Tag Archives: Immanuel Kant

Anatomy, Кибермозг

Can Philosophy contribute to an understanding of Artificial Intelligence?

One might ask: what contributions could philosophy possibly make to an understanding of computer technology, in particular Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)?  Is this not the exclusive province of technical people who have no need for a philosopher’s meddling? We shouldn’t prejudge this issue; rather, it’s worth exploring whether philosophy can add anything of value to the discussion. And if so, what value does it add?

A.I.: some philosophical thoughts

Contemporary philosopher Andy Clark has made an important contribution to the study of A.I by raising questions about its assumptions. Clark, who is also trained in the cognitive sciences, has investigated whether A.I.’s model of an abstract computerized ‘mind’ that is separate from the concrete physical reality of the body and external world might be wrong.

Why, he wondered, are our ‘intelligent’ artifacts still so seemingly dumb? Perhaps it is because we have completely misconstrued the nature of intelligence itself. We have conceived of the mind as simply a logical, reasoning device linked to a set of explicit data—a kind of a cross between a logic machine and a filing cabinet.

Instead, Clark offers an alternative: the philosophical theory of the extended mind, which questions the natural boundary between the mind and the world. This is a scientific operationalization of Kantian epistemology—a computational and neuroscientific theory  known as “Predictive Processing”—in which the mind is not a passive spectator, but actively engaged with sensation. Instead of accepting the empiricist thesis that the brain merely receives and processes sensate data from putative external causes, Predictive Processing , a la Kant, argues for generative schema—“chains of endogenous procedural rules”—which actively shape and structure raw experiential data (though Predictive Processing frames these Kantian themes inside a very non-Kantian biological and evolutionary theory). The human mind/brain is an active player in the experiential world, rather than merely reacting to stimuli.

Clark further observes how studies in robotics and A.I. have tended to discount the role of intelligence in functioning in the physical environment, such as walking or performing tasks. This smooth interaction of the body, world, and mind—often seemingly an unconscious process—conflicts with A.I.’s abstract, logic machine model, bifurcated from the external, natural world.

A.I.: philosophically neutral?

Andy Clark has called our attention to the fact that the cognitive model assumed by current researchers in A.I. does not have a monopoly on the nature of the mind, but is in tension with a countervailing paradigm of the mind rooted in a previous philosophical tradition. Despite the impressive technical accomplishments inherent in building such robotic systems, they are not philosophically neutral, that is, they are not just pieces of technology constructed in a vacuum, without assuming a particular philosophical context. A.I. is not the last word, but only one voice, albeit impressive, among other conflicting models of knowledge and the mind.

Distinctions made by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein suggest a way of exploring this issue: because multiple “language games” have their own unique rules, they are incommensurable. For example, the language of science and mathematics differs from any number of other language games such as the language of religion, which in turn differ from each other. Furthermore, A.I. has its own unique language game separate from alternative paradigms of learning and knowledge, which are based on an active engagement of the human biological body with the physical world—a physicality that machine-based A.I., by definition, does not have.

Artificial vs. Creative Intelligence

Extrapolating from Clark’s analysis and Wittgenstein’s insights, we can now discern the limits of A.I.’s abstract machine model: it obviates the need for the human body and emotions as the means to know and learn. A.I. researchers, in designing robotics to perform functional tasks, such as playing chess games, translating languages, verifying financial fraud, and computing mathematical theorems, have not touched upon the other ways flawed, non-digitized humans obtain knowledge.

For example, as John Dewey argued, humans naturally think experimentally, testing hypotheses in their encounters with physical reality and social problems in order to find knowledge rather than relying on ‘infallible’, preexisting dogmas for guidance. Artificial Intelligence does not mirror this type of creative intelligence, in which fallible homo sapiens, without absolute rules, are immersed in the world confronting, as Dewey wrote, the unexpected, the “reaching forward into the unknown,” not only learning but changing the given.  Moreover, creative intelligence, naturally entwined with the human organism, is conducive to serving human purposes and interests by solving problems and finding knowledge that benefit individuals in a social context.

Thus A. I.’s abstract machine model, despite its important uses, fails to emulate human intelligence in all its richness; instead it is grounded in specific, limited types of cognition, or, in Wittgensteinian parlance, particular language games (e.g. language translation, solving mathematical formulas) that are different from forms of creative, experimental and moral intelligence used, for example, in social reform, public policy, or even artistic innovation.

Multiple intelligences, not one…

If Andy Clark is right, then Artificial Intelligence’s perceived threat to human knowledge workers, as well as to their essential emotional intuitions, is overblown. One-dimensional robotic minds that can win at chess, predict the weather, and perform other problem-solving tasks will not be able to replace human creativity, intuition, activism, empathy, and judgment— that is, multiple forms of alternative intelligences that do not fit the abstract machine model paradigm, the “logical, reasoning device.” Even Facebook—that vaunted user of A.I.—is finding that it does not replace human intelligence. Facebook’s reliance on A. I., is failing to combat fake news; keywords often can’t effectively identify misinformation. Human intelligence is needed. In other words, Artificial Intelligence cannot replace human intelligence.

Humans, unlike robotic systems, experience their minds and lives through many different contextual grounds, learning and knowing via emotional, artistic, political, musical, literary, and biological encounters with the world that go beyond just technical problem resolution. This means that there will always be new challenges for philosophers—the ultimate knowledge workersto understand the different forms of intelligence that humans use in their efforts to comprehend—and changethe world.

