To the "Anonymous" wag who has already e-mailed me triumphantly to declare me exposed as a mystic because of a recent Futurological Brickbat -- to wit: "To profess the dream of making an intelligent robot is always to confess the nightmare that one imagines oneself already merely a mineral" -- you do realize (whoever "you" are... honestly, is it so terrifying to actually stand by any judgment or assertion at all, you endless parade of timorous anonymities and pseudonymities?), don't you, that many of us have managed to distinguish animal, vegetable, mineral, peer to peer, without recourse to the supernatural, why, for years and years now?
Updated: Both Singularitarian Robot Cultist Michael Anissimov and Techno-Immortalist Robot Cultist Giulio Prisco have jumped, utterly predictably, on this bandwagon on their blogs (find the quotes yourselves), implying that any anti-reductionist account of personhood such as my own must amount to a supernaturalist account.
This is, of course, perfectly absurd. It isn't supernaturalism to distinguish animal from vegetable from mineral, nor is it supernaturalist to recognize that actual intelligence is and always has been both biologically incarnated and socially expressed, nor is it supernaturalist to take seriously the is-ought distinction.
Quite apart from all that, I think it is precisely because imaginary artificial and actual organismic/social intelligence are distinct even to those who keep on expecting the former to arrive -- however endlessly deferred that arrival seems to be -- that the GOFAI dead-enders of cybernetic totalism and the sociopathic reductionists of triumphalist scientism who offer up their variously ringing declarations about sooper artificial intelligence think they are saying something interesting in the first place.
Even if the Robot Cultists keep failing to shepherd into actual existence the sooper AI they endlessly assure us is well and inevitably on the way, they certainly can manage, here and now, to denigrate the substance and significance of actually-existing actually-incarnated actually-historical intelligences among their actual peers (with whom they tend to dis-identify to enable identification with an idealized "post-human," after all). This demoralizing denigration of human intelligence is the actually-real impact of their discourse (certainly their fetishized sooper-robots have no comparable reality), and their eager embrace of that demoralization inspired my description of them as already brutalized into a mineral, meaningless self-image in which they would soak the world if they could.
Futurology, as I never tire of pointing out, is a funhouse mirror held up to the present from the vantage of parochial moralizing, it is not so much a matter of predictions about plural-presents-to-come (what the futurologists then myopically reduce to "The Future"), and so too the Robotic fetishes of the futurologists reflect their pathological preoccupations in the here and now, they fail utterly to pass muster as actual scientific hypotheses whatever the protestations to the contrary among the Robot Cultists themselves.
Updated Again: It's fairly flabbergasting (until you remember that these are Robot Cultists we are talking about here and hence one should possibly not expect too much in the way of sense from them), but so far the futurologists seem to be digging in their heels and simply insisting over and over again (not listening! not listening!) that my position amounts to supernaturalism somehow. Of what exactly does my supernaturalism consist? Honestly. My description of Robot Cultists as confessors to a pathologically reductionist self-image that is mineral in its meaninglessness is a fairly straightforward reminder of the is-ought distinction. No need for ghosts to grasp the distinction, guys. Giulio Prisco says I might not be mystical just for pointing out that all intelligence is and always has been biologically incarnated and socially expressed (I already knew the facts were on my side there, Giulio, thanks, guy), but that I am mystical if I say it always must be forever. But, of course, I don't need to make any such claim. To affirm or deny such a claim would be to talk nonsense as far as I can see. Again, my claim is always that AI enthusiasts are incoherent, not that they are "too optimistic" in their predictions or what have you. Any description of "intelligence" that is not incarnated and social can only be treated as a loose metaphorical utterance until there is some actual experience to the contrary on the basis of which to elaborate the concept -- to imagine a thing as something other than it is and then claim on the basis of the imaginary non-thing to have assumed a vantage from which to re-think the actual thing is completely nonsensical. I may be forced by ongoing technodevelopment to re-figure the language of fact (this happens all the time, obviously), but there is nothing to suggest that the futurologists' idealized outcomes will eventuate and so that we must re-figure the actual beforehand -- especially given that this re-figuration imposes actually palpable costs here and now in the denigration of actually incarnated actually socialized intelligence -- just because they Believe so very Faithfully themselves in "The Future" with which they happen parochially to identify at the expense of the present and their peers. You'll forgive me, but as usual, it looks to me to be the superlative futurologists who are behaving like Faithful would-be Priests, not me.
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4 comments:
Oh cmon, you can at least link to your opponents. They aren't Nazis or the like.
