Philosoph and Computers · 2018-04-01 · November 17, 2014, marked the end of an inspiring career. On that day Patrick Suppes died quietly at the age of ninety-two in his house on

copy 2015 BY THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION ISSN 2155-9708

Philosophy and Computers

NEWSLETTER | The American Philosophical Association

VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 2 SPRING 2015

SPRING 2015 VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 2

FROM THE GUEST EDITOR John P Sullins

NOTES FROM THE COMMUNITY ON PAT SUPPES

ARTICLES

Patrick Suppes

Patrick Suppes Autobiography

Luciano Floridi

Singularitarians AItheists and Why the Problem with Artificial Intelligence is HAL (Humanity At Large) not HAL

Peter Boltuc

First-Person Consciousness as Hardware

D E Wittkower

Social Media and the Organization Man

Niklas Toivakainen

The Moral Roots of Conceptual Confusion in Artificial Intelligence Research

Xiaohong Wang Jian Wang Kun Zhao and Chaolin Wang

Increase or Decrease of Entropy To Construct a More Universal Macroethics (A Discussion of Luciano Floridirsquos The Ethics of Information)

JOHN P SULLINS GUEST EDITOR VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 2 | SPRING 2015

APA NEWSLETTER ON

FROM THE GUEST EDITOR John P Sullins SONOMA STATE UNIVERSITY

November 17 2014 marked the end of an inspiring career On that day Patrick Suppes died quietly at the age of ninety-two in his house on the Stanford Campus which had been his home both physically and intellectually since 1950 At the time of his death he was the Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and a member of the departments of Statistics and Psychology and of the Graduate School of Education Pat was the first recipient of the Barwise Prize which is awarded by the APA Committee on Philosophy and Computers A more fitting individual for the prize would have been hard to find given that Pat has done significant research teaching and publishing on a vast array of subjects many of which crossed over into the areas that we now call the philosophy of computers and information This of course was neither his only nor even his most significant award In 1990 he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his work in the measurement of subjective probability and utility in uncertain situations the development and testing of general learning theory the semantics and syntax of natural language and the use of interactive computer programs for instruction any one of which could have been sufficient for an entire career This issue of the newsletter is dedicated to his memory and towards that end I have collected some interesting material

While I only knew Pat from meeting him at various conferences and events I was struck by his generosity of spirit and the way he was undaunted by age He never really retired from his positions at Stanford he just went on to find other ways to contribute and work within the academic community there and was still active with some research and teaching in the spring of 2014 The last time I saw him was at a conference at Stanford celebrating the many significant achievements that they have had in the philosophy of science Pat was there and in his glory since many if not most of those achievements were things that he had contributed substantially to He was right in the thick of the discussion the entire event The lasting legacy I will take from him is as a role model for the joyous dedication to the life of the mind and the many pleasures that can bring right to onersquos last days It is sad to lose him I think he had at least another fifty years of good ideas left in him but he has bequeathed us much that we can use and build on There have been a number of very fine obituaries written for Pat and we have links to those later in the issue

but here we wish to celebrate his accomplishments in the fields of philosophy and computing one last time

To accomplish that goal I have compiled some interesting pieces from an autobiography that Pat wrote some years ago but that he added to a bit for an event held in his honor at Stanford In this document he explains his motivations and accomplishments in various fields of study that are of interest to our community In that section you will see just how ambitious Pat was in the world of computer education particularly using the computer as a tool for philosophy education While few would argue the value of computer and online education when it comes to the formal topics in philosophy such as basic logic or aspects of critical thinking I think many would argue that these tools are grossly inappropriate for developing the Socratic symposium style of instruction philosophers have used since the beginning of the profession many millennia ago Even from the early days of personal computing Pat saw things differently He was convinced that something like an AI tutor could be developed that could act as a Socratic tutor to a student and take them through a rich discussion based educational experience that introduced them to not only the facts of philosophy but to the method of philosophical inquiry as well As you will see he also imagined the ldquoflippedrdquo classroom many decades before that term came into vogue when he suggests that the computer is best used in philosophy to prepare the student on facts and reading so that they come prepared to enter the classroom to enter into vigorous philosophical discussions Pat was also way ahead of the game when it comes to experimental philosophy He considered himself an empiricist first and foremost and he believed in testing his ideas through experimentation When Michael Friedman from the Suppes Center for the History and Philosophy of Science at Stanford and John Markoff from the New York Times were working on writing obituaries for Pat John found a news clip from the Times archive from 1966 describing one of Patrsquos first large-scale experiments in deploying computer education to first grade students in an East Palo Alto school1 East Palo Alto is very different from Palo Alto its more affluent neighbor but somehow Pat convinced IBM to put the computer with sixteen consoles costing $450000 dollars in 1966 money into a school that served underprivileged and at-risk students Pat wanted the promise of computer education to cross all the social political race and economic boundaries True to his vision this machine the IBM 1500 made use of verbal inputs and outputs through which ldquothe child gets spoken commands suggestions and encouragementrdquo2 As John Markoff notes in the obituary he wrote for the Times Pat wanted everyone to have a computerized tutor that could personally attend

APA NEWSLETTER | PHILOSOPHY AND COMPUTERS

to them as they learned any and every subject Of course this would be a very ambitious claim to make now and was even more audacious in the 1960s when he first started developing technologies to make it happen

One of Patrsquos most enduring legacies will be his many positive interactions with the people he worked with To address that I also solicited some remembrances of Pat from our various members and in that section of the newsletter you will find a wonderful anecdote from Marvin Croy that paints an amusing portrait of Pat as well as illustrates his desire to help younger scholars

In addition we will dive into a brewing controversy Recently John Searle wrote a scathing critique of Luciano Floridirsquos book The Fourth Revolution in the New York Review of Books Floridi was able to write a short reply in the pages of the review but I thought it would be interesting to give him as much space as he wanted to make a more thorough reply and we have that in this issue Hopefully it will spark an interesting discussion in the pages of this newsletter Floridirsquos work continues to gain attention across the globe and we have a good discussion of his book The Ethics of Information from Professor Xiaohong et al from Xirsquoan Jiaotong University P R China

Building on the philosophy of AI theme for this issue we have two good articles that make challenging claims within the philosophical discussion on AI Pete Boltuc makes an interesting case for the idea that first-person consciousness fits with a hardware analogy better than the idea that it is similar to a software process In this way he hopes to find middle ground between reductivist and non-reductivist arguments Late in the issue Niklas Toivakainen makes the case that there is a deep conceptual confusion in the philosophical discussions of AI that may be preventing meaningful dialog Rounding out the issue we have a paper from D E Wittkower that explores some of the ethical impacts of social media from a new point of view

We accept submissions regularly for publication in the newsletter This is a good forum for following up on debates or making comments on discussions that might not fit well in other journal formats We also like to see position papers and reviews that can spark productive conversations Please send anything you want to see in the newsletter in a timely manner Computers and philosophy is a topic that moves very quickly and philosophers need to play a role in the development and analysis of these world-changing technologies

1 Thomas OrsquoToole ldquoA Robot Teacher Is Hired on Coast 170 First Graders to Begin Daily Use of a Computerrdquo New York Times (1923ndash current file) April 4 1966 ProQuest Historical Newspapers the New York Times (1851ndash2010) 35

2 Ibid

NOTES FROM OUR COMMUNITY ON PAT SUPPES

As IACAP program chair in 2002 I had the honor of introducing him with his presentation ldquoA Retrospective on Instructional Computingrdquo which was excellent We shared many moments together during the meeting which I shall cherish always

ndash Ron Barnette

Pat Suppes had an eye for the future and helped to lead us there In 1967 he published ldquoOn Using Computers to Individualize Instructionrdquo The Computer in American Education (1967) 11ndash24 It is startling that 47 years later that paper still has something interesting to say about the use of computing in education

ndash Keith W Miller Orthwein Endowed Professor for Lifelong Learning in the Sciences University of MissourindashSt Louis

Please do not forget the work done jointly with Mario Zanotti see eg Foundations of Probability with Applications Selected Papers 1974ndash1995 Patrick Suppes and Mario Zanotti Cambridge University Press 1996

ndash Stefano Cerri Montpellier Laboratory of Informatics Robotics and Microelectronics (LIRRM) and French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

Had I never met Pat Suppes there is no question that I would not have spent the last thirty plus years developing and researching instructional computer programs for teaching logic In 1978 I was a grad student at Florida State studying philosophy of science I traveled to Stanford for a week to help investigate the possibility of transporting the Stanford logic program to FSU What I witnessed in action within Suppesrsquos shop was what we now call interdisciplinary applied research This is common in science today but then most computer-assisted instruction projects for teaching logic were focused on successfully delivering drill and practice lessons Suppesrsquos own system for constructing deductive proofs went far beyond this and was the centerpiece of a complete course in logic Moreover Suppes directed a team approach working

SPRING 2015 | VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 2

closely with psychologists computer scientists and even speech technologists and health-care providers when it came to teaching deaf or blind students

Now Pat was interested in just about every topic and he made significant contributions to many This came home in an amusing way when I went to his office for a chat It turned out that literally every square inch of his desk was piled high with books so high that when I sat down I could not see him across the desk I tried not to look surprised and slid sideways to intersect with a valley in the mountains of tomes where we had eye contact and a wide-ranging conversation (I laugh now but at the time it felt very bizarre) I am grateful to have experienced Patrsquos energetic and optimistic style of engaging life then and over the years

Patrsquos project made a lasting impression on me and the most important influence concerned the nature of data collection Computer-assisted instruction programs were routinely being designed to collect information for immediate feedback and grading But Pat took this to a new level carefully collecting data to address questions concerning interface design aspects of the subject matter that students found most demanding and program features proved to be most effective all of which generated a new round of development questions In principle this makes every instructional technology project also a research project a key point when developers come up for tenure and funding decisions Today we call this the scholarship of teaching and learning In 1978 I came away calling it one hell of an adventure Thanks Pat

ndash Marvin Croy Complex Systems Institute University of North CarolinandashCharlotte

LINKS TO OBITUARIES FOR PATRICK SUPPES

Stanford Philosophy Obituary Stanford News Service New York Times Obituary Los Angeles Times Obituary Stanford Daily article

Pat Suppes accepting the first APA Barwise Prize in Philosophy and Computing in 2002 Robert Cavalier from Carnegie Mellon presented the prize and sitting beside Suppes is Richard Scheines (now Dean of Carnegie Mellonrsquos Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences)

ARTICLES Patrick Suppes Autobiography Patrick Suppes

The following is a document that was prepared for use at two events held at Stanford University where Pat Suppes was honored for his many years of dedication to the intellectual life at that university It appears to be an abridged version of a document titled ldquoIntellectual Autobiography (Written in 1978)rdquo1 which has been edited and added to at some later date by Patrick Suppes What follows is a transcription of that document2

FOUNDATIONS OF PHYSICS My doctoral dissertation lay within the philosophy of physics In particular I studied the problem of action at a distance as it had occurred in 17th- and 18th-century physics and philosophy especially in the writings of Descartes Newton Boscovich and Kant The final chapter dealt with the problem in the special theory of relativity Working on it strengthened my earlier desire to give an axiomatic formulation of classical mechanics in the spirit of modern mathematics rather than ldquophysicalrdquo axiomatizations common in physics Serious joint work on this project began soon after my arrival at Stanford in collaboration with J C C McKinsey and is represented in four papers we wrote on the foundations of physics prior to McKinseyrsquos death in 1953 (1953a 1953b I953c also with A C Sugar and 1955b) Shortly thereafter I wrote with Herman Rubin a similar paper (1954c) on the axiomatic foundations of relativistic particle mechanics It is a long and very complicated piece of work that has not been read I suspect by very many people

QUANTUM MECHANICS Most of the effort that I have put in on the foundations of physics since 1960 has been devoted to quantum mechanics and this continues to be a current active intellectual interest Almost everything that I have written about quantum mechanics has been intertwined with questions related to the foundations of probability especially as to how probabilistic concepts are used in quantum mechanics My first paper on the subject (1961c) was concerned with the absence of a joint distribution of position and momentum in many standard cases I shall not enter into the technical details of the argument here but I do want to convey the basic philosophical point that I continue to find the real puzzle of quantum mechanics Not the move away from classical determinism but the ways in which the standard versions seem to lie outside the almost universal methodology of modern probability theory and mathematical statistics For me it is in this arena that the real puzzles of quantum mechanics are to be found I am philosophically willing to violate classical physical principles without too many qualms but when it comes to moving away from the broad conceptual and formal framework of modern probability theory I am at once uneasy My historical view of the situation is that if probability theory had been developed to anything like its current sophisticated state at the time the basic work on

SPRING 2015 | VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 2 PAGE 3

quantum mechanics was done in the twenties then a very different sort of theory would have been formulated

It is worth recording a couple of impressions about this because they indicate the kind of changes that can take place in onersquos attitudes as the years go by Initially I was much impressed by the mathematical formulation of foundations given by Von Neumann in his classical work and later by Mackey (1963) whose book has also become classical in its own way No doubt I was originally struck by the mathematical clarity and sophistication of this work but in later years I have become dissatisfied with the unsatisfactory conceptual basis from a probabilistic standpoint of the way in which the theory is formulated I shall give here just two examples to indicate the nature of my conceptual dissatisfaction Von Neumann stresses that we can take the expectation of the sum of any two operators even though they are conjugate that is do not commute But once this is said the natural question is to ask about the underlying probability space that justifies the exact probabilistic meaning of the expectation A similar question arises with respect to Mackeyrsquos treatment Mackey takes as fundamental the concept of the probability that a measurement in a given state of an observable will lead to a given value This seems innocent enough but when the fundamental postulates of the theory are stated in these terms what seems missing from what one would expect in a standard causal physical theory is any clarity about the relation between observables The axioms he gives would seem to concentrate too deeply on the relatively simple properties of the probability of a given measurement on a given observable and not enough on the causal dependencies between observables (It is important to remember that I am not really making a technical argument here but trying to give the intuitions back of arguments that I think can be formalized)

THEORY OF MEASUREMENT In my first published article (1951a) I gave a set of independent axioms for extensive quantities in the tradition of earlier work by Holder and Nagel My contribution was primarily to weaken the assumptions of Holder axioms and also to prove that both the axioms and the concepts used were independent Looking around for other topics in measurement and returning to the earlier interest in the theory of games and utility theory it soon became apparent that there were more outstanding problems of measurement in psychology than in physics One of my first efforts in this direction was a joint article with my student Muriel Winet (1955d) We gave an axiomatization of utility based on the notion of utility differences The idea of considering such utility differences is a very old one in the literature but an explicit and adequate set of axioms had not previously appeared In 1956 I published two other articles which fell between decision theory and measurement theory One was on the role of subjective probability and utility in decision making In this article (1956b) I used the results of the joint work with Winet to provide an axiomatization alternative to that given by Savage in his book Foundations of Statistics (1954) And in the second article my colleague Donald Davidson and I gave a finitistic axiomatization of subjective probability and utility (1956c)

Shortly after this I began to think more generally about the foundational aspects of theories of measurement and was fortunate to have as a collaborator the logician and mathematician Dana Scott who was at that time a graduate student in mathematics (Scott is also one of the Berkeley-Stanford persons from whom I learned a great deal beginning when he was an undergraduate in a course on the philosophy of science I taught at Berkeley in 1952 along with Richard Montague What a pair to have in such a course) Scott and I tried to give a general framework for theories of measurement and to obtain some specific results about axiomatization This article was published in 1958 a year or so after it was written The framework that Scott and I set up has I think been of use in the literature and probably the article with him has been the most important article in the theory of measurement that I have written although the chapter in the Handbook of Mathematical Psychology written with J L Zinnes and published in 1963 has perhaps been more influential especially in psychology

DECISION THEORY It is not easy to disentangle measurement theory and decision theory because the measurement of subjective probability and utility has been such a central part of decision theory The separation that I make will therefore be somewhat arbitrary My really serious interest in psychology began with experimental research on decision theory in collaboration with my philosophical colleague Donald Davidson and a graduate student in psychology at that time Sidney Siegel Davidson and I had begun collaborative work with McKinsey in 1953 on the theory of value and also on utility theory We continued this work after McKinseyrsquos death and it is reflected in Davidson McKinsey and Suppes (1955a) and in the joint article with Davidson (1956b) on the finitistic axiomatization of subjective probability and utility already mentioned The article on the measurement of utility based on utility differences with Muriel Winet was also part of this effort

Sometime during the year 1954 Davidson and I undertook with the collaboration of Siegel an experimental investigation of the measurement of utility and subjective probability Our objective was to provide an explicit methodology for separating the measurement of the two and at the same time to obtain conceptually interesting results about the character of individual utility and probability functions This was my first experimental work and consequently in a genuine sense my first real introduction to psychology The earlier papers on the foundations of decision theory concerned with formal problems of measurement were a natural and simple extension of my work in the axiomatic foundations of physics Undertaking experimental work was quite another matter I can still remember our many quandaries in deciding how to begin and seeking the advice of several people especially our colleagues in the Department of Psychology at Stanford

I continued a program of experimentation in decision theory as exemplified in the joint work with Halsey Royden and Karol Walsh (1959i) and the development of a nonlinear model for the experimental measurement of utility with Walsh (1959j)

DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE For a variety of reasons the literature on decision theory has been interwined [sic] with the literature on social choice theory for a very long period but the focus of the two literatures is rather different and I have certainly had more to say about decision theory than about the normative problems of social choice or distributive justice To a large extent this is an accident of where I have happened to have had some ideas to develop and not a matter of a priori choice I have published two papers on distributive justice (1966 1977a) The main results about justice in the first one which were stated only for two persons were nicely generalized by Amartya Sen (1970) The other paper which was just recently published looks for arguments to defend unequal distributions of income I am as suspicious of simplistic arguments that lead to a uniform distribution of income as I am of the use of the principle of indifference in the theory of beliefs to justify a uniform prior distribution The arguments are too simple and practices in the real world are too different A classical economic argument to justify inequality of income is productivity but in all societies and economic subgroups throughout the world differences in income cannot be justified purely by claims about productivity Perhaps the most universal principle also at work is one of seniority Given the ubiquitous character of the preferential status arising from seniority in the form of income and other rewards it is surprising how little conceptual effort seems to have been addressed to the formulation of principles that justify such universal practices

