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A descriptive and normative characterization of the Republican Party that admits of far too few exceptions

The GOP is the political party of imaginary if not delusionary grievances, of crass and clownish schtick, of denial and desperation, of repugnance and regression, of illusion and irrationality, of empty gestures and vain cynicism, of authoritarianism and aspirational fascism, of obscene wealth and amoral power, of sycophants and cults, of self-deception and phantasy, of white supremacy (and racism generally) and narcissistic privilege, of putatively Christian nationalism, a faux populism of bread and circuses that has failed to conceal, let alone contain, a degraded and debased political practice mired in a toxic dump of greed, corruption, and sleaze. Republicans effectively tolerate and thus provide a de facto endorsement of the epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings in this country. The Republican Party continues to peddle QAnon phantasies, continues to minimize the constitutional and democratic threats, dangers and deadly consequences of the Jan. 6^th insurrection, and continues its perfervid devotion to purely performative politics, pornographic political theater which routinely and shamelessly invokes the mind-numbing, soul-degrading, and polarizing rhetoric of culture wars to distract their constituents from the patently plain fact that they cannot govern, that they have no coherent or responsible political policies to proffer the voting public.

Are we, or might we become, artificial intelligences “living” in a virtual or artificial reality (a ‘simulation’)?

Are we, or might we become, artificial intelligences “living” in a virtual or artificial reality (a ‘simulation’)?

“There’s a new creation story going around. In the beginning, someone booted up a computer. Everything we see around us reflects states of that computer. We are artificial intelligences living in an artificial reality — a ‘simulation.’ It’s a fun idea, and one worth taking seriously, as people increasingly do. But we should very much hope that we’re not living in a simulation.”—Eric Schwitzgebel in an op-ed in the LA Times. (Schwitzgebel is a well-known philosopher at UC Riverside who has a blog titled The Splintered Mind, where this article is also found, with links and additional material.)

I don’t think “simulation” is a “fun idea” (outside of science fiction) if only because or especially in the light of the fact that far too many people today are liable to believe virtually any story or idea or scenario, no matter how implausible, divorced from reality, suffused with phantasy, what have you, that gains some traction on social and mass media (one can cite quite a number of examples on this score, much of it owing to QAnon (see here and here), but most recently, consider ‘birds aren’t real’). The notion that we are living in a “simulation” is nonsense if not phantasy or, less harshly perhaps, science fiction. To take it “seriously” accords it worthy of consideration in terms of possibility or probability, which is, I think, dangerous because not true (I cannot prove it to the satisfaction of some philosophers, any more than I can prove that there is, or is not, a God).

Not long ago there was a popular science article with the headline, “New Physics Experiment Indicates There’s No Objective Reality.” The notion of simulation or artificial reality is in the same ballpark, a least in spirit, although I doubt any philosophers of science have drawn the same conclusions that a few physicists and science journalists apparently did from the experiment discussed in the article. In our case, however, philosophers are entertaining hypotheses that legitimate the dreams and fantasies (and perhaps ‘phantasies’ in the pathological sense) of more than a few computer scientists. Perhaps we should extend “reality testing” beyond psychotherapeutic and psychiatric settings to the speculative musings of some scientists and philosophers:

“Reality testing is a concept initially devised by Sigmund Freud which is used by some therapists to assist clients in distinguishing their internal thoughts, feelings and ideas from the events, which are based within reality. In other words, it is the ability to see a situation for what it really is, rather than what one hopes or fears it might be. However the need for reality testing extends beyond a therapeutic setting and the need to appropriately distinguish our inner world from reality is something, which occurs in everyday life.”

However, something more like or closer to the notion of an ”artificial reality” might be said to exist or have some semblance of sense or coherence when we look, for example, at Advaita Vedānta philosophy, with its philosophical and religious ideas of fundamental ignorance (avidyā) and entanglement in māyā (illusion). However, our everyday reality must nonetheless be treated as “real” until such time on has attained the “higher truth”—the aim of jñāna-yoga—which is awareness/knowledge of (nirguna) Brahman. This appears to be a monistic philosophy, yet its monism is decidedly different from modern idealist and realist conceptions (wherein there is one kind of ‘something’ or stuff), for Brahman is (the ‘One without a second’), in the end (and beginning, as it were), beyond predication, beyond conceptualization (hence it is non-rational or supra-rational but not necessarily irrational). And while Advaita philosophers will, so to speak, talk about what Brahman is or is not (here we find rhetorical warrant by way of its role in spiritual motivation and the philosophical and religious milieu in which this tradition was engaged in arguments with other Indic philosophical schools, including other Vedantin ‘schools’), it is nonetheless dogmatically stated to be absolutely indescribable or “ineffable” (cf. the Daodejing, which says the Dao that can be talked about is not the true, or real, or everlasting Dao). This religious philosophy is perhaps best characterized as a “neutral” monism, or better, after Ram-Prasad, metaphysical non-realism, thus an Indic exemplification of apophatic mysticism. I won’t go into the complex details here, but an Advaitan would not, however, refer to the everyday reality we experience in daily life “artificial” or a “simulation,” as it remains real for us, at least until such time as one has the awareness of (nirguna) Brahman, which is not something experienced after death but in this very life. So for all intents and purposes, everyday reality is quite real for most of us, at least epistemically and practically speaking, for it is only illusory from the vantage point of those who’ve had Brahman realization, not unlike the Platonic philosopher who has had a vision of the Good and is compelled to return to the Cave which its denizens view as definitively real.

Another similar philosophical and religious notion is found in some traditions of Buddhism. In the Mahāyāna Buddhist schools, for example, “dependent origination” [(P.) paticca-samuppāda/(S.) pratītya-samutpāda] is characterized by “emptiness” (śūnyatā) meaning the lack of “inherent” existence or essential being (among other things). This emptiness is not “nothingness” but the real mode of being of things, as cause and effect, identity and difference, entity and non-entity function within a cohesive system or complex, interconnected world of dependent origination. As Thupten Jinpa says, dependent origination and emptiness might be thought of as two sides of the same coin. We might ask ourselves at this point how all of this relates to the possibility of nibbāna/nirvāna, defined as the subject’s experience of a liberated or unconditioned mind, the phenomenal character of which is characterized in terms of immeasurable peace and true happiness, “completely untainted by the presence or possibility of mental duhkhā/dukkhā.” A Zen Buddhist will proclaim that form is empty, that all phenomena in the world are illusory. On the other hand, over the centuries a prodigious amount of artwork has been created in association with Zen thought and practice, which one might characterize as, in part, or for metaphysical reasons, illusory, but its illusory nature is availing, serving the purposes of Zen spiritual training. Once more, the ethical and spiritual reasons for and consequences of these ideas is rather complicated, but in both Advaita Vedānta and some schools of Buddhism, the illusory nature of our experiences does not mean we are living in a computer-generated “artificial reality,” or a “simulation,” even if, reality has a “provisional” status when viewed in metaphysical terms within the liberated state of awareness designated as awareness of (nirguna) Brahman or nibbāna.

If you think the aforementioned comparisons from physics and Indian philosophy are a tad overdrawn or unnecessary by way of clarifying boundaries and concepts, practices and purposes, or viable hypotheses from fantasies and (more troubling) phantasies, consider the title of a recently published book: The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics All Agree We Are In a Video Game (Bayview Books, 2019).

Given the widespread dispositional tendency to self-deception, denial, wishful thinking (of a deleterious sort) and the corresponding subscription to illusions, myths, delusions, and phantasies that suggest evidence of mass psychoses or forms of shared mental illness (what Fromm memorably termed the ‘pathology of normalcy’), it strikes me as irresponsible for philosophers like Chalmers to accord plausibility to what is charitably or misleadingly termed an “hypothesis” or thought experiment:

“Although the standard argument for the simulation hypothesis traces back to a 2003 article from Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, 2022 is shaping up to be the year of the sim. In January, David Chalmers, one of the world’s most famous philosophers, published a defense of the simulation hypothesis in his widely discussed new book, Reality+[: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy (W.W. Norton & Co., 2022)] Essays in mainstream publications have declared that we could be living in virtual reality, and that tech efforts like Facebook’s quest to build out the metaverse will help prove that immersive simulated life is not just possible but likely — maybe even desirable.”

