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All of Blake H.'s Comments + Replies

Grokking the Intentional Stance
Blake H.10

This is great work. Glad that folks here take these Ryle-influenced ideas seriously and understand what it means for a putative problem about mind or agency to dissolve. Bravo.

To take the next (and I think, final step) towards dissolution, I would recommend reading and reacting to a 1998 paper by John McDowell called "The Content of Perceptual Experience" which is critical of Dennett's view and even more Rylian and Wittgensteinian in it's spirit (Gilbert Ryle was one of Dennett's teachers). 

I think it's the closest you'll get to de-mystification and "... (read more)

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The Plan
Blake H.20

Yeah, I agree with a lot of this. Especially:

If you want to have some fun, you can reach for Rice's theorem (basically following from Turing's halting problem) which shows that you can't logically infer any semantic properties whatsoever from the code of an undocumented computer program. Various existing property inferrer groups like hackers and biologists will nod along and then go back to poking the opaque mystery blobs with various clever implements and taking copious notes of what they do when poked, even though full logical closure is not available.

I ... (read more)

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The Plan
Blake H.10

Good - though I'd want to clarify that there are some reductionists who think that there must be a reductive explanation for all natural phenomena, even if some will remain unknowable to us (for practical or theoretical reasons).

Other non-reductionists believe that the idea of giving a causal explanation of certain facts is actually confused - it's not that there is no such explanation, it's that the very idea of giving certain kinds of explanation means we don't fully understand the propositions involved. E.g. if someone were to ask why certain mathematical facts are true, hoping for a causal explanation in terms of brain-facts or historical-evolutionary facts, we might wonder whether they understood what math is about.

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The Plan
Blake H.10

If you think there's some impossible gap between the human and the nonhuman worlds, then how do you think actual humans got here?

 

There are many types of explanatory claims in our language. Some are causal (how did something come to be), others are constitutive (what is it to be something), others still are normative (why is something good or right). Most mathematical explanation is constitutive, most action explanation is rational, and most material explanation is causal. It's totally possible to think there's a plain causal explanation about how hum... (read more)

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1rsaarelm
If we believe there is a plain causal explanation, that rules out some explanations we could imagine. It shouldn't now be possible for humans to have been created by a supernatural agency (as was widely thought in Antiquity, the Middle Ages or Renaissance when most of the canon of philosophy was developed), and basic human functioning probably shouldn't involve processes wildly contrary to known physics (still believed by some smart people like Roger Penrose). The other aspect is computational complexity. If we assume the causal explanation, we also get quantifiable limits for how much evolutionary work and complexity can have gone into humans. People are generally aware that there's a lot of it, and a lot less aware that it's quantifiably finite. The size of the human genome, which we can measure, creates one hard limit on how complex a human being can be. The limited amount of sensory information a human can pick up growing to adulthood and the limited amount of computation the human brain can do during that time creates another. Evolutionary theory also gives us a very interesting extra hint that everything you see in nature should be reachable by a very gradual ascent of slightly different forms, all of which need to be viable and competitive, all the way from the simplest chemical replicators. So that's another limit to the bin, whatever is going on with humans is probably not something that has to drop out of nowhere as a ball of intractable complexity, but can be reached by some series of small enough to be understandable improvements to a small enough to be understandable initial lifeform. The entire sphere of complex but finite computational processes has been a blind spot for philosophy. Nobody really understood it until computers had become reasonably common. (Dennett talks about this in Darwin's Dangerous Idea when discussion Conway's Game of Life.) Actually figuring things out from the opaque blobs of computation like human DNA is another problem of c
The Plan
Blake H.50

Totally get it. There are lots of folks practicing philosophy of mind and technology today in that aussie tradition who I think take these questions seriously and try to cache out what we mean when we talk about agency, mentality, etc. as part of their broader projects.

