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The following is taken from the preface of the above book:
“..a major point of this book is precisely that we, all of us, have made the world too much into a computer, and that this remaking of the world in the image of the computer started long before there were any electronic computers. Now that we have computers, it becomes somewhat easier to see this imaginative transformation we have worked on the world. Now we can use the computer itself–that is the idea of the computer—as a metaphor to help us to understand what we have done and are doing.”(Page IX)
The ancient Greeks and the enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant were concerned to point out a major difference in the kind of reasoning we use in instrumental contexts of activity involving tools and artifacts(techné), and the categorical form of reasoning we use in knowledge contexts(epistemé) whether that knowledge is practical/moral or theoretical.
For Aristotle there were 3 principles 4 causes in relation to 4 kinds of change in relation to the infinite continuum of the media of change(e.g. space, time, and matter), and our understanding of the world is mediated by three kinds of science( theoretical, practical and productive/techné). Techné, then is best explained in terms of the reasoning we find in the productive sciences where the major point of the activity is the creation of tools and objects that instrumentally contribute to the good-spirited flourishing life(eudaimonia) that was so important to Aristotle. The “good spirited” aspect of of this life, however, is best accounted for by the theoretical and practical reasoning we find in both Aristotle and Kant’s writings. The major categorical difference between productive reasoning and practical/moral/theoretical reasoning is that the former is exclusively focussed on the means one uses to bring about ends, rather than the ends-in themselves, which we human beings and all life forms(psuche) represent: the latter form of reasoning, i.e. reasoning about ends-in themselves, exclusively obey different principles(arché), and rely less on material and efficient causation for their explanation/justification and more on formal and final causation in such contexts. Final causation is a key here because it is teleological in the sense Kant described in his third critique, a form belonging to forms of life.
Turning to two modern Philosophers of the 20th century will further enlighten us about what Weizenbaum is referring to in his preface, namely the mentality of what Hannah Arendt called the “new men”, whose influence over our culture began with Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, and continued with Adam Smith and Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, the logical positivists, logical atomists, pragmatists and instrumentalists. The agenda of the “new men” was to neutralise the influence of Aristotle and Kant upon our thinking and replace it with a form of thinking that was anti-rationalist . A form of thinking that would restore the materialist and dualist controversies in a new form centring around the “new” Psychology that began in the 1870’s with the definition “the Science of Consciousness”. In Wittgenstein’s early work, for example, a logical solipsism is espoused which is abandoned later when Wittgenstein realises that there are fundamental conceptual confusions in much of psychology: confusions revolving around the role which forms of life and language play in the thinking and reasoning activities of the human being, whose embodiment is fundamentally different to the embodiment of artifacts such as computers.
Weizenbaum continues his introductory ideas with:
“We are all used to hearing that the computer is a powerful new instrument. But few people have any idea where the power of a computer comes from.”
The power of any artifact is a secondary power dependent upon the primary power of its creator, and this fact means that whilst the creators primary powers build upon an autonomy and freedom which the computer per definition can never possess, the category of most importance in the account we give of the computers “secondary powers” is one that necessarily places it in a material space-time continuum under the laws of cause-and effect, which mean that the machine is essentially a “reactive” entity, a cog in the chain of causes and effects in the space-time-matter continuum that is continually changing.
The “new men” of our “modern age” which began with Descartes have provided a foundation for not just confusion in the field of psychological reasoning but a more general kind of cultural confusion which is beginning to resemble the confusion we find in the minds of the mentally ill :
“We appear to have come to a time in which the ideas that there are differences between human beings and machines, that there are experiences that human beings can have but machines cannot, and that therefore(at least!) there are thoughts but not machines can have, we have come to a time in which the holding of such ideas is a lonely preoccupation, a business that tempts one to doubt of ones own sanity. In the book I wrote that the necessity to debate such ideas at all is as an index to the insanity of our time.”. The danger now is that the debate will stop–not because the absurdity of equating human beings with computers has finally been universally recognised, but because the voices defending human-centred positions are becoming ever fainter.”(PXIV)
The general cultural confusion of the new men referred to by Arendt, has infected our discourse to such an extent, that one today, more often than not, fails to note that an artifact is not a form of life, and therefore logically cannot be said to have the power of experiencing anything. Failure to experience anything, then, has logical consequences such as not being able to engage in any discourse related to experience, e.g. perceiving, feeling, thinking etc.. Another consequence is that one cannot legitimately engage in any reasoning about experience. This suggests that computers and AI cannot “mean what they say” when they appear to be having a conversation about experience, i.e. they literally do not know what they are talking about.
