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Manning Clark House Symposium Conference paper by Keith Price
Abstract The notion that computers and robots either have a measure of intelligence, or at least will have at some stage, has firmly taken root in Western culture. It has inspired a slew of science fiction novels and films, and one of these, ‘The Matrix’, has attained the status of a modern classic. Moreover, it has powerful advocates in the scientific and philosophical fraternities, the most prominent of whom are probably Daniel Dennett and Stephen Pinker. In my opinion, however, most of the ideas that make up this most influential of popular themes are demonstrably false. I outline a couple of philosophical arguments against the whole notion of machine consciousness, turning on, respectively, beliefs and desires, etc — the so-called ‘intentional attitudes’ — and on conscious experience — ‘what it is like to be human’. Computers, it is argued, are disqualified from personhood by reason of being artefacts, which have their organising principle imposed from without rather than built into the structure of their being in the processes of biological evolution. I then apply this perspective to the larger dimension of the philosophy of science. We are liable to fall into giving credence to the beliefs I criticise because of a one-sided narrow empiricism which neglects our very real knowledge of the ‘insides’ of reality and is utterly unable to account for meaning and value. The real threat to ethics in science is not smart machines, but our narrow objectivist notions of science itself. Introduction Many people seem to feel that the idea that computers will never be people is obviously well founded, but most, I suspect, would be hard pressed to say exactly why. Others, perhaps influenced by science fiction novels and films, or more generally the scientistic Zeitgeist of modernity, will be inclined to feel that there is no good reason why, given enough advances in computer technology, robotics, neuroscience etc, some sophisticated artefact ‘descended’ from our current devices may not become ‘one of us’. As will already be apparent, I do not share this view. I am maintaining that we need not worry about nightmarish scenarios where the machines take over, such as that depicted in the Matrix films. Rather, I see the major problem to be the ideas that lead us to think such things are possible. The leading idea is scientific materialism, or physicalism, as defended, for instance, by Daniel Dennett. . In this paper I will set out a couple of representative arguments against the possibility of true machine personhood, taking Dennett and other major materialist positions into account. I then briefly set out an alternative position and explore some of the reasons I think scientific materialism is a major problem for us. First Argument: The Non-Computability of Beliefs and Desires
Persons and Intentional Systems What, then, is a person? I am not going to develop a theory of this here — indeed do little more than acknowledge the incredibly rich cluster of concepts which centre around the idea of a person. For instance, to be a person means, inter alia, to belong to a community of rational, valuing beings, so a person must be at least in principle capable of communicating, by means of symbols and signs, in a shared space of interpersonal meanings and shared experience of pleasure, pain, desires, hopes, fears, etc. This is, broadly, the notion that what is distinctive about persons is the possession of language. Moreover, a precondition of language seems to be possession of a first person point of view. Many (maybe all) animals appear to have a perspective on the world, but only persons are capable of reflection on that perspective. (If an animal did have that capability, I would argue that it is at least on the way to becoming a person — the point being that personhood is, partly at least, so constituted.) There is much that could be said about this lightning sketch of a theory of personhood, but none of it is essential to my current purpose, except the point that having beliefs, desires and other mental states with content are essential to being a person. A focus on brains and brain states is typical of the views I am here attacking. The basic idea is that, since being a person, and the sophisticated beliefs, desires, intentions and other such states that it requires, seems to have required the massive development of the neo-cortex in humans, those mental states must be identical, in some fashion, with states of human brains. Following Lynne Rudder Baker , I call this The Standard View. The Standard View would seem to imply that thinking is a matter of computation in a virtual serial processor in my brain, and that processor is (more or less) my conscious mind. Now, there is a view in cognitive science which regards talk of such mental states as comprising a bad psychological theory, dubbed ‘folk psychology’, which needs to be replaced with a properly scientifically verified theory of what goes on in people’s heads. This is eliminative materialism, which is a Standard View approach to beliefs, desires, etc, together with the further judgement