe that develops a mental state about itself – as exemplified by our presence as a part of that universe? Then in what mind does that logic belong if there is more to it than we can supply? Or have we taken the place of that God by determining, in the name of truth, what can, should and must be the case both for ourselves and in the universe at large? And what kind of mind is in charge of a universe like that; alternatively, what kind of universe is in charge of a mind like that?
Mike Laidler
Science is a reality proceeding to its completeness through the realisation of possibilities and the discovery of what is there. A prerequisite for this exercise is the capacity for knowing which the knower uniquely brings to the facts under study in a reality now extended by a new and different kind of realisation – one that takes place in the mind.
This process of completion began long before we invented science. Hearing a sound extends the reality from its physical state into a co-existing mental state. It is futile to argue whether the one or the other is the more real, they both add up a new reality – a reality that has already changed with the advent of its perception. We now know that we occupy both versions of this new reality – knowing that the physical waveform of sound is not everything to know, that perception brings sound to life and without that living perception the ‘sound’ remains in the silence of its physical state. Meanwhile the forests may fall and the mountains crumble without the full reality of sound having made its appearance.
Scientists know that the reality of knowledge is incomplete without an objective basis, yet tend to overlook the fact that the objective basis is incomplete within a wider reality that is known to obtain – that the world is incomplete in the oblivion of its physical completeness without the presence of a knowing realisation to change what happens next.
Mike Laidler
What killed Cecil Lion? Was it the weapons used or the power of money and cheapening of life?
Do legalities make our morals or is it the converse? How do we balance the morality and immorality of what we want? Is it based upon what others will tolerate, and is tolerance a moral position? Aren’t we meant to tolerate the freedom of others to do what is legal, or do we need to wait for the court of public opinion to change the law with protest and unrest – ultimately to apply Cecil’s law, to the wider law – whereby the ethical failures of the law reduce us to the law of the jungle?
But in what jungle do we frame our laws? Cecil may not be human, yet his natural nobility makes an ass of any law to legitimate our ignoble exploitations. And what law of nature gives dominion over the beasts to an animal that is more deadly than the wild?
Mike Laidler
Is science defined by scientists or is it the other way round?
Scientists proceed by trying to prove their hypotheses wrong and can be certain only when they know they are wrong: ‘ … we make measurements, we make models and we try and give some answers. The key thing to understand is science is never right. It’s the one discipline where you can be absolutely wrong, you can be shown to be wrong, but it’s just the best we can do given our current knowledge – that’s very important.’ (Interview on BBC Radio 4 Today Programme on 16th June with the scientist Brian Cox.)
So is science identifiable as the set of scientists who can never know for sure when they are right – and can those scientists be right in saying: ‘science is never right’? For like the barber who shaves everyone who doesn’t shave himself and therefore can and cannot shave himself, these scientists can and cannot be right. But there is a deeper paradox at the heart of science, namely science does and doesn’t owe its presence to the work of scientists – being populated and popularised by scientists who do not know whether their current state of knowledge is right, yet who strive assiduously to prove that it is by doing the opposite.
Mike Laidler
There is something eternal about the power to exist that cannot be measured against existing possibilities. There is something special about the existence of sentient being in the midst of an insensible universe. But can there be a special place in which our personal being is exalted for eternity in a sublime mutuality? Are we all that similar or is one person’s heaven another’s hell? Surely something has to give. We all share in the simple things in life but differ in the cultural expression of our needs, wants, preferences and desires. So does a candidate have to be compatible with what’s on offer, or is what’s on offer variable to suit? Can our beliefs take care of the details? And what about degrees of sophistication? Will it be a caveman’s heaven or more like an advanced civilisation? How sophisticated does or doesn’t it need to be? Sophistication may be imperious to the lesser mortal, so perhaps heaven has its hierarchy to accommodate different types. And what about those we don’t get on with? What must we gain and lose in order to qualify? Where is the common humanity in which all these differences even out?
It would seem that the main thing we need to loose is our expectation, including our view of ourselves as a fixed person. There is nothing fixed or complete about us. Individuality is but a sample of what is possible in the life that we claim as ours; but even that life is bigger than us – our faculties are more than our choosing and we remain incomplete in all things we might have been in a different time and place. Nor do our beliefs take care of us. And what about those we love? Do we love because of love or because of them? Is love an invention or something bigger than us? Can we take from love, or is it relative to what we are prepared to give? Is there anything spiritual in the love of another or one another? How does love define us if it is not unique to us, and if it is unique to us, how does it define love? Is its uniqueness merely a construct of the perceived uniqueness of our experiences and of ourselves as having experiences that are unique to us? And what does it mean to love a thing or an idea? Perhaps love is the means of surrendering ourselves to the ideal it gives to us – an ideal for which we will forsake all else. Is that why we talk of the power of love?
Love is special because it is important and it is important because it is transformative. And though it may be subject to our inventions and interventions it is hard to think of a better subject. It is also possible to think of love in its broadest sense, beyond all the things we love, to see it as more than we make of it in the particulars of our lives – a presence that we cannot own – the torment of those who want to manage it on their own terms, who seek possession. Then the love of self, in all the constructions by which we claim to know ourselves, may be the first hurdle we need to overcome. For what do we possess of ourselves that we do not acquire? And does not every acquisition take possession of the owner? Do we not delimit ourselves by self-definition, by what we take personally? Perhaps all we are, all the good things, don’t belong to us, rather they are something we partake in, something we cannot personalise in terms of what we want, or to differentiate ourselves from others. For if life and personal existence are things to share in, then perhaps the personal factor in existence is bigger than all we can make of it individually, personally – yet in the attempt we cannot see anything in it save ourselves – something we may realise as such only by letting go.
Mike Laidler
Belief in all it’s forms is self-justifying, whether it is in science, religion, economics or culture, and we all need to look at our beliefs for the reason given in Believing in belief
Money can’t make money of itself, yet that’s just what we have come to expect of it, and to the extent that we have made it happen we have achieved the impossible – but there is a price to pay.
‘Usuary’ gives the impression that we can all be better off so long as we abide by the rules: A lends B some money and expects interest in return – because A could have spent that money on himself. But in a way that is just what A has done because he wants to see his money grow, and he starts living off the expectation of monies due. B is also living off money that is not his, so nobody is living within their means. The whole edifice of expectation is open to collapse, but our attention is diverted in the meantime by the rule of growth – as if money can increase itself indefinitely at no economic cost.
It is apparent that lending money creates growth and incentivises productivity. Industry borrows in order to further its enterprises and everyone benefits from the output. However an increasingly large proportion of that output goes to servicing the money providers and markets where everyone expects returns on their investments. The actual products of industry are the stuff of modern life, we all expect innovations and improvements in the form of cheaper and better products, but the investors want something more – they want improvements in the productivity of money. The output of industry translates into its profitability, but profit alone is no longer seen as enough – those profits need to keep growing – money profitability is now the main stay and industry can diversify into anything that makes money so long as it enables us to make money for money’s sake.
It seems that we expect two things from our labours – one is the product that we have laboured to produce for all the reasons we give to its utility and the other is a financial product expected to generate additional utility by making profit from profit – a profitability that demands of industry an ever-increasing capacity for growth because that’s what the money requires. This demand for profitability has taken a more sinister turn in the financial markets where interest rates, debt liabilities and the ups and downs of trading have become commodities that are expected to make yet more money from money – like a giant wave machine that can harness the natural resources of a financial ocean to replenish is energy.
It seems that with such natural resources waiting to be consumed that our debts will forgive themselves.
Mike Laidler
Philosophy Alive 