Weizenbaum also takes up the issue of the zombie-like experience that many are having in the playing of violent computer games. Experience becomes vicarious and achieved through a digital medium in which one can experience the “thrill of killing” without any of the real-world experiences and consequences. The Zombie, the author points out, is psychically numbed by the clinical distance there is between themselves and their “victims”. This is excellent training, it is argued , to detach what one is doing from the consequences of what one is doing. The rush to ensure that even 5 year olds are introduced to this “zombie experience”, is the rush, the author argues, to acquire an education in “violence without guilt”(XVII). Weizenbaum points out, in the context of this discussion, that one implication of the importance of working with models is that the model only contains what is essential for the purposes for which the model is being used. Computer models such as those we find in computer games, however, leave out almost everything that is essential to the real thing the model is modelling. This seriously truncates the learning-experience, a fact, the author claims, that is not obvious to many of those involved in the computer education we are receiving.
The picture that Weizenbaum paints is one of a world obsessed with techné without its normal conceptual connections to areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time), diké(justice–getting what one justly deserves) and epistemé( explanations and justifications that are in accordance with the principles(arché) of noncontradiction and sufficient reason). This is the world of the “new men” and the “age of discontentment” that has dawned upon us: a world without the sense of responsibility that normally follows from the life we have been leading for thousands of years before the industrial and technological revolutions that have relatively recently taken place. Any discussion of collective insanity ought to refer to Freud and his later cultural writings, e.g. “Civilisation and its Discontents”, in which Freud maintains that modern man no longer believes that all his work over the ages has been worth the effort. This essay was written in 1929 before any computers were being assembled and at least 12 years before the first electrical non mechanical digital machine was invented. The “spirit” of “techné” was, however, in the air ,and Europe was preparing for war and the “new men” had succeeded in repressing the “spirit” of ancient Greece and the enlightenment. In 1945 two weapons of mass destruction were to be dropped on civilian populations in accordance with the “new spirit” which had taken root in a soil that was, by this time, almost completely toxic. Hannah Arendt is also an important commentator on the political effects of the new spirit, namely the collapse of the political party system in Europe and their replacement by mass movements which could be easily influenced by “mass messaging” that appealed to feelings and emotions rather than to principles and reasoning. Tyrants used this to their advantage and mobilised masses to do terrible deeds. We ought also, to retain some political perspective, and remind ourselves that it was the so-called “democratic” USA which dropped the weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations in 1945. The action was approved of by the masses(Gallup poll 85% in favour in the US) indicating that “populism” and the elevation of instrumental calculation over moral judgement, in politics, was here to stay, irrespective of the political convictions of leaders. Weizenbaum points out that with the movement toward miniaturisation of chips, weapon accuracy could be substantially increased. The phenomenon of using cruise missiles to destroy civilian infrastructure and target hospitals, schools etc had not yet occurred at the time of the writing of Weizenbaum’s work but is now part of the current war-scape of our “modern” world.
The author also takes up the cultural influence of the mass viewing of television-content which takes as its model of knowledge, a truncated form of scientific calculative thinking that bares no resemblance to the more philosophical accounts of science we find in Aristotle and Kants writings. All other forms of so called “non-scientific knowledge” is delegitimated in favour of the science of the “new men”.