that no brain states will turn out to be suitable candidates for them. It has often been supposed in recent philosophical discussions of mind that if your approach could be shown to commit you to mind/body dualism (eg Descartes), that constituted a refutation of your position. Dualism, it was said, was not a position that one adopted, but more a cliff that one fell off. Whether or not that is fair to dualism — and on balance I am inclined to say that it is not — I certainly feel the same way about eliminative materialism. I agree with Lynne Baker that, if it is true that no suitable candidates for computable brain states to identify with beliefs and desires can be found, that will impugn the Standard View rather than their reality . I can recommend two of Baker’s books — — for relevant argumentation. Here I will only say that I do not think ‘folk psychology’ actually is a scientific theory subject to disconfirmation, and that the very idea of science presupposes, both in theory and practice, the integrity of standard mental states with content. If you want to get a sense of why, I recommend that you meditate on the sentence ‘I do not believe in belief’. What is of more interest — because more apparently believable — is Dennett’s characterization of persons as ‘intentional systems’. In Brainstorms he sets out the notion of three ‘stances’ one can take to an entity or system — the physical, design and intentional. From the physical stance ‘our predictions are based on the actual physical state of the particular object, and are worked out by applying whatever knowledge we have of the laws of nature.’ , p.4. From the design stance, we predict behaviour based on our knowledge of the intended function or purpose of the system or its parts. Finally, from the intentional stance we predict behaviour by treating the system as an intelligent agent with its own beliefs and desires. Dennett’s standard example is a chess-playing computer. It is not practical to treat a chess-playing computer from either the design or physical stances when playing against it — it is much more fruitful to treat it as if it had beliefs and desires, that is, from the intentional stance. The ‘as if’ is important. In Dennett’s usage, ‘a particular thing is an intentional system only in relation to the strategies of someone who is trying to explain and predict its behavior.’ , p.4. Given this understanding, as Dennett notes, ‘Lingering doubts about whether the chess-playing computer really has beliefs and desires are misplaced … whether one calls what one ascribes to the computer beliefs or belief-analogues or information complexes makes no difference to the nature of the calculation one makes on the basis of the ascriptions.’ , p.7. This instrumentalist nature of Dennett’s intentional stance theory has the additional apparent benefit that he can combine an explicitly eliminativist approach to such things as beliefs and desires, or pains, with treating complex systems like persons as if they really have them. Unfortunately for Dennett, this solution is fundamentally unstable. I leave to one side criticisms which depend on the fact that he often treats important aspects of the intentional stance, such as rationality and ethical evaluation, non-instrumentalistically. (See pp. 307-312 for an incisive critique.) Though I would contend that this is highly symptomatic of an unstable position, the crucial point is a dilemma about whether the intentional stance is dispensable without cognitive loss. Baker: ‘If Dennett is correct, then any system, human or not, may be described exhaustively and its operations explained wholly in terms of its physical constitution. Dennett points out that "if some version of mechanistic physicalism is true (as I believe), we will never need absolutely to ascribe any intentions to anything…"’ (, p.273). … ‘This seems to imply that the intentional stance is in principle (even if not in practice) dispensable. On the other hand, Dennett has suggested, to fail to take an intentional stance is, in some cases, to miss certain "objective patterns". Surely, this claim, which would help give the intentional stance the weight it needs to be more than a "sham", leads straight to a dilemma for Dennett; for the existence of objective patterns that would be missed by a physical stance would seem to falsify Dennett’s instrumentalism concerning the intentional level’ pp.312-313. For example, a race of superior Martians, who can predict all our behaviour from the physical stance, would nevertheless miss a great deal about us if they do not also see us as intentional systems, and what they missed would be perfectly objective patterns. A stockbroker placing an order in the stock exchange can be, in principle, minutely understood and predicted at the physical level with absolutely no understanding of the significance of his movements for the market, or indeed that there is such a thing at all. The upshot is that: ‘If intentional system theory is genuinely instrumentalistic … then the theory can not play … the proto-scientific role that Dennett assigns to it … because, as mere "interpretation", the intentional stance swings free of the design and physical stances. On