Ours is a generation quite familiar with and perhaps inordinately fond of such popular scientific fictions films as 2001: A Space Odyssey (in which ‘HAL is an artificial intelligence, a sentient, synthetic, life form’) and The Matrix (which ‘depicts a dystopian future in which humanity is unknowingly trapped inside a simulated reality, the Matrix, which intelligent machines have created to distract humans while using their bodies as an energy source’). In the latter, “a copy of Jean Baudrillard’s philosophical work Simulacra and Simulation [in French, 1981] … is visible on-screen as ‘the book used to conceal disks,’” although Baudrillard “said that The Matrix misunderstands and distorts his work.” So perhaps it should not surprise us that our scientists and philosophers are transforming if not transfiguring science fiction and fantasy into simulation hypotheses that include the possibility of “virtual reality” one day effacing the substantive metaphysical and ontological boundaries and differences with reality as we know (and have known it). This reminds one of how utopian imagination thought and imagination has often been misunderstood and misused as pointing to imminent historical possibilities or pictures of the future. That accounts in part for the “Liberal anti-utopianism” of such philosophical luminaries as Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, and Isaiah Berlin who came to “dismiss utopians or their sympathizers as foolhardy dreamers at best and murderous totalitarians at worst.” Hence we often find the term “utopian” used in a pejorative sense, despite the fact that this represents a tragic yet remediable misunderstanding of the moral, social, and political function of utopian thought and imagination.

Returning to Schwitzgebel:

“Scientists and philosophers have long argued that consciousness should eventually be possible in computer systems. With the right programming, computers could be functionally capable of independent thought and experience. They just have to process enough information in the right way, or have the right kind of self-representational systems that make them experience the world as something happening to them as individuals. In that case, the argument goes, advanced engineers should someday be able to create artificially intelligent, conscious entities: ‘sims’ living entirely in simulated environments. These engineers might create vastly many sims, for entertainment or science. And the universe might have far more of these sims than it does biologically embodied, or ‘real,’ people. If so, then we ourselves might well be among the sims.

In that case, the argument goes, advanced engineers should someday be able to create artificially intelligent, conscious entities: ‘sims’ living entirely in simulated environments. These engineers might create vastly many sims, for entertainment or science. And the universe might have far more of these sims than it does biologically embodied, or ‘real,’ people. If so, then we ourselves might well be among the sims.”

Poppycock! At least in reaction to the last sentence in each of these two paragraphs. This is literary phantasy or science fiction. I find the arguments here implausible for motley reasons, some of which are canvassed in my post on Turing’s AI philosophy (which was not static and not always pellucid, conceptually speaking). I well realize that some science fiction (much like some, or at least aspects of some utopias) has, over time, become reality, but to speak of “computers [that] could be functionally capable of independent thought and experience” is metaphysical, ontological, and psychological nonsense. It reveals a failure to understand just what thought and experience among human animals entails, what they mean, both conceptually and practically. It represents, in my view, a colossal failure to think long and hard about human nature, what makes for a human animal (here is where I find many of the books by Raymond Tallis to be indispensable). And it shows how much of what counts as “philosophy of mind” in contemporary philosophy, when not wholly reductionist (or ‘eliminativist’) is, consciously or not, a mere underlaborer for sullied sciences and technology enchanted by the Promethean promises of science fiction and phantasy.

If I understand him correctly, Schwitzgebel leaves open the possibility there may one day be “sophisticated simulations containing genuinely conscious artificial intelligences.” I believe that scenario to be impossible. A more sensible Schwitzgebel concludes his LA Times article (it is reprinted at his blog but with a postscript): “A large, stable planetary rock is a much more secure foundation for reality than bits of a computer program that can be deleted at a whim.”

Relevant Bibliographies

• Analogy and Metaphor
• The Emotions
• Ethical Perspectives on the Sciences and Technology
• Human Nature, Personhood, and Personal Identity
• Sullied (Natural and Social) Sciences
• Utopian Thought, Imagination, and Praxis

Relevant Notes

• On the distinction and differences between AI (‘artificial intelligence’) and human intelligence, judgment and the emotions
• Notes on Science and the Sciences
• Toward assessing some of the arguments of “AI’s first philosopher,” Alan Turing
• The “kindly illusions” of Yoga and utopian thought and imagination

This is also available for viewing or download on my Academia page as The Simulation Argument and Hypothesis in Philosophy.

Assessing some of the arguments of “AI’s first philosopher,” Alan Turing

Introduction

I address a few of the arguments of Turing out of respect for his intellectual brilliance, as conveyed in this introduction.

“Alan (Mathison) Turing (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. He is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.

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“Alan Turing did not fit easily with any of the intellectual movements of his time, aesthetic, technocratic or marxist. In the 1950s, commentators struggled to find discreet words to categorise him: as ‘a scientific Shelley,’ as possessing great ‘moral integrity.’ Until the 1970s, the reality of his life was unmentionable. He is still hard to place within twentieth-century thought. He exalted the science that according to existentialists had robbed life of meaning. The most original figure, the most insistent on personal freedom, he held originality and will to be susceptible to mechanisation. The mind of Alan Turing continues to be an enigma.

But it is an enigma to which the twenty-first century seems increasingly drawn. The year of his centenary, 2012, witnessed numerous conferences, publications, and cultural events in his honor. Some reasons for this explosion of interest are obvious. One is that the question of the power and limitations of computation now arises in virtually every sphere of human activity. Another is that issues of sexual orientation have taken on a new importance in modern democracies. More subtly, the interdisciplinary breadth of Turing's work is now better appreciated. A landmark of the centenary period was the publication of Alan Turing, his work and impact (eds. Cooper and van Leeuwen, 2013), which made available almost all aspects of Turing's scientific oeuvre, with a wealth of modern commentary. In this new climate, fresh attention has been paid to Turing's lesser-known work, and new light shed upon his achievements. He has emerged from obscurity to become one of the most intensely studied figures in modern science.”

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“Throughout his life, Alan Turing’s fearless approach to daunting problems helped him break new conceptual ground. From his time at Cambridge, when he published papers now recognised as the foundation of computer science, through his vital work at Bletchley Park cracking German codes – shortening the Second World War by years – to his exploration of the notion of artificial intelligence and his fascination with the application of mathematics to the biological world. At The [Alan Turing] Institute we aim to adopt a similarly ground-breaking, multi-faceted approach to our research. Despite being a singular genius, Turing was also a great collaborator, both with the hundreds of women and men at Bletchley Park, and throughout his career working with other mathematicians, engineers and scientists.

The biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges includes the following quote from Turing, which sums up the spirit in which the Institute operates: ‘The isolated man does not develop any intellectual power. It is necessary for him to be immersed in an environment of other[s]…. The search for new techniques must be regarded as carried out by the human community as a whole, rather than by individuals.’

Turing’s life was tragically affected by the societal norms of his time: despite his pivotal part in ensuring the safety of the nation and saving countless lives, his homosexuality resulted in him being defined as a security risk, and he was harassed by police surveillance up until his untimely death in 1954. Though we now live in a more progressive and open society, at the Institute we recognise the importance of actively ensuring anyone in ‘the human community’ can contribute effectively to changing the world through data science. We do this through our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion, demonstrated by events such as ‘Gamechangers for diversity in STEM.’

On Turing’s influence on the modern world of data science Vinton Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist for Google, says: ‘His practical realisations of computing engines shed bright light on the feasibility of purposeful computing and lit the way towards the computing rich environment we find in the 21st Century.’ Our programme in Data Science at Scale continues this legacy, identifying the ways in which computers and algorithms can be better designed to fulfil a huge range of purposes and tasks. And our Research Engineering team, which likes to think of itself as an echo of the Bletchley Park ‘Hut 8’ group led by Turing, helps the Institute develop practical data science tools.

