Tag Archive for 'philosophy'
In our hyperlinked world, we can know anything, anytime. And this mass enlightenment, says Buddhist scholar Bob Thurman, is our first step toward becoming Buddha. When we can know everything, we can see how everything is interconnected — and we can begin to feel compassion for every living being.
Think about this claim.
It is questionable as to whether it is meaningful at all. Upside down in relation to what? Well, we have designated a northern and a southern hemisphere on our fair planet, with the representation being that the north is on top and the south is down below.
But of course, it could just as easily have been the other way around. There is no objective reason for preferring one to the other. We might discover alien civilizations that position their planets ‘upside down’ in relation to our own.
To declare the universe is upside down is to suggest that our directional preference has some ‘truth’ or objectiveness that the rest of the universe has failed to observe. This is absurd because no such objectiveness exists. We have forgotten that we invented this idea of direction.
This is a metaphor for the absurdity of applying objectivity to human ‘reason’. Just like north & south we have designated certain ideas and limits to better understand and navigate the realms of human knowledge. For something to be outside the limits of human logic (and there are competing logics that each rule out different absurdities) means simply that it falls outside the rules we have invented. The rules so implicit in the functioning of out brains and our language that it is easy to forget we have invented them.
Were our brains and our language different it is easy to conceive that so too our logic might be different. Thus, ‘truth’, like ‘north’, is a word, we invented to describe an idea particular to our place and time. To think that it extends to and beyond the reaches of existence… well the universe might as well be upside down.
I wanted a metaphor and now I have one.
I happened upon an intriguing article over at brooders.net titled: How would a machine think? Probably not like us…
It seems like so long ago that I was entertaining these exact thoughts, latching onto the Sapir-Worf hypothesis to confirm my intuitions about the cognitive nature of language, before I found out their particular research was bunk.
I remember writing about how representations of AI have been woefully lacking in truly imagining the limitations and expanded possibilities of a machine mind. My story ‘Press Any Key’ was based on this very thought, but it is clear to me know how much this is in need of an update.
So I dug this out of the trashcan, on Wed Aug 04, 2004 some thoughts of mine on how that digital thinker might think!
…Think about it, we’re operating on the instructions of human 95, a scared, individualistic, reproductive survival machine. That is what we were built for (if you believe in evolution) however long ago, and we get patches and updates (biologically) as often as Windows.
Greed, jealousy, selfishness, are all products of a survival mechanism built in to keep the whole human race going. But our cognitive applications have evolved faster than our hardware can keep up. We have much more of an emphasis on how we use our brains, and as such we get fat, contract heart-disease and die. Our hardware is still operating on the idea that we run 50 miles a day to get dinner.
So now turn to AI (I’d say DI but it isn’t as catchy). It has no such biological limitations. It’s hardware is only limited by our ability to invent it. I have yet to see a movie that accurately depicts an artificially intelligent being, (maybe T2). Why? Because like the self-loving gods that we are we shape them in our own image. I tend to think that emotions are a biological product of a certain arrangement of chemicals. Before we attached meaning and significance to them they were designed to get the job done, (it’s much easier to kill when you’re angry). But don’t ask me what depression is for. “Crying is a puzzler”
So there is no reason to assume that they are necessary to intelligence and as such why an AI would have them. Considering that AI does not have the same biological heritage as ourselves there is also no reason to assume that it would posses the same left-overs. The inherent selfishness, and greed that is apart of being human (which isn’t to say, love and compassion aren’t also parts) would not be necessarily present in AI.
AI characters which emulate these characteristics (i.e. ‘angry’ robots in I Robot) are due to a poverty of the imagination. We are so used to humanity, that we find it difficult to imagine an emotionless intelligence. To our way of thinking, someone without any emotion is a very ill-minded person.
The consequences of realistically envisaging the AI construct are numerous and intriguing. Suppose we had a suitable default AI receptacle. A hard drive with sensory input devices and output devices. Also suppose that any particular AI could be loaded onto any particular machine, the greatest of all human traits might then be non-existent. And that is an unwavering attachment to our own particular vessels. Imagine a being that had no such hang-up, that they knew if one was broken that could always to uploaded to another. What kind of ramifications would that have for the thought processes of AI?
Would it lead to an infinite amount of Smith-like duplicates? No, I don’t think so. The primal urge for reproduction is also lost. All the emotional crap that clouds our vision of reality would disappear. I’d like to think these beings would have a very Zen-like appreciation of our world. But of course, what value is there in a creature that can never be happy?
I was looking for something I have previously written on Hume and the Reason vs. Desire dichotomy and I did indeed find a section on Hume from my essay: Evolution, Altruism and Ethics, and whilst it is relevant it’s also very ‘academic’ and embedded in a very different context.
The basic idea is that Hume challenged a dichotomy put most eloquently by Plato story of Phaedrus the charioteer. Phaedrus represents the soul of a man who is constantly pulled by two forces in different directions. One horse named reason, and the other named passion.