the other hand, if Dennett means the intentional stance to offer a special vocabulary for describing features equally well describable in the vocabulary of the design or physical stances, then it is not even instrumentalistic … This would be a straightforward reduction…’ p. 314. Why does Dennett try an ‘as if’ strategy which seems to cause as many problems as it solves when talking of beliefs, desires, etc? The reason, I submit, is that straightforwardly reductionist strategies have at least as many problems. Before I look at some of these, though, it is worth noting that intentional system theory provides a rather promising way, superficially, of motivating the idea that computers could be persons. If both computers and people are intentional systems according to Dennett’s definition, perhaps there is no insuperable barrier to computers being people after all. If, however, people really do have beliefs and desires and it is only convenient to sometimes treat computers as if they do, we need to dig deeper if we hope to motivate the possibility that they one day might be people. As it stands, we have no reason to think that computers are intentional systems, construed realistically. Computers are, however, artefacts. This is enough to make them intentional systems in another sense. The fact that there are computers depends on the fact that there are real intentional states in the world — namely those of the people who design, build, program and run them. I think that the significance of this fact, obvious as it is, has been vastly underestimated by philosophers and cognitive scientists. I will have some more to say about this later. The Non-Computability of Propositional Content The computability requirement places severe constraints on our understanding of how beliefs, desires, etc might be understood as causal factors in producing overt behaviour. In particular, the content needs to be understood syntactically, as a physical structure in the brain, rather than semantically. Taking a realist approach to beliefs, desires etc and upholding the Standard View, which says that they are brain states, leads naturally to the idea that the content of beliefs, for example, are structures in the head which are part of a ‘language of thought’. The most influential proponent of this idea is Jerry A. Fodor, who champions the notion of ‘narrow content’ of beliefs, etc as causally explanatory of behavior. (See, for example, ) The idea of narrow content is that it ‘supervenes on the subject’s intrinsic properties, without regard to the subject’s environment’ ( p. 44). This is opposed to broad content — our ordinary relational notion of content — which depends on both the believer’s intrinsic properties and their physical and social environment. In Fodor’s scheme, it is not content so understood, but some more restricted narrow, non-relational neural structure, which does the actual work when we think, entertain propositions, etc. I do not wish to focus here on Fodor’s defense of narrow content — see pp.42-56 for an extended rebuttal — but on a related idea developed by William Lycan. On the language of thought hypothesis, belief states have syntactic structure, which means that ‘Psychological processes are causal processes on sentencelike entities, individuated syntactically.’ p.34. The idea is that there is a ‘semantic representation’ associated with neural sentences which gives the logical structure of the sentence, and which can ‘serve as input for syntactic transformations’. Many sentences have indexical and other contextual elements. How to represent them in the neural language of thought? An obvious suggestion is that the syntax has parameters for such elements. These are filled by whatever indexical or contextual elements are relevant parts of the believer’s environment when the internal sentence causes behaviour. Baker explains: ‘Since the causal efficacy of sentences in the language of thought, on this view, is wholly determined by brain states of the agent, every element whose presence or absence can affect behavior must be represented in the brain. So, whether or not public language requires that every semantically relevant feature be explicitly represented in logical form, the function of the syntax of the language of thought in causing behavior requires that every semantically relevant feature be explicitly represented in logical form and physically encoded in the brain’ p.35. So, for instance, ‘I am tired now’ must have parameters for speaker and time. More generally, all of the many hidden parameters in ordinary discourse must have a ‘slot’ in the extended internal syntax. It is not too hard to show that this leads to trouble, in the form of ‘the problem of the parameter’. There are two constraints that this view puts on the syntactic structure of beliefs:
It is almost ludicrously easy to come up with cases which violate these constraints. Baker’s example is standard utterances of ‘An event on the sun is not simultaneous with anyone’s seeing it’ by Newtonian and Einsteinian physicists. Since we may assume that Einstein’s theory, which includes a frame-of-reference parameter for simultaneity, gives the actual truth conditions for this utterance, we must either assume, bizarrely, that historical Newtonian physicists had such a parameter in their heads, despite believing in absolute simultaneity, or else suppose that the Einsteinian has an extra parameter. If we take this option, we must suppose that, in conformity to (A), that the two beliefs must have physically distinct realisations in the brain, despite apparently being the ‘same’ belief. A brief thought experiment, which I will not go into right now, shows, however, that this need not be so, so at least one of (A) or (B) is violated. What do problems like this point to? The general moral has often been taken to be that ‘meanings ain’t in the head’, or at least not only in the head. As Baker notes, the problem of the parameter is quite general, and is in fact a lot harder than her example might suggest: ‘Consider (putative) representations of ‘slurping soup is impolite’ in the heads of an absolutist and a relativist. In the scientific case, theories provide accounts of which features are the semantically relevant ones. But in most ordinary contexts, things are not so tidy. We have no general theory of semantically relevant features of standard utterances, because of the frame problem’, which is ‘how to get a machine to update knowledge of a changing situation by "noticing" salient features and ignoring others’. p.41. What I am pointing to here by means of the problem of the parameter is a truly major difference between computers and people. We persons notice semantically relevant features in our environmental context and respond appropriately to them as a matter of course. How we do this is a difficult question to answer, but as semantic content is relational and does not live completely ‘in our heads’ there is a real difficulty in imagining how a machine might do something even roughly similar. At a minimum, it would have to bear interesting perceptual and volitional relations to an environmental context, as we do. There are, indeed, various proposals, such as causal theories of perception and reference, which are meant to remedy some of these problems, but I cannot pursue my scepticism about their prospects further here. I want now to move on to my second argument, which concerns Frank Jackson’s ‘Mary the Colour Scientist’ thought experiment about the ‘qualia’ or phenomenal qualities that we encounter in those perceptual relations, and Dennett’s response to this. Second Argument: What Mary Didn’t Know Another major area of dispute about the mind — perhaps the major area in most people’s mind — is phenomenal experience and the difficulties of physicalism in persuading us that it could ever, in principle, explain how it is possible. The thought experiment is about a brilliant scientist who knows ‘all the physical information there is to obtain’ about colour vision. She has never seen any colour but black and white, however — she lives in a black-and-white room, uses a black and white monitor, always wears black gloves, has no mirror, etc. Now what will happen when she is released from this environment or given a colour monitor? By hypothesis she already knows all the physical information about colour. Nevertheless it seems obvious that she will learn something about the world and our experience of it. Hence physicalism, which says that the physical information is all that there is, is false. Dennett’s rebuttal insists that if, per impossible, Mary knew all the physical facts she would know dispositional truths which would enable her to immediately recognise all the various colours when she does experience them. Her captors try to fool her with a blue banana, but, as she tells them ‘before you brought the banana in, I had already written down, in exquisite detail, exactly what physical impression a yellow object or a blue object … would make on my nervous system. So I already knew exactly what thoughts I would have…’ pp. 399-400 It is hard to believe that Dennett thinks he is any further forward with this response. I agree with him that Mary could indeed know what response to expect when she does see yellow or blue, if she is skilled in reading off her own physical reactions. I suspect that she would need to have trained herself to do this. She knows that she will have one kind of physical response to yellow and another to blue. Whether she would be able to predict different thoughts is another matter entirely, but not necessary to the point. So, she is able to instantly detect the blue banana. Still, nevertheless, she learns something when she sees it — that it is this sort of experience which brings about those physical changes. Even Dennett himself admits that ‘the only task that remains is for her to figure out a way of identifying those neurophysiological effects "from the inside." p. 400 However, there is only one way to make any progress on that score, which is to have the experience in question! For Dennett to insist otherwise is, I think, the result of a curious, but alas, very common, one-sided philosophical diet of third-person empirical scientific thinking. I will now sketch my general picture of the relationship between persons and computers, courtesy of the philosophy of Ken Wilber, who has much to