The mathematical foundations strand of our Data-centric Engineering programme also recognises that delivering reliable and robust data science solutions requires rigorous theoretical research and practices. It’s a notion which aligns well with the ‘from first principles’ approach Turing often adopted in his work.

Turing’s revolutionary ideas in cryptography were developed in service of public safety and security, and the Institute’s programme in Defence and Security is continuing this purpose. For example, we have multiple projects looking at ways to store sensitive data, such as health records, in the cloud, in a way that not only allows the data to remain encrypted, but also makes them accessible to publicly beneficial research, without compromising anyone’s privacy.”

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I do not think that it is true or fair to say that “artificial intelligence” (hereafter, AI) replicates human cognitive abilities, although it may “replicate” in a very attenuated or simply analogical sense, one aspect or feature of one particular cognitive ability, formal logical reasoning, and even then, in as much as human cognitive abilities do not function in isolation, in other words, as they work more or less in tandem and within a larger cognitive (and affective, etc.) human context, the replication that takes place in this case is not in any way emulative of human intelligence as such. AI is not about emulating or instantiating (peculiarly) human intelligence, but rather a technological replication of aspects of formal logic that can be mathematized (such as algorithms), thus it is a mistake to describe the process here as one of “automated reasoning” (i.e., AI machines don’t ‘reason,’ they compute and/or process), if only because our best philosophical and psychological conceptions of rationality and reasoning cast a net—as the later Hilary Putnam often reminded us—far wider than anything that can, in fact or principle, be scientized, logicized, or mathematized (i.e., formalized).

Moreover, AI only occurs as the result of the (creative, collaborative, managerial …) work of human designers, programmers, and so on, meaning that it does not in any real sense add up to the construction of “autonomous” (as that predicate is used in moral philosophy and moral psychology) machines or robots, although perhaps we could view this as a stipulative description or metaphor, albeit one still parasitic (and to that extent misleading) on conceptions of human autonomy. And insofar as a replication is in reference to a copy, in this case the copy is not an exact replica of the original. We should therefore be critically attentive to the metaphors and analogies (but especially the former) used in discussions of AI: “learning,” “representation,” “intelligence” (the adjective ‘artificial’ thus deserving more descriptive and normative semantic power), “autonomous,” “mind,” “brain,” and so forth; these often serve, even if unintentionally, to blur distinctions and boundaries, muddle our thinking, create conceptual confusion, obscure reality, and evade the truth. Often extravagant claims are made (by writers in popular science, scientists themselves, mass media ‘experts’ and pundits, philosophers, corporate spokespersons or executives, venture capital and capital investors generally, and so forth) to the effect that AI computers or machines possess powers uncannily “like us,” that is, they function in ways that, heretofore at least, were demonstrably distinctive of human (and sometimes simply animal) powers and capacities, the prerogative, as it were, and for better and worse, of human beings, of persons, of personal normative agency.

Recent attempts to articulate something called “algorithmic accountability,” meaning a concern motivated by the recognition that data selection and (so to speak) algorithmic processing often encode “politics,” psychological biases or prejudices, or stereotypical judgments, are important, but attributions of accountability and responsibility, be they individual or shared (in this case, almost invariably the latter), can only be human, not “algorithmic” in the first instance, hence that notion lacks any meaningful moral or legal sense unless it is a shorthand reference to the human beings responsible for producing or programming the algorithms in the first place.

A fair amount of the philosophical, legal, and scientific (including computer science) literature—both its questions and propositions—on AI (‘artificial intelligence’), including robots, “autonomous artificial agents, and “smart machines,” is replete with implausible presuppositions and assumptions, as well as question-begging premises such the arguments can be characterized by such terms as implausibility, incoherence, and even “nonsense” (or failure to ‘make sense’). In short, the conceptual claims upon which its statements and premises depend, that which is at the very heart of its arguments, often make no sense, that is to say, they “fail to express something meaningful.”

Sometimes even the very title of a book will alert us to such nonsense, as in the case of a volume edited by Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen, Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong (Oxford University Press, 2009). The book title begs the question, first with the predicate “moral,” and correlatively, with the phrase, “teaching robots right from wrong,” which depends upon concepts heretofore never applied outside human animals  or persons (we can speak of ‘teaching’ at least some kinds of animals, but it makes no sense to speak of teaching them ‘right from wrong’), and thus it is eminently arguable as to whether or not we can truly “teach” robots anything, let alone a basic moral orientations, in the way, say, that we teach our children, our students, or each other, whether in informal or formal settings. The novelty of the claim, as such, is not what is at issue, although radical and unprecedented manner in which it employs concepts and words should provoke presumptive doubts as to whether or not our authors have a clear and plausible picture of what it means for “us” to “be moral,” what it typically means for us to teach someone “right from wrong,” or how someone learns this fundamental moral distinction. We might employ such words in a stipulative or even theoretical sense, for specific and thus very limited purposes that are parasitic on conventional or lexical meaning(s), or perhaps simply analogical or metaphorical at bottom, but even in those cases, one risks misleading others by implying or evoking eminently questionable or arguable presuppositions or assumptions that make, in the end, for more or less conceptual confusion if not implausibility.

According to our editors, respectively a consultant and writer affiliated with Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and a Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and of Cognitive Science, “today’s [computer] systems are approaching a level of complexity … that requires the systems to make moral decisions—to be programmed with ‘ethical subroutines’ to borrow a phrase from Star Trek” (the blurring of the lines between contemporary science and science fiction, or the belief that much that was once science fiction on this score is no longer fiction but the very marrow of science itself, is commonplace). This argument depends, I would argue, on a rather implausible model of what it means for us to make “moral decisions,” as well as on an incoherent or question-begging application of the predicate “ethical.” Wallach and Allen open the Introduction with the breathless statement that scientists at the Affective Computing Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) “are designing computers that can read human emotions,” as if this is a foregone conclusion awaiting technical development or completion. Human beings are not always adept at reading emotions insofar as we can hide them or simply “fake it,” as it were. In any case, as I will later argue, a machine cannot understand what constitutes a human emotion. For now, an assertion will have to suffice: The expression of emotions in persons is in fact an incredibly complex experience, involving both outward and inner dimensions (some of which are cognitive), biographical history, relational contexts and so forth, all of which are part, in principle or theory, of an organic whole, that is, the person. In the words of P.M.S. Hacker,

“Emotions and moods are the pulse of the human spirit. They are both determinants and expressions of our temperament and character. They are tokens of our engagement with the world and with our fellow human beings. [….] [T]he emotions are also perspicuously connected with what it, or is thought to be, good and bad. Our emotional pronenesses and liabilities are partly constitutive of our temperament and personality. Our ability to control our emotions, to keep their manifestations and their motivating force within the bounds of reason, is constitutive of our character as moral agents. So the investigation of the emotions is a fruitful prolegomenon to the philosophical study of morality. It provides a point of access to the elucidation of right and wrong, good and evil, virtue and vice, that skirts the morass of deontological and consequentialist approaches to ethics without neglecting the roles of duties and obligations, or the role of the consequences of our actions in our practical reasoning.”

Last year I argued these points about the putative possibility of computers reading emotions in further detail but as this post is long enough, I will leave it at that and move on to other things.

Consider these respective definitions of “learning” and “pedagogy:”

(i) “Learning is the process [the human experience] of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences.”

(ii) “Pedagogy, most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political and psychological development of learners.”

Assuming the above definitions and characterizations are roughly—or in the main—correct and true, what does it mean to say that machines are capable of “learning?” How do machines learn? In what ways is that the same as, resemble, or mimic human learning (I’m leaving out nonhuman animals for now)?