FOUNDATIONS OF PROBABILITY The ancient Greek view was that time is cyclic rather than linear in character I hold the same view about my own pattern of research One of my more recent articles (1974g) is concerned with approximations yielding upper and lower probabilities in the measurement of partial belief The formal theory of such upper and lower probabilities in qualitative terms is very similar to the framework for extensive quantities developed in my first paper in 1951 In retrospect it is hard to understand why I did not see the simple qualitative analysis given in the 1974 paper at the time I posed a rather similar problem in the 1951 paper The intuitive idea is completely simple and straightforward A set of ldquoperfectrdquo standard scales is introduced and then the measurement of any other event or object (event in the case of probability object in the case of mass) is made using standard scales just as we do in the ordinary use of an equal-arm balance This is not the only occasion in which I have either not seen an obvious and simple approach to a subject until years later or have in fact missed it entirely until it was done by someone else Recently we have found correspondingly simple necessary and sufficient qualitative axioms for conditional probability The qualitative formulations of this theory beginning with the early work of B O Koopman (1940a I940b) have been especially complex We have been able drastically to simplify the axioms by using not only extended indicator functions but the restriction of such functions to a given event to express conditionalization In the ordinary logic of events when we have a conditional probability P(A|B) there is no conditional event A|B and thus it is not possible to define operations on conditional or restricted events

CAUSALITY Because my own approach to causality is probabilistic in character I have included it in this section It is hard to think of a philosophical topic that has received more attention historically than that of causality It has already become clear to me that what I have had to say (1970a) has got to be extended revised and deepened in order to meet objections that have been made by other people and to account for a variety of phenomena that I did not consider in any detail Causality is one of those concepts that plays a major role in a variety of scientific disciplines and that can be clarified and enriched by extensive philosophical analysis On some subjects of a probabilistic kind I find it hard to imagine how I or another philosopher could improve in a substantial way on what has been said with clarity and precision by probabilists and statisticiansmdashthe concept of a stochastic process is a good example This is not true of the concept of causality A good many statisticians use the concept in various ways in their research and writing and the concept has been a matter of controversy both in the physical sciences and in the social sciences over the past several decades There is a major place in these discussions for philosophical analyses of causality that join issue firmly and squarely with this extensive scientific literature

SET-THEORETICAL METHODS I do not think of set-theoretical methods as providing any absolute kind of clarity or certainty of results independent of this particular point in the history of such matters They constitute a powerful instrument that permits us to communicate in a reasonably objective way the structure of important and complicated theories In a broad spirit they represent nothing really new the axiomatic viewpoint that underlies them was developed to a sophisticated degree in Hellenistic times Explicit use of such methods provides a satisfactory analysis of many questions that were in the past left vaguer than they need to be A good example would be their use in the theory of measurement to establish appropriate isomorphic relations between qualitative empirical structures and numerical structures

CONCLUSION [Document ends here]

The document above omits quite a bit of the work that Pat did up until the late seventies and given the interest of the readers of this newsletter we will excerpt the sections on Education and Computers and Computer-assisted instruction from the original document

EDUCATION AND COMPUTERS In the section on mathematical concept formation in children I mentioned the beginning of my interests in education in 1956 when my oldest child Patricia entered kindergarten I cited there the work in primary-school geometry An effort also noted but briefly that was much more sustained on my part was work in the basic elementary-school mathematics curriculum This occupied a fair portion of my time between about 1956 and the middle

of the sixties and led to publication of a basic elementary-school mathematics textbook series Sets and Numbers which was one of the more radical of the ldquonew mathrdquo efforts Unlike many of my colleagues in mathematics and science who became interested in school curriculum after Sputnik I had a genuine interest in the psychological and empirical aspects of learning and a traditional interest in knowing what had been done before

When I began working on the foundations of physics after graduate school I was shocked at the absence of what I would call traditional scholarship in the papers of philosophers like Reichenbach that I read or even more of physicists who turned to philosophical matters such as Bridgman and Campbell There was little or no effort to know anything about the previous serious work in the field I found this same attitude to be true of my colleagues from the sciences who became interested in education They had no desire to know anything about prior scholarship in education

I found I had a real taste for the concrete kinds of questions that arise in organizing a large-scale curriculum activity I shall not attempt to list all the aspects of this work here but since beginning in the mid-fifties I have written a large number of research papers concerned with how students learn elementary mathematics and I have had a fairly large number of students from education or psychology write dissertations in this area Most of the work in the last decade or so has been within the context of computer-assisted instruction to which I now turn

COMPUTER-ASSISTED INSTRUCTION In the fall of 1962 on the basis of conversations with Lloyd Morrisett Richard Atkinson and I submitted a proposal to the Carnegie Corporation of New York for the construction of a computer-based laboratory dedicated to the investigation of learning and teaching The proposal was funded in January 1963 and the laboratory began operation in the latter part of that year as computing equipment that was ordered earlier in the year arrived and was installed The laboratory was initially under the direction of an executive committee consisting of Atkinson Estes and me In addition John McCarthy of the Department of Computer Science at Stanford played an important role in the design and activation of the laboratory In fact the first computer facilities were shared with McCarthy and his group

From a research standpoint one of my own strong motivations for becoming involved in computer-assisted instruction was the opportunity it presented of studying subject-matter learning in the schools under conditions approximating those that we ordinarily expect in a psychological laboratory The history of the first five years of this effort through 1968 has been described in great detailmdashprobably too much detail for most readersmdashin two books (l968a l972a) and in a large number of articles I shall restrict myself here to a few general comments

To some extent those initial hopes have been realized of obtaining school-learning data of the sort one expects to get in the laboratory Massive analyses of data on elementary-school mathematics have been presented in

my own publications including the two books listed above and a comparable body of publications has issued from the work of Atkinson and his colleagues on initial reading My own experience has been that even a subject as relatively simple as elementary-school mathematics is of unbounded complexity in terms of understanding the underlying psychological theory of learning and performance Over the past several years I have found myself moving away from the kind of framework that is provided by stimulus sampling theory and that has been so attractive to me for so many years The new ideas are more cognitive in character and organized around the concept of procedures or programs as exemplified for instance in a simple register machine that is a simple idealized computer with a certain number of registers and a small fixed number of instructions (1973c) I think that the ideas of stimulus sampling theory still have importance in terms of learning even in the context of such procedures or programs but certainly there is a shift in conceptual interest characteristic not only of my own work but also of that of a great many psychologists originally devoted to learning

One of my initial interests in computer-assisted instruction was the teaching of logic at the elementary-school level and subsequently at the college level Once complexity of this level is reached psychological theory is in a more difficult spot in terms of providing appropriate conceptual tools for the analysis of student behavior Currently my work in computer-assisted instruction is almost entirely devoted to university-level courses and we are struggling to understand how to analyze data from the sorts of proofs or logical derivations students give in the first logic course or in the course in axiomatic set theory that follows it

Although there are many questions about the psychology of learning and performance in elementary-school mathematics that I do not understand still I feel that I have a relatively deep conceptual grasp of what is going on and how to think about what students do in acquiring elementary mathematical skills This is not at all the case for skills of logical inference or mathematical inference as exemplified in the two college-level courses I have mentioned We are still floundering about for the right psychological framework in which to investigate the complete behavior of students in these computer-based courses

There are other psychological and educational aspects of the work in computer-assisted instruction that have attracted a good deal of my attention and that I think are worth mentioning Perhaps the most important is the extent to which I have been drawn into the problems of evaluation of student performance I have ended up in association with my colleagues in trying to conceive and test a number of different models of evaluation especially for the evaluation of performance in the basic skills of mathematics and reading in the elementary school Again I will not try to survey the various papers we have published except to mention the work that I think is probably intellectually the most interesting and which is at the present time best reported in Suppes Fletcher and Zanotti (1976f) in which we introduce the concept of a student trajectory The first point of the model is to derive from qualitative assumptions

a differential equation for the motion of students through the course initially the drill-and-practice supplementary work in elementary mathematics given at computer terminals The constants of integration of the differential equation are individual constants of integration varying for individual students On the basis of the estimation of the constants of integration we have been able to get remarkably good fits to individual trajectories through the curriculum (A trajectory is a function of time and the value of the function is grade placement in the course at a given time) The development of these ideas has taken me back to ways of thinking about evaluation that are close to my earlier work in the foundations of physics

Research on computer-assisted instruction has also provided the framework within which the large-scale empirical work on first-language learning in children has taken place Without the sophisticated computer facilities available to me at Stanford it would not have been possible to pursue these matters in such detail and on such a scale Even more essentially the presence of a sophisticated computer system in the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences has led to the computer-based approach to the problems of language learning and performance mentioned earlier One of our objectives for the future is to have a much more natural interaction between student and computer program in the computer-based courses we are concerned with Out of these efforts I believe we shall also come to a deeper understanding of not only how computer programs can best handle language but also how we do in fact handle it (Part of this search for naturalness has led to intensive study of prosodic features of spoken speech and how to reproduce them in computer hardware and software)

I have not yet conveyed in any vivid sense the variety of conceptual and technical problems of computer-assisted instruction that I have tried to deal with in collaboration with my colleagues since 1963 This is not the place to undertake a systematic review of these problems most of which have been dealt with extensively in other publications I do however want to convey the view that the best work is yet to be done and will require solution of formidable intellectual problems The central task is one well described by Socrates long ago in Platorsquos dialogue Phaedrus Toward the end of this dialogue Socrates emphasizes that the written word is but a pale image of the spoken the highest form of intellectual discourse is to be found neither in written works or prepared speeches but in the give and take of spoken arguments that are based on knowledge of the truth Until we have been able to reach the standard set by Socrates we will not have solved the deepest problems in the instructional use of computers How far we shall be able to go in having computer programs and accompanying hardware that permit free and easy spoken interaction between the learner and the instructional program is not possible to forecast with any reasonable confidence for we are too far from yet having solved simple problems of language recognition and understanding

At the present time we are only able to teach well skills of mathematics and language but much can be done and it is my conviction that unless we tackle the problems we can

currently handle we will not move on to deeper solutions in the future Because I am able to teach all my own undergraduate courses in a thoroughly computer-based environment I now have at the time of writing this essay the largest teaching load in terms of number of courses of any faculty member at Stanford During each term I offer ordinarily two undergraduate courses one in logic and one in axiomatic set theory both of which are wholly taught at computer terminals In addition I offer either one or two graduate seminars As I have argued elsewhere on several occasions I foresee that computer technology will be one of the few means by which we can continue to offer highly technical and specialized courses that ordinarily draw low enrollment because of the budgetary pressures that exist at all American universities and that will continue unremittingly throughout the remainder of this century Before I am done I hope to add other computer-based courses in relatively specialized areas such as the foundations of probability and the foundations of measurement The enrollment in one of these courses will ordinarily consist of no more than five students I shall be able to offer them only because I can offer them simultaneously My vision for the teaching of philosophy is that we should use the new technology of computers to return to the standard of dialogue and intimate discourse that has such a long and honored tradition in philosophy Using the technology appropriately for prior preparation students should come to seminars ready to talk and argue Lectures should become as passeacute as the recitation methods of earlier times already have

In 1967 when computer-assisted instruction was still a very new educational technology I organized with Richard Atkinson and others a small company Computer Curriculum Corporation to produce courses in the basic skills that are the main focus of elementary-school teaching In retrospect it is now quite clear that we were ahead of our times and were quite lucky to survive the first five or six years Since about 1973 the company has prospered and I have enjoyed very much my part in that development I find that the kind of carefully thought out and tough decisions required to keep a small business going suits my temperament well

I have not worked in education as a philosopher I have published only one paper in the philosophy of education and read a second one as yet unpublished on the aims of education at a bicentennial symposium Until recently I do not think I have had any interesting ideas about the philosophy of education but I am beginning to think about these matters more intensely and expect to have more to say in the future

Above sections excerpted from Bogdan RJ (ed) Patrick Suppes Dordrecht Holland D Reidel Publishing Company 1979 Retrieved January 2015 from httpwebstanfordedu~psuppesautobio19html

1 R J Bogdan ed Patrick Suppes (Dordrecht Holland D Reidel Publishing Company 1979) Full text available as of 2015 at httpwebstanfordedu~psuppesautobio1html This reprint is not meant to challenge the copyright of the original in any way

2 Many thanks to Dikran Karagueuzian CSLI Publications Stanford Pat Suppesrsquos survivors and the Pat Suppes Estate for their gracious help in allowing us to print these materials

Singularitarians AItheists and Why the Problem with Artificial Intelligence is HAL (Humanity At Large) not HAL Luciano Floridi OXFORD INTERNET INSTITUTE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD LUCIANOFLORIDIOIIOXACUK

It is awkward and a bit embarrassing to admit but average philosophy does not do well with nuances It may fancy precision and very finely cut distinctions but what it really loves are polarizations and dichotomies Internalism or externalism foundationalism or coherentism trolley left or right zombies or not zombies observer-relative or observer-independent possible or impossible worlds grounded or ungrounded philosophy may preach the inclusive vel but too often indulges in the exclusive aut aut Such an ability to reduce everything to binary alternatives means that anyone dealing with the continuum of real numbers (pun intended) is likely to be misunderstood

The current debate about artificial intelligence (AI) is a case in point Here the dichotomy is between believers and disbelievers in true AI Yes the real thing not Siri in your iPhone or Roomba in your kitchen Think instead of the false Maria in Metropolis (1927) Hal 9000 in Space Odyssey (1968) C3PO in Star Wars (1977) Rachael in Blade Runner (1982) Data in Star Trek The Next Generation (1987) Agent Smith in The Matrix (1999) or the disembodied Samantha in Her (2013) You got the picture Believers in true AI belong to the Church of Singularitarians For lack of a better term I shall refer to the disbelievers as members of the Church of AItheists Letrsquos have a look at both faiths

Singularitarianism is based on three dogmas First the creation of some form of artificial superintelligencemdasha so-called technological singularitymdashis likely to happen in the foreseeable future Both the nature of such a superintelligence and the exact timeframe of its arrival are left unspecified although Singularitarians tend to prefer futures that are conveniently close-enough-to-worry-about but far-enough-not-to-be-around-to-be-proved-wrong Second humanity runs a major risk of being dominated by such superintelligence Third a primary responsibility of the current generation is to ensure that the Singularity either does not happen or if it does it is benign and will benefit humanity As you can see there are all the elements for a Manichean view of the world with Good fighting against Evil some apocalyptic overtones the urgency of ldquowe must do something now or it will be too laterdquo an eschatological perspective of human salvation and an appeal to fears and ignorance Put all this in a context where people are rightly worried about the impact of idiotic digital technologies on their lives while the mass media report about new gizmos and unprecedented computer disasters on a daily basis and you have the perfect recipe for a debate of mass distraction

Like all views based on faith Singularitarianism is irrefutable It is also ludicrously implausible You may more reasonably be worried about extra-terrestrials conquering

earth to enslave us Sometimes Singularitarianism is presented conditionally This is shrewd because the then does follow from the if and not merely in an ex falso quod libet sense if some kind of superintelligence were to appear then we would be in deep trouble Correct But this also holds true for the following conditional if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were to appear then we would be in even deeper trouble trust me Some other times Singularitarianism relies on mere possibilities Some form of artificial superintelligence could develop couldnrsquot it Yes it could But this is a mere logical possibility that is to the best of our current and foreseeable knowledge there is no contradiction in assuming the development of a superintelligence It is the immense difference between ldquoI could be sick tomorrowrdquo when I am already not feeling too well and ldquoI could be a butterfly that dreams to be a human beingrdquo There is no contradiction in assuming that a relative of yours you never heard of just died leaving you $10m Yes he could So Contradictions are never the case but non-contradictions can still be dismissed as utterly crazy

When conditionals and modalities are insufficient then Singularitarians often moved I like to believe by a sincere sense of apocalyptic urgency mix faith and facts They start talking about job losses digital systems at risks and other real and worrisome issues about computational technologies dominating increasing aspects of human life from learning to employment from entertainment to conflicts From this they jump to being seriously worried about being unable to control their next Honda Civic because it will have a mind of its own How true AI and superintelligence will ever evolve autonomously from the skill to park in a tight spot remains unclear but you have been warned you never know and surely you better be safe than sorry

Finally if even this stinking mix of ldquocouldrdquo ldquoif thenrdquo and ldquolook at the current technologies rdquo does not work there is the maths A favourite reference is the so-called Moorersquos Law This is an empirical generalization that suggests that in the development of digital computers the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years The outcome is more computational power at increasingly cheaper prices This has been the case so far and it may well be the case for the foreseeable future even if technical difficulties concerning nanotechnology have started raising some serious manufacturing challenges After all there is a physical limit to how small things can get before they simply melt The problem is that just because something grows exponentially this does not mean that it develops without boundaries A great example was provided by The Economist last November

Throughout recorded history humans have reigned unchallenged as Earthrsquos dominant species Might that soon change Turkeys heretofore harmless creatures have been exploding in size swelling from an average 132lb (6kg) in 1929 to over 30lb today On the rock-solid scientific assumption that present trends will persist The Economist calculates that turkeys will be as big as humans in just 150 years Within 6000 years turkeys will dwarf the entire planet Scientists

pe a ra og st c urve a ty ca s gm unct onhttpcommonswikimediaorgwikiFileLogistic-curvesvgmetadata

Enough I used to think that Singularitarianism was merely funny Not unlike people wearingtin foil hats I was wrong for two reasons First plenty of intelligent people have joined theChurch Bill Gates Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk Tesla CEO who has gone as far as totweet that ldquoWe need to be super careful with AI Potentially more dangerous than nukesrdquo I guess we shall be safe from true AI as long as we keep using Windows but sadly such testimonials have managed to transform a joke into a real concern Second I have realized that Singularitarianism is irresponsibly distracting It is a rich-world preoccupation likely to worry people in leisure societies who seem to forget what real evils are oppressing humanityand our planet from environmental disasters to financial crises from religious intolerance and violent terrorism to famine poverty ignorance and appalling living standards just to mention a few Oh and just in case you thought predictions by experts were a reliable guidethink twice There are many staggeringly wrong technological predictions by great experts(see some hilarious ones in (Pogue 18 January 2012) and (Cracked Readers 27 January2014)) For example in 2004 Bill Gates stated ldquoTwo years from now spam will be solvedrdquo And in 2011 Stephen Hawking declared that ldquophilosophy is deadrdquo (Warman 17 May 2011) so you are not reading this article But the prediction of which I am rather fond is by RobertMetcalfe co-inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com In 1995 he promised to ldquoeat his wordsrdquo if his prediction that ldquothe Internet will soon go supernova and in 1996 willcatastrophically collapserdquo should turn out to be wrong In 1997 he publicly liquefied hisarticle in a food processor and duly drank it A man of his word I wish Singularitarians wereas bold and coherent as him

I have spent more than a few words to describe Singularitarianism not because it can be takenseriously but because AI disbelievers the AItheists can be better understood as people over-reacting to all this singularity nonsense I sympathise Deeply irritated by the worshipping ofthe wrong digital gods and the catastrophic prophecies the Church of AItheism makes itsmission to prove once and for all that any kind of faith in true AI is really wrong totallywrong AI is just computers computers are just Turing Machines Turing Machines are

claim that the rapid growth of turkeys is the result of innovations in poultry farming such as selective breeding and artificial insemination The artificial nature of their growth and the fact that most have lost the ability to fly suggest that not all is lost Still with nearly 250m turkeys gobbling and parading in America alone there is cause for concern This Thanksgiving there is but one prudent course of action eat them before they eat yourdquo1