say about this one-sidedness. How Could Computers Ever Be People? A Wilberian Picture It is a hopeless task for me to give you an adequate summary of Ken Wilber’s work in this space. Very briefly, however, Wilber has developed a framework to integrate all human knowledge which can be represented by a diagram with four quadrants, representing the interior individual, interior social or collective, exterior individual and exterior social or collective dimensions of existence. There are four axes of development running out from the centre of the diagram through the centre of each quadrant, marked off at intervals to represent various levels of individual interior or psychological development, social interior or cultural development, individual exterior or physiological development and collective exterior or institutional/systemic development. This diagram should be envisaged as a schematic of universal evolution, and also individual and social development, operating on units called, following A.N. Whitehead, holons. A holon is a ‘whole which is part of a larger whole’. Every actually existing thing is either an individual holon, a social holon, a heap composed of holons or an artefact. Moreover, holons ‘tetra-evolve’ simultaneously through all four quadrants, and they have an interior, an exterior, and interior and exterior relations to other holons. For instance, persons have an interior reality, only accessible to first-person awareness, a shared space with other persons of interpersonal meanings, accessible to second-person relational awareness, an individual exterior bodily reality and networks of external relations to other bodies and the environment as a whole, accessible to third-person awareness. None of these realities are reducible to any of the others. From the point of view of Wilber’s framework, physicalism is a version of flatland thinking, which collapses the left hand, or interior, dimensions to the right hand, or exterior, dimensions. On this view there are really only exteriors, accessible to monological third person awareness. Phenomenal awareness, meaning and all else that makes up our sense of ourselves as persons disappears as the cosmos is ‘gutted’. On Wilber’s view, interiors of holons ‘go all the way down’ to atoms and beyond. This is not ‘pan-psychism’, however, as interiors at these lower levels do not constitute what we would want to call a psyche, soul or mind, but something very minimal. Wilber’s term is ‘pan-interiorism’. The major point is that minds and souls emerge in the process of evolution or personal development, in lockstep with the evolution of exteriors. Computers, however, do not evolve — they are artefacts. Holons have their principle of organisation within themselves, artefacts have it imposed from without. Why, then, will computers never be people? At base, because they have not gone through the biological evolutionary development required to become such sophisticated holons. Computers are, of course, composed of holons (typically, atoms of silicon and various metals, plus other various molecules of plastics, etc), but the level of interiority of these holons is nearly as far removed from that of persons as it could be. Because they are artefacts, any evolutionary development would require them to first become complex molecular and then biological holons. Such a development would almost certainly destroy the externally imposed structure which makes them computers. At the least it would fail to make any use of it. The notion that computers could evolve in a ‘hybrid’ fashion — biologically and technologically at the one time — does not take the importance of having an interior principle of development seriously enough. We indeed can, and do, put our computers through a process of technological evolution, but all this means is that we impose ever more sophisticated levels of order and control from without. There is no corresponding increase in interiority in the computer, no matter how many feedback control mechanisms, and the like, we build into the system so that it can be relatively self-managing. For computers to become people, they would probably have to cease being computers and then undergo a lengthy process of biological, not technological, evolution, which would transform them out of all recognition. Why Materialism Is The Problem Here
There are many environmental and social ills plaguing the modern world which we are discussing at this conference, such as global warming, toxic pollution, deforestation, overfishing, breakdown of communities, the growing gap between rich and poor, etc. The second part of this paper is devoted to explaining how the philosophical materialism, or physicalism, which lies behind the idea that computers will become people, is itself one of the problems causing or exacerbating the damage that is being done. It is an interesting question — and not one much discussed to my knowledge — what the relationship is between the usual ethical sense of materialism as only caring about the acquisition and use of material goods and services, to the detriment of personal relationships, community service and the like, and philosophical materialism. I believe there is one — indeed