...implying that any anti-reductionist account of personhood such as my own must amount to a supernaturalist account.
You dismiss this thought but I think there are a very large number of people, most of them in fact, who cannot imagine models of personhood that do not fall into one of these buckets (hard reductionism or supernaturalism). Like you, I think, I prefer a naturalistic non-reductionist theory of personhood, but it is hard and there's no point pretending that such a stance should be obvious and only idiots would hold to something else.
The differences between animal and vegetable are not as fundamental as you might suppose.
Natural selection tells us that there must be common ancestors that represent intermediate steps between the species. The only reason we can catagorize life into different species is because 99% of lifeforms have become extinct and the fossil record is very much incomplete. If there were no gaps in the fossil record, or if all common ancestors were alive today, you would not be able to tell where plants end and animals begin. It would be a smooth continuum from one to the other.
As for the natural world and the artificial world, with particular emphasis on robotics, surely gaps in our knowledge provide the most reasonable explanation for obvious differences?
The assumption of robotics and AI is that lifeforms are a kind of machine. However, they are not like any machine we have manufactured so far. Organisms are harmonious systems of machines compared to which our mechanical marvels are crude and roughly-hewn minerals.
According to Hans Moravec, it was not until the 1990s that mobile robotics researchers had the computing power to build neural nets that approached the complexity of insect brains. The real mystery was not why such robots failed to act with all the general intelligence of mammals, but why anybody ever thought they could.
Surely, the most reasonable explanation for the missing intelligence of today’s robots, is that their brains still do not match the complexity of mamallian brains. The Blue Brain project aparrently has modelled one neocortical column, but a human neocortex has a million. If Dale’s brain were stripped down until only one cortical column remained, I doubt he would function like a healthy human adult- and I need posit no mysterious factor X to explain this loss of function.
If, when we finally have built artificial brains that match the complexity of mamallian ones, no intelligent behaviour arises, then we may ask ourselves if there is after all something that forever separates the technological from the biological. But until that day the fact that our artificial brains do not have sufficient complexity provides all the explanation you need for lack of general intelligence.
So, in the case of animal and vegetable the differences are an illusion brought about by gaps in the fossil record and extinction events among species. The difference between a robot and an animal are due to gaps in our understanding of complex systems. Nothing fundamental applies.
I think both Dale and the robot cultists are guilty of underestimating complexity. In Dale's case, he underestimates the complexity of tomorrow's machines. Robot Cultists underestimate the complexity of biology. I do not believe we will see humanlike behaviour in machines within 20 years, like some transhumanists do, but I see no real reason why that cannot be achieved eventually.
Mtraven: "Like you, I think, I prefer a naturalistic non-reductionist theory of personhood, but it is hard..."
If you say so. Clearly, I regard the point as sufficiently nonobvious that I do have actually to formulate the notion rather than simply assuming it, but it is awkward, I must say, to square the insistence that this idea is super duper hard with the insistence among the Robot Cultists that they are ze most brilliant soopergeniuses evah!
"Extropia": The differences between animal and vegetable are not as fundamental as you might suppose.
No doubt when nothing matters but spiritualized data-streams in virtual heaven differences between animals and vegetables and minerals seem petty indeed.
"Extropia": If Dale’s brain were stripped down until only one cortical column remained, I doubt he would function like a healthy human adult
Go ahead, indulge and enjoy your little sadistic fantasy, Robot Cultist...
"Extropia": I think both Dale and the robot cultists are guilty of underestimating complexity. In Dale's case, he underestimates the complexity of tomorrow's machines.
Ooh, how "even-handed"! The Robot Cultists underestimate biological complexity as it actually exists, but mean Dale in his critiques of Robot Cultism also underestimates the "complexity" of non-existing made-up bullshit technologies of the future that only the Robot Cultists themselves respect appropriately! See, it's exactly the same!
PS: "Extropia" if you want to position yourself as a reasonable middle-ground between mean anti-futurological Dale and Robot Cultists you might do well to conceal a bit better your own card-carrying membership in the Robot Cult. I mean, "Extropia"? Really? You know, as in Max More's libertopian transhumanist Robot Cult the Extropians, get it? Get it? And, by the way, non-Robot Cultists typically only quote Hans Moravec to provide examples of Robot Cult craziness (see Katherine Hayles). Keep up the good fight though -- you will no doubt be rewarded in the fullness of time in tech-heaven when the Robot God takes you up into Its loving chromium bosom.
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