I am, periodically, going to put various quotations on this blog. They will be taken from my current reading. I shall not comment. The idea is that you should. Each one will be headline 'Discuss'. It is possible this will help me with a book I am writing and equally possible that it will not. It is important you do not know the subject of this book. Here is the first.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Discuss 1
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
The Royal Society preparing their christmas crackers already?
ReplyDeleteMarvin was bitterly disappointed to recieve his rejection letter for the post of Daily Mail Agony Aunt.
ReplyDeletewhy would regarding myself as a complex machine diminish my feelings of self-respect?
ReplyDeleteor is the word 'machine' meant in a derogatory way, with the antithesis being 'soul'
I would imagine that's what it's about, Worm. I tend to think that, on balance, there being no Ghost in the Machine shouldn't affect things too much.
ReplyDeleteAs to free will, would love to help you, Bryan, but it's just a dilly of a pickle. Every fibre of one's being rejects the idea that hard materialism rules out free will, but unfortunately it does seem to, and all the philosophical attempts so far to reconcile the two have been a bit lame. This is why it's important not to take philosophy too seriously.
You have a point Brit, but, in the end, hard materialism ends up eating itself, whereas free will doesn't.
ReplyDeleteAs to the 'machine'; since, by the very nature of it being a machine, it cannot be self-directed, but must be directed by something external to itself, how is it possible for it to have a 'self' to respect?
This is a good example of the kind of ex cathedra declaratory pronouncement a sage can get away with because it corresponds to what everybody very much wants to believe. That it doesn't hold up philosophically and indeed undercuts pretty much everything else the sage has ever said requires either sophisticated debate or uneducated simplicity to see, so as long as it is just thrown out to an audience of undergrads as the sage is half-way out the door, he is pretty safe.
ReplyDeleteHere is another gem in the same vein from Dawkins:
I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will. Indeed, I encourage people all the time to do it. Much of the message of my first book, "The Selfish Gene," was that we must understand what it means to be a gene machine, what it means to be programmed by genes, so that we are better equipped to escape, so that we are better equipped to use our big brains, use our conscience intelligence, to depart from the dictates of the selfish genes and to build for ourselves a new kind of life which as far as I am concerned the more un-Darwinian it is the better,...
It's a little like the Pope saying that just because one is a faithful Christian doesn't mean he can't have a varied and creative sex life with lots of partners. The only answers are to respond with a lengthy theological tome or just put on a bemused look and say "Okaaaaay..."
As the statement is made by Metal Mickey man Marvin Minsky it emanates from his world, dictated by his perspective, another example of theory at odds with practice, the statement is pointless.
ReplyDeleteWhy would a complex machine need to develop feelings of self-respect? Do machines feel just as insecure as we do?
ReplyDelete'Tis a great shame that Minsky failed to observe that materialist ontologies--if they ever made sense--were somewhat undermined (to put it mildly) by early 20th century developments in Physics.
ReplyDeleteI know you like Marilynne Robinson Bryan. From Facing Reality.
Yet we have put together among ourselves a rigidly simple account of life in the world, which we honor with the name Reality and which, we now assure one another, must be faced and accepted, even or especially at the cost of those very things which societies which we admire are believed by us to value, for example education, the arts, a humane standard of life for the whole of the community. Science fetches back from its explorations mystery upon mystery, yet somehow we fee increasingly sunk in the world of mere things, in a hard-edged reality that disallows imagination except to extract tribute from it, in portraits which assert its own power and ferocity, or interludes and recreations which concede with their triviality that only Reality matters. Our present model of the world is a fiction, based on notions of objectivity and of the character and implications of science which are a hundred years out of date. It is based on the flotsam and detritus and also the floor sweepings of all disciplines—psychology, penology, economics, history, all of them.
(My emphasis.) For those that would like Robinson's point expanded in detail I recommend Henry Stapp's Mindful Universe.
Hmmn, if I say I am a "complex machine" I am still looking at myself as a discrete entity - an ego - with a past, present and future. But supposing this is an illusion? MM may be taking a new angle, but it is an angle on the same old view of personality that's been with us for aeons, I'd have thought. I wonder whether it will continue to hold up. So much of our culture is based on it that changing it would change everything.
ReplyDeleteDo any other machines feel self-respect and an enhanced sense of responsibility? On a semantic level, isn't Minsky's trying to put a weight of meaning and connotation on 'machine' that the word can't bear?
ReplyDeleteWe're either exclusively machines, as we understand them, or exclusively capable of feeling self-respect and an enhanced sense of responsibility. The metaphor doesn't work, which makes me wonder whether the theory cloaked in the metaphor doesn't either.
Let's compare the statement with its obverse:
ReplyDelete"Just because we have souls and free will need not lead us to believe we're anything special or give us cause to feel responsible for anything we do."
Hmmm...
Chris - ok, science has moved on; but what has the new science offered to take the place of materialist ontologies? Mystery upon mystery is all very diverting, but I'm not keen on it as a personal philosophy.
ReplyDeleteIt is entirely possible that every action we take is the result of the interaction of every event since events began. Therefore no free will & no morality (& no quantum mechanics?).
ReplyDeleteTo invoke free will is to invoke a metaphysical entity. Which does not mean it doesn't exist.
"'Tis a great shame that Minsky failed to observe that materialist ontologies--if they ever made sense--were somewhat undermined (to put it mildly) by early 20th century developments in Physics."
ReplyDeleteGood heavens, physics has found some soul stuff and nobody told me!
As to the 'machine'; since, by the very nature of it being a machine, it cannot be self-directed, but must be directed by something external to itself, how is it possible for it to have a 'self' to respect?
ReplyDeleteI agree with Recusant.
Our present model of the world is a fiction, based on notions of objectivity and of the character and implications of science which are a hundred years out of date. (quoted by Chris Dornan)
Subject implies object Chris, they define each other. The world has common objectivity as much unique subjectivity. Interestingly this relates to the question further up about discontinuity. The objectivity is the continuity, and the subjectivity the discontinuity.
I think the problem lies in putting the two words "complex" and "machine" together.
ReplyDeleteI can happily agree that everything we learn about our complexity increases our self-respect and sense of responsibility.
But the metaphor of the "machine" - which as has been pointed out "cannot be self-directed, but must be directed by something external to itself" - cannot do other than remove any sense of responsibility. And without a sense of responsibility how can you have any self-respect?
If I regard myself as a complex machine, I have complex and varied capabilities.
ReplyDeleteIf I have complex and varied capabilities, then I have a wider variety of ways to respond to various situations. That is, I have more resources, and I know it, which is to say that I am resourceful and competent, moreso than if I was a simpler machine.
If I have this wider variety of ways to respond to various situations, I am equipped to be responsible. I am potentially more responsible.
However, if I am not equipped to be responsible, then I will not have a feeling of responsibility. That is, if I feel I cannot solve the problem of violence in, say, the Middle East, I will not feel responsible for it. However, if I am competent to do this, then this "should enhance" my "sense of responsibility."
If my sense of responsibility is enhanced, then so should my feelings of self-respect--assuming in this case that I settle the issue of violence in the Middle East as I am able to, and that I sense is my resposibility to.
Mr. Appleyard's "quotation" deleted my first few words, which are: "Chapter 9 will argue that ..." See my original statement at http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/Introduction.html
ReplyDeleteYou can find the text of "Chapter 9" at
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/eb9.html
I think it was rude to make my statement seem foolish by deleting the keywords that point to its context.
Hello, Marvin. I am completely baffled as to why you think this makes you look foolish. I thought it was a very important an challenging statement
ReplyDelete