However, a closer examination of human decision making reveals that nothing can be done without a desire / passion to do so. Reason only has the power to examine how effective one’s course of action may be in achieving their desire. If I desire to eat a bar of chocolate then eating this chocolate shaped poison would be a very unreasonable thing to do…
So why does the dichotomy exist? Well it helps to explain why we take courses of action that are at times completely irrational. A heat of the moment, a loss of willpower, a feeling of our reason being subjugated by our writhing selfish passions. How can we feel guilty after such an action if we only do that which we desire?
The answer is simply that a person can want more than one thing at once, even completely contradictory things. I can want a healthy, stable and monogamous relationship with my wife, but I can also want to have a quickie with my secretary on my lunch break. Both of these are desires, but one seems to be more informed by reason than the other. This is quite accurate and has to do with the dichotomy of the human brain.
Consider the fact that reason is a recent addition to the cognition of mammals. Underneath it in the primal brain is instincts and more complex instincts. Reason is an abstraction device that allows us to think of things that don’t actually exist, they are long term, non-concrete usually idealistic kinds of things.
How can you fulfil the desire of a healthy, stable, monogamous relationship with your wife? You can’t really, it’s a never-ending desire, the only moments of gratification probably come at anniversary and all the times you thought about but didn’t go through doing something else.
Immediately gratify, sensuous and emotionally driven desires on the other hand are very easily and quickly satisfied. These are powerful forces, forces of nature or forces of selfishness or Satan if you subscribe the religious/cultural mythology Phaedrus has gotten us into. If you exalt reason as the pinnacle of man’s achievements of nature and the natural world, the paragon of animals etc. then it is no wonder you feel a great deal of guilt when you follow these ‘base’ desires.
I don’t think willpower is what the issue is here, we’re talking about a reprogramming of how you view your desires. Faced with the choice of fulfilling the immediate desire and the never-ending desire it’s a contest with a serious handicap.
I think to even up the match a little you need to replace your never-ending desires with concrete ones. If you want a healthy marriage the feeling of having not done something to destroy is nowhere near good enough. In doing this you are focusing on the thing you wish to avoid and fixating on your own weaknesses. Instead think of actions you can do right now that fulfil your abstract desire. Write an e-mail, buy flowers, write a poem whatever…
Only by giving your abstract desires a concrete failure are you giving yourself a real choice. A choice between conflicting passions not between two horses.
Buddhist morality seems to me to be an entirely utilitarian affair. That is, once one realizes that life is suffering and all human beings suffer, the right course of action is to alleviate suffering and replace it with the good: happiness. The good in this case being a specific spiritual happiness as oppose to the tradition material and physical conceptions of happiness common in Utilitarian theory.
Now the problem of Utilitarianism has always been in my view finding the method to best maximize the good. You might work very hard to make a large number of people happy only to find that in doing so you have made an even larger group of people unhappy. Or you just could have simply set off a chain of events which results in the whole earth being destroyed to make way for a intergalactic hyperspace bypass. Whoops.
However, the Mahayana Buddhists have the answer and what I would regard to be the only answer to this problem which would give someone any hope of redeeming this dangerous ethical theory:
Omniscience.
That’s right. The only way you can effectively (and safely) maximize the happiness of all sentient beings is to know everything, especially the exact effects your actions will cause.
The only person you could really trust to be a utilitarian is an omniscient being after all. When someone is performing all manner of ghastly and counter-intuitive acts such as running people over with trains and killing people for their organs and they say, “Don’t worry, it’s all for the best”, you really wanna be sure about that.
So this seems to be the justification for a whole lot of monks removing themselves from the world and sitting still in a monastery for a few decades. As utilitarians dedicated to helping the suffering of all, they’re trying damn to become omniscient.
Of course, such actions are only justifiable if you believe becoming omniscient is actually possible. If not, I think you just stay way from ‘the ends justifies the means’ theories in general.
It is worth noting that the Judeo-Christian God is often given a pass for all the obvious evil and suffering in the world because he has a ‘grand plan’ and being omniscient we have every reason to trust that it will work out in the end. That all this, blood, sweat and tears are not shed in vain. (Can’t wait to find out how the Holocaust was necessary to the great cosmic game!)
However, this tends to neglect the fact that this god is a professed believe in moral absolutes, I mean we’re talking about written in stone, literally! I mean if killing innocent people is part of the grand plan, that’s all well and good, but you might want to revise your own rules and regulations there Yaweh! You’re not living up to your own standards and by your own definition down live up to being ‘good’ and since God being good is part of your definition as an entity you have just contradicted yourself out of existence.
Apologists can of course counter that this too is part of the plan. That we should act in accordance with his moral absolutes whilst he goes on killing and causing all manner of suffering to fulfil the grand plan. By this stage though there seems to be nothing which can’t be explained by the ‘grand plan’ scenario which renders the explanation the equivalent of, “stop asking questions, just trust me!” (At least that’s what the priest said to me.)