The most serious consequence of the domination of a limited conception of the law of cause and effect on the experiences of men, is that the agents autonomy, or freedom, is impeached in favour of a Hobbesian mechanical deterministic view of life. The new men, it must be noted, have succeeded in the installation of their world view: a world view in which freedom is devalued along with the value of areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time) and epistemé (the regulation of mans activity by principles(arche)) and diké(the justice of getting what one deserves). These terms literally have no meaning in the lives of the new men, and the beginning of this first surfaced in a “modern” form in the writings of Hobbes who saw in life(psuche) the mere mechanical movement of limbs. It was Hobbes, we ought to recall that used the model of the Leviathan(a sea monster with enormous power(and dangerous for human life)) to “picture” modern government. Psuche for Aristotle was a term covering all forms of life from the simplest plant life that possessed the powers of growing and reproduction, to animal forms which possess these powers in addition to the power of sensing and locomotion. Human forms possess all these powers in addition to the powers of discourse and reasoning, and the relation between these powers is such that they interpenetrate and produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Man is the best and the worst of animals, Aristotle claims, and he also claims that he is at his best if he is a member of good well run state which resembles more a , of course, friendly living form, rather than a monster. The zombie is a kind of human monster which denies the essential characteristic of life which is that once ilife has ceased to exist it is absolutely dead and so and cannot be reanimated. The zombie “form of life” is a figment of the imagination of the new men. Our conception of ourselves, it now seems, is left to images constructed by the imagination, rather than the complex conception produced via our theoretical, practical and productive sciences and Aristotelian metaphysics(first principles).
For Weizenbaum, the Hobbesian idea of a contract ensures that the freedom not to agree is substituted by a transactional process in which one freely agrees to abide by the terms of the contract. For him it is important that both the ideas of freedom and God are respected in this transaction. This idea of a social contract, however, may well exist between men but, as Hume pointed out has never existed between men and the states they are citizens of. The idea of ” a mans word is his bond” is eroded with the idea of a contract which is some kind of insurance policy against the possibility of someone promising to do something and then not keeping their promise. Now in Kantian ethics the proposition “Promises ought to be kept” is supported by the principle of the categorical imperative and it is of course no guarantee that everyone will in fact keep the promises they make. If they do not keep their promises, however, their honesty and agency is called into question by moral judgements that weighed heavily both in ancient Greek times and in Kantian times. Nowadays trusting each other is less prevalent, and we will believe that a third party will keep their promise only if we can prove to another third party that the promise was made. This proof, it is important to note, is only needed if the original moral system breaks down. So what happens when the whole moral system breaks down and we no longer trust one another because men no longer possess good wills? The only recourse left is the transactional contract and morality becomes a matter of good defined in terms of its consequences rather than the classical ideas of a good in itself defined in terms of areté and diké.
In the context of this discussion it is important to point out that AI in the form of Chat GPT does not believe that promises ought to be kept is a legitimate moral recommendation with a definite meaning. Chat claims that it has learned all sorts of things. but if learning is an experience, than the veracity of this claim must be called into question. One can of course redefine learning mechanically in the way some early neural scientists did when they claimed that “learning is the facilitation if neuronal pathways such that a type of experience is present that was not present before”(Starling). Note, however recourse to the term “experience”. This definition only makes sense if we are experiencing beings and understand what experience is. Both conditions are necessary because our form of consciousness is a self-conscious form of consciousness which in turn implies that our experiences are related to a self that can take these experiences as objects and reflect upon them in judgements such as “Promises ought to be kept”. This idea of “experience” also includes the ideas of both doing and undergoing as suggested by Dewey in his work “Art as experience”. There is much in the “language-games” used by chat robots that appears to make sense but on closer conceptual examination falls apart.