Thomas White is a Wiley-Blackwell journal author, and previous contributor to Undercurrent Philosophy, Aeon, The Philosopher’s Eye, and other journals. He is also  a poet and speculative fiction writer whose work has appeared in print and online in Australia, Canada, United States, and Great Britain.

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'The Birth of Venus', Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre

Aesthetic And Moral Education

‘Aesthetic’ is a vague and frustrating term with a profligate and confused history.  During the Enlightenment, aesthetic was employed as a synonym for ‘beauty’, which was understood as taking many apparently unrelated forms, from the natural world to gardens to art to interior decorating and even mathematics.  In the last two hundred years, aesthetic has most frequently been conflated with ‘artistic’ and philosophical aesthetics understood as sharing the same subject matter as art criticism.  Both of these conceptions are too restrictive when it comes to the contemporary discipline and Bence Nanay offers a refreshingly simple definition in Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception when he states that aesthetics is ‘about ways of perceiving the world that are really rewarding and special.’  Nanay distinguishes the particular type of perception involved as FODP – focused on objects but distributed amongst the properties of those objects – providing a contemporary take on Immanuel Kant’s famous definition of aesthetic judgement in terms of disinterested pleasure.  Disinterest was associated with attending to an object as an end rather than a means and pleasure with the value of attending to the object in such a manner.  Combining Nanay’s two characterisations, we have the aesthetic as primarily a kind of attention that is purposeless, i.e. useless without being worthless.  ‘Aesthetic education’ has suffered as much if not more than ‘aesthetic’ when it comes to multiplicity of meanings and inconsistency of usage.  Aesthetic education has been employed as a synonym for a liberal arts education, to mean education in or through the arts, and as a defence of the role of either the arts, the humanities, or both within the education system.  Its philosophical use is, however, precise: the tradition of aesthetic education does not identify an education in aesthetics, but a moral or ethical education by aesthetic means.

The thesis originates, like so much else in value theory, with Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury.  Shaftesbury’s work was highly original but notoriously unsystematic and he argued that aesthetic taste and art were necessary conditions for the flourishing of character and society respectively.  Typically, Shaftesbury offered little evidence for this claim and it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the theory was popularised.  In his On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, Friedrich Schiller drew on Kant’s Third Critique to argue for the significance of the ‘instinct of play’ in removing the barrier that prevented the elevation of human being from the sensual and savage to the rational and moral.  More significantly, beauty had political implications because the harmony that an aesthetic education produced in the individual was replicated at the level of the state, which blended individual freedom and social justice.  One could say that aesthetic means were a sufficient condition for a moral or political education for Schiller, but unfortunately history presents numerous counterexamples of civilizations where beauty was revered without respect for human rights.

anthony_ashley_cooper_3-_earl_of_shaftesbury

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, third Early of Shaftesbury

Schiller’s Letters were nonetheless popular among artists, critics, and philosophers and aesthetic education was adopted by public moralists such as John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century and cultural critics such as Walter Benjamin and F.R. Leavis in the twentieth century.  The tradition was revitalised in the last decade of the twentieth century, following the posthumous revelation that literary theorist Paul de Man had collaborated with the National Socialist authorities in Belgium during the war, and the subsequent ethical turn in criticism was pioneered by Jacques Derrida’s post-structuralism, Richard Rorty’s pragmatism, and Martha Nussbaum’s Aristotelianism.  Nussbaum and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a former student of De Man’s, have advanced the most comprehensive contemporary theories of aesthetic education.

Nussbaum’s version, which is set out most clearly in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, is based on her identification of a genre of realist novels that includes (but is not restricted to) the work of Charles Dickens, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Richard Wright.  In these novels, the intimacy of the relation between narrative form and moral content is such that ‘concern for the disadvantaged is built into the literary experience’.  Nussbaum is extremely ambitious and proposes not only a moral education by aesthetic means, but also a political education, using Dickens’ Hard Times as an example of a novel that promotes liberal democracy on a necessary rather than contingent basis.  For Spivak, aesthetic education is a theme (rather than an explicit theory) that links the twenty-five essays collected in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization.  She follows Schiller in claiming that aesthetic education can remove the barriers to self-actualisation and specifies these as gender and class prejudices that have been internalised by their victims.  Spivak defines aesthetic education as ‘training the imagination for epistemological performance’, identifying the imagination as the bridge between the aesthetic and the ethical.  Drawing on Derrida’s hyperbolic ethics, she argues that ethical situations are characteristically impossible – i.e., all moral choices are moral dilemmas – and that literature provides access to the imaginative experience of the impossible.  In virtue of the shared feature of impossibility, aesthetic practice produces both aesthetic and ethical expertise.

Both Nussbaum and Spivak regard aesthetic experience – the experience of paying aesthetic attention to literary works – as an imaginative exercise that develops ethical sensibility and thus argue for a moral education by aesthetic means.  Unfortunately, each thesis is flawed: Nussbaum restricts her claim to a very narrow selection of novels and admits that they must be read sympathetically in the first instance; Spivak’s theory is more compelling, but relies on the adoption of a radical reconception of ethical responsibility that many will be resist.  Perhaps more importantly in the age of quantification, monetisation, and profit-seeking against which Nussbaum and Spivak rail in their respective ways, there is no empirical evidence for the effects of aesthetic experience on ethical sensibility.  The notion is nonetheless fascinating and affords philosophers, theorists, and psychologists a perfect opportunity for collaboration.

 

 

 

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