While in a cognitive science course pursuing my Bachelor of Science, I wrote the following synthesis paper on artificial intelligence in the works of Plato and Descartes among others. Years after writing the paper, the summation I made in its conclusion is probably more at home in my political philosophy than ever. The paper is published in its entirety below:
Computability and Cognition Fall 2002Synthesis Paper
bibliography
I believe the suggested synthesis topic:
What are the foundations (if any) that each philosopher proposed for making judgements and how (if at all) do these judgements relate to truth (reality)?has fertile ground for exploring questions about artificial intelligence.
Plato
Theaetetus 185 d-e, Plato contends information that arrives through the senses are unified by a central thing. This "thing" is given a management position ruling over the various sense modalities, and coordinating them into a unified representation. Once this distinction is made, at 186-d, Socrates saysThen knowledge is to be found not in the experiences, but in the reasoning about them; it is here, seemingly, not in the experiences, that it is possible to grasp meaning and truth.Although at the last of Theaetetus Socrates deems all of the answers they had postulated are wind-eggs (Theae 210-b), and all that had been gained was knowing that these were not the answers. I will take an unconfirmable position that 185d-e is more Plato's philosophy than Socrates, and 210-b is more Socrates' humble and healthy skepticism. With that, I want to hang onto the quote from Theaetetus 186-d as a fundamental Platonism.
Rene Descartes
This central manager of all sensory modalities in Theaetetus 185-d is given a higher position in Descartes "Discourse on Method". By higher position, I may mean more independent of such mundane tasks as depending on material existence. It is this central and unifying point that is Descartes only sure thing (well then God immediatelly after being sure of I), the "I" that is managing or simply doubting all.Descartes does go on to deal with what is outside of himself. In "Meditation Three, Concerning God, That He Exists" the other things external to Descartes' "I" are considered. External both as in other substances and entities that are contemporary with Descartes' "I", and also the causality of his "I".
Corporeal things are given an origin, and that is from the "I";
Section 43
As to the ideas of corporeal things, there is nothing in them that is so great that it seems incapable of having originated from me.
Corporeal things external to him are assigned their only sure cause, the "I", Descartes moves on to find the cause or origin of the "I". Descartes deals with many possibilities, and makes many interesting disqualifications. I see an implied evolution in Section 48.
...(these items of knowledge being merely accidents of that substance).He also entertains eternal existence in Section 49. He even muses briefly that, (egads!), this immaterial "I" may have been the product of...parents(!), in Section 49 first of paragraph.
But perhaps this being is not God, and I have been produced either by my parents or by some other causes less perfect than God.he enumerates over many disqualifications and compares that disqualification to the stronger evidence that God is the surest candidate for the cause of the "I".
In Meditation 4, Paragaph 2; Descartes says
To begin with, I acknowledge, that it is impossible for God ever to deceive me, for trickery or deception is always indicative of some imperfection.Finally Descarte mentions a more holistic and relational universe full of many things. Meditation 4 Sect 56.
And although subsequent to having decided to doubt everything, I have come to know with certainty only that I and God exist, nevertheless, after having taken note of the immense power of God, I cannot deny that many other things have been made by him, or at least could have been made by him. Thus I may have the status of a part in the universal scheme of things.Wow, finally Descartes hangs out with the rest of us.
I feel that Descartes takes the "thing", the sense modality unifier or knowledge center, that appeared in Theaetetus 186-d and gives it a more forceful existence and also provides a method to build a universe around it. I feel that Descartes is the first post-Greco philosopher that developes platonism to another level. So I am playing double duty by commenting on both Plato and Descartes. I think that they relate to truth, but maybe not reality. I feel they construct a framework in which truth can happen in that game, in that formal process. There are moments when Descartes simply sets the game board up; disallowing the consciousness "I" from being born of parents, or accidently occurring from mere substance, and that something perfect cannot deceive. Descartes does us a service in where he takes the story from there, but that is a very arbitrary starting point. It determines the ending point.