Weizenbaum’s trust in the idea of a contract is perhaps a consequence of his belief in what he calls “science” which, whilst not reducible to the kind of calculation he despises, is nevertheless an anti-rational position. He says, amongst other things:
“For the only certain knowledge science can give us is knowledge of the behaviour of formal systems, that is systems that are games invented by man himself and in which to assert truth is nothing more or less than to assert that, as in a chess game, a particular board position was arrived at by a sequence of legal moves.”(P.14)
Aristotle believed that “All men are mortal” is a theoretical knowledge-statement which we are absolutely certain of, not because of a relation to primitive elements of a formal system, but because we are rational animals capable of discourse. The kind of understanding we have in this case, could never be purely observational because observation is of particulars situated in a space-time-matter continuum, and being situated in a time span as being live at that time could never constitute immortality. Conceptual truths such as “All men are mortal”, are, then, true not in virtue of being related to any particular, but rather, only in virtue of being related to a class of particulars that are categorised by the understanding. The author continues:
“All empirical science is an elaborate structure built on piles that are anchored not on bedrock, as supposed, but on the shifting sand of fallible human judgement, conjecture and intuition….The man in the street surely believes such scientific facts to be well established, as well proven, as his own existence. His certitude is an illusion. Nor is the scientist himself immune to the same illusion. In his praxis he must, after all, suspend disbelief in order to do or think anything at all. He is rather like a theatregoer, who, in order to participate in and understand what is happening on the stage, must for a time pretend to himself that he is witnessing real events.”(P 14-15)
So if, on witnessing Othello strangling Desdemona, the scientific theatregoer rushes onto the stage to hinder this murder, what ought we to to say about such a sequence of events? Whatever we will say it will contain a judgement to the effect that the scientist was not aware that this is a “play” he is witnessing, composed not of real events but of artistically constituted imitations of events. This kind of absurd description abounds in all anti-rational accounts of science, whether they be logical positivist, logical atomist, naturalist or pragmatist. Not everything we know has to be proved or observed. I am not certain of my own existence because I have observed myself to exist in this space-time-matter continuum, nor have I in any other way “proved” my existence. I do know this to be the case , as Descartes suggested, through thought, and the existential argument for this is that I cannot doubt that I am thinking without thinking, and furthermore something must in some sense of existence “exist” in order to think, i.e. at the very least it must be a human form of life. For Aristotle, the soul is a principle whose essence is to be thought which is actualised in thinking but it is an embodied form of thinking that originates in a human body with human limbs, hands and organs which include a brain(whose function Aristotle may have misunderstood). Now Descartes was a rationalist, and the argument for our existence was a typical rational argument for existence but he was also a dualist without any argument for a reconciliation of his ontology of thought and existence ,and he was subsequently forced under argumentative pressure to retreat to a materialist position in which he claims that the mental and physical worlds meet in a particular place in the brain. The author then comes to an incredible conclusion:
“Gradually he(the scientist) becomes what he at first merely pretended to be: a true believer. I choose the word “argument” thoughtfully, for scientific demonstrations, even mathematical proofs, are fundamentally acts of persuasion…… But no merely logical argument, no matter how cogent or eloquent, can undo this reality: that science has become the sole legitimate form of understanding in the common wisdom.”(P 15-16)
This claim that argument is merely a rhetorical device to persuade, would ring false to Aristotelian philosophers who would not confuse the enthymemes of rhetoric with the logical reasoning that follows the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason in the domains of knowledge and action. Neither striving after the acquisition of theoretical conceptual knowledge nor any call to action is required in the aesthetic context of the play. There is certainly some relation to the idea of the Good and the Bad, e.g. tragedy is about good men interacting with bad men and diké( men getting what they deserve), but the issue is not to act but to learn something from what one is witnessing or experiencing.
Anti-rationalism, in other words confuses the different forms of reasoning in different universes of discourse. The different forms of epistemé(sciences) for Kant would be characterised in terms of different principles applying to different realms or domains of reality. Kant would have been happy with the term “moral science” to categorise his ethical reflections and would have seen a certain identity of procedure in the conclusions one reaches from both theoretical and practical premises. For him there would be at least two different kinds of “demonstrations” that move from the level of principles expressed in major premises(Promises ought to be kept, All men are mortal) to reality in the conclusion(e.g that one ought to act in a particular way, Socrates is mortal). This is the route of law in a context of explanation/justification : a route very different from the route of experience or learning in a context of exploration in which one might be moving toward an understanding of a concept or a judgement which is some form of generalisation of what we have experienced.
Weizenbaum does not tell us how we are certain of our own existence, so it is not clear how far his anti-rationalism extends. He does not, that is, declare the variables and the values of his variables as is the practice of computer programmers in the process of creating their programmes. The formal relation of variables to each other resembles very closely the relation of rules to the games they constitute. These games, to a greater or lesser extent, may also imitate the activities of our human life, may, that is, be aesthetic representations of aspects of our lives. Games require a work of creation by the imagination, insofar as their content is concerned, but it is the imitation of action/life that is the point of many computer games and the relations between the elements of the games are relations between cause and effect particularities, expressed by “if you do X then Y will happen”: hypothetical reasoning and consequences are the arena of the skill-learning and skill performances that occur. This is the arena of productive sciences for both Aristotle and Kant.