From Turkzilla to AIzilla the step is small if it werenrsquot for the fact that a growth curve can easily be sigmoid (see Figure 1) with an initial stage of growth that is approximately exponential followed by saturation then a slower growth maturity and finally no further growth But I suspect that the representation of sigmoid curves might be blasphemous for Singularitarianists

Wiki di G ph of L i i C pi l i oid f i Figure 1 Graph of Logistic Curve a typical sigmoid function Wikipedia httpcommonswikimediaorgwiki FileLogistic-curvesvgmetadata

Enough I used to think that Singularitarianism was merely funny Not unlike people wearing tin foil hats I was wrong for two reasons First plenty of intelligent people have joined the Church Bill Gates Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk Tesla CEO who has gone as far as to tweet that ldquoWe need to be super careful with AI Potentially more dangerous than nukesrdquo I guess we shall be safe from true AI as long as we keep using Windows but sadly such testimonials have managed to transform a joke into a real concern Second I have realized that Singularitarianism is irresponsibly distracting It is a rich-world preoccupation likely to worry people in leisure societies who seem to forget what real evils are oppressing humanity and our planet from environmental disasters to financial crises from religious intolerance and violent terrorism to famine poverty ignorance and appalling living standards just to mention a few Oh and just in case you thought predictions by experts were a reliable guide think twice There are many staggeringly wrong technological predictions by great experts2 For example in 2004 Bill Gates stated ldquoTwo years from now spam will be solvedrdquo And in 2011 Stephen Hawking declared that ldquophilosophy is deadrdquo so you are not reading this article3 But the prediction of which I am rather fond is by Robert Metcalfe co-inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com In 1995 he promised to ldquoeat his wordsrdquo if his prediction that ldquothe Internet will soon go supernova and in 1996 will catastrophically collapserdquo should turn out

to be wrong In 1997 he publicly liquefied his article in a food processor and duly drank it A man of his word I wish Singularitarians were as bold and coherent as him

I have spent more than a few words to describe Singularitarianism not because it can be taken seriously but because AI disbelievers the AItheists can be better understood as people over-reacting to all this singularity nonsense I sympathise Deeply irritated by the worshipping of the wrong digital gods and the catastrophic prophecies the Church of AItheism makes its mission to prove once and for all that any kind of faith in true AI is really wrong totally wrong AI is just computers computers are just Turing Machines Turing Machines are merely syntactic engines and syntactic engines cannot think cannot know and cannot be conscious End of the story AI does not and cannot exist Even bigots should get it This is why computers (still) cannot do something (the something being a conveniently movable target) and are unable to process semantics (of any language Chinese included no matter what Google translation achieves) This proves that there is absolutely nothing to talk about let alone worry about There is no AI so a fortiori there are no problems caused by it relax and enjoy all these wonderful electric gadgets

Both Churches seem to have plenty of followers in California the place where Hollywood sci-fi films wonderful research universities like Berkeley and some of the most important digital companies in the world live side by side This may not be accidental especially when there is a lot of money involved For example everybody knows that Google has been buying AI tech companies as if there were no tomorrow (disclaimer I am a member of Googlersquos Advisory Council on the right to be forgotten4 Surely they must know something with regard to the real chances of developing a computer that can think that we outside ldquoThe Circlerdquo are missing Thus Eric Schmidt Google Executive Chairman speaking at The Aspen Institute on July 16 2013 stated ldquoMany people in AI believe that wersquore close to [a computer passing the Turing Test] within the next five yearsrdquo5 I do not know who the ldquomanyrdquo are but I know that the last people you should ask about whether something is possible are those who have abundant financial reasons to reassure you that it is So let me offer a bet I hate aubergine (eggplant) but I shall eat a plate full of it if a software program will get the gold medal (ie pass the Turing Test) of a Loebner Prize competition before July 16 2018 It is a safe bet So far we have seen only consolation prizes given to the less badly performing versions of contemporary ELIZA As I explained when I was a judge the first time the competition came to the UK it is human interrogators who often fail the test by asking binary questions such as ldquoDo you like ice creamrdquo or ldquoDo you believe in Godrdquo to which any answer would be utterly uninformative in any case6 I wonder whether Gates Hawking Musk or Schmidt would like to accept the bet choosing a food of their dislike

Let me be serious again Both Singularitarians and AItheists are mistaken As Alan Turing clearly stated in the article where he introduced his famous test (Turing 1950) the question ldquoCan a machine thinkrdquo is ldquotoo meaningless to deserve discussionrdquo (ironically or perhaps presciently that

question is engraved on the Loebner Prize medal) This holds true no matter which of the two Churches you belong to Yet both Churches dominate this pointless debate suffocating any dissenting voice of reason True AI is not logically impossible but it is utterly implausible According to the best of our scientific knowledge today we have no idea how we may begin to engineer it not least because we have very little understanding of how our brain and our own intelligence work This means that any concern about the appearance of some superintelligence is laughable What really matters is that the increasing presence of ever-smarter technologies in our lives is having huge effects on how we conceive ourselves the world and our interactions among ourselves and with the world The point is not that our machines are conscious or intelligent or able to know something as we do They are not The point is that they are increasingly able to deal with more and more tasks better than we do including predicting our behaviors So we are not the only smart agents around far from it This is what I have defined as the fourth revolution in our self-understanding We are not at the center of the universe (Copernicus) of the biological kingdom (Darwin) or of the realm of rationality (Freud) After Turing we are no longer at the center of the world of information and smart agency either We share the infosphere with digital technologies These are not the children of some sci-fi superintelligence but ordinary artefacts that outperform us in ever more tasks despite being no cleverer than a toaster Their abilities are humbling and make us revaluate our intelligence which remains unique We thought we were smart because we could play chess Now a phone plays better than a chess master We thought we were free because we could buy whatever we wished Now our spending patterns are predicted sometimes even anticipated by devices as thick as a plank What does all this mean for our self-understanding

The success of our technologies largely depends on the fact that while we were speculating about the possibility of true AI we increasingly enveloped the world in so many devices applications and data that it became an IT-friendly environment where technologies can replace us without having any understanding or semantic skills Memory (as in algorithms and immense datasets) outperforms intelligence when landing an aircraft finding the fastest route from home to the office or discovering the best price for your next fridge The BBC has made a two-minutes short animation to introduce the idea of a fourth revolution that is worth watching7 Unfortunately like John Searle it made a mistake in the end equating ldquobetter at accomplishing tasksrdquo with ldquobetter at thinkingrdquo I never argued that digital technologies think better than us but that they can do more and more things better than us by processing increasing amounts of data Whatrsquos the difference The same as between you and the dishwasher when washing the dishes Whatrsquos the consequence That any apocalyptic vision of AI is just silly The serious risk is not the appearance of some superintelligence but that we may misuse our digital technologies to the detriment of a large percentage of humanity and the whole planet We are and shall remain for the foreseeable future the problem not our technology We should be worried about real human stupidity not imaginary artificial intelligence The problem is not HAL but HAL Humanity At Large

It may all seem rather commonsensical But if you try to explain it to an AItheist like John Searle he will crucify you together with all the other Singularitarians In a review of my book The Fourth Revolution ndash How the Infosphere is Reshaping Humanity where I presented some of the ideas above Searle criticized me for being a believer in true AI and a metaphysician who thinks that reality is intrinsically informational8 This is nonsense As you might have guessed by now I subscribe to neither thesis9 In fact there is much I agree about with Searlersquos AItheism So I tried to clarify my position in a reply10 Unsuccessfully Unfortunately when people react to Singularitarianism to blind faith in the development of true AI or to other technological fables they run the risk of falling into the opposite trap and thinking that the debate is about computers (it is notmdashsocial media and Big Data for example are two major issues in the philosophy of information) and that these are nothing more than electric typewriters not worth a philosophical investigation They swing from the pro-AI to the anti-AI without being able to stop think and reach the correct middle ground position which identifies in the information revolution a major transformation in our Weltanschauung Let me give you some elementary examples Our self-understanding has been hugely influenced by issues concerning privacy the right to be forgotten and the construction of personal identities online Just think of our idea of friendship in a world dominated by social media Our interactions have hugely changed due to online communications Globalization would be impossible without the information revolution and so would have been many political movements or hacktivism The territoriality of the law has been completely disrupted by the onlife (sic) world in which online and offline experiences are easily continuous thus further challenging the Westphalian system11 Today science is based on Big Data and algorithms simulations and scientific networks all aspects of an epistemology that is massively dependent on and influenced by information technologies Conflicts crime and security have all been re-defined by the digital and so has political power In short no aspect of our lives has remained untouched by the information revolution As a result we are undergoing major philosophical transformations in our views about reality ourselves our interactions with reality and among ourselves The information revolution has renewed old philosophical problems and posed new pressing ones This is what my book is about yet this is what Searlersquos review entirely failed to grasp

I suspect Singularitarians and AItheists will continue their diatribes about the possibility or impossibility of true AI for the time being We need to be tolerant But we do not have to engage As Virgil suggests to Dante in Inferno Canto III ldquodonrsquot mind them but look and passrdquo For the world needs some good philosophy and we need to take care of serious and pressing problems

1 ldquoTurkzillardquo The Economist

2 See some hilarious ones in Pogue ldquoUse It Betterrdquo and Cracked Readers

3 Matt Warman ldquoStephen Hawking Tells Google lsquoPhilosophy Is Deadrdquo

4 Robert Herritt ldquoGooglersquos Philosopherrdquo

5 httpswwwyoutubecomwatchv=3Ox4EMFMy48

6 Luciano Floridi Mariarosario Taddeo and Matteo Turilli ldquoTuringrsquos Imitation Gamerdquo

7 httpwwwbbccoukprogrammesp02hvcjm

8 John R Searle ldquoWhat Your Computer Canrsquot Knowrdquo

9 The reader interested in a short presentation of what I mean by informational realism may wish to consult Floridi ldquoInformational Realismrdquo For a full articulation and defense see Floridi The Philosophy of Information

10 Floridi ldquoResponse to NYROB Reviewrdquo

11 Floridi The Onlife Manifesto

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cracked Readers ldquo26 Hilariously Inaccurate Predictions about the Futurerdquo January 27 2014 httpwwwcrackedcom photoplasty_777_26-hilariously-inaccurate-predictions-about-future

Floridi Luciano ldquoResponse to NYROB Reviewrdquo The New York Review of Books November 20 2014 httpwwwnybookscomarticles archives2014dec18information-desk

Floridi Luciano 2003 ldquoInformational Realismrdquo Selected papers from conference on Computers and Philosophy volume 37

Floridi Luciano The Philosophy of Information Oxford Oxford University Press 2011

Floridi Luciano The Fourth Revolution How the Infosphere Is Reshaping Human Reality Oxford Oxford University Press 2014a

Floridi Luciano ed The Onlife Manifesto Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era New York Springer 2014b

Floridi Luciano Mariarosaria Taddeo and Matteo Turilli ldquoTuringrsquos Imitation Game Still a Challenge for Any Machine and Some Judgesrdquo Minds and Machines 19 no 1 (2009) 145ndash50

Herritt Robert ldquoGooglersquos Philosopherrdquo Pacific Standard December 30 2014 httpwwwpsmagcomnature-and-technologygooglesshyphilosopher-technology-nature-identity-court-legal-policy-95456

Pogue David ldquoUse It Better The Worst Tech Predictions of All Time ndash Plus Flawed Forecasts about Applersquos Certain Demise and the Poor Prognostication Skills of Bill Gatesrdquo January 18 2012 httpwww scientificamericancomarticlepogue-all-time-worst-tech-predictions

Searle John R ldquoWhat Your Computer Canrsquot Knowrdquo The New York Review of Books October 9 2014 httpwwwnybookscomarticles archives2014oct09what-your-computer-cant-know

The Economist ldquoTurkzillardquo November 27 2014 httpwwweconomist comblogsgraphicdetail201411daily-chart-16

Turing A M ldquoComputing Machinery and Intelligencerdquo Mind 59 no 236 (1950) 433ndash60

Warman Matt ldquoStephen Hawking Tells Google lsquoPhilosophy Is Deadrsquordquo The Telegraph May 17 2011 httpwwwtelegraphcouktechnology google8520033Stephen-Hawking-tells-Google-philosophy-is-dead html

First-Person Consciousness as Hardware Peter Boltuc UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS SPRINGFIELD AND AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

INTRODUCTION I take the paradigmatic case of first-person consciousness to be when a nurse says that a patient regained consciousness after surgery The patient does not need to have memory or other advanced cognitive functions But she is online so to saymdashwe have good reasons to believe that the question what it is like for her to be is not empty

Advanced cognitive architectures such as LIDA approach the functional threshold of consciousness Such software performs advanced cognitive functions of all kinds including image making and manipulation advanced memory organization and retrieval communication (including semantic structures) perception (that includes responses to color temperature and other qualia) and even creativity (eg imagitrons) Some AI experts believe that at a certain threshold adding further cognitive functions would result in first-person consciousness Nonshyreductivists claim that the latter would emerge based on an informationally rich emergence base Reductivists claim that such a rich information processing structure just is consciousness that there is no further fact of any kind I disagree with both claims

The kind of first-person consciousness in the example of a patient regaining consciousness is analogous to a stream of lightmdashit is not information processing of some advanced sort Just like light bulbs are pieces of hardware so are the parts of animal brain that create first-person consciousness1

Every object can be described as information (Floridi) and is in principle programmable (a physical interpretation of Church-Turing thesis) but this does not make every object in the universe a piece of software The thesis of this paper is that first-person consciousness is more analogous to a piece of hardware a light emitting bulb than to software There are probably information processing thresholds below which first-person consciousness cannot function (just like a bulb cannot emit light if not hooked up to the source of electricity) but no amount of information processing no cognitive function shall produce first-person consciousness without such consciousness emitting a piece of hardware

This claim follows from the so-called engineering thesis the idea that if first-person consciousness is a natural process it needs to be replicable in robots Instituting such functionality in machines would require a special piece of hardware slightly analogous to the projector of holograms On the other hand human cognitive functions can be executed in a number of cognitive architectures2 Such architectures do not need to be hooked up to the lightshybulb-style first-person consciousness This last claim opens the issue of philosophical zombies and epiphenomenalism On both issues I try to keep the course between Scylla and Charybdis presented by the most common alternatives

THE ENGINEERING THESIS In recent works I advanced the engineering thesis in machine consciousness (Boltuc 2012 2010 2009 Boltuc and Boltuc 2007)3 The argument goes as follows

1) Assume that we accept the non-reductive theory of consciousness

2) Assume that we are physicalists (non-reductive materialists broadly defined)

3) First-person consciousness must be generated by some natural mechanism probably in animal brains

If one accepts some version of panpsychismmdashinstead of ldquoproducedrdquomdashconsciousness is collected or enhanced by brains

-gt From 3 and historic regularity of development of science

4) One day as neuroscience develops we should get to know how first-person consciousness works

5) To know well how anything is produced in nature is to understand in detail how such producing occurs To have such an understanding means to have an engineering blueprint of the process

6) Once we have an engineering blueprint of first-person consciousness we should in principle be able to generate it

7) We should be able to engineer first-person consciousness

This argument helps us avoid anthropocentric naturalism the claim that first-person consciousness is physical but in some important sense reserved for human beings and select animals If first-person consciousness is natural it must in principle be implementable in artificial objects4

CONSCIOUSNESS AS HARDWARE It should now be clear that Turing was right there are no functionalities that AI is unable to replicate (at the right level of granularity) Functional consciousness is the programming that allows one to perform cognitive functions It is rightly viewed as software First-person consciousness also tends to be viewed as software that processes specific phenomenal information but it should not5

Phenomenal information just like any information can be processed by robots with no irreducible first-person consciousness First-person consciousness should rather be viewed as analogous to a stream of light or a holographic projection though those analogies are remote Some functionally conscious entities have it and their information processing is first-person conscious Other functionally conscious entities those with no

irreducible first-person consciousness do not have this stream to project their phenomenal information onto The sub-system of CNS responsible for producing the stream of proto-consciousness (Damasio) is a piece of hardware just like a light bulb belongs to hardware6 Also the light which is a stream of photons is much like hardware similar to the stream of water though some ontologists may disagree due to the peculiar (wave-corpuscular) status of light7

Due to the fact that first-person consciousness is not just information processing it should be viewed as hardware Information (a product of software) gets embroiled in the stream of first-person consciousness as the conscious being becomes more and more conscious of things through information processing

It is not clear whether the conscious element helps information processing in any way though it is plausible that it does (just like light helps viewers see details in the room) Below we explore whether first-person consciousness is merely epiphenomenalmdashin some detail

EPIPHENOMENALISM REVISITED Is first-person consciousness just information processing If it is then its operation can be described by an algorithm Such algorithms could be followed by non-conscious AI engines (To be sure such AIs would be functionally conscious Yet they would not be first-person conscious in terms of non-reductive consciousness) The question arises Is first-person consciousness merely epiphenomenal

There are two ways to address this question

A) To claim that non-reductive consciousness does something that purely functional consciousness could not do If so consciousness would not be epiphenomenal I discuss the light version of this claim Consciousness and in particular qualia bring about a way to mark certain states of affairs which happen to be optimal in cognitive architectures of advanced animals

B) To bite the bullet and accept that first-person consciousness does nothing in functional terms If so consciousness would be epiphenomenal I discuss and provisionally endorse the indirectly relevant version of this claim While first-person consciousness does not perform any unique functions we have reasons to care whether certain organisms have or lack such consciousness Those reasons are moral reasons in a broad sense of the term

A) THE NON-EPIPHENOMENAL ALTERNATIVE QUALIA AS MARKERS

I used to argue that first-person consciousness should be viewed as a convenient marker maybe even a unique one (more likely non-unique but best available)8 By a marker I mean something like color-coding Your can code files on your desktop by different symbols or shades of gray but the color coding makes the coding easily recognizable to the human eye the eyes of many animals and some of the non-animal preceptors Phenomenal consciousness

allows us to use colors scents sounds and other qualia in a way that is at least as good and for human cognitive architecture better than the other potential kinds of coding (say using the electron spin) This argument was my last ditch effort to do two things save qualia as essential to first-person consciousness and also view them as a way to secure its non-epiphenomenal status

Gradually I have been losing faith in this two-step effort I still retain some sympathy for this approach but I doubt that it works The main reason in favor of the approach is an analogy with light (a different analogy than the one used elsewhere in this paper)mdashthe light reflected or absorbed by objects enables us to gain visual information it is not identical with such information but it is usually its necessary condition