that philosophical materialism is part of the background which drives excessive consumerism. The great Indian philosopher sage Sri Aurobindo puts the point very well: ‘If we push the materialist conclusion far enough, we arrive at an insignificance and unreality in the life of the individual and the race which leaves us, logically, the option between either a feverish effort of the individual to snatch what he may from a transient existence, to "live his life", as it is said, or a dispassionate and objectless service of the race and the individual, knowing well that the latter is a transient fiction of the nervous mentality and the former only a little more long-lived collective form of the same regular nervous spasm of Matter. We work or enjoy under the impulsion of a material energy which deceives us with the brief delusion of life or with the nobler delusion of an ethical aim and a mental consummation.’ p.21. At ground, materialism is a broader philosophical attitude which neglects the inner subjective and the relational intersubjective life worlds, because it thinks them ultimately unreal, in favour of what can be objectively observed, measured and controlled. All problems are then reduced to technical problems and the human life world is not seen primarily as a field in which to establish free relationships of open communication, respect, care and responsibility. It is rather yet another area of technical expertise, where ‘human resource management’ and similar black arts replace establishing honest, open and respectful relationships. This is not merely an ethical problem, but also about how ethics is possible at all. The example of neo-classical economic theory is instructive in this regard. Neo-classical or ‘economic rationalist’ economic theory markets itself as being an objective or ‘value free’ approach to economics. The idea is roughly as follows: Human beings are understood as rational agents who can be expected to ‘maximise their own utility’ if given a free market context in which to operate. By this is meant that, in fact, everyone is out to get as many goods and services for themselves as possible, and the economist’s job is merely to promote policies which allow people to do this with as little interference from government as possible, which will allow the market to work properly and let people do what they are going to do anyway. There are many problems with this general picture, but one of the basic problems is that the idea of a ‘value free’ economics is utterly untenable. In fact, neo-classical economics works off some very powerful, yet largely unacknowledged, value positions — principally to do with the importance of individual autonomy. Because these are not explicitly acknowledged as values, however, it becomes impossible for the economist to balance them against collective values such as responsibility to the community, humanity at large and to the planet itself. They are seen merely as basic facts which the technical economist employs to get the ‘right answer’, which then is used to trump merely ‘subjective’ concerns about the consequences of policies which promote individual and corporate acquisitiveness at all costs. In fact, ethics is possible at all because there is an intersubjective reality, not reducible to anything that can be studied by empirical science, which is an integral part of our existence. It is not possible to theorise at any level without presupposing some idea of what is valuable, even in such areas of ‘hard’ science as physics. The way to be objective is to be very explicit about what one’s value commitments are and allow them to be discussed in free open communication. This is what fails to happen with conventional economics. Once we see how unacknowledged value positions masquerading as technical expertise are used by global corporations, governments and others to justify exploitative and oppressive policies and actions, it becomes clear why materialism, as I understand it here, is a basic issue for environmental and social activists. It has been maintained that many of the very pressing problems we face are actually about our inability to come to collective agreement, at the national and international levels particularly, about what actions to take. A case in point is the difficulty in getting the Kyoto Agreement on Climate Control ratified. This inability has often to do with a failure to understand and acknowledge that many of these issues are actually up for discussion or agreement rather than being technical facts that we take for granted. Because many economists treat value issues this way, it is difficult to get a satisfactory dialogue going with them. People will only treat as important what they perceive as real. Because the subjective and intersubjective dimensions of reality can be fairly easily ignored if we keep our gaze fixed outwards, and our society encourages us to do that much of the time anyway, it is too easy for people to forget that they can become aware of what values they actually operate on, and can then change them if they want to. It is only when we do this that the spell of materialism can be broken.
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