David Hume
The metaphysical "I" given defacto supremecy in Plato and Descartes gets no starring role in the works of Hume. Hume divests the heavens of these eternal forms, places the Forms in books on speculation, and sets fire to them. Let's look at the "I" be death marched from heaven to the page and finally to a funeral pyre.
Section 5 Part 1 page 87
Nothing is more usual than for writers , even, on moral. political, or physical subjects, to distinguish between reason and experience....
....But notwithstanding that this distinction be thus universally received, both in active and speculative scenes of life, I shall not scruple to pronounce, that it is, at bottom, erroneous, at least, superficial.
Hume is not planning on existing in the orbs with the Forms any time soon with this insulting statement. He dares to slander the reputation of so many while simulataneously not writing as well as they did, an interesting tactic in itself.
I have often been amazed at how language is this thing that can be so far removed in time and space from
the referent. This is a really a cool thing that allows us to talk about Old John the Farmer long after
anything he ever did is still laying around the farm. The meme people love this, how the Old John
the Farmer meme is going to live on like those bacteria strains that arrived on meteors, sometimes
really dormant but always ready to re-invigorate when an Old John the Farmer joke is needed. But I
have just revealed that Old John the Farmer is a platonic form. I start my joke with with
"...there was this Old John the Farmer" and everyone has the heaven given image.
But wait. Old John the Farmer jokes are not going to told on the Space Colony ship in 2080,
because no one will know people named John, that are allowed to grow old, and that farm. Hume
will be there at the Space Colony policing all Old John the Farmer jokes with this statement:
Section 5 Part 1,page 89Well, I think Hume said this. A plethora of book stores stock these books with his name on them. My college has a course in which they claim this book was penned by him. Oh, the book I bought, THAT object, allows me the foundation to lay claim that Hume existed and wrote non-flammable philosophy books. If it had been an Oracle of Delphi that had uttered the above paragraph in my presence I would have been wondering if the Delphinians were going the way of the paradoxical lying Cretans. Luckily I have this used book I bought to have read it out of.
But here it may be proper to remark, that though our conclusions from experience carry us beyond our memory and senses, and assure us of matters of fact which happened in the most distant places and most remote ages....you must at last terminate in some fact, which is present to your memory or senses ; or must allow that your belief is entirely without foundation... ...What , then, is the conclusion of the whole matter? A simple one...All belief of matter of fact or real existence is derived merely from some object, present to the memory or senses., and a customary conjunction between that and some other object.
Seriously, Hume is my least understood philosopher. I will admit that. I will speak now about all the philosophers on the list above in relation to Hume's sensory perception method of judgement. One philosopher, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, contends that any organism that keeps regular intervals of lifespan has an accurate representation of reality. Survival is the truth test. Platonism seems to be powerful example of a mind thinking, but not of a whole body surviving. It is too ready to not need terrestrial or corporeal existence. Hume is wanting the object in hand, the body to be here to be counted, and he has the trait of not assuming the future is going to be like the past. Hume's lack of faith in knowing the future is an awesome trait for survival. One could take it to a level of numbing insanity if you assumed the sky could rain hot pokers any second, but I think Hume always is perceiving enough objects in his surroundings to know the hot pokers are not currently a danger. (There, I wrote a sentence as long as Hume's.)
Immanuel Kant
While Hume seems to read like a complete disallow of Platonism, Kant manages to resurrect a discussion of the consciousness that unifies or manages various modalities.Second Part Section 22, paragragh 305:
The sum of the matter is this: the business of the senses is to intuit, that of the understanding to think. But thinking is uniting representations in a consciousness.... The uniting of representations in a concsiousness is judgement. Thinking therefore is the same as judging, or referring representations to judgements in general.... This uniting in consciousness is either analytic by identitiy, or synthetic by combination and addition of various representations one to another.
Kant proceeds in Section 23 to accept a priori rules as principles of possible experience.