The main reason against this approach is the following After some conversations with David Chalmers contrary to his intentions I lost faith in the idea that the hard-problem of consciousness is the problem of experience To be precise If Chalmersrsquos hard-problem is the problem of experience then my problem of first-person consciousness is not the hard problem since it is not the problem of experience Why not If we carefully read a standard paper on phenomenal consciousness for robots (say Franklin et al ldquoA Phenomenally Conscious Robotrdquo) we can see that there is a notion of purely functional reaction of robots or humans to sound color smell and other phenomenal qualia The robots have functional-phenomenal consciousness What distinguishes their phenomenal consciousness from the other kind of phenomenal experience namely from the first-person consciousness is that those who possess the latter have the first-person subjective feel of qualia Their information processing of phenomenal information seems exactly the same or at least very similar This conclusion can also be drawn from the physical interpretation of the Church-Turing thesis Hence there are two kinds of phenomenal experience and only one of them relates to the hard problem of consciousness Block seems to make a similar distinction though not very prominently

To conclude The informational structure of phenomenal qualia is NOT what makes a difference between reductive and non-reductive approaches The difference is in the irreducible first-person perspective on phenomenal information that humans have and AI engines lack at least these days

B) A ZOMBIE INTERLUDE The above conclusion makes qualia-based arguments irrelevant (or rather not directly relevant) to the hard problem of consciousness For instance Jacksonrsquos Black and White Mary argument tells us something important about human cognitive architecture9 it tells us that we have no connection from knowledge by description to the actual sensors of colors and other qualia in the brain10 The argumentmdashso reformulatedmdashis not directly relevant for the debate of irreducible first-person consciousness since it relates to specificity of human cognitive architecture So does the Chinese room11 The case of zombies is relevant for the argument advanced in this paper for the reasons that may not be the gist of the zombie case The issue of

zombies opens an interesting problem How rough can a zombie get12

Let me explain Chalmers argues that it is conceivable that for two physically identical individuals one is a zombie while the other has first-person consciousness Dennett responds that such an assumption violates the very tenet of materialism (there is no difference without physical difference) and therefore begs the question if the zombie argument is to be used in polemics against physicalism I think Dennett is right since the argument begs the question13 An interesting task is to define the zombie most similar to a first-person conscious human being that does not violate the claim that there is no difference without physical difference To use David Lewisrsquos ontology of possible worlds the goal is to establish the closest possible world in which zombies dwell Well if functionallymdashin terms of information processingmdashzombies and first-person conscious individuals would have the same cognitive abilities the only difference would be that the latter have a certain ldquoprojector of consciousnessrdquo Such a projector would have to have a physical basis Probably the smallest possible difference could be attained if both the zombies and the non-zombies would have a (physical) projector of consciousnessmdashfunctionally analogous to the projector of holograms or to the projector of light (one such projector is a light bulb) In terms of the zombies such a projector would not function and the malfunction would be caused by the smaller possible errormdashby something like a burn-out of a small wire that prevents the functioning of a light bulb

Here is a way to present the argument of this paper based on the issue at hand The light bulbs and projectors of holograms are pieces of hardware and so are the brainshycells most likely responsible for generation of first-person consciousness The first avenue to takemdashto maintain that first-person consciousness affects information processingmdash has something to its advantage but the above discussion of zombies leads to the second approach the approach that first-person consciousness is epiphenomenal

C) THE EPIPHENOMENAL ALTERNATIVE FIRST-PERSON CONSCIOUSNESS IS INDIRECTLY RELEVANT The second approach to non-reductive consciousness endorses epiphenomenalism Most philosophers would scoff at the idea epiphenomenalism seems hardly worth any respect If first-person consciousness does not do anything it is practically irrelevant and empirically notshyverifiablemdashtwo bummers or so it seems Yet there is at least one aspect such that first-person consciousness is relevant even if it is functionally epiphenomenal

The epiphenomenal does not need to mean irrelevant Imagine a sex robot that behaves just like a human lover at the relevant level of granularity but has no first-person consciousness I think it should matter whether onersquos lover or a close friend merely behaves as if heshe had first-person consciousness or whether heshe in fact has first-person consciousness In response to this point Alan Hajek pointed out that whether onersquos friend has first-person consciousness should matter even more outside of

the context of sex This is a persuasive point but maybe less so for those philosophers who do not endorse first-person consciousness already For them this general question may be viewed as meaningless or speculative (for instance due to the problem of privileged access) The cultural expectations that one should care whether onersquos lover actually feels hisher love or just behaves as if she or he did seem to play a role in this context and they may be stronger than the other epistemic intuitions This is in fact a bit strange It may come in part from the fact that people in love are supposed to connect with one another in a manner not prone to verificationist objections another explanation may come from the fact that psychology of most epistemic functions used by reductionists harkens back on mid-twentieth-century philosophy of science (Popper) whereas psychology of sex and love follows a different more intuitively plausible paradigm

If I care about whether my child my friend or my lover is in fact feeling the world or my interaction with her or him I have a legitimate interest in whether an individual does or does not have first-person consciousness despite onersquos exact same external functioning Hence I have shown at least one broad class of instances when epiphenomenalism about first-person consciousness does not lead to an irrelevant question The question is even more relevant if we have a way of discovering strong inductive evidence whether one has or lacks first-person consciousness Such evidence would be missing in the world of zombies In the world of rough zombies as we have seen above while (at a given level of granularity) there may be no difference in functioning between a zombie and a being with first-person consciousness there is a physical difference between the two the non-zombie has a unit (projector of consciousness) that if properly functioning does produce consciousness whereas zombies do not have such a functioning unit Hence first-person consciousness matters even if it does not influence any functionalities Moreovermdashas we see both from the rough zombies argument and from the engineering thesismdashit can be empirically verifiable (by inductive methods) which individuals have and which ones lack the capacity for producing consciousness and in fact whether such capacity is activatedmdashthis translates into them having first-person consciousness

DEFLATIONARY MOTIVATION There is another reason to adopt a very weak theory of non-reductive consciousness A deflationary approach may be the best or only chance to save non-reductive physicalism

Thomas Nagel once made a very important point It is a better heuristic hypothesis to assume that we know 20 percent of what there is to know than the 80 or 90 percent that many scientists and philosophers tend to assume14

There is no reason to assume that if human civilization lasts another few thousand years we will stop making crucial discoveries in basic sciences Those discoveries if they are as big as Einsteinrsquos revolution add up to a justification of the new ways of thinking that may be inconsistent with some important aspects of what we consider a scientific view today All of this did not prevent Nagel from claiming to endorse non-reductive materialism Until recently that is

In his recent work the author moves a step further and maybe a little too far15 He starts questioning the theory of evolution not by pointing out that maybe it requires some fixes but by posing that we may need to reject the gist of it and engage in some teleological theory of a mind or spirit with the purpose creating the world16 Nagel expresses his amazement in human cognitive powers and consciousness and claims that they would not have emerged from chance and randomness All this is happening today when science provides quite good hypotheses of how consciousness evolved (Damasio) He also seems to disregard the older sound approaches showing how order and life emerge from chaos (Monod) Nagelrsquos disappointing change in view puts into question the gist of non-reductive naturalism

Also David Chalmers abandoned non-reductive materialism In the past Chalmers presented a number of potential theories in philosophy of mind and desisted from making a choice among them (Chalmers) He kept open the possibility of non-reductive materialism as well as panpsychism I viewed this work as an example of intellectual honesty and the ability to overcome human psychological tendencies to drive towards hasty conclusions A few years back Chalmers endorsed panpsychism moreover in its dualistic form He accepted the idea that the mental substance is one of the elements in the world potentially available to science but that it is essentially different from the material This dualistic approach differs from neutral monism as another form of panpsychism (formulated by Spinoza) not to mention basically materialistic neutral monism presented by Russell (1921)

What are the background reasons for those radical choices of at least two of the former top champions of non-reductive physicalism or materialism If we were to look for the common denominator of Nagelrsquos and Chalmersrsquos decisions it is their robust inflationary idea of the subject of consciousness Many philosophers tend to view certain aspects of personal being as essential parts of the subject or consciousness However thinking even creative thinking memory color and smell recognition or emotional states (in their functional aspect) are features of human cognitive architecture that are programmable in a robot or some other kind of a zombie They are by themselves just software products

If we want to find something unique as non-reductive philosophers should we ought to dig more deeply All information processing whether it is qualia perception thinking and memory or creative processes can be programmed and therefore is a part of the contentmdashof an object defined as content as some functionalities By physical interpretation of the Church-Turing thesis such content can always be represented in mathematical functions that almost certainly can be instantiated by other means in other entities The true subjectivity is not software at all it is the stream of awareness before it even reflects any objects we are aware of Let us come back to the story of a patient in a hospital when a nurse discovers that he or she regained consciousness even though we may be unsure of what he or she is aware of Such consciousness just like a stream of water or some Roentgen rays or any other sort of lightmdashis not a piece

of software It is hardware That internal light to use an old-fashioned sounding phrase is the gistmdashand in fact it is the whole shebangmdashof what is non-reductive in non-reductive naturalism Any and all information processing can be duplicated in cognitive architectures with no first-person non-reductive consciousness (in zombies if one likes this theatrical term)

This is my controversial claim First-person consciousness is not like a piece of software but of hardware This view may look like a version of type E dualism since such dualism is linked to epiphenomenalism about consciousness Yet it would be difficult to interpret as dualism a position that consciousness is as material as hardware (A view that maintains that software is material but hardware is not would be really quite odd wouldnrsquot it)

TO SUM UP I began with an argument that first-person consciousness should be a natural process and that we should be able to engineer it in machines (the engineering thesis) But first-person consciousness is not just an information-processing mechanism First-person consciousness lies beyond any information processing The fact that it is not information processing and not a functionality of any sort makes the first-person consciousness unique and irreducible Thanks to the recent works in cognitive neuroscience and psychology the view of non-reductive consciousness as hardware seem better grounded than the alternatives

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Rachel Briggs and David Chalmers for good discussions and encouragement

1 Whether light is hardware is an interesting topic in ontology but it is definitely not software

2 I actually think all human cognitive functions though this is a stronger claim than I may need for the sake of the current argument

3 Boltuc ldquoThe Engineering Thesis in Machine Consciousnessrdquo Boltuc ldquoA Philosopherrsquos Take on Machine Consciousnessrdquo Boltuc ldquoThe Philosophical Problem in Machine Consciousnessrdquo Boltuc and Boltuc ldquoReplication of the Hard Problem of Consciousness in AI and Bio-AIrdquo

4 It is an open question whether it requires carbon-based organic chemistry

5 This is the standard AI approach See Franklin but also the works by Aaron Sloman Igor Alexander and others

6 Proto-consciousness is not identical to stream of consciousness it is more of a stable background for cognitive tasks but the task of drawing an exact analogy with neuroscience is one for another article

7 Still they would disagree even more strongly with the claim that light is just a piece of software

8 Boltuc ldquoA Philosopherrsquos Take on Machine Consciousnessrdquo

9 Boltuc ldquoMaryrsquos Acquaintancerdquo

10 The link goes one way from experience to description One could bio-engineer the reverse link but evolution left us without it since knowledge by description is evolutionarily new

11 Details in the upcoming book Non-reductive Consciousness Naturalistic Deflationary Approach

12 This is the title of an existing paper I presented at various venues in 2014

13 I leave aside Chalmersrsquos intricate argument that proceeds from conceivability to modally stronger notions I think Chalmers is successful in showing that there is a plausible modal language (system of modal logic) in which zombies can be defended I also think Dennett shows that such language may not be used in debate with reductive physicalism

14 Nagel Mortal Questions Nagel The View from Nowhere

15 Nagel Mind and Cosmos

16 I think this is what may be called the Spencer trap In his attempt to endorse evolutionary theory and implement it to all matters Spencer made scientific claims from a philosophical standpoint Nagel seems to follow a similar methodology to the opposite effect

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Block N ldquoOn a Confusion about a Function of Consciousnessrdquo Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 no 2 (1995) 227ndash87

mdashmdashmdash ldquoConsciousnessrdquo In Oxford Companion to the Mind 2nd ed edited by R Gregory Oxford University Press 2004

Boltuc P ldquoThe Engineering Thesis in Machine Consciousnessrdquo Techneacute Research in Philosophy and Technology 16 no 2 (Spring 2012) 187ndash 207

mdashmdashmdash ldquoWhat Is the Difference between Your Friend and a Church Turing Loverrdquo In The Computational Turn Past Presents and Futures 37ndash40 C Ess R Hagengruber Aarchus University 2011

mdashmdashmdash ldquoA Philosopherrsquos Take on Machine Consciousnessrdquo In Philosophy of Engineering and the Artifact in the Digital Age edited by V E Guliciuc 49ndash66 Cambridge Scholarrsquos Press 2010

mdashmdashmdash ldquoThe Philosophical Problem in Machine Consciousnessrdquo International Journal of Machine Consciousness 1 (2009) 155ndash76

mdashmdashmdash ldquoMaryrsquos Acquaintancerdquo APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers 14 no 1 (2014) 25ndash31

Boltuc P and N Boltuc ldquoReplication of the Hard Problem of Consciousness in AI and Bio-AI An Early Conceptual Frameworkrdquo In AI and Consciousness Theoretical Foundations and Current Approaches A Chella R Manzotti 24ndash29 Merlo Park CA AAAI Press 2007 Also online httpwwwConsciousnessitCAIonline_papersBoltucpdf

Chalmers D Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 no 3 (1995) 200ndash19

Damasio A Self Comes to Mind Constructing the Conscious Brain 2010

Dennett D Consciousness Explained Boston The Penguin Press 1991

mdashmdashmdash ldquoThe Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombiesrdquo Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 no 4 (1995a) 322ndash26

Franklin S B Baars and U Ramamurthy ldquoA Phenomenally Conscious Robotrdquo APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers 8 no 1 (Fall 2008) 2ndash4 Available at httpwwwapaonlineorgpublications newslettersv08n1_Computers_03aspx

Monod J Chance and Necessity New York Alfred A Knopf 1981

Nagel T Mind and Cosmos Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False Oxford University Press 2012

mdashmdashmdash The View from Nowhere Oxford University Press 1986

mdashmdashmdash Mortal Questions Oxford University Press 1979

Russell B The Analysis of Mind London George Allen and Unwin New York The Macmillan Company 1921

Social Media and the Organization Man D E Wittkower OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY

In an age of social media we are confronted with a problem novel in degree if not in kind being called to account for the differences between presentations of self appropriate within a variety of group contexts Business news in the post-Facebook era has been replete with stories about privacy fails large and smallmdashemployees fired or denied promotion seemingly due to same-sex relationships revealed on social media career advice to college students about destroying online evidence of having done normal college-student things and so on Keeping work and private lives separate has become more difficult and difficult in different ways and we are living in a new era of navigating self- and group-identities

While social media in general tends to create these problems Facebook with its unitary profile single Friend list and real-name policy has been central to creating this new hazardous environment for identity performance Mark Zuckerberg is quoted in an interview with David Kirkpatrick saying ldquoYou have one identity The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrityrdquo1 Many have critiqued this simplistic view of identity but Michael Zimmerrsquos widely read blog post on the topic is particularly pithy and direct

Zuckerberg must have skipped that class where Jung and Goffman were discussed Individuals are constantly managing and restricting flows of information based on the context they are in switching between identities and persona I present myself differently when Irsquom lecturing in the classroom compared to when Irsquom having a beer with friends I might present a slightly different identity when Irsquom at a church meeting compared to when Irsquom at a football game This is how we navigate the multiple and increasingly complex spheres of our lives It is not that you pretend to be someone that you are not rather you turn the volume up on some aspects of your identity and tone down others all based on the particular context you find yourself2

And this view of the complexity of managing self-presentations within different organizational contexts destructive as it already is to Zuckerbergrsquosmdashwell itrsquos hard to say simplistic Naiumlve Unrealistic Hetero- and Cisshyprivileged Judgmental All of these I supposemdashat any rate to Zuckerbergrsquos faulty view of multiple identities as ldquoa lack of integrityrdquo this view doesnrsquot even yet consider that different elements of identity may need to be not merely emphasized or toned down in different contexts but that integral aspects of identity may need to be hidden entirely in some contexts and revealed only in others Zimmer is aware of this too and quotes an appropriately pseudonymous comment on Kieran Healyrsquos blog post on

the topic that ldquoNobody puts their membership in Alcoholics Anonymous on their CVrdquo3 Surely we ought to say that if anything demonstrates integrity it would be admitting a difficult truth about oneself and seeking support with others through a frank relationship of self-disclosure making the AA example particularly apt not least since the ldquoanonymousrdquo part of AA recognizes that this sort of integrity requires a safe separation of this organizational identity from other aspects of onersquos life of which the contents of a CV is only one particular example dramatic in its absurdity

Zuckerberg for his part seems to have started to think differently about this stating in a 2014 interview that

I donrsquot know if the balance has swung too far but I definitely think wersquore at the point where we donrsquot need to keep on only doing real identity things [ ] If yoursquore always under the pressure of real identity I think that is somewhat of a burden4

The 2010 comments are still important for us to take seriously though Not so much because Zuckerbergrsquos comments reveal a design trait in the Facebook platform that has changed how we think about and perform identity (although this is interesting as well) But even more so because if Zuckerberg mired as he is in thinking about how people manage self- and group identities can fall into a way of thinking so disconnected from the actual conduct of lives there must be something deeply intuitive perhaps seductive about this way of thinking about integrity

At the heart of this intuition is a modern individualist notion of the selfmdashthe self which rights-bearing with an individual and separable existence the juridical self We must assume an integral self logically prior to organizational and communal entanglement in order to pass judgment on whether it is limited transformed disfigured hidden or altered by its entrance into and representation within groups and contexts We tend to take on a ldquocorrespondence theoryrdquo of integrity parallel to the correspondence theory of truth in which a self-representation is to have greater or lesser integrity depending upon the degree of similarity that it bears to some a priori ldquotruerdquo self This view of an ldquounencumbered selfrdquo is deeply mistaken as Sandel (1984) among others has pointed out but is logistically central to our liberal individualist conception of rights and community and thus hard to avoid falling into Zuckerberg may do well to read philosophy in addition to the remedial Goffman (1959) to which Zimmer rightly wishes to assign him

INTEGRITY AND SELF-PERFORMANCE Turning to philosophical theories of personal identity seems at first unhelpful Whether for example we adopt a body-continuity or mind-continuity theory of identity has only the slightest relevance to what might count as ldquointegrityrdquomdashin fact it seems any perspective on philosophical personal identity must view ldquointegrityrdquo as either non-optional or impossible more a metaphysical state than a moral value But even within eg the Humean view that the self is no more than a theater stage on which impressions appear in succession5 fails to preclude that there may be some integral selfmdashHumersquos claim applies only to the self as revealed by introspection as Kant pointed out in arguing

for the idealism of the transcendental unity of apperception (1998) a grammatical necessity as it were corresponding in unknowable ways to the noumenal reality which however is not necessarily less real for its unknowability Indeed when we look to Humersquos (2012) theory of moral virtue we see it is based upon sentiment and sympathy rather than following moral rules or calculation implying that we have these acquired and habitual attributes which constitute our moral selves even if they are not the ldquoIrdquo of the ldquoI thinkrdquo which accompanies all representations Even reductive and skeptical positions within philosophical theories of personal identity make room for habit character and some sort of content to the self inaccessible through introspection though it might be which is subject to change and growth and which is if not an origin then at least a conditioning factor in the determination of our thought and action