When Alan Turing said “The whole thinking process is still rather mysterious to us, but I believe that the attempt to make a thinking machine will help us greatly in finding out how we think ourselves,” it is not clear precisely what he meant, but one thing we can say at this point, is that the development of “artificial intelligence” (AI) has quickened our appreciation of how much thinking, intelligence, and learning among human beings is radically different than what we observe or have achieved with AI in computers and robots. Indeed, whatever “learning” takes place with computers is wholly dependent in the first instance on computer programmers, and the so-called learning programs they develop are not at all similar to the way we learn (which, at bottom, is based on experience, on consciousness, and a mind, none of which are properties of a computer). Consider, if you will, this story from an article by the philosopher Sebastian Sunday Grève in Aeon, “AI’s First Philosopher,” which motivated me to address a few of Turing’s more philosophical ideas and arguments he shared and summarized:

“Due to his true scientific interests in the development of computing technology, Turing had quickly become frustrated by the ongoing engineering work at the National Physical Laboratory, which was not only slow due to poor organisation but also vastly less ambitious in terms of speed and storage capacity than he wanted it to be. In mid-1947, he requested a 12-month leave of absence. The laboratory’s director, Charles Darwin (grandson of the Charles Darwin), supported this, and the request was granted. In a letter from July that year, Darwin described Turing’s reasons as follows:

‘He wants to extend his work on the machine still further towards the biological side. I can best describe it by saying that hitherto the machine has been planned for work equivalent to that of the lower parts of the brain, and he wants to see how much a machine can do for the higher ones; for example, could a machine be made that could learn by experience?’

While provocative, the question trades on conceptual confusion or ignorance about the nature of human experience: simply put, machines cannot and never will have experiences. That is, if you will, a metaphysical or ontological fact (and Turing deliberately if unsuccessfully avoided explicitly addressing such topics).

In a 1948 paper by Turing that received widespread attention only much later, he proclaims that “analogy with the human brain is used as a guiding principle.” This prescription was taken to heart within the computers sciences and the field of AI, as analogies, direct and indirect, arising or derived from connectionist (neural networks, etc.) approaches to AI (neural networks, have been combined with earlier and now more elaborate or sophisticated deductive logical forms mathematical algorithms in the field. One ironic consequence of this approach is that while a model of the human brain (in both an analogical and metaphorical sense) was to be a “guiding principle” for AI research, what became commonplace in such fields as psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy was talk and theoretical models that speak of the mind or the brain as like a—or even some sort of—computer, effectively reversing the relevant similarities and correspondences! In a later lecture Turing recognizes and effectively endorses this new and radically reductionist picture or model:

“If any machine can appropriately be described as a brain, then any digital computer can be so described … If it is accepted that real brains … are a sort of machine it will follow that our digital computer, suitably programmed, will behave like a brain.”

Be careful, “if…” does a lot of work here. Are “real brains” (let alone minds, which are not brains), in his words, “a sort of machine?” Yet Turing has a tendency to later qualify or deflate his more extravagant hopes and dreams, as evidenced in the following:

“‘The fact is,’ he went on to explain, ‘that we know very little about it [how to program a machine to behave like a brain], and very little research has yet been done.’ He adds: ‘I will only say this: that I believe the process should bear a close relation [to] that of teaching.’”

And now we come back to the parts played by learning and pedagogy among human beings, in which case the field of AI is not involved in practices that clearly involve a “relation to teaching,” let alone a “close relation.”

Here is where Grève’s article is revealing:

“… [A] fresh look at the 1950 paper shows that Turing’s aim clearly went beyond merely defining thinking (or intelligence) – contrary to the way in which philosophers such as Searle have tended to read him – or merely operationalising the concept, as computer scientists have often understood him. In particular, contra Searle and his ilk, Turing was clearly aware that a machine’s doing well in the imitation game is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criterion for thinking or intelligence. This is how he explains the similar test that he presents in the radio discussion:

‘You might call it a test to see whether the machine thinks, but it would be better to avoid begging the question, and say that the machines that pass are (let’s say) ‘Grade A’ machines … My suggestion is just that this is the question we should discuss. It’s not the same as ‘Do machines think,’ but it seems near enough for our present purpose, and raises much the same difficulties.’

This passage, along with Turing’s other writings and public speeches on the philosophy of AI (including all those described above), has received little attention. However, taken together, these writings provide a clear picture of what his primary goal was in formulating the imitation game. For instance, they show that, from 1947 onwards (and perhaps earlier), in pursuit of the same general goal, Turing in fact proposed not one but many tests for comparing humans and machines. These tests concerned learning, thinking and intelligence, and could be applied to various smaller and bigger tasks, including simple problem-solving, games such as chess and Go, as well as general conversation. But his primary goal was never merely to define or operationalise any of these things. Rather, it was always more fundamental and progressive in nature: namely, to prepare the conceptual ground, carefully and rigorously in the manner of the mathematical philosopher that he was, on which future computing technology could be successfully conceived, first by scientists and engineers, and later by policymakers and society at large.

It is widely overlooked that perhaps the most important forerunner of the imitation game is found in the short final section of Turing’s long-unpublished AI research paper of 1948, under the heading ‘Intelligence as an Emotional Concept.’ This section makes it quite obvious that the central purpose of introducing a test such as the imitation game is to clear away misunderstandings that our ordinary concepts and the ordinary use we make of them are otherwise likely to produce. As Turing explains:

‘The extent to which we regard something as behaving in an intelligent manner is determined as much by our own state of mind and training as by the properties of the object under consideration. If we are able to explain and predict its behaviour or if there seems to be little underlying plan, we have little temptation to imagine intelligence.’

We want our scientific judgment as to whether something is intelligent or not to be objective, at least to the extent that our judgment will not depend on our own state of mind; for instance, on whether we are able to explain the relevant behaviour or whether we perhaps fear the possibility of intelligence in a given case. For this reason – as he also explained in each of the three radio broadcasts and in his 1950 paper – Turing proposed ways of eliminating the emotional components of our ordinary concepts. In the 1948 paper, he wrote:

‘It is possible to do a little experiment on these lines, even at the present stage of knowledge. It is not difficult to devise a paper machine [i.e., a program written on paper] which will play a not very bad game of chess. Now get three men as subjects for the experiment A, B, C. A and C are to be rather poor chess players, B is the operator who works the paper machine. (In order that he should be able to work it fairly fast it is advisable that he be both mathematician and chess player.) Two rooms are used with some arrangement for communicating moves, and a game is played between C and either A or the paper machine. C may find it quite difficult to tell which he is playing.’

It is true that, in addition to his conceptual work, Turing advanced numerous philosophical arguments to defend the possibility of machine intelligence, anticipating – and, arguably, refuting – all of the most influential objections (from the Lucas-Penrose argument to Hubert Dreyfus to consciousness). But that is markedly different from providing metaphysical arguments in favour of the existence of machine intelligence, which Turing emphatically refused to do.”

So, while it is undeniable that “Turing advanced numerous philosophical arguments to defend the possibility of machine intelligence,” those arguments must be assessed with plausible if not sound and persuasive arguments explaining just what constitutes human intelligence, arguments which are found in the literature, thus I am confident that it’s been decisively demonstrated that whatever “machine intelligence” is, it is in many relevant respects quite different from human intelligence, even if the latter often, in our world, draws upon the former, recalling that the former, in the first and last instance, is in fact wholly dependent on the latter.

Finally, Grève writes that “Turing advanced numerous philosophical arguments to defend the possibility of machine intelligence, anticipating – and, arguably, refuting – all of the most influential objections.” I doubt it is even “arguable” (which does not rule out fresh arguments) indeed, I don’t think it is true that the most influential objections have been refuted, for those objections and corresponding arguments rely on conceptions of intelligence that radically differ from those used by Dreyfus, Descombes, Hacker, Bennett, Tallis, et al. From my vantage point, Turing at times is writing science fiction or speculative philosophy, which of course he was free to do, but too many intellectual fields related to AI (e.g., cognitive science and psychology, the neuroscience, mathematics, and philosophy), have exploited if not manipulated these facets of his work on the order of utopian blueprints for research programs that often detract from if not avoid more modest uses of AI properly cabined by fundamental ethical and moral principles (found largely outside computer science and the sciences more generally) as well as the sundry constraints (political, socio-economic, environmental, etc.) that arise from our deep and abiding concern with human welfare, well-being and flourishing within the parameters framed by conceptions of human dignity and human rights.