The concepts grounded thereupon, which contain the a priori conditions of all synthetic and necessary judgements, accordingly constitute a transcendental system. Finally, the principles by means of which all appearances are subsumed under these concepts constitute a physiological system, that is, a system of nature, which precedes all empirical cognition of nature, first makes it possible, and hence may in strictness be called the universal and pure natural science.Kant here introduced the dangerous things that do not exist in space and time. He later saves this from corporeal independence and lack of empirical contingency.
Section 30, paragraph 313
Hence if the pure concepts of the understanding try to go beyond objects of experience and referred to in themselves, they have no meaning whatever.
Kant goes on to explore how seductive pure a priori concepts are for use that transcends
all possible experience. He disallows this disembodied transcendence with statements such
as:
Second Part Section 34
For our understanding is not a faculty of intuition but a connection of given intuitions in an experience. Experience must therefore contain all the objects[Hume's objects] for our concepts...
Lance Miller
This seems to me reasonable enough. Kant has not thrown away pure reason with the bath water like Hume had. As I had contended regarding formalism, the games of pure reason do happen, but pure reason arose out of corporeal utility by a corporeal entity. Our platonic forms are ideas begotten by a small subset of organisms on this planet, and allow us to represent our experience.Kant draws a nice class war truce by making platonic forms the elected leaders that serve empiricism, instead of the diety-like despotic power that platonic forms had in antiquity and the middle ages. I am still unsure of Kant's correspondence to reality. It seems the forbiddance of a priori for purely transcendental musings is a weak law. It is like trusting the former despot with police powers in a post despotic state. We can always claim, "look here, this language construct, it is here with us, not in corporeal existence, but in our dialogue. It still exists, and seems to have existed for all time." Actually I am just playing a language game now. We can find security in showing that formalism was begotten by corporeal organisms, for corporeal needs. This strips it of a noble origin, and theories of origin are the key to regulating the power of transcendental thought. I am using political terminology, but I am not being entirely metaphorical. I think the epistemology of the platonic forms begat the political economy and religions of the western and middle eastern world for over a 1500 years. I think Hume and Kant are trying to cage (or burn) the abuses of pure reason. Unfettered transcendental speculation, combined with queer local religious customs, led to an amazing cosmology that seemed to be unaccountable to the sense perception that tells a human they are being a slave to another human's every whim or that they are performing acts that are incongruent. But maybe put in less emotional language, the subjects of this political enterprise forgot that formalism happened in service to simple utility for the organism(s) using it.
Addendum
The first week of our class we saw a film that presented the caveats in the question "what is an expert". When we read and discussed Meno I felt we were doing a good job of pursuing the question. I don't have an epiphany on the subject to offer the world. Far from it. I would like to take an entirely negative stance, not against the prospect of classical AI being successful, but in regards to the arete of humans. The enumerations of expertise in humans. The nobility of our species. I am not disqualifying arete in individuals, I am saying the social aggregates of humans seem to want devices that ensure no arete occurs. The way in which a market economy invests in the more certain return, not the more innovative solution. The way a totalitarian regime tries to exterminate sectarian cultural or political expression. Our management styles of the last 100 years are excellent arete eliminators. So when a machine finally passes the Turing Test, I will be assuming we have successfully eliminated originality of character in humans, and built a computer that is mildly more powerful in computation than today. I am also saying that a deterministic machine would do a better job than we are at providing a political stasis that has less misery. We are already flunking at the expert status qualification, so why not go for the more sure method of stasis, a machine produced social stasis.
-Lance Miller
12-17-2002
References
Plato.Protagoras and Meno.Trans. W.K.C. Guthrie.England: Penguin Books, 1956
Plato.Theaeteus.Trans. M.J. Levett.
Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co, 1992.
René Descartes.Discourse on Method/Meditations on First Philosophy.Trans.Donald A. Cress.
Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co, 1998.
David Hume.An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding.
Illinois: Open Court, 1988
Immanual Kant.Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.Trans. James W. Ellington.
Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co, 1977
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