We could do worse than to turn to Aristotle for an account of this6 An Aristotelian view of character has the significant virtue of viewing identity as both real and consequential as well as also being an object of work We have on his view a determinate charactermdasheg we may in fact be a coward But in this view we still need not fall into Sartrean bad faith for a coward need not be a coward in the sense that Sartrersquos waiter is a waiter7 A coward may be a coward but may nevertheless be brave in this or that particular situationmdash and through an accretion of such instances of bravery may become brave rather than cowardly Aristotle along with AA tells us to ldquofake it lsquotil you make itrdquo and both rightly view this ldquofaking itrdquo as a creation of integrity not a mere demonstration of its absence

On a correspondence theory of integrity this self-conscious performance of a character which we do not possess appears as false representation but this makes sense only when we assume a complete settled and coherent character We say someone is ldquoacting with integrityrdquo when she takes an action in accordance with her values and principles even or especially when it goes against her self-interest Integrity then is not a degree of correspondence between character and behavior but between values and behavior One can even act with integrity by going against onersquos character as in the case of the coward who nonetheless stands up for what she believes in a dangerous situation the alcoholic entering recovery who affirms ldquoI am intemperaterdquo and concludes ldquotherefore I will not drinkrdquo8

The sort of identity relevant to integrity then is not personal identity in a philosophical sense (for the mere unity of apperception is not a thing to which I can stay true) nor is it onersquos actual character or habits (for to reduce oneself to onersquos history and habits is bad faith and acting according to our habits could well lead us away from integrity if our habits are vicious) Instead the relevant sort of identity must be that with which we identify Certainly we can recognize that we have traits with which we do not identify and the process of personal growth is the process of changing our character in order to bring it into accordance with the values we identify with As Suler has argued disinhibition does not necessarily reveal some ldquotruer selfrdquo that lies ldquounderneathrdquo inhibitions disinhibition may instead make us unrecognizable to ourselves9 Our inhibitionsmdashat the least the ones we value which we identify withmdashare part of

the self that we recognize as ourselves and inhibitions may themselves be the product of choice and work

INTEGRITY IN AN ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT We need not fall into a correspondence theory of integrity or adopt a liberal individualist conception of the self in order to recognize that organizational contexts present problems for personal integrity Two primary sorts come immediately to mind (1) that organizational contexts may exert influences rendering it more difficult to act with integrity as in familiar cases such as conformity and groupthink and (2) that organizational contexts may contain hostility towards certain self-identifications making self-performance with integrity dangerous The second kind of problem is the sort most obviously presented by social media in novel ways and will be our focus here but by the end of this chapter wersquoll have some insights on the first as well

Conflicts between aspects of self-identity in different contexts certainly do not arise for the first time with social media and are not limited to identities which are discriminated against One does not for the most part discuss onersquos sex life in church even if that sex life takes place within marriagemdashand within a straight marriage and involves ldquovanilla sexrdquo rather than BDSM and so on And yet it is not without reason that recent years have seen renewed and intensified discussion of managing boundaries between personal and professional life and the tendency of social media to either blur or overlap contexts of identity performance has created a new environment of identity performance causing new requirements for thinking about and managing identities10

In contemporary digital environments we are frequently interacting simultaneously with persons from different personal and social contexts Our friends and followers in social networking sites (SNS) are promiscuously intermixed We have only a single profile in each and we cannot choose which profile itemsmdashgender identity religious identity former employers namemdashare viewable to which connections or groups of connections in our network Nor can we choose to have different presentations for different connections or groups we may portray ourselves differently in social or work contexts but can choose only a single profile picture There are work-arounds of course but they are onerous difficult to maintain and sometimes violate terms of service agreements requiring single accounts and real names Even using built-in affordances intended to aid in maintaining contextual integrity11 such as private accounts (Twitter) friend lists (Facebook) or circles (Google+) is difficult and socially risky difficult because managing such affordances requires significant upkeep curation memory and attention risky because members of groups of which we are members tend to have their own separate interconnections online or off and effective boundary enforcement must include knowledge of these interconnections and accurate prediction of information flows across them If you wish to convince your parents that yoursquove quit Facebook how far out in their social networks must you go in excluding friends from viewing your posts Aunts and uncles Family friends Friends of friends of family Or in maintaining separation of work and personal life how are you to know whether a Facebook friend or

Twitter follower might know someone in your office well enough to mention that ldquoOh I know a co-worker of yours Sounds like you have some serious HR issues rdquo Social media is indeed connecting us more than ever before but there are many significant silos the structural integrity of which we wish to maintain

These social silos were previously maintained not only by non-simultanous interactions with different groups and organizational contexts but also by the mundane barriers of time and space missing in digital and especially in SNS environments In our offline lives when one is in church one is not also simultaneously in the office in onersquos tennis partnerrsquos car on a family vacation in onersquos adult childrenrsquos living roomsmdashand similarly when one is out on the town it is not also simultaneously the morning after next Monday at lunch break and five years later while interviewing for a new position Digital media do not limit information flows through time and space the same ways as do physically based interactions and our ability to predict to where information may flow and how it may matter to others and in other contextsmdashand to project that prediction indefinitely into the future and in relation to concerns which our future selves may havemdashis obviously insufficient to inoculate ourselves against the ldquoprivacy virusrdquo that SNS presents12

Worse still in the absence of these mundane architectural barriers of time and space and the social barriers to which they give rise even our most thoughtful connections may not be able to accurately perceive and maintain the limits on information flows which we seek to maintain

The co-worker who we run into at the gay bar regardless of his sexual orientation must have overcome potential social barriers by being sufficiently comfortable with presence in a context and location where a sexualized same-gender gaze is considered normal and proper rather than deviant Given these mundane conditions those who may bump into a co-worker at the gay barmdashwhether they be taking part in a community of common self-identification or whether they be gay-friendly straights who are there to see a drag show or because itrsquos just the best place in town to go dancingmdash can at least know that the other party has similarly passed through these social filters Although it may not be known by either party what has brought the other there both are ldquoinsidersrdquo insofar as they have each met these conditions and are thus aware that this knowledge of one another conditioned by this limited mode of access ought to be treated as privileged information to be transmitted only selectively

By contrast identification of sexual orientation through SNS profile data requires only a connection of any kind arising within any context in order to grant access to potentially sensitive information But even without this self-disclosure all contacts from all contexts are welcome in the virtual gay bar that may be overlaid on the SNS userrsquos page and feed A vague work contact made at a professional conference is invited along to passively overhear conversations within communities which he might never have been invited and might never have made himself a party tomdasheven if a user for example posts news of gay marriage legal triumphs and vacation pictures with her partner only to a limited ldquoclose friendsrdquo list her page nonetheless remains a venue in which

conversations take place within overlapping contexts A public post absent identity markers a popular music video for example may receive a simple comment from an ldquoinshygrouprdquo friend (eg ldquoToo bad shersquos straightrdquo) and through such interactions a potentially sensitive social context may coalesce around all those participants and passive viewers presentmdashand all this without the ldquoin-grouprdquo friend having any cues that she has broken down a silo How are we to know which of a friendrsquos user-defined groups we are in and how they are organized

These effects are related to prior theorizations of Meyrowitzrsquos ldquomiddle regionrdquo Papacharissirsquos ldquopublicly private and privately public spacesrdquo and Marwick and boydrsquos ldquocontext collapserdquo13 What is perhaps most distinctive about this particular case is the way these identity performances are tied to unitary SNS profiles and take place within shifting and interlocking publicities rather than across a public private divide We are not seeing the private leaking out into the public so much as we are seeing a variety of regional publics overlaid upon one another In this we are called to account for our contextual identities in a new way our selves are displayed through both our actions as well as through othersrsquo interactions with us simultaneously before a multiplicity of audience with which we may identify in different ways

This is the most peculiar challenge to integrity in an age of social media we can no longer work out our own idea of how our values and commitments can harmonize into an integral self Siloed identity performances allow us to perform those aspects of our identity understood as that version of ourselves with which we identify which fit within one context and another context variously and in sequence We can be gay in one context Muslim in another and a soldier in another still and whether and to what extent those identities can be integrated can largely be sequestered as an issue for our own moral introspection and self-labor Once these identities must be performed before a promiscuously intermixed set of audiences integrity in the sense of staying true to our values takes on a newfound publicity for we can no longer gain acceptance within groups merely by maintaining the local expectations for values and behaviors within each group in turn but instead must either (1) meet each and all local expectations globally (2) argue before others for the coherence of these identities when they vary from expectations particular to each group with which we identify or (3) rebuild and maintain silos where time space and context no longer create them

Indeed so striking is this change that some have worried whether we are losing our interiority altogether

INTEGRITY AND THE ldquoORGANIZATION MANrdquo The worry that maintaining multiple profiles and with them multiple selves reflects a lack of integrity is a Scylla in the anxieties of popular discourse about SNS to which there is a corresponding Charybdis the fear that an emerging ldquolet it all hang outrdquo social norm will destroy the private self altogether and ring in a new age of conformity where all aspects of our lives become performances before (and by implication for) others

There are however significant reasons to believe that even if our lives become ubiquitously subject to surveillance and coveillance this will not result in the exclusion of expressions of marginalized identities or unpopular views14

First we see tendencies towards formation of social and informational echo chambers resulting in increasingly extreme views rather than an averaging-out to moderate and universally accepted views as Sunstein has argued for and documented at length15 But secondly even insofar as we do not separate ourselves out into social and informational ldquoDaily Merdquos becoming a virtual ldquocity of ghettosrdquo the messy and contentious digital spaces in which we are called to account for the integration of our multiple selves may tend not only towards safe and ldquolowest-common denominatorrdquo versions of self-expression but also towards greater visibility and impact of divergent views and even a new impetus away from conformity16

Thus far we have considered how limiting information flows across social and organizational contexts can promote integrity but it is certainly true as well that such siloing of different self-performances can support a lack of integrity Compartmentalization is a key tool in allowing diffusion of responsibility The employee who takes an ldquoI just work hererdquo perspective in her professional life is more likely to encounter productive cognitive dissonance when participating in the mixed contexts of SNS in which discussions with co-workers about their employerrsquos actions are subject to viewing and commentary by other friends who may view a corporate triumph as an environmental disaster The churchgoer who has come to a private peace with her personal rejection of some sectarian dogmas may be forced into a more vocal and public advocacy by having to interact simultaneously with various and divergent friendsrsquo reactions to news of court rulings about abortion rights

In these sorts of cases there is a clear threat to identity performances placing users into precarious positions wherein they must defend and attempt to reconcile seemingly incompatible group identificationsmdashbut this loss in the userrsquos tranquility in some cases may bring with it a gain in personal integrity and possibilities for organizational reform While it is certainly a bad thing that intermixing of audiences may subject users to discrimination and separate performances of identities proper to different groups and contexts need not be indicative of a lack of integrity compartmentalization can also enable people to act against their own values and stifle productive criticism within organizations

Luban et al argue forcefully with reference to the Milgram experiment that bureaucracies create a loss of personal responsibility for collective outcomes resulting in what Arendt called ldquorule by nobodyrdquo17 They suggest that we should attempt to maintain adherence to our moral valuesmdashmaintain our integrity in the sense of staying true to the version of ourselves with which we identifymdash by analogy to how we think of our responsibility for our actions when under the influence of alcohol Just as we plan in advance for our impaired judgment later by taking a cab to the bar or designating a driver so too before we enter into an organizational context we should be aware

that our judgment will become impaired by groupthink and diffusion of responsibility and work out ways in which we can avoid making poor judgments under that organizational influence Social networks may metaphorically provide that more-sober friend who asks ldquoare you sure yoursquore okay to driverdquo enabling our better judgment to gain a foothold

Organizations may then have a similar relation to our integrity as does our character Our character is formed by a history of actions and interactions but we may not identify with the actions that it brings us to habitually perform When we recognize our vicesmdasheg intemperancemdashand seek to act in accordance with our values and beliefs we act against our character and contribute thereby to reforming our habits and character to better align with the version of ourselves with which we identify Organizations may similarly bring us through their own form of inertia and habituation to act in ways contrary to our values and beliefs A confrontation with this contradiction through context collapse may help us to better recognize the organizationrsquos vices and to act according to the version of ourselves in that organizational context with which we identifymdashand contribute thereby to reforming our organization to better align with our values and with its values as well

1 D Kirkpatrick The Facebook Effect 199

2 M Zimmer ldquoFacebookrsquos Zuckerbergrdquo np

3 K Healy ldquoActually Having One Identity for Yourself Is a Breaching Experimentrdquo np

4 B Stone and S Frier ldquoFacebook Turns 10rdquo np

5 D Hume A Treatise of Human Nature I46

6 Aristotle ldquoNicomachean Ethicsrdquo 1729ndash1867

7 J-P Sartre Existentialism and Human Emotion Sartre Being and Nothingness 101ndash03

8 To forestall a possible misunderstanding I do not mean to claim that alcoholism is a matter of character As I understand it the common view among those who identify as alcoholics is that it is a disease and a permanent conditionmdashwhat is subject to change is whether the alcoholic is keeping sober or has relapsed This is where character comes into playmdashspecifically the hard work of (re)gaining and maintaining the virtue of temperance through abstemiousness

9 J Suler ldquoThe Online Disinhibition Effectrdquo

10 Discussion in the first part of this section covers material addressed more systematically in D E Wittkower ldquoFacebook and Dramauthentic Identityrdquo

11 H Nissenbaum ldquoPrivacy as Contextual Integrityrdquo

12 J Grimmelmann ldquoThe Privacy Virusrdquo

13 J Meyrowitz No Sense of Place Z Papacharissi A Private Sphere A Marwick and D Boyd ldquoI Tweet Honestly I Tweet Passionatelyrdquo

14 S Mann et al ldquoSousveillancerdquo

15 C Sunstein Republiccom 20 Sunstein Going to Extremes

16 N Negroponte Being Digital E Pariser The Filter Bubble Wittkower ldquoFacebook and Dramauthentic Identityrdquo

17 D Luban et al H Arendt On Violence 38-39

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arendt H On Violence New York Harcourt Brace amp World 1969

Aristotle ldquoNicomachean Ethicsrdquo In The Complete Works of Aristotle edited by J Barnes Princeton NJ Princeton University Press 1984

Grimmelmann J ldquoThe Privacy Virusrdquo In Facebook and Philosophy edited by D E Wittkower Chicago Open Court 2010

Goffman E The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life New York Doubleday 1959

Healy K ldquoActually Having One Identity for Yourself Is a Breaching Experimentrdquo Crooked Timber May 14 2010 Retrieved from http crookedtimberorg20100514actually-having-one-identity-forshyyourself-is-a-breaching-experiment

Hume D A Treatise of Human Nature Project Gutenberg 2012 Retrieved from httpwwwgutenbergorgfiles47054705-h4705-h htm

Kant I Critique of Pure Reason New York Cambridge University Press 1998

Kirkpatrick D The Facebook Effect New York Simon amp Schuster 2010

Luban D A Strudler and D Wasserman ldquoMoral Responsibility in the Age of Bureaucracyrdquo Michigan Law Review 90 no 8 (1992) 2348ndash92

Mann S J Nolan and B Wellman ldquoSousveillance Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environmentsrdquo Surveillance amp Society 1 no 3 (2003) 331ndash55

Marwick A and D Boyd ldquoI Tweet Honestly I Tweet Passionately Twitter Users Context Collapse and the Imagined Audiencerdquo New Media amp Society 13 no 1 (2011) 114ndash33

Meyrowitz J No Sense of Place The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior New York Oxford University Press 1986

Negroponte N Being Digital New York Vintage 1996

Nissenbaum H ldquoPrivacy As Contextual Integrityrdquo Washington Law Review 79 no 1 (2004) 119ndash57

Papacharissi Z A Private Sphere Democracy in a Digital Age Malden MA Polity Press 2010

Pariser E The Filter Bubble How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think New York Penguin 2012

Sandel M ldquoThe Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Selfrdquo Political Theory 12 no 1 (1984) 81ndash96

Sartre J-P Being and Nothingness New York Washington Square Press 1993

Sartre J-P Existentialism and Human Emotion New York Citadel 2000

Stone B and S Frier ldquoFacebook Turns 10 The Mark Zuckerberg Interviewrdquo Business Week January 30 2014 Retrieved from http wwwbusinessweekcomprinterarticles181135-facebook-turns-10shythe-mark-zuckerberg-interview

Suler J ldquoThe Online Disinhibition Effectrdquo CyberPsychology amp Behavior 7 no 3 (2004) 321ndash26

Sunstein C Republiccom 20 Princeton NJ Princeton University Press 2009

Sunstein C Going to Extremes How Like Minds Unite and Divide New York Oxford University Press 2011

Wittkower D E ldquoFacebook and Dramauthentic Identity A Post-Goffmanian Model of Identity Performance on SNSrdquo First Monday 19 no 4 (2014) np Retrieved from httpfirstmondayorgojsindexphp fmarticleview48583875

Zimmer M ldquoFacebookrsquos Zuckerberg lsquoHaving Two Identities for Yourself Is an Example of a Lack of Integrityrsquordquo May 5 2014 Michaelzimmerorg Retrieved from httpwwwmichaelzimmerorg20100514facebooksshyzuckerberg-having-two-identities-for-yourself-is-an-example-of-a-lackshyof-integrity

Niklas Toivakainen UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI

INTRODUCTION I gather that it would not be an overstatement to claim that the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research is perceived by many to be one of the most fascinating inspiring hopeful but also one of the most worrisome and dangerous advancements of modern civilization AI research and related fields such as neuroscience promise to replace human labor to make it more efficient to integrate robotics into social realities1 and to enhance human capabilities To many AI represents or incarnates an important element of a new philosophy of mind contributing to a revolution in our understanding of humans and life in general which is usually integrated with a vision of a new era of human and super human intelligence With such grandiose hopes invested in a project it is nut surprising that the same elements that invoke hope and enthusiasm in some generate anxiety and disquietude in others2