Here is a list of titles (far from exhaustive and perhaps a bit idiosyncratic) I think can help us properly assess some of the statements and arguments (including presuppositions and assumptions) made by Turing about AI, as well as, and perhaps more importantly or urgently, updated versions  of same made by contemporary enthusiasts of AI and robotics, the latter prone to capitalist technophilia and unabashed indulgence in scientific phantasies in the name of Promethean-like promises of civilizational progress that renders modest the optimism of the European Enlightenment:

• Bennett, M.R. and P.M.S. Hacker. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Blackwell, 2003).

• Bennett, Maxwell, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle, and Daniel Robinson. Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language (Columbia University Press, 2007). (I favor the arguments of Bennett, Hacker, and Robinson over Dennett and Searle)
• Brakel, Linda A.W. Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and the A-Rational Mind (Oxford University Press, 2009).
• Brakel, Linda A.W. Unconscious Knowing and Other Essays in Psycho-Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2010).

• Cassam, Quassim, ed. Self-Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 1994).

• Descombes, Vincent (Stephen Adam Schwartz, tr.) The Mind’s Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism (Princeton University Press, 2001).
• Dilman, Ilham. Freud and Human Nature (Basil Blackwell, 1983).
• Dilman, Ilham. Freud and the Mind (Basil Blackwell, 1984).
• Dilman, Ilham. Freud: Insight and Change (Basil Blackwell, 1988).
• Dilman, Ilham. Raskolnikov’s Rebirth: Psychology and the Understanding of Good and Evil (Open Court, 2000).
• Dreyfus, Hubert L. What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, revised ed., 1992 [1979]).
• Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Stuart E. Dreyfus. Mind over Machine (Free Press, 1986).

• Elster, Jon, ed., Multiple Selves (Cambridge University Press, 1986).

• Finkelstein, David H. Expression and the Inner. (Harvard University Press, 2003).

• Ganeri, Jonardon. The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance (Oxford University Press, 2012).

• Gillett, Grant. Subjectivity and Being Somebody: Human Identity and Neuroethics (Imprint Academic, 2008).
• Gillett, Grant. The Mind and Its Discontents (Oxford University Press, 2^nd ed., 2009).
• Hacker, P.M.S. Human Nature: The Categorial Framework (Blackwell, 2007).
• Hacker, P.M.S. The Intellectual Powers: A Study of Human Nature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

• Hacker, P.M.S. The Passions: A Study of Human Nature (John Wiley & Sons, 2018).
• Hacker, P.M.S. The Moral Powers: A Study of Human Nature ((John Wiley & Sons, 2021).

• Hodgson, David. The Mind Matters: Consciousness and Choice in a Quantum World (Oxford University Press, 1991).
• Horst, Steven. Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science (Oxford University Press, 2007).
• Hutto, Daniel D. The Presence of Mind (John Benjamins, 1999).
• Hutto, Daniel D. Beyond Physicalism (John Benjamins, 2000).
• Hutto, Daniel D. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding (MIT Press, 2008).
• Koch, Christof. The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed (MIT Press, 2019).
• Laden, Anthony Simon. Reasoning: A Social Picture (Oxford University Press, 2014).
• Larson, Erik J. The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021).
• Lear, Jonathan. Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990).
• Lear, Jonathan. Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Harvard University Press, 1998).
• Lear, Jonathan. Wisdom Won from Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Harvard University Press, 2017).

• Midgley, Mary. Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Routledge, revised ed., 1995).

• Pardo, Michael S. and Dennis Patterson. Minds, Brains, and Law: The Conceptual Foundations of Law and Neuroscience (Oxford University Press, 2013).

• Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, with corrections, 1987).

• Patterson, Dennis and Michael S. Pardo, eds. Philosophical Foundations of Law and Neuroscience (Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge University Press, 1981).
• Putnam, Hilary. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Harvard University Press, 2002).
• Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (Beacon Press, 1988).

• Smith, Christian. What Is a Person? (University of Chicago Press, 2010).
• Tallis, Raymond. The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness (St. Martin’s Press, 1999 ed.).
• Tallis, Raymond. I Am: An Inquiry into First-Person Being (Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
• Tallis, Raymond. The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth (Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
• Tallis, Raymond. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Acumen, 2011).
• Tallis, Raymond. Seeing Ourselves: Reclaiming Humanity from God and Science (Agenda Publishing, 2020).
• Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (MIT Press, 2005 ed. [1^st ed., 1984]).
• Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2011).
• Velleman, J. David. Self to Self: Selected Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
• Velleman, J. David. How We Get Along (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
• Wollheim, Richard. The Thread of Life (Harvard University Press, 1984).
• Wollheim, Richard. The Mind and Its Depths (Harvard University Press, 1993).

Relevant Bibliographies and other material:

• Analogy and Metaphor
• The Emotions
• Ethical Perspectives on Science and Technology
• Human Nature, Personhood, and Personal Identity
• Notes on Science and the Sciences
• Sullied Sciences

Sidney Morgenbesser: a philosophical practitioner of “street medicine”

Morgenbesser in response to B.F. Skinner: “Are you telling me it’s wrong to anthropomorphize people?”

During campus protests of the 1960s, Sidney Morgenbesser was hit on the head by police. When asked whether he had been treated unfairly or unjustly, he responded that it was ‘unjust, but not unfair. It was unjust because they hit me over the head, but not unfair because they hit everyone else over the head.’

When asked his opinion of pragmatism, Morgenbesser replied, ‘It’s all very well in theory but it doesn’t work in practice.’

What does this fairly wide array of well-known philosophers (save perhaps Rosen): Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Raymond Geuss, Alvin Goldman, Daniel M. Hausman, Robert Nozick, Gideon Rosen, Naomi Zack, and Michael Stocker [apologies to those who might also have been included in this list], have in common?

I was startled to learn that they were all students of the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser (September 22, 1921 – August 1, 2004), who seems to have exemplified what it means to be both a Socratic gadfly and a Socratic midwife, although The New York Times Magazine dubbed him the “Sidewalk Socrates” (cf. Socrates in the agora). Inspired by and synthesizing these characterizations, I’m inclined to believe his pedagogical methods were maieutic, therapeutic, and dialectic, incarnating the philosophically metaphorical equivalent of “street medicine.” Morgenbesser was a Jewish American philosopher (as Geuss notes, ‘Sidney had had rabbinical training at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and had one time been attracted by a movement called ‘Reconstructionist Judaism’….) and professor at Columbia University who “wrote little but is remembered by many for his philosophical witticisms … and humor.” His “areas of expertise included the philosophy of social science, political philosophy, epistemology, and the history of American pragmatism,” co-founding “the Society for Philosophy and Public Affairs [the journal of which is Philosophy & Public Affairs] along with G.A. Cohen, Thomas Nagel and others.”

While recognizing the name but knowing next to nothing about him, I looked up information on Morgenbesser after reading Raymond Geuss’s discussion of his philosophical ideas (‘a great admirer of the pragmatism of John Dewey’) and the profound influence it appears to have had on Geuss himself as revealed in his book, Who Needs a World View? (Harvard University Press, 2020), even though, as he writes—when Geuss was no longer a student but now a colleague—“Sidney and I eventually had a terminal falling out.”

The above encomia were reinforced when I read in the Preface to Arthur C. Danto’s Narration and Knowledge (Columbia University Press, 1985 [revised ed. of Analytical Philosophy of History, 1968]) that Morgenbesser was a “close friend and colleague” of Danto whom he describes as “a man of warmth, wit, and extraordinary philosophical acuity.” Furthermore, “His own submission to the highest standards of philosophical integrity stands as a kind of conscience upon all who know him.” Elsewhere, in a memorial notice on Morgebesser’s death, Danto writes he “heard secondhand that someone said that while I did philosophy, Sidney lived philosophy.”