I'd resist your characterization that I'm insisting words shouldn't be used a particular way, though I can understand why it might seem that way. I'm rather hoping to shed more light on the idea raised by this post that  we don't actually know what many of these words even mean when the... (read more)

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2Daniel Kokotajlo
Those articles are all paywalled; got free versions? I tried Sci-Hub, no luck.
The Plan
Blake H.10

Naturalizing normativity just means explaining normative phenomena in terms of other natural phenomena whose existence we accept as part of our broader metaphysics. E.g. explaining biological function in terms of evolution by natural selection, where natural selection is explained by differential survival rates and other statistical facts. Or explaining facts about minds, beliefs, attitudes, etc., in terms of non-humoncular goings-on in the brain. The project is typically aimed at humans, but shows up as soon as you get to biology and the handful of normative concepts (life, function, health, fitness, etc.) that constitute its core subject matter.

Hope that helps. 

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6rsaarelm
I don't think I've seen the term "normative phenomena" before. So basically normative concepts are concepts in everyday language ("life", "health"), which get messy if you try to push them too hard? But what are normative phenomena then? We don't see or touch "life" or "health", we see something closer to the actual stuff going on in the world and then we come up with everyday word-concepts for it that sort of work until they don't. It's not really helping in that I still have no real intuition about what you're going on about, and your AI critique seems to be aimed at something from 30 years ago instead of contemporary stuff like Omohundro's Basic AI Drives paper (you describe AIs as being "without the desire to evade death, nourish itself, and protect a physical body", the paper's point is that AGIs operating in the physical world would have exactly that) or the whole deep learning explosion with massive datasets of the last few years ("we under-estimate by many orders of magnitude the volume of inputs needed to shape our “models.”", right now people are in a race to feed ginormous input sets to deep learning systems and probably aren't stopping anytime soon). Like, yeah. People can be really impressive, but unless you want to make an explicit case for the contrary, people here still think people are made of parts and there exists some way to go from a large cloud of hydrogen to people. If you think there's some impossible gap between the human and the nonhuman worlds, then how do you think actual humans got here? Right now you seem to be just giving some sort of smug shrug of someone who on one hand doesn't want to ask that question themselves because it's corrosive to dignified pre-Darwin liberal arts sensibilities, and on the other hand tries to hint at people genuinely interested in the question that it's a stupid question to ask and they should have read better scholarship to convince themselves of that.
The Plan
Blake H.00

No - but perhaps I'm not seeing how they would make the case. Is the idea that somehow their existence augurs a future in which tech gets more autonomous to a point where we can no longer control it? I guess I'd say, why should we believe that's true? Its probably uncontroversial to believe many of our tools will get more autonomous - but why should we think that'll lead to the kind of autonomy we enjoy? 

Even if you believe that the intelligence and autonomy we enjoy exist on a kind of continuum, from like single celled organisms through chess-playing... (read more)

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7Mitchell_Porter
I don't know... If I try to think of Anglophone philosophers of mind who I respect, I think of "Australian materialists" like Armstrong and Chalmers. No doubt there are plenty of worthwhile thoughts among the British, Americans, etc too, but you seem to be promoting something I deplore, the attempt to rule out various hard problems and unwelcome possibilities, by insisting that words shouldn't be used that way. Celia Green even suggested that this 1984-like tactic could be the philosophy of a new dark age in which inquiry was stifled, not by belief in religion, but by "belief in society"; but perhaps technology has averted that future. Head-in-the-sand anthropocentrism is hardly tenable in a world where, already, someone could hook up a GPT3 chatbot to a Boston Dynamics chassis, and create an entity from deep within the uncanny valley. 
The Plan
Blake H.-10

I'm perpetually surprised by the amount of thought that goes into this sort of thing coupled with the lack of attention to the philosophical literature on theories of mind and agency in the past, let's just say 50 years. I mean look at the entire debate around whether or not it's possible to naturalize normativity - most of the philosophical profession has given up on this or accepts the question was at best too hard to answer, at worst, ill-conceived from the start.

These literatures are very aware of, and conversant with, the latest and greatest in cogsci... (read more)

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2TAG
Why was this downvoted? Sheesh!
2rsaarelm
What do you mean by "naturalize" as a verb? What is "naturalizing normativity"? Does this amount to you thinking that humans are humans because of some influence from outside of fundamental physics, which computers and non-human animals don't share?
5Mitchell_Porter
Do you have any thoughts on chess computers, guided missiles, computer viruses, etc, and whether they make a case for worries about AGI,  even if you consider them something alien to the human kind of intelligence?