While I will have things to say about features of these visions and already existing technologies and institutions the main ambition of this paper is to discuss what I understand to be a pervasive moral dimension in AI research To make my position clear from the start I do not mean to say that I will discuss AI from a moral perspective as if it could be discussed from other perspectives detached from morals I admit that thinking about morals in terms of a ldquoperspectiverdquo is natural if one thinks of morality as corresponding to a theory about a separable and distinct dimension or aspect of human life and that there are other dimensions or aspects say scientific reasoning for instance which are essentially amoral or ldquoneutralrdquo with respect to morality Granting that it is a common trait of modern analytical philosophy and scientific thinking to precisely presuppose such a separation between fact and morality (or ldquovaluerdquo as it is usually perceived) I am quite aware that moral considerations enters into the discussion of AI (as is the case for all modern techno-science) as a distinct and separate consideration Nevertheless I will not be concerned here with a critique of moral evaluations relevant for AI researchmdashas for instance an ethics committee would bemdashbut rather with radicalizing the relationship between morality and techno-science3 My main claim in this paper will be that the project of AImdashas the project of any human endeavormdashis itself inextricably a moral matter Much of what I will be doing here is to try and articulate how this claim makes itself seen on many different levels in AI research This is what I mean by saying that I will discuss the moral dimensions of AI

AI AND TECHNO-SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING OF NATURE

The term ldquoArtificial Intelligencerdquo invites three basic philosophicalmdashie conceptualmdashchallenges What is (the

meaning of) ldquoartificialrdquo and ldquointelligencerdquo and what is the idea of these two coupled together For instance if one takes anything ldquoartificialrdquo to be categorically (conceptually metaphysically) distinct from anything ldquogenuinerdquo ldquorealrdquo or ldquonaturalrdquomdashwhich it conceptually seems to suggestmdashand if we think it sufficient (for a given purpose) that ldquointelligencerdquo be understood as a computationalmechanical process of some sort then any chess playing computer program not to speak of the new master in Jeopardy IBMrsquos ldquoWatsonrdquo4 would be perceived as a real and successful token of AI (with good future prospects for advancement) and would not invoke any philosophical concerns in us But as can be observed when looking at the diverse field of AI research there are many who do not think that chess playing computers or Jeopardy master Watson display ldquointelligencerdquo in any ldquorealrdquo sense that ldquointelligencerdquo is not simply a matter of computing power Rather they seem to think that there is much more to the concept of ldquointelligencerdquo and how it relates to the concept of (an actual human) life than machines like Watson encompass or display In other words the dissatisfaction with what is perceived as a limited or narrow conception of intelligence invites the need for philosophical reflection as to what ldquointelligencerdquo really means I will come back to the concept of ldquointelligencerdquo but let us begin by considering the role the term ldquoartificialrdquo plays in this debate and the philosophical and ideological weight it carries with itself

Suppose we were of the opinion that Watsonrsquos alleged ldquointelligencerdquo or any other so-called ldquoGood Old Fashion Artificial Intelligencerdquo5 does not satisfy essential features of intelligence of the ldquosortrdquo human intelligence builds on and that ldquomorerdquo is needed say a body autonomy moral agency etc We might think all of this and still think that AI systems can never become out of conceptual necessity anything more than technological devices or systems albeit very sophisticated and human or animal like ones there will always so to speak be an essential difference between a simulation and a real or natural phenomenamdash this is what the term ldquoartificialrdquo conceptually suggests But as we are all aware this standpoint is not shared by all and especially not within the field of AI research and much of ldquonaturalistic philosophy of mindrdquo as the advocates of what is usually termed ldquostrong AIrdquo hold that AI systems can indeed become ldquorealrdquo or ldquogenuinerdquo ldquoautonomousrdquo ldquointelligentrdquo and even ldquoconsciousrdquo beings6

That people can entertain visions and theories about AI systems one day becoming genuinely autonomous conscious intelligent beings without feeling that they are committing elementary conceptual mistakes derives from the somewhat dominant conception of the nature of concepts such as ldquoartificialityrdquo ldquoliferdquo and the ldquonatural genuinerdquo deep at the heart of the modern technoshyscientifically informed self-understanding or worldview As most of us are aware modern science developed into its paradigmatic form during the seventeenth century reflecting a sort of culmination point of huge social religious and political changes Seen from the perspective of scientific theory and method the founders and visionaries of modern science turned against the ancient Greek and medieval scholastic ldquocontemplativerdquo natural

philosophy devising new methods and practices which built on (very) different ideologies and aspirations

It would take not one but many volumes to clarify all the different (trans)formative forces that led up to the birth of the new methods and cosmology of modern technoshyscience and many good books have been written on the subject7 Nevertheless I shall shortly try to summarize what seems to memdashwith regards to the topic of this papermdash to be some of the decisive differences between modern science and its ancient and medieval predecessors We begin by noting that in the Aristotelian and scholastic natural philosophy knowing what a thing is was (also and essentially) to know its telos or purpose as it was revealed through the Aristotelian four different causal forces and especially the notion of ldquofinal causerdquo8 Further within this cosmological framework ldquoNaturerdquo or ldquothe naturalrdquo stood for that which creates itself or that which is essentialmdashand so that which is created by human hands is of a completely different order Thirdly both Plato and Aristotle had placed the purely theoretical or formal arts or knowledge hierarchically above ldquopracticalrdquo knowledge or know-how (arguably reflecting the political and ideological power structures of the ancient Greek society) On the other hand in the paradigm of modern science knowing what a thing is is to know how that thing functions how it is ldquoconstructedrdquo how it can be controlled and manipulated etc Similarly in the modern era the concept of ldquoNaturerdquo or ldquothe naturalrdquo loses its position as that which is essential and instead becomes more and more perceived as the raw material for manrsquos industriousness So in contrast to the Platonic and Aristotelian glorification of the purely theoretical or formal artsknowledge the seventeenth-century philosophers drew on a new vision ldquoof the importance of uniting theoria with paraxis a vision that grants new prominence to human agency and laborrdquo9 In other words the modern natural philosophers and scientists sought a knowledge that would enable them to dominate natural phenomena

This was the cornerstone of Francis Baconrsquos scientific revolution For Bacon as for his followersmdasharguably the whole project of modern techno-sciencemdashthe duty of human power was to manipulate change and refine corporeal bodies thus conceptualizing ldquoknowledgerdquo as the capacity to understand how this is done10 Hence Baconrsquos famous term ldquoipsa scientia potestas estrdquo or ldquoknowledge itself is powerrdquo This same idea can also be found at the heart of the scientific self-understanding of the father of modern philosophy and modern dualism (which also sets the basis for much of the philosophy and theory of AI) namely in Descartesrsquos articulations In explaining the virtues of the new era of natural philosophy and its methods he proclaimed that they will ldquorender ourselves the masters and possessors of naturerdquo11

Now the main point of this short and crude survey is to try and highlight that had the modern scientific paradigm not been built on a unity between theoria and praxis and the ideas of the duty of man to dominate over nature we would not have read Bacon proclaiming that the artificial does not differ from the natural either in form or in essence but only in the efficient12 For as in the new Baconian model when nature loses (ideologically) its position as

essential and becomes predominantly the raw material for manrsquos industriousness nature (and thus life) itself becomes nothing apart from how man knows it or will someday be able to know itmdashand here ldquoknowledgerdquo is conceptualized as that which gives power over phenomena And even more to the point had such decisive changes not happened we would not be having a philosophical discussion about AI in its ldquostrongrdquo sensemdashie in the sense that the ldquoartificialrdquo can gain the same ontological status as the ldquorealrdquo or ldquonaturalrdquo when such a conceptual change has been made when the universe is perceived as essentially in no way different than an artifact or technological device when the cosmos is perceived to essentially be captured through techno-scientific knowledge then the idea of an AI system as a genuinely autonomous conscious intelligent being becomes a thought to entertain

As I have pointed out this modern and Baconian idea is echoed in thinkers all the way from Descartesmdashwhom perceived all bodily functions as essentially mechanical and subject to technological manipulationcontrol13mdashto modern ldquonaturalist functionalistsrdquo (obviously denying Descartesrsquos substance dualism) who advocate AI in its ldquostrongrdquo sense and suggest that life and humans are ldquomade of mindless robots [cells] and nothing else no nonshyphysical nonrobotic ingredients at allrdquo14 Claiming such an essential unity between nature and artifact obviously goes so to speak both ways machines and artifacts are essentially no different than nature or life but the main argument and emphasis is really that nature and life are essentially no different from artifacts In other words I would claim what is expressed heremdashin the modern techno-scientific understanding of phenomenamdashis the idea that it is the artificial (ie human power) that is the primary or the essential I will characterize this ideologically based conception as a technological or techno-scientific understanding of nature life and being Now the claim I will attempt to lay out is that such a technological understanding is in contrast to how it is usually perceived not simply a question of neutral objective facts but rather an understanding or perspective that is highly morally charged In the last part of the paper I will try to articulate in what sense (or perhaps a particular sense in which) this claim has a direct bearing on our conceptual understanding of AI

IS TECHNO-SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING AMORAL

The reason that I pose the question of techno-sciencersquos relation to morality is that there resides within the self-understanding of modern techno-science an emphatic separation between fact and value (as it is usually termed) It may be added that modern science is by no means the only institution in our modern culture that upholds such a belief and practice In addition to the institutional cornerstone of modern secular societiesmdashnamely the separation between state and churchmdashthe society at large follows a specialization and differentiation of tasks and authorities hierarchies15 Techno-science is one albeit central of these differentiated institutions Now despite the fact that modern techno-science builds strongly on a kind of unity between theory and practicemdashthe truth of a scientific

theory is shown by the power of manipulation it producesmdash it simultaneously developed due to diverse reasons a self-image of political and value (moral) neutrality a science for the sake of science itself16 This meant that while the measure of knowledge was directly related to utility power of manipulation and control17 it was thought that this knowledge could be attained most efficiently and purely when potentially corrupt individual interests of utility or other values were left outside the methods theories and practices of science18 This principle gives modern science its specific specialized and differentiated function in modern society as the producer of ldquoobjectiverdquo technoshyscientific knowledge

One of the main reasons for calling scientific knowledge ldquoneutralrdquo seems to be founded on an urge to detach it as much as possible from the ldquouserdquo this knowledge is put to it can be ldquomisusedrdquo but this is not to be blamed on the institution of science for it (ideally) deals purely with objective facts The real problem one often hears is the politico-economic power structures that pervert scientific knowledge in pursuit of corrupted ends This is why we need political regulation for we know that scientific knowledge has high potency for power and thus destruction or domination This is why we need ethics committees and ethical regulations because science itself is unable to ethically determine its moral status and regulate its domain of action it only deals itself with supposedly amoral objective facts

I am of course not indicating that scientists are morally indifferent to the work they do I am simply pointing out that as a scientist in the modern world onersquos personality as a scientist (dealing with scientific facts) is differentiated from onersquos moral self-understanding in any other sense than the alleged idea that science has an inherent value in itself Obviously any scientist might bring her moral self with them to work and into the laboratories so the split does not have to occur on this level Instead the split finds itself at the core of the idea of the ldquoneutral and objectiverdquo facts of science So when a scientist discovers the mechanisms of say a hydrogen bomb the mechanism or the ldquofact of naturerdquo is itself perceived as amoralmdashit is what it is neutrally and objectively the objective fact is neither good nor evil for such properties do not exist in a disenchanted devalorized and rationally understood nature nature follows natural (amoral) laws that are subject to contingent manipulation and utilization19

One problem with such a stance relates to what I will call ldquothe hypocrisy of modern sciencerdquo On a more fundamental level I would challenge the very idea that scientific knowledge of objective facts of naturereality is itself ldquoneutralrdquo with respect to morals Now to begin outlining what I mean by the ldquohypocrisy of modern sciencerdquo let me start by noting that the dawn of modern science carries with itself a new perhaps unprecedented democratic principle of open accessibility20 In addition to the Cartesian idea that ldquoGood sense or Reason is by nature equal in all menrdquo21 one might say that the democratic principle was engraved in the method itself for it was the right methods of modern science not aristocratic or elite minds that were to produce true knowledge ldquoas if by machineryrdquo22

Hence the new ideology and its methodsmdashboth Baconrsquos and Descartesrsquosmdashwere to put men on ldquoan equal footingrdquo23

Although the democratization of knowledge was part of the ideology of Bacon Descartes and the founders of The Royal Society the concrete reality was and is a completely different story As an example the Royal Society founded in 1660 did not have a single female member before 1945 Nor has access to the scientific community ever been detached from individualsrsquo social backgrounds and positions (class) economic possibilities etc not to speak of cultural and racial factors There is also the issue of how modern science is connected to forms of both economic and ecological exploitation modern science with its experimental basis is and has always been highly dependent on large investments and growing capitalmdashcapital which at least historically and in contemporary socio-economic realities builds on exploitation of both human as well as natural resources24 Nevertheless one might argue such prejudices are more or less part of an unfortunate history and today we are closer to the true democratic ideals of science which have always been there so we can still hold on to a separation between fact and morals

All the same there is another form of hypocrisy that finds itself deep in the roots of modern science and alive and well if not even strengthened even today As both Bacon and Descartes clearly noted the new methods of modern science were to make men ldquomasters and possessors of naturerdquo25 But the new methods of science would not come only to serve man in his domination over nature for the power that this new knowledge gave also served man in his domination over man26 As one may quite easily observe when looking at the interconnectedness of the foundations of modern science with political and economic interests of the newly formed nation states of Europe and the Americas it becomes clear that the history of modern techno-science runs in line with modern military industry and technologies of domination27 For example Galileo also used his own calculations of falling objects in order to calculate ammunition projectile trajectories while Descartesrsquos analytical geometry very quickly became utilized for improvements of ballistics28 And in contrast to the democratic spirit of modern sciencemdashwhich perhaps can be said to have made some ldquoprogressrdquomdashthe interconnectedness of techno-science and military and weapons research and development (RampD) (and other forms of exploitationdestruction) is still very tight That is to say while it is certainly true that modern technoshyscience is not in any sense original in its partnership and interdependence with military and weapons RampD it nevertheless in its conceptual and methodological strive to gain power over phenomena has created unprecedented means of destruction domination and oppressionmdashand we must not forget means of construction and perhaps even liberation In other words modern techno-science has not exclusively built on or led to dreams of liberation and diminishment of suffering (as it quite often rhetorically promises) but as one might put it the complete opposite

In 1975 the Stockholm International Peace Research Institutersquos annual books record that around 400000 scientists engineers and technicians (roughly half of the entire worldrsquos scientific manpower at that time) were

committed to and engaged with weapons research29 At least since the Second World War up until say the late 1980s military technology RampD relied mostly on direct funding by the state as state policy (at least in the United States) was dominated by what is usually called ldquospin-offrdquo thinking The term ldquospin-offrdquo refers to the idea and belief that through heavy funding of military RampD the civilian and commercial sectors will also benefit and develop So as it was perceived as military RampD yielded new high-tech devices and related knowledge some of this knowledge and innovations would then ldquoflow downstreamrdquo and find its place in the civilian commercial markets (in appropriate form) This was arguably one of the main ldquolegitimatizingrdquo reasons for the heavy numbers of scientists working directly for military RampD

But this relationship has changed now (if it ever really was an accurate description) For instance in 1960 the US Department of Defense funded a third of all Scientific RampD in the Western world whereas in 1992 it funded only a seventh of it30 Today this figure is even lower due to a change in the way military RampD relates to civil commercial markets Whereas up until the 1980s military RampD was dominated by ldquospin-offrdquo thinking today it is possible to distinguish at least up to eight different ways in which military RampD is connected to and interdependent with civil commercial markets spanning from traditional ldquospin-offrdquo to its opposite ldquospin-inrdquo31 The modern computer and supercomputer for example are tokens of traditional spin-off and ldquoDefense procurement pull and commercial learningrdquo and the basic science that grew to become what we today know as the Internet stems from ldquoShared infrastructure for defence programs and emerging commercial industryrdquo32 The case of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) which is used to treat symptoms related to Parkinsonrsquos disease and people suffering from essential tremor33 and which falls under the category of ldquoBrain Machine Interfacesrdquo and has its relevance for AI research will serve as another telling example of the complex and interconnected web of techno-science and the military industrial complex Developed within the civilian sector DBS and related knowledge and technology are perceived to be of high importance to military RampD An official NATO report document from 2009 makes the following observation ldquoFrom a military perspective knowledge [neuroscientific knowledge] development should focus on three transitions 1) from clinical and patient applications to applications for healthy users 2) from lab (or controlled) environments to the field and 3) from fundamental knowledge to operational applicationsrdquo34

I emphasized the third transitional phase suggested by the document in order to highlight just how fundamental and to the point Baconrsquos claim that ldquoknowledge itself is powerrdquo is and what the unity between theory and practice means in the modern scientific framework technoshyscientific knowledge of the kind derived for example from neuroscientific and cognitive science research not only lends itself but co-creates the interdependence between basic scientific research and the military industrial complex and finds itself everywhere in between ldquospin-offrdquo and ldquospin-inrdquo utilization

Until today the majority of applied neuroscience research is aimed at assisting people who suffer

from a physical perceptual or cognitive challenge and not at performance enhancement for healthy users This situation opens up opportunities for spin-off and spin-in between advanced (military) Human System Interaction knowledge and the accomplishments in neurotechnology for patients35

We should be reminded here that the military-industrial complex is just one frontier that displays the interconnectedness of scientific ldquofundamental knowledgerdquo and end specific utilization (ldquothe means constraint the endsrdquo36) Adding to this we might just as well think of the interconnectedness of basic scientific knowledge in agricultural research and the food markets37 or scientific research of the human and other genomes and for example the drug industry But I take the case of military RampD to suffice for the point I am making

Now despite the historical and ongoing (and increasing) connection between modern science and military RampD and other exploitative forces I am aware of the fact that this connection can be perceived to be contingent rather than essentialmdashthis is why I called the above a discussion of the ldquohypocrisyrdquo of modern science In other words one may claim that on an essential and conceptual level we might still hang on to the idea of science and its ldquofundamental knowledgerdquo as ldquoneutralrdquomdashalthough I find it somewhat worrisome that due to reasons described above alarm bells arenrsquot going off more than they are Part of the difficulty with coming to grips with the neutrality status of modern science is that the issue is connected on two different levels On the one hand the neutrality of science has been integrated into its methods and to its whole ethos when modern science struggled to gain freedom from church and state control since the seventeenth century38 Related to this urge to form an institution free from the grips of religious and political power structures and domination neutrality with respect to value has become an important criterion of ldquoobjectivityrdquo only if the methods of science are free from the distorting corrupting and vulnerable values of individual humans can it be guided in a pure form by the objective stance of rational reason But one might ask is it really so that if science was not value free and more importantly if it was essentially morally charged by nature it would be deprived of its ldquoobjectivityrdquo