This led to that: Ariadne’s Thread or a trail of breadcrumbs?

Adolph Gottlieb, Phoenix Burst, 1973

The other day I learned of a new and intriguing entry in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), “Arabic and Islamic Philosophy of Mathematics.” Although mathematics is not my cup of tea, mainly because I’m not very good at it (I lost interest at some point during high school), I was still able to follow a fair amount of the discussion. In any case, I was delighted to simply see such an entry, having long thought that Arabic and Islamic philosophy is not sufficiently well-known let alone appreciated among professional philosophers in the West. I looked up the author of the entry, one Mohammad Saleh Zarepour, and discovered he has a broad background encompassing both philosophy and “Theology and Religious Studies,” hence his corresponding wide range of research interests, which include “medieval Islamic philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of logic.” Still exploring, I clicked on his Publications page and came across an open access article that immediately got my attention, “Islamic Problems and Perspectives in Philosophy of Religion.” For now I merely want to comment on two propositions: the first sentence of the article’s abstract, which is (i) in what follows, as well as a second proposition (ii) found on the page that contains the aforementioned article in conjunction with others as part of an effort to attract “the attention of contemporary philosophers of religion to Islam and the Islamic tradition as a rich source … worth considering [for] philosophical problems and approaches.” The papers selected are said to be “a collection of [the] best ever papers about Islam published in [the journal] Religious Studies.”

(i) “Contemporary philosophy of religion is excessively Christianity-oriented.” (from the abstract of one of the papers here)

(ii) “Islam and the Islamic tradition have been largely underrepresented in contemporary philosophy of religion.”

To the extent that (i) may be true, it is deeply troubling and inexcusable. However, there is in fact much philosophy of religion that is influenced by topics that arise in Indian and Chinese worldviews, and this goes back to my time in graduate school in the late 1980s (and teachers like Ninian Smart, Gerald J. Larson, Raimundo Panikkar, Herbert Fingarette, Nandini Iyer, among others). One can get an ample taste of this at two blogs: The Indian Philosophy Blog, and Warp, Weft, and Way, a Chinese (and comparative) philosophy blog. Nonetheless, I think (ii) is in fact generally true, thus “Islamic problems and perspectives” have indeed been comparatively neglected, apart from a few notable exceptions, such as the work of Oliver Leaman (and a few of our authors here). One still comes across introductory and other textbooks in the philosophy of religion that are either biased in favor of Christian themes and topics, or at least theistic in orientation (while excluding non-Abrahamic theistic traditions). 

One antidote to this state of affairs exists with the emergence and consolidation of the field of “Comparative Philosophy,” which I view as a big tent capable of embracing philosophical material that is both religious and non-religious. Conceived in this way, I think it should subsume and thus eventually replace “Philosophy of Religion” as such. One reason to bring the religious and non-religious material together has to do with topics that are common to both domains, such as metaphysical, moral and ethical questions, as well as specific subjects, like personal identity, moral psychology, philosophy of mind and consciousness, human nature, values, truth, practical reasoning, art and aesthetics, and so forth and so on. Something like this was proposed over 25 years ago by Ninian Smart when he suggested in several books using the term “worldviews” to level the playing field as it were, in which case, Buddhism, scientific humanism, Existentialism, Personalism, Marxism, and Islam, for example, are all studied in the same department, in other words, it does not matter if a worldview is religious or not, or if a particular intellectual or philosopher is secular or religious, thus Mao and Ramakrishna, Marx and Tagore, Wittgenstein and the worldview of the Masai, all help us transcend the “false division between religion and philosophy” which has resulted in an “irrational [academic] division of the study of worldviews” (and, I would add, of ideologies and lifeworlds, the latter being the individual person’s body of values and beliefs as these are derived—accurately or not, from one or more of these).

We might be able to call upon a theory of truth and corresponding perspectival relativism (which does not mean ‘anything goes’) and thus pluralism by way of providing or at least attempting a plausible ontological or metaphysical and epistemic warrant for this field of Comparative Philosophy (or ‘Worldviews’). There might, one imagines, be different approaches to this endeavor, and I happen to favor one that relies in the main on works by such philosophers as Hector-Neri Castañeda, Michael P. Lynch, Nicholas Rescher, B.K. Matilal, and Hilary Putnam, as well as some ideas found in Jain and perhaps Buddhist doctrines. Of course we need not wait for such a warrant to be formulated or garner widespread support to embark on this particular pedagogical reform, but at the very least, as teachers or philosophers, we should assume that no one worldview can make a claim to absolute truth, that any worldview has, so to speak, a monopoly on truth, and thus all worldviews deserve a hearing, a forum, that their claims and views might be contested or debated or evaluated from positions outside that worldview. In brief, no one worldview or ideology is privileged over others, even if our descriptive, analytical and evaluative tasks are likely never to be completely impartial, wholly objective, free of all bias; and yet we should at least aspire to impartiality and objectivity, rely on reason and rationality and reasonableness, all the while remaining true to our ethical sensibilities and a moral compass.

This does not preclude us from cleaving to or identifying with or demonstrating fidelity to one particular worldview, or our fashioning of an idiosyncratic worldview or lifeworld (the latter being uniquely yours), one that might be far from systematic like “official” worldviews propounded by authorities of one kind or another in a particular tradition or school of thought. I would argue that empirically speaking, all individual worldviews depart in all manner of ways and in varying degrees from such “official” or authoritative worldviews, a fact which is sustained in the first instance when we inquire into individual lifeworlds. And while the individual assemblage or construction of a personal worldview or lifeworld may (and typically does) trouble “communitarians” who stress the fidelity to those worldviews which are christened crucial if not indispensable to one’s upbringing, to one’s moral, intellectual and emotional development, such construction or fashioning or choosing should be considered a possible, and in some societies or cultures, a likely consequence of reaching what we can—loosely—term moral psychological autonomy or perhaps the simply the “age of reason.” In other words, one reaches that time in life in which one can and indeed should be critical of worldviews and ideologies, be it one’s own or those of others, as one is now prepared to think for oneself, which of course does not take place in a vacuum nor need be an exercise in narcissism or a solipsistic enterprise. Thinking for oneself in this regard does not, to be sure, necessarily mean forswearing the worldview of one’s birth. And it might very well be the case that a young person who abandons the worldviews and traditions of his or her parents or those responsible for their upbringing may, at some point, become dissatisfied or troubled by the choice(s) they have (prematurely, immaturely, hastily) made and return to the worldview which nurtured them and originally formed and influenced their outlook on life, having learned and earned a newfound appreciation and understanding of same, which entails a deeper or more discerning awareness of the meaning, beliefs and values it previously provided them. I mention this not only because it as a theoretical or real possibility, but because we know, or at least some of us know, intimately, of cases just like this, cases where people come back to the traditions and worldviews most familiar to them.