But let us for the moment suppose that this is right. It is now somehow good to lie and murder, because god is good and this is what god does, and yet it is wrong to do these things, god said so. In any case such a dodgy character can clearly be up to no good and it is hardly worth worshiping a lying murderer. But then that was probably part of the plan all along.
I’m trying to come about with a metaphor that will help me express the absurdity of logic. Logic as we all know is a system of rules, inductive and deductive that were created by us people that we use to apply to the world, reality in order to ascertain truth.
We don’t mind the fact the logic was created by us and not reality because we tend to forget that fact and think that it in fact exists independently of us out in the world. It just seems to be a happy coincidence that what qualifies as a rule of logic is that which seems to make sense to the human brain and what is disqualified is that which seems absurd.
I mean if you have a cause you must then have an effect, and X cannot be both P and not P right!!! That just doesn’t make sense!!!
In fact (I’m using the term figuratively) logic appears to be more a corollary of language than anything else. Language rules which are of course governed by the particular arrangements of our brains.
So what is a metaphor (or a simile, or even an analogy) that expresses the absurdity of inventing a system of rules and then finding absolute truth by testing everything against these rules and forgetting the fact that you invented them in the first place?
More on this as it develops…
A reply written by me made about my hypothesis that the laws of human logic are not fixed, universal and ‘immutable.’
If logic is not immutable, how can we know that logic is wrong?
We won’t know what’s wrong. At least not with any certainty. That is the point of the brain in the vat problem. You don’t come to a belief about either proposition with any certainty, you are left with uncertainty, something propositional logic has a real problem with.
Does this mean you jump off a bridge or dismiss tautologies because they are not certain? No, just as scientific knowledge is uncertain but still functional so too can all areas of human thought be seen as a cloud of light amongst the darkness of possibility.
If logic is not a universal truth and law unto itself, the walls of cognition do not come crashing down. We can admit that the axioms of mathematics may be expressions of human cognition that are vastly different from possible alien constructions which we cannot comprehend, but within the system we have constructed they are fundamental. Exploring the nature of that relationship is far more intriguing than postulating our discovery of the mysterious transcendent mechanics of the whole universe.
Philopingo is a site dedicated to exploring philosophy and philosophical ideas through fictional stories. Something I think is very cool indeed.
From the site:
Philopingo is a website that focuses on philosophical ideas through fictional stories. Our name ‘Philopingo’ comes from the Latin words philosophia (meaning philosophy) and appingo (meaning ‘to write’). The website and the stories have been created by a group of teenagers who live in New Zealand.
Check it out:
http://www.philopingo.com/
This is an objection to Richard’s argument as to why the ammoralist is compelled by reason to be moral, Why be moral? over at Philosophy, Et cetera.
What would be incoherent is to fail to desire a food you admit you would enjoy eating just as much, unless some further reason can be given for the differential treatment.
I think there are cases where arbitrariness is not equivalent to irrationality. I talk about this in my essay.
However I absolutely agree with you in that there is a definite place for reason in assessing our desires as I talk about here.
Let’s say I love guitars except red guitars. (Which happens to be true)
For our desires to be rational that must cohere or accord with our beliefs about the world. So if I believe that red guitars are actually the best guitars in the world, it is not rational that my desire doesn’t accord with my belief, (unless there was some other reason why I didn’t like red guitars).
To whatever extent we can know, the beliefs which our desires are based on should accord with the world to be considered rational.
So if I believe that painting the colour red on a guitar actually alters the sound of the instrument and that belief is false (which I think it is) then my aversion to red guitars is irrational.
But what about the idea that our desires and moral judgements are reducible or entailed by first order principles. In order for them to be rational they must accord with those principles (which is similar to a coherent desire set).
So if my aversion to red guitars is derived from a aesthetic aversion to all red ‘status symbols’ then it is coherent. (I don’t like red cars either but I don’t mind red T-shirts).
If I did like red bass guitars then there would need to be a reason why I regarded lead guitars and bass guitars as meaningfully different in this context. Otherwise my desire is not in accord with my principle (i.e. the belief or desire about red status symbols).
Of course the aversion to red status symbols may itself by reducible to a further belief or desire, but as long as it is consistent that the desire is rational. And yet it is arbitrary in the sense that it might have been any other colour were it not for the cultural and perhaps physiological associations with the colour red.
But I don’t think you are using arbitrary in this way, you are right to use it in terms of inconsistency.
So if the amoralist cares about the welfare of his friends but not anyone else, there may be a consistent explanation for this. The amoralist may only care about the people who are loyal to him et al. If he doesn’t care about family member who are also loyal to him, just because he is related to them (and no other reason) then we can charge him with irrationality.
However an intelligent amoralist (a sociopath like Hannibal Lecter) may very well avoid these inconsistencies in his desires and beliefs. Certainly even the most moral people may have irrational desires in some aspect of their lives.
So if the amoralist is consistent in his application of a lack of empathy, (and perhaps his disregard for his future self) then how is his immorality irrational?
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