To me it seems that ldquoobjectivityrdquo is not at all dependent on value neutrality in any absolute sense or rather not dependent on being amoral Of course this does not mean that certain values perceived by individuals owing up to say certain social norms and conventions might not distort the scientific search for ldquoobjectivityrdquo not to speak of objectivity in other forms of knowing and understanding Obviously it might do so The point is rather that ldquoneutralityrdquo and ldquoobjectivityrdquo is not the same thing

Neutrality refers to whether a science takes a stand objectivity to whether a science merits certain claims to reliability The two need not have anything to do with each other Certain sciences

may be completely ldquoobjectiverdquomdashthat is validmdashand yet designed to serve a certain political interest the fact that their knowledge is goal-orientated does not mean it doesnrsquot work39

Proctorrsquos point is to my mind quite correct and his characterization of scientific ldquoobjectivityrdquo as validity that ldquoworksrdquomdashsomething that enables one to manipulate and control phenomenamdashis of course in perfect agreement with Baconrsquos definition of scientific knowledge40 The main lesson here as far as I can see it is that in an abstract and detached sense it might seem as if scientific ldquoobjectivityrdquo really could be politically and morally neutral (in its essence) Nevertheless and this is my claim the conceptual confusion arises when we imagine that ldquoobjectivityrdquo can in an absolute sense be ldquoneutralrdquo and amoral Surely any given human practice can be neutral and autonomous relative to specific issuesthings eg neutral to or autonomous with respect to prevailing political ideologies by which we would mean that one strives for a form of knowledge that does not fall victim to the prejudices of a specific ideology This should nevertheless not lead us into thinking that we can detach ldquoobjectivityrdquo from ldquoknowledgerdquo or ldquoknowingrdquomdashas if we could understand what ldquoobjectivityrdquo is independently of what ldquoknowingrdquo something is In this more pervasive sense objectivity is always dependent as one might put it on knowing while knowing itself is always a mode of life and reflects what might be called a moral-existential stance or attitude towards life The mere fact that we choose to call something ldquoknowledgerdquo draws upon certain values and more essentially on a dynamics of aspirations that reflect our stance towards our lives towards other human beings other forms of life and ldquothe worldrdquo But the recognition that we have come to call some specific stance towards life and the world ldquoknowledgerdquo also includes the questions ldquoWhy do we know what we know and why donrsquot we know what we donrsquot know What should we know and what shouldnrsquot we know How might we know differentlyrdquo41 By this I mean to say that such questions moral by nature are included in the questions of ldquoWhy has this gained the status of knowledgerdquo and ldquoWhy have we given this form of knowledge such a position in our livesrdquo So the moral question we should ask ourselves is what is the moral dynamics that has led guiding concepts such as ldquodominationrdquo ldquopowerrdquo ldquocontrolrdquo ldquoartificialrdquo ldquomechanizationrdquo etc to become constitutional for (modern scientific) ldquoknowledgerdquo

I am aware that many philosophers and theorists would object to the way I seem to be implying that moral understanding is prior to scientific or theoretical understanding and not as I gather many would claim that all moral reasoning is itself a form of proto-theoretical rationalization My claim is in a sense the opposite for I am suggesting that in order to understand what modern science and its rationale is we need to understand what lies so to speak behind the will to project a technoshyscientific perspective on phenomena on ldquointelligencerdquo ldquoliferdquo the ldquouniverserdquo and ldquobeingrdquo In other words this is not a question that can be answered by means of modern scientific inquiry for it is this very perspective or attitude we are trying to clarify So despite the fact that theories of the hydrogen bomb led to successful applications and can in this sense be said to be ldquoobjectiverdquo I am claiming

that this objectivity is not and cannot be detached from the political and moral dimensions of a the will to build a hydrogen bomb from a will to power Rather it seems to me that the ldquoobjectivityrdquo of the facts of the hydrogen bomb are reflections or manifestations of will for such a bomb (power) for knowledge of the ldquofactsrdquo of say a hydrogen bomb shows itself as meaningful as something worth our attention only insofar as we are driven or aspire to search for such a knowledgepower In other words my point is that it is not a coincidence or a contingent fact that modern techno-science has devised means of for instance mass-destruction As Michel Henry has put it

Their [the institution of techno-science] ldquoapplicationrdquo is not the contingent and possible result of a prior theoretical content it is already an ldquoapplicationrdquo an instrumental device a technology Besides no authority (instance) exists that would be different from this device and from the scientific knowledge materializing in it that would decide whether or not it should be ldquorealizedrdquo42

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE OR ARTIFICIAL LIFE My initial claim was that if there is to be any serious discussion about AI in any other sense than what technical improvements can be made in creating an ldquoartificialrdquo ldquointelligencerdquomdashand thus holding a conceptual distinction between realnatural and artificialmdashthen intelligence or ldquothe mindrdquo must be understood as technological The discussion that followed was meant to suggest that (i) the (modern) scientific worldview is a technological (or technoshyscientific) understanding of the world life and of being and (ii) that such an understanding is founded on an interest for utility control manipulation and dominationmdashfor powermdash and finally that (iii) modern science is fundamentally and essentially morally charged and strongly so with the moral questions of power control and domination

Looking at the diversity of theories and philosophies of AI one will quite quickly come to realize that AI research is always an interplay between on the one hand a technological demandchallenge and aspiration and on the other hand a conceptual challenge of clarifying the meaning of ldquointelligencerdquo As the first wave of AI research or ldquoGood Old Fashion Artificial Intelligencerdquo (GOFAI)43

built on the idea that high-level symbol manipulation alone could account for intelligence and since the Turing machine is a universal symbol manipulator it was quite ldquonaturalrdquo to think that such a machine could one day become genuinely ldquointelligentrdquo Today the field of AI is much more diverse in its thinking and theorizing about ldquoIntelligencerdquo and as far as I can see the reason for this is that people have felt dissatisfaction not only with the kind of ldquointelligencerdquo the ldquotop-downrdquo systems of GOFAI are able to simulate but more so because people are suspicious with how ldquointelligencerdquo is conceptualized under the banner of GOFAI Today there is talk about how cognition and ldquothe mindrdquo is essentially grounded in the body and in action44

thus making ldquoroboticsrdquo (the body of the AI system) an essential part of AI systems We also hear about ldquosituated cognitionrdquo distributed or de-centralized cognition and ldquothe extended mindrdquo45 Instead of top-down GOFAI many are advocating bottom-up ldquodevelopmentalrdquo approaches46

[L]arge parts of the cognitive science community realise that ldquotrue intelligence in natural and (possibly) artificial systems presupposes three crucial properties

1 The embodiment of the system

2 Its situatedness in a physical and social environment

3 A prolonged epigenetic developmental process through which increasingly more complex cognitive structures emerge in the system as a result of interactions with the physical and social environmentrdquo47

My understanding of the situation is that the new emerging theories and practices are an outcome of a felt need to conceptualize ldquointelligencerdquo or cognition in a manner that more and more resembles how (true and paradigmatic) cognition and intelligence are intertwined with the life of an actual (humanliving) being That is to say there seems to be a need to understand intelligence and cognition as more and more integrated with both embodied and social life itselfmdashand not only understand cognition as an isolated function of symbol-manipulation alaacute GOFAI To my mind this invites the question to what extent can ldquointelligencerdquo be separated from the concept of ldquoliferdquo Or to put it another way How ldquodeeprdquo into life must we go to find the foundations of intelligence

In order to try and clarify what I am aiming for with this question let us connect the concept of ldquointelligencerdquo with that of ldquolanguagerdquo Clearly there might be a specific moment in a childrsquos life when a parent (or some other person) distinctly hears the child utter its ldquofirst wordrdquomdasha sound that is recognizable as a specific word and used in a way that clearly indicates some degree of understanding of how the word can be used in a certain context But of course this ldquofirst wordrdquo is not a miracle in the sense that before the utterance the child was completely deprived of language or that it now suddenly ldquohasrdquo language it is rather a kind of culmination point Now the question we might ask ourselves is whether there is any (developmental) part of a childrsquos lifemdashup until the point of the ldquofirst wordrdquo and beyondmdashthat we could so to speak skip without the child losing its ability to utter its ldquofirst wordrdquo and to develop its ability to use language I do not think that this is an empirical question For what we would then have to assume in such a case is that the ldquofirst wordrdquo is not a culmination of all the interaction and learning that the child had gone through prior to the utterance and this would mean that we could for instance imagine a child that either came into the world already equipped with a ldquodevelopedrdquo capacity to use language or that we could imagine a child just skipping over a few months (I mean ldquometaphysicallyrdquo skipping over them going straight from say one month old to five months old) But we might note in imagining this we make use of the idea ldquoalready equipped with a developed capacity to use languagerdquo which all the same builds on the idea that the development and training usually needed is somehow now miraculously endowed within this child We may compare these thought-experiments with the

real case of a newborn child who immediately after birth crawls to hisher motherrsquos breast who stops screaming when embraced etc Is this kind of what one might call sympathetic responsiveness not constitutive of intelligence and language if this responsiveness was not there from the startmdashas constitutive of life itselfmdashhow could it ever be established And could we imagine such an event without the prenatal life in the womb of the mother all the internal and external stimuli interaction and communication that the fetus experiences during pregnancy And what about the pre-fetal stages and conception itselfmdashcan these be left out from the development of language and intelligence

My point here is of course that from a certain perspective we cannot separate intelligence (or language) from life itself I say ldquoa certain perspectiverdquo because everything depends on what our question or interest is But by the looks of it there seems to be a need within the field of AI research to get so to speak to the bottom of things to a conception of intelligence that incorporates intelligence as it is fleshed out in human and other forms of life in its totalitymdashto make the artificial genuine And if this is the aim then my claim would be that ldquointelligencerdquo and ldquoliferdquo cannot be separated and that AI research must try to figure out how to artificialize not only ldquointelligencerdquo but also ldquoliferdquo In other words any idea of strong AI must understand life or being not only intelligence or ldquothe mindrdquo technologically for if it is not itself technological then how could it be made so

In the beginning of this section I said that AI research is always the interplay between technological aspirations and conceptual enquiry Now I will add to this that AI is first and foremost driven by a technological aspiration and that the conceptual enquiry (clarification of what concepts like ldquoliferdquo and ldquointelligencerdquo means or is) is only a means to fulfill this end That is to say the technological aspiration shapes the nature of the conceptual investigation it has predefined the nature of the end result What makes the ultimate technological fulfillment of strong AI different from its sibling genetic engineering is that whereas the latter must in its pursuit to control and dominate the genetic foundations of life always take for granted life itselfmdashit must rely on re-production of life it can only dominate a given lifemdashthe former aspires in its domination to be an original creator or producer of ldquointelligencerdquo and as I would claim of ldquoliferdquo

THE MORAL DYNAMICS OF THE CONCERN FOR MECHANIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE AND LIFE

I have gone through some effort to make the claim that AImdashin its strong sensemdashpresupposes a technological understanding of life and phenomena in general Further I have tried to make the case that modern science is strongly driven by a technological perspectivemdasha perspective of knowledge to gain power over phenomenamdashand that it makes scant sense to detach morals (in an absolute sense) from such a perspective Finally I have suggested that the pursuit of AI is determined to be a pursuit to construct an artificial modelsimulation of intelligent life itself since to the extent we hope to ldquoconstructrdquo intelligence as it is fleshed out in human and other forms of life it cannot

really be detached from the whole process or development of life What I have not saidmdashand I have tried to make this clearmdashis that I think that modern science or a technological understanding of phenomena and life is invalid or ldquowrongrdquo if our criterion is as it seems to be utility or a form of verification that is built on control over phenomena We are all witnessing how well ldquoit worksrdquo and left to its own logic so to speak modern science will develop indefinitelymdashwe do not know the limits (if there is such) to human power

In this final part I want to try and illustrate how what I have been trying to say makes itself shown in the idea of strong AI My main argument is that while I believe that the idea of strong AI is more or less implicitly built into the modern techno-scientific paradigm (and is thus a logical unfolding of this paradigm) the rationale behind it is more ancient and in fact reflects a deep moral concern one might say belongs to a constitutive characteristic of the human being Earlier I wrote that a strong strand within the modern techno-scientific idea builds on a notion that machines and artifacts are no different than nature or life but that the main argument and emphasis is really that nature and life are essentially no different from artifactsmdashthat it is the artificial human power which is taken as primary or essential Following this suggestion my concern will now be this What is the dynamics behind the claim that human beings or life itself is formal (since any given AI system would be a formal system) and what kind of understanding or conception of human beings does it build on as well as what it overlooks denies and even represses

There are obviously logical and historical reasons why drawing analogies between humans and machines is not only easy (in certain respects) but also tells us something true Namely machines have more or less exclusively been created to simulate human or animal ldquobehaviorrdquo in order to support enhance intensify and replace human labor48 and capability49 and occasionally for the purpose of entertainment And since this is so it is only logical that machines have had to build on some analogies to human physiology and cognitive capability Nevertheless there is another part to the storymdashone might call it the other side of the coinmdashof mechanization that I want to introduce with the help of a quote from Lewis Mumford

Descartes in analyzing the physiology of the human body remarks that its functioning apart from the guidance of the will does not ldquoappear at all strange to those who are acquainted with the variety of movements performed by the different automata or moving machines fabricated by human industry Such persons will look upon this body as a machine made by the hand of Godrdquo But the opposite process was also true the mechanization of human habits prepared the way for mechanical imitations50

It is important to note that Mumfordrsquos point is not to claim any logical priority to the mechanization of human habits over theoretical mechanization of bodies and natural phenomena but rather to make a historical observation as well as to highlight a conceptual point about ldquomechanizationrdquo and its relations to human social

discipline regimentation and control51 Building on what I said earlier I will take Mumfordrsquos point to support my claim that to both theoretically and practically mechanize phenomena is always (also) to force or condition it into a specific form to formalize phenomena in a specific way As Bacon explained the relation between natural phenomena and scientific inquiry nature reveals her secrets ldquounder constraint and vexedrdquo Although it is clear that Bacon thought (as do his contemporary followers) that such a method would reveal the ldquotruerdquo nature of phenomena we should note or I would claim that it was and still is the method itself which wasis the primary or essential guiding force and thus nature or phenomena hadhas to be forced into a shape convenient to the demands and standards of experiment52mdashthis is why we speak of a ldquocontrolled research environmentrdquo Similarly my claim will be that to theoretically as well as practicallymdashin other words ideologicallymdashmechanizeformalize (human) life (human) behavior (human) intelligence (human) relationships is itself to force or condition so to speak human nature into a specific form formalize in a specific way with specific underlying purposes Now as my claim has been these underlying purposes are essentially something that must be understood in moral-existential termsmdashthey are the ldquorationalerdquo behind the scientific attitude to the world and not themselves ldquoscientific objectsrdquo To this I now add that the underlying purposes cannot be detached from what (the meaning of) phenomena are transformed into under the scientific and mechanizing methodsmdashand this obviously invites the question whether any instance is a development a re-definition or a confusion distortion or perversion of our understanding

Obviously this is a huge issue and one I cannot hope to argue for to the extent that a good case could be made for the understanding that I am advocating Nevertheless I shall attempt by way of examples to bring out a tentative outlining of how this dynamics makes itself shown in human relationships and interaction and how it relates to the idea of strong AI

Some readers might at first be perplexed as to the character of the examples I intend to use and perhaps think them naiumlve and irrelevant Nevertheless I hope that by the end of the paper the choice of the examples will be more clear and seen to have substantial bearing on the issue at hand It might be added that the examples are designed to conceptually elaborate the issue brought up in Mumfordrsquos quote above and to shed light on the dynamics of the idea that human intelligence and life are essentially mechanical or formal

Think of a cocktail party at say the presidentrsquos residence Such an event would be what we would call ldquoformalrdquo and the reason for this is that the expectations on each personrsquos behavior are quite strict well organized and controlled highly determined (although obviously not in any ldquoabsolute sense) predictable etc One is for instance expected not to drink too many cocktails not to express onersquos emotions or desires on the dance floor or otherwise too much not to be impolite or too frank in onersquos conversations and so

on the appropriate and expected behavior follows formal rules But note exactly because this is the case so is its opposite That is to say because ldquoappropriaterdquo behavior is grammatically tied to formal rulesexpectations so would also ldquoinappropriaterdquo behavior be to each appropriate response and act there are various ways of breaking them ways which are derived from the ldquoappropriaterdquo ones and become ldquoinappropriaterdquo from the perspective of the ldquoappropriaterdquo So for instance if I were to drink too many cocktails or suddenly start dancing passionately with someonersquos wife or husband these behaviors would be ldquoinappropriaterdquo exactly because there are ldquoappropriaterdquo ones that they go against The same goes for anything we would call ldquoinformalrdquo since the whole concept of ldquoinformalrdquo grammatically presupposes its opposite ie ldquoformalrdquo meaning that we can be ldquoinformalrdquo only in relation to what is ldquoformalrdquo or rather seen from the perspective of ldquoformalrdquo One could for instance say that at some time during the evening the atmosphere at the party became more informal One might say that both ldquoformalrdquo and ldquoinformalrdquo are part of the same language game In other words one might think of a cocktail party as a social machine or mechanism into which each participant enters and must use his rational ability to ldquoplayrdquo along with the determined or expected rules in relation to his own motivations goals fears of social pressure etc

We all know of course that the formal as well as any informal part of a cocktail party (or any other social institution) is a means to discipline regulate control regiment effectuate make efficient polite tolerable etc the way in which human relations are fleshed out to have formal rulesmdashand all the social conditioning that goes into making humans ldquoobeyrdquo these customsmdashis a way to moderate any political or ideological differences that people might have to avoid or control embarrassing and painful encounters between people and emotional passionate and spontaneous reactions and communication etc In other words a cocktail party is to force or condition human nature into a specific formalized form it is to mechanize human nature and her interpersonal relationships53 The point to be made here is that understanding the role that formalizing in this sense has has to include a moral investigation into why human relations create difficulties that need to be managed at all and what are the moral reactions that motivate to the kinds of formalizations that are exercised