In a future post I want to speak more about the form or nature or structure of worldviews, which are often mistakenly viewed (it may be only an assumption or presumption) as having more consistency, systematicity, or coherence than they in fact possess, even if the passage of time and the nature of traditions is such that “official” or authoritative worldviews, be they religious or not, often strive for such qualities and properties (hence ‘orthodoxy,’ which in some well-known worldviews frequently comes at the expense of ‘orthopraxis’) in response not only to criticisms from the inside but, and perhaps more importantly, in response to interactions with other worldviews and ideologies, be it in the form of dialogue or cultural exchange of one kind or another, or conflict that can range from the emotionally volatile to violent; in all cases, there is invariably explicit and implicit borrowing (some would claim ‘stealing’) and forms of influence that, historically, has led to worldviews which are never wholly or absolutely discrete, let alone, “original.” Globalization and kinds of cosmopolitanism were with us long before the Peace of Westphalia and capitalism, and this resulted in worldviews that invariably became more human if not humane. In speaking about worldviews qua worldviews, I will attempt to explain why, all things considered, it remains the case that we need or strongly desire worldviews—perhaps merely as “pictures”—that help us navigate our way about in the world, that help one make it through the day, that keep one sane, that provide one with a sense of meaning and purpose, a cluster of values as guiding lights, or, in the words of John Lennon,

“Whatever gets you through the night

It’s all right, it’s all right …

Whatever gets you to the light

It’s all right, it’s all right …. ”

I have been thinking of such matters afresh while reading Raymond Geuss’ book, Who Needs a World View (Harvard University Press, 2020) (In deference to the German term Weltanschauung, I prefer ‘worldview’ to ‘world view’). In that post, or perhaps a different one, I want to address the role of “narrativity” in more than a few worldviews. Once again, a philosopher, Galen Strawson, has moved me to speak on a topic which I’ve not thought about for some time, and what is more, has prompted me to revise my views on story telling or narrativity with his discussion of the “Psychological Narrativity Thesis” and the “Ethical Narrativity Thesis” in two somewhat polemical but no less incisive and well-argued essays, “A Fallacy of Our Age,” and “The Unstoried Life” (I will not discuss what he terms the ‘endurant’ and ‘transient’ forms of life, what he earlier defined, as kinds of self-experience, as ‘diachronic’ and ‘episodic’) in his book, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, etc. (New York Review Books, 2018). By way of a conclusion, I leave you with a quote from my late teacher and friend, Ninian Smart:

“Critical analysis will suggest that we tend to live in a certain amount of aporia. Do we, when it comes to the crunch, really have a systematic worldview? We have an amalgam of beliefs, which we may publicly [and misleadingly or even falsely or disingenuously] characterize in a certain way. I may say that I am an Episcopalian, but how much of my real worldview corresponds to the more or less official views of the Episcopal Church? How much is in any case left out by an ‘official worldview’ which tells me nothing directly about cricket, being Scottish, have a certain scepticism about nationalism, thinking that there is life on other worlds, shelving the problem of evil [part of the theodicy question; in some societies, the problem of evil may translate into the problem of suffering] or other matters. Our values and belief are more like a collage [or perhaps bricolage] than a Canaletto. They do not even have consistency of perspective.”—From Smart’s (unfortunately titled) book, Religion and the Western Mind (State University of New York Press, 1987): 16-17.

Some Relevant Bibliographies

• Africana and African American Philosophy
• Alternative and Complementary Medicine
• North American Indians
• The Bedouin
• Buddhism
• Christianity
• Classical Chinese Worldviews
• Comparative Philosophy
• The Emotions
• The European Enlightenment
• Hinduism
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Indian/Indic Philosophies
• Indigenous Peoples: Culture, Law and Politics
• Theology and Philosophy in Islamic Traditions
• Jainism
• Judaism and Jewish Philosophy
• Marxism
• Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy
• Sufism

Sullied Science on Behalf of Ostensibly Progressive Egalitarianism

You must know the parable about the frog that sits in a pot of water being gradually heated, allowing itself to be boiled alive: because the change happens gradually, it never realizes it should leap out. Reading Kathryn Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (2021) is a similar experience, as the author ingenuously points out. ‘Like a frog being slowly boiled alive,’ she observes, readers follow her argument ‘from an uncontroversial premise to a highly controversial one.’

*          *          *

What follows is an edited selection of material from the NYRB review (April 21, 2022), “Why Biology is Not Destiny,” by M.W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin of Kathryn Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (Princeton University Press, 2021). The sample of comments from motley members of the chattering classes on the Amazon page reveals something bordering on feckless enthusiasm for her argument. Even the well-known philosopher Peter Singer joins the chorus. After the snippets I have a brief comment.

[….] “[Harden] introduces many comfortably room-temperature premises: measurement is essential to science; people differ genetically; genes cause conditions such as deafness; a recipe for lemon chicken produces variable results but never leads to chocolate-chip cookies. Lulled to complacency by such anodyne and often homey observations, we soon find ourselves in a rolling boil of controversial claims: genes make you more or less intelligent, wealthier or poorer; every kind of inequality has a genetic basis. Harden is right that such assertions are controversial, but they’re nothing new. The idea of a biological hierarchy of intelligence arose alongside the first theories of human evolution. It never goes away when discredited, just changes forms. [….]

Biological essentialism, aimed at demonstrating an innate hierarchy of intelligence, is going strong after more than two centuries of empirical failure. There’s always a new approach waiting in the wings. This time it’s ‘genome-wide association studies’ of people’s ‘single-nucleotide polymorphisms.’ A single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) is a spot on the genome where people can have different variants: alternative nucleotides in their DNA. An average human has about 3.2 billion nucleotides and four million to five million single-nucleotide polymorphisms in their genome, and the genomes of any two people are about 99.9 percent the same. A genome-wide association study (GWAS) calculates a statistical correlation between patterns of DNA variants and a particular phenotype, or observable characteristic, among the sampled people. [….]

So far, these so-called polygenic indices haven’t indicated any therapeutic interventions, and their value is a matter of debate. But meanwhile, a growing number of social scientists, primarily in economics, psychology, and sociology, have seized upon the technique as a way of studying their own subjects. Social scientists engaging in ‘sociogenomic’ research exploit existing genetic databases, which have recently become cheap to produce and readily accessible, to conduct genome-wide association studies for ‘social-science-relevant outcomes’ such as the one Harden features most prominently in her book, ‘educational attainment.’ For a given life outcome—dropping out of high school, earning a Ph.D., having a teen pregnancy, becoming wealthy, going bankrupt—these writers claim they can use a genome-wide association study to generate a ‘polygenic index,’ or overall genetic score revealing a person’s likelihood of having that outcome.

Among other phenotypes associated with ’educational attainment’ for which Harden cites genome studies are ‘grit,’ ‘growth mindset,’ ‘intellectual curiosity,’ ‘mastery orientation,’ ‘self-concept,’ ‘test motivation,’ and especially ‘a trait called Openness to Experience, which captures being curious, eager to learn, and open to novel experiences.’ Harden doesn’t reveal just who calls this important trait ‘Openness to Experience’ or how they measure it. Surely, there must be disagreement among researchers about what constitutes this phenotype or others in the list, such as ‘grit.’ More so, at any rate, than about what constitutes macular degeneration.

Explaining how social scientists make genome-wide association studies and polygenic scores, Harden writes:

‘Correlations between individual SNPs and a phenotype are estimated in a “Discovery GWAS” with a large sample size…. Then, a new person’s DNA is measured. The number of minor alleles (0, 1, or 2) in this individual’s genome is counted for each SNP, and this number is weighted by the GWAS estimate of the correlation between the SNP and the phenotype, yielding a polygenic index.’

This alphabet soup in the passive voice implies that no one actively does all this estimating, measuring, counting, weighting, correlating—or that these are such technical processes that any human presence in them is irrelevant. But people are making interpretive decisions at every stage: how to define a phenotype and select people to represent it, how to count these people, which single-nucleotide polymorphisms to consider, how to weight and aggregate them. Interpretive decisions are of course essential to all science, but here there are a great many opinions dressed up in facts’ clothing. ‘This polygenic index will be normally distributed,’ Harden continues, now disguising an assumption—that there are intrinsic cognitive and personality traits whose distribution in a population follows a bell-shaped curve, a founding axiom of eugenics—as an objective fact. Harden then tells us that ‘a polygenic index created from the educational attainment GWAS typically captures about 10–15 percent of the variance in outcomes.’ All these trappings of scientific objectivity notwithstanding, a polygenic index ‘captures’ differences in educational outcomes the way Jackson Pollock’s Summertime painting captures the season: as a reflection of its creator’s radically subjective view of things (which is just fine for abstract expressionism).

If you find a magical hammer that, whenever you swing it, rewards you with funding and professional advancement, you look at your research area and see nothing but nails. Genome-wide association studies are the social sciences’ new magical hammer. Macular degeneration seems plausibly to be a nail: genomic analysis revealed two sets of single-nucleotide polymorphisms that were importantly associated with having the disease. Schizophrenia appears not to be a nail, though it might have some structural features a hammer could help with. The things social scientists have been swinging at aren’t just non-nails. They are to nails as ships to sealing wax, as cabbages to kings. To suggest that macular degeneration has genetic causes is to make an empirically testable proposal; to suggest that ‘grit’ or ‘openness to experience’ has genetic causes is to make a category mistake. These are interpretive descriptions, made of ideas, opinions, and practices, not molecules. [….]

Harden’s purpose in The Genetic Lottery is to popularize the claim that social inequalities have genetic causes, and to argue that if progressives want to address inequality, they’d better confront this fact. In presenting her case, Harden revives central features of the earlier, now-discredited biological theories of intelligence: the presentation of interpretive opinions as objective facts, as we’ve seen; spurious reduction to a biological mechanism that is not only hypothetical but unspecified; and a claim to be writing in the interest of social progress.

Regarding spurious reduction to an unspecified mechanism: although Harden pays lip service to the principle that correlation is not causation, she both implies and explicitly argues that correlations of genetic differences with social ones indicate genetic causes of social differences. When merely implying causation, she uses weasel words: genes are ‘relevant’ for educational attainment; they are ‘associated with’ first having sex at an earlier age; they ‘matter’ for aggression and violence; social and economic inequalities ‘stem from’ genetics. Harden also says it directly: genes ‘cause’ differences in educational outcomes; genetic differences ‘cause’ differences in social and behavioral outcomes; a ‘causal chain’ links a genotype with the social behavior of going to school, and another such chain joins genetics to performance on intelligence tests. [….]

Such talk of entanglements and braids is misleading, implying that genetics and environment are discrete strands, when in fact living things are in continual interaction with their environments in ways that transform both at every level. The late Harvard evolutionary biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin used the concept of the “reaction norm”—a curve expressing the relation between genotype and phenotype as a function of the environment—to describe this interaction and its implications. Lewontin showed that since the relationship between genotype and phenotype depends on the environment in which the phenotype is measured, one can’t infer genetic causes from correlation and regression calculations. Harden mentions Lewontin as a critic of behavioral genetics, but she implies that he didn’t approve of the field simply on ideological grounds. She never mentions or engages with his substantive refutation of the core assumption that genetic and environmental causes of behavior are separable.

With an admirable poker face, Harden writes that what behavioral geneticists really care about is environment: they want to identify the genetic causes of different life outcomes just to get them ‘out of the way, so that the environment is easier to see.’ This is impossible, even as an ideal, because the environment is in the genome and the genome is in the environment. We can no more unbraid genetics and environment than we can unbraid history and culture, or climate and landscape, or language and thought.

Progressives, Harden says, shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge genetic causes of inequality; instead, they should work to narrow ‘genetically associated inequalities’ with programs specially benefiting the genetically disadvantaged. She implies it’s a new departure for a political progressive to espouse the idea of inherent differences in intelligence, but in fact scientists arguing for a biological hierarchy of intelligence have traditionally invoked progressive values. Harden indeed sounds like Spencer, who said his science would help rectify ‘ignorant legislation’ and ‘rationalize our perverse methods of education.’

Just how can behavioral genetics serve the interest of social progress toward greater equality? Harden never says. She does mention three examples of programs or policies that she claims have helped to rectify natural imbalances in intelligence, but none involve genomic analysis. [….]

Harden was right to compare her reasoning to the reasoning of the frog boilers. Both the logic and the experimental program of frog boiling exemplify the essentialist tradition in which she is a participant. But the theory doesn’t hold up in experiments: the frog, if intact and in a vessel it can escape, will actually jump out rather than be boiled alive. Our message to you, reader, is accordingly simple: jump out.”

*          *          *

This sort of sullied science, while perhaps at points rhetorically shrewd (when not vague or ambiguous), involves both speculative reductionism and deterministic behaviorism, including rather simple-minded conceptions of human nature and agency, as well as socio-cultural and economic circumstances and situations. Instances of such sullied science stubbornly persist, periodically reappearing to make extravagant theoretical claims while assuming an unwarranted scientific confidence which in part stems from a surprising dispositional failure to properly digest the history of science. Thus we need to remind ourselves of earlier arguments made by Stephen Jay Gould, R.C. Lewontin, John Dupré, Hilary Rose, Steven Rose, Mary Midgley, Philip Kitcher, among others. Our co-authors do a fine job in steering us in the right direction. Some form of “reductionism” is unavoidable in the natural and especially social sciences, yet, as Jon Elster notes, objections to reductionism “can be well founded” if they are “prefixed by ‘premature,’ ‘crude,’ or ‘speculative.’” He proceeds to provide examples in the literature (e.g., mechanistic physiology, natural selection as an analogy for social phenomena, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology…; cf. too what Deidre McCloskey once termed the ‘secret sins of economics’ which, thanks to her and others, are no longer ‘secret’). Alas, “The idea of a biological hierarchy of intelligence arose alongside the first theories of human evolution. It never goes away when discredited, just changes forms.”

Further Reading (bibliographies and other material)

• Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
• Ethical Perspectives on the Sciences and Technology
• Global Distributive Justice
• Health: Law, Ethics, and Social Justice
• Human Nature, Personhood, and Personal Identity
• The Political Philosophy of Liberalism
• Marxism
• Otto Neurath & Red Vienna: Mutual Philosophical, Scientific and Socialist Fecundity
• Notes and Science and the Sciences
• Philosophy, Psychology, and Methodology for the Social Sciences
• Public Health: Social Epidemiology, Ethics, and Law
• Social Security and the Welfare State
• Sullied (natural and social) Sciences
• Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law

The “red balloon” of Egypt’s Arab Spring

        

“These days it feels hopeless, even pathetic, to go on looking back at the Arab Spring. Yet a minority of Egyptians remain committed to its memory and ideals. [….] Human rights groups estimate that since the coup the Sisi regime has detained 60,000 political prisoners—so many that it has had to build a network of secret prisons, where torture is endemic. One of the few organizations that has monitored the number of detainees and prisons in Egypt, the Arab Network for Human Rights Information, announced on January 11 that it was closing because of unsustainable levels of harassment from the state. Most political prisoners are accused by the authorities of being members of the Muslim Brotherhood. But all of Egypt’s most prominent secular and liberal activists have faced prosecution, imprisonment, abuse, surveillance, or exile. [….] In January the US government withheld from Egypt $130 million in aid because of its dismal human rights record, while simultaneously authorizing more than $2 billion in arms sales.” Please see Ursula Lindsey’s review essay in the NYRB, “Refusing Silence in Egypt” (April 21, 2022 issue).

Having been among those who at the time was moved and inspired by the “Arab Spring,” it is painful to read and recall the subsequent history in Egypt and most of the other countries that basked in the light of these protests and uprisings; that found their citizens moved to struggle courageously on behalf of democratic revolutionary hopes and dreams. One thing we cannot do is let the powerful and ruthless dictators and autocrats, the anti-democratic thugs who’ve since come to power, to erase the truth and reality of those times. Of course there are many other things we should do to oppose authoritarian suppression, coercion and violence, to combat the systematic violation of basic human rights, be they civil and political or economic, social and cultural. But we live in a time when too many people lack any consistent or coherent sense of fundamental values and purposes, when too many people feel, or at least act as if, they are overwhelmed by the myriad events, be they political or “natural,” that define this apocalyptic-like period of human history, when many if not most of us are in denial, well-versed in the art of self-deception, and dispositionally prone to indulging in the crudest of ideologies, the vilest of myths, the darkest phantasies. Yes, there are exceptions to these generalizations, but one suspects they will suffer the fate of Pascal’s red balloon. The question is whether or not the next chapter, or the end of our story, will by anything even remotely resembling the end of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 French film, Le ballon rouge.

Relevant Bibliographies

• The Modern Arab World
• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• Human Rights