To make my point a bit more visible think of a dinner invitation To begin with we might imagine that the invitation comes with the words ldquoinformal dressrdquo which indicates that the receiver might have had reason to expect that the dress code could have been formal indicating that there is an underlying ldquoformalrdquo pressure in the relationship invitation In fact having ldquoinformal dress coderdquo written on an invitation is already a formal feature of the apparently formal invitation Just the same the invitation might altogether lack any references to formalities and dress codes which might mean any of three things (i) It might be that the receiver will automatically understand that this will be a formal dinner with some specific dress code (for the invitation itself is formal) (ii) It might mean that they will understandmdashdue to the context of the invitationmdashthat it will be an informal dinner but that they might have had reason

still to expect that such invitations usually imply some form of formality (a pressure to understand the relationship as formal) Needless to say though both of these play on the idea of a ldquocoderdquo that is either expected or not expected (iii) The third possibilitymdashwhich is in a sense radical although a commonly known phenomenonmdashis simply that the whole ideaconcept of formalitiesinformalities does not present itself That is to say the invitation itself is neither formal nor informal If my friend with whom I have an open and loving relationship invites me over for dinner it would be very odd and indicative of a certain moral tension in our relationship or lack of understanding if I were to ask him if I should dress formally or informally54 our relationship is in this sense and to this extent a-formal And one might say it will stay a-formal to the extent no conflict or difficulty arises between us potentially leading us to adopt a code of formality in order to manage avoid control etc the difficulty that has come between us There is so to speak nothing formalmechanical as such about the relationship or ldquobehaviorrdquo and if an urge to formalize comes from either inside or outside it transforms the relationship or way of relating to it it now becomes formalizedmechanized ie it has now been contextualized with a demand for control regimentation discipline politeness moderation etc What I take this to be pointing at is that (i) if a relationship does not pose a relational and moral difficulty there will be no need urge or reason to formalize or mechanize the relationship This means that the way we relate to each other in such cases is not determined by social collective identities or rolesmdashat least not dominantlymdashbut is rather characterized by an openness towards each other (ii) This indicates that mechanization or codification of human relationships and behavior is a reaction to certain phenomena over which one places a certain demand of regulation control etc

So a cocktail party attendee does not obviously have to understand his or her relationship to other attendees in terms of formalinformal although the social expectations and pressures might do so If an attendee meets a fellow attendee openly kindly and lovingly as opposed to ldquopolitelyrdquo (ldquopolitelyrdquo being a formal way of relating to another hence part of a ldquomechanismrdquo) then there is no mechanism or determined cause or course of action to specify Rather such an encounter is characterized by an openness (and to which extent it is open depends on the persons in the encounter) in which persons encounter each other at least relatively independent of what their social collective identities prescribe to them so to speak as an I to a you In such an openness as far as it is understood in this openness there is no technological knowledge to be attained for whereas technological understanding always includes a demand over (to control and dominate) phenomena in an (morally) open relationship or encounter ldquowe do not find the attitude to make something yield to our willrdquo55 This does not mean of course that we cannot impose a mechanicaltechnological perspective over phenomena and in this case on human relationships and that this wouldnrsquot give us scientifically useful information The point is that if this is done then it must exactly be understood as imposing a certain perspective seeks to determine means of domination regulation control power So in this respect it is definitely correct to say that scientifically valid knowledge reveals itself only through

the methods of science But this in itself does not say more than that by using scientific methods such and such can be attained ie power over phenomena cannot be attained through moral understanding or insight

I am by no means trying to undermine how much of our (social) lives follow formal codes and how much of society and human behavior functions mechanically in one sense or another It is certainly true that what holds for a cocktail party holds also for many other social phenomena and institutions And it is also true that any given social or interpersonal encounter carries with itself a load of different formal aspects (eg what clothes one wears has always a social stamp on it) In fact one might say that the formal aspect of human life is deeply rooted in language itself56 Nevertheless the crucial point is that any formal featuresmdashwhich clothes one wears what social situation or institution one finds oneself inmdashdo not dominate or control the human encounter as far as individuals are able to stay in the openness that invites itself57 Another way of putting it is that it is not the clothes one wears or the party one attends that by itself is ldquoformalrdquo Rather the ldquoformalrdquo makes itself known only as a response to the quite often unbearable openness driven by a desire to control regiment etc the moral and I would add constitutive bond that makes itself known in encounters between people and even between humans and other life-forms the formal is a morally dynamic response to the a-formal openness

To summarize my point is (i) that a technological perspective (ie strong AI58) is so to speak grammatically bound to what I have now called formal or mechanical aspirations towards life and interpersonal relationships (ii) what I have called the a-formal openness cannot so to speak itself be made formalmechanical but can obviously be mechanized in the sense that the openness can be constrained and controlled and (iii) an AI system can within the bounds of technological knowledge and resources be created and developed to function in any given social context in ways that resemble (up to perfection) human behavior as it is fleshed out in formal terms But perceiving such social behavior ie formal relationships as essential and sufficient for what it is to be a person who has a moral relation to other persons and life in general is to overlook deny suppress or repress what bearing others have on us and we on them

A final example is probably in order although I am quite aware that much of what I have been saying about the a-formal openness of our relationships to others will remain obscure and ambiguousmdashalso I must agree partly because articulating clearly the meaning of this is still outside the reach of my (moral) capability In her anthropological studies of the effects of new technologies on our social realities and our self-conceptions Sherry Turkle gives a striking story that illustrates something essential about what I have been trying to say During a study-visit to Japan in the early 1990s she came across a surprising phenomenon that she rightly I would claim connects directly with the growing positive attitude towards the introduction of sociable robots into our societies Facing the disintegration of the traditional lifestyles with large families at the core Japanrsquos young generation had started facing questions as to what

to do with their elderly parents and how to relate to them This situation led to a perhaps surprising (and disturbing) solutioninnovation instead of visiting their parents (as they might have lived far away and time was scarce) some started sending actors to replace them

The actors would visit and play their [the childrenrsquos] parts Some of the elderly parents had dementia and might not have known the difference Most fascinating were reports about the parents who knew that they were being visited by actors They took the actorrsquos visits as a sign of respect enjoyed the company and played the game When I expressed surprise at how satisfying this seemed for all concerned I was told that in Japan being elderly is a role just as being a child is a role Parental visits are in large part the acting out of scripts The Japanese valued the predictable visits and the well-trained courteous actors But when I heard of it I thought ldquoIf you are willing to send in an actor why not send in a robotrdquo59

And of course a robot would at least in a certain sense do just as well In fact we are not that far from this already as the elderly-care institution is more and more starting to replace humans with machines and elaborating visions of future mechanization (and not only in Japan)mdashas is for instance also the parenting institution It might be said that Turklersquos example as it is in a sense driven to a quite explicit extreme shows how interpersonal relationships when dominated by formal codes and roles hides or masks shuts out suppresses or even represses the a-formal open encounter between individuals As Turklersquos report illustrates what an actor or robot for that matter can do is to play the role of the childmdashand here ldquochildrdquo and ldquoparentrdquo are formal categories What the actor (as an actor) cannot do is to be another person who responds to you and gives expression to say the fear of losing you The actor (as an actor) might surely take on the role of someone respondingrelating to someone but that means that the actor would derive such feelings from say hisher own life and express them to you as another co-playeractor in the script that is being played In other words the actor (as an actor) would not relate to you as himherself If the actor on the other hand would respond to you as himherself he or she would not anymore be (in the role of) an actor but would have to set this aside My claim is that a robot (AI system) could not do this that is to set aside the part of acting upon formal scripts What it can do is to be (play the role of) ldquoa childrdquo or a ldquoparentrdquo to the extent that these categories designate formal roles but it could not be a being that is composed so to speak of the interplay or dynamics between the formal and the a-formal openness And even though my or your culture might not understand parental relations as formally as the Japanese in Turklersquos report it is undeniable that parent-child relationships (due to moral conflicts and social pressuremdashjust look at any psychoanalytical analysis) take on a formal charactermdashso there is no need to think that this is only a ldquoJapanese phenomenardquo One could or rather should say it is a constant moral challenge and self-investigation to clarify how much of our relationship to others (eg to onersquos parents or children) is determined or formed by the formal categories of eg ldquoparentrdquo

ldquochildrdquo etc as they are understood in terms of collective normativity and to what extent one is open to the other as an I to a you To put it once more the idea of strong AI is as one might put it the flip side of the idea that onersquos relationships to for instance onersquos parents was and is only a matter of ldquoa childrdquo relating to ldquoparentsrdquo ie relating to each other exclusively via collective social identities

I am of course aware that anyone who will be advocating for strong AI will simply conclude that what I have called the a-formal openness of human relationship to others and to life is something that must be ldquonaturalizedrdquo ldquodisenchantedrdquo and shown to finally be formalmechanical in its essence To this I cannot here say anything more The only thing that I can rely on is that the reader acknowledges the morally charged dimensions I have tried to articulate which makes the simple point that understanding what it means to place a technological and mechanical perspective on phenomena always concerns a moral question as to what the demand for mechanization is a reaction to and what it strives for And obviously my point has been that any AI system will be a formal system and is conceptually grammatically bound to a technological perspective and aspiration which indicates not that this sets some ldquometaphysicalrdquo obstacles for the creation of ldquostrong AIrdquo60

but rather that there is inherent confusion in such a fantasy in that it fails to acknowledge that it is a technological demand that is placed on phenomena or life61

CONCLUDING REMARKS I realize that it might not be fully clear to the reader how or in what sense this has bearing on the question of AI and especially on ldquostrong AIrdquo To make it as straightforward as possible the central claim I am advocating for is that technological or mechanical artifacts including AI systems all stem from what I have called a ldquoformalrdquo (encompassing the ldquoinformalrdquo) perspective on phenomena And as this perspective is one that as one might put it contextualizes phenomena with a demand for control discipline regimentation management etc and hence transforms it it becomes an artifact of our demand So my claim is that the idea of strong AI is characterized by a conceptual confusion In a certain sense one might understand my claim to be that strong AI is a logicalconceptual impossibility And in a certain sense this would be a fair characterization for what I am claiming is that AI is conceptually bound to what I called the ldquoformalrdquo and thus always in interplay with what I have called the a-formal aspect of life So the claim is not for instance that we lack a cognitive ability or epistemic ldquoperspectiverdquo on reality that makes the task of strong AI impossible The claim is that there is no thought to be thought which would be such that it satisfied what we want urge for or are tempted to fantasize aboutmdashor then we are just thinking of AI systems as always technological simulations of an non-technological nature In this sense the idea of strong AI is simply nonsense But in contrast to some philosophers coming from the Wittgenstein-influenced school of philosophy of language I do not want to claim that the idea of ldquostrong AIrdquo is nonsense because it is in conflict with some alleged ldquorulesrdquo of language or goes against the established conventions of meaningful language use62 Rather the ldquononsenserdquo (which is to my mind also a potentially misleading way of phrasing it) is

a form of confusion arising out of a temptation or urge to avoid acknowledging the moral dynamics of the ldquoformalrdquo and ldquoa-formalrdquo of the openness inherent in our relationship to other and to life It is a conceptual confusion but it is moral by nature which means that the confusion is not simply an intellectual mistake or shortcoming but must be understood through a framework of moral dynamics

1 See Turkle Alone Together

2 See for instance Kurzweil The Singularity Is Near and Malone ldquoHow Artificial Intelligence Will Shape Our Livesrdquo

3 In this article I use the term rdquotechno-sciencerdquo to characterize the dominant self-understanding of modern science as such In other words I am claiming for reasons which will become clear mdashalthough not argued for sufficientlymdashthat modern science is predominantly a techno-science I am quite sympathetic with Michel Henryrsquos characterization that when science isolates itself from life as it is lived out in its sensible and interpersonal naturemdashas modern science has donemdashit becomes a technoshyscience As Henry puts it science alone is technology See Henry Barbarism For more on the issue see for instance Ellul The Technological Bluff Mumford Technics and Civilization and von Wright Vetenskapen och Foumlrnuftet

4 See httpwww-03ibmcominnovationuswatson

5 See the short discussion of the term ldquoGood Old Fashion Artificial Intelligencerdquo later in this article

6 Dennett Consciousness Explained Dennett Sweet Dreams Haugeland Artificial Intelligence The Very Idea

7 See for instance Mumford Technics and Civilization Proctor Value Free Science Taylor A Secular Age

8 In the Aristotelian system natural phenomena had four ldquocausalrdquo forces substance formal moving and final cause Proctor Value Free Science 41 Of these causes the moving or ldquoefficient causerdquo was the only one which remained as part of the modern experimental scientific investigation of natural phenomena Bacon Novum Organum II 9 pp 70

9 Proctor Value Free Science 6

10 Bacon Novum Organum 1 124 pp 60 Laringng Det Industrialiserade 96

11 Descartes The Philosophical Works of Descartes Discourse on Method part VI 119

13 See for instance Descartesrsquos Discourse on Method and Passions of the Soul in Descartes The Philosophical Works of Descartes We might also note that Thomas Hobbes in addition to Descartesrsquos technological conception of the human body gave a technological account of the human soul holding that cognition is essentially a computational process Hobbes Leviathan 27shy28 See also Haugeland Artificial Intelligence 22

14 Dennett Sweet Dreams 3 See also Dennett Consciousness Explained and Haugeland Artificial Intelligence

15 Habermas The Theory of Communicative Action Vol 1 and Vol 2 Taylor A Secular Age

16 Cf Henry Barbarism chapter 3 ldquoScience Alone Technologyrdquo

17 As Bacon put it truth and utility are the same thing Bacon Novum Organum I124 60

18 Proctor Value Free Science 31-32

19 One of the main ideological components of modern secularized techno-science has been to devise theories and models of explanation that devalorized the world or nature itself Morals are a human and social ldquoconstructrdquo See Proctor Value Free Science and Taylor A Secular Age

20 von Wright Vetenskapen och Foumlrnuftet 53 Robinson Philosophy and Mystification

21 Descartes The Philosophical Works of Descartes Discourse on the Method Part I 81

22 Bacon Novum Organum Preface 7

24 Pereira From Western Science to Liberation Technology Mumford Technics and Civilization

25 Descartes The Philosophical Works of Descartes Discourse on the Method Part VI 119

26 Cf Bacon Novum Organum 1129 62-63 Let me just note here that I am certainly not implying that it is only modern science that serves and has served the cause of domination This is obviously not the case My main claim is that in contrast to at least ancient and medieval science modern science builds both conceptually as well as methodologically on a notion of power The consequence of this is and has been the creation of unprecedented means of domination (both in form of destruction and opression as well as in construction and liberation)

27 Mumford Technics and Civilization von Wright Vetenskapen och Foumlrnuftet Taylor A Secular Age Mendelssohn Science and Western Domination

28 Mendelssohn Science and Western Domination 77 amp 207

29 Uberoi The European Modernity 90

30 Alic et al Beyon Spinoff 5

31 Reverse spin-off or ldquospin-inrdquo Technology developed in the civil and commercial sector flows upstream so to speak into military uses See ibid 64ndash75

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

33 See httpwwwparkinsonorgParkinson-s-DiseaseTreatment Surgical-Treatment-OptionsDeep-Brain-Stimulation

34 van Erp et al Brain Performance Enhancement for Military Operations 11-12 Emphasis added

35 Ibid 11

37 For an interesting read on the effects of the inter-connectedness between scientific research and industrial agro-business in India see Kothari and Shrivastava Churning the Earth

38 Taylor A Secular Age Proctor Value Free Science

40 Another example closer to the field of AI research would be Daniel Dennettrsquos claim that the theoretical basis and methodological tools used by him and his fellow champions of cognitive neuroscience and AI research are well justified because of the techno-scientific utility they produce See Dennett Sweet Dreams 87

42 Henry Barbarism 54 Emphasis added

43 Or top-down AI which is usually referred to as ldquoGood Old Fashion Artificial Intelligencerdquo (GOFAI) See Haugeland Artificial Intelligence

44 Barsalou Grounded Cognition

45 Clark ldquoReasons Robots and the Extended Mindrdquo Clark Supersizing the Mind Wilson ldquoSix Views of Embodied Cognitionrdquo

46 Oudeyer et al ldquoIntrinsic Motivation Systems for Autonomous Mental Developmentrdquo

47 Guerin 2008 3

48 A telling example is of course the word ldquorobotrdquo which comes from the Check ldquorobotardquo meaning ldquoforced laborrdquo

49 AI seen purely as a form of technology without any philosophical or metaphysical aspirations falls under at least three different categories (i) compensatory (ii) enhancing and (iii) therapeutic For more on the issue see Toivakainen ldquoMan and His Inventionrdquo and Lin et al Robot Ethics

50 Mumford Technics and Civilization 41 Emphasis added

51 Sherry Turkle gives contemporary examples of this logic that Mumford is highlighting Based on her fieldwork as an anthropologist she has noted that sociable robots become either possible or even welcomed replacements for humans when the context of human relationships into which the robots are designed enter is mechanized and regimented sufficiently For example when a nursersquos job has become sufficiently mechanizedformal (due to resource constraints) the idea of a robot replacing the nurse enters the picture See Turkle Alone Together 107

52 In the same spirit the Royal Society also claimed that the scientist must subdue nature and bring her under full submission and control von Wright Vetenskapen och Foumlrnuftet 65

53 For an interesting discussion of the conceptual and historical relationship between mechanization and regimentation discipline and control of human habits see Mumford Technics and Civilization

54 Obviously I am thinking here of a situation in which my friend has not let me know that the dinner will somehow be exceptional with perhaps an ldquoimportantrdquo guest joining us

55 Nykaumlnen ldquoMusic and the Frailness of Wonderrdquo 130

56 Cf Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations sect 111

57 For more on this issue see Backstroumlm The Fear of Openness

58 Let me note here that the so called ldquoweak AIrdquo is not free from conceptual confusion either Essentially a product of modern techno-science it must also deal with the conceptual issue of how to relate questions of moral self-understanding with the idea of ldquoknowledge as powerrdquo and ldquoneutral objectivityrdquo

59 Turkle Alone Together 74 Emphasis added

60 My point is for instance not to make any claims about the existence or non-existence of ldquoqualiardquo in humans or AI systems for that matter As far as I can see the whole discussion about qualia is founded on confusion about the relationship between the so-called ldquoinnerrdquo and ldquoouterrdquo Obviously I will not be able to give my claim any bearing but the point is just to encourage the reader to try and see how the question of strong AI does not need any discussion about qualia

61 I just want to make a quick note here as to the development within AI research that envisions a merging of humans and technology In other words cyborgs See Kurzweil The Singularity Is Near and wwwkevinwarrickcom If strong AI is to make any sense then this is what it might mean namely that humans transform themselves to become ldquoartificialrdquo as far as possible (and we do not know the limits here) Two central points to this (i) A cyborg will just as genetic manipulation always have to presuppose the givenness of life (ii) cyborgs are an excellent example of human social and bodily life becoming (ideally fully) technological The reason why the case of cyborgs is so interesting is that as far as I can see it really captures what strong AI is all about to not only imagine ourselves but also to transform ourselves into technological beings

62 Cf Hacker Wittgenstein Meaning and Mind Kenny Wittgenstein

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alic John A et al Beyon Spinoff Harvard Business School Press 1992

Backstroumlm Joel The Fear of Openness Aringbo University Press Aringbo 2007

Bacon Francis Novum Organum Memphis Bottom of the Hill Publishing 2012

Barsalou Lawrence L Grounded Cognition In Annu Rev Psychol 59 (2008) 617ndash45

Clark Andy ldquoReasons Robots and the Extended Mind (Rationality for the New Millenium)rdquo Mind and Language 16 no 2 (2001) 121ndash45

mdashmdashmdash Supersizing the Mind New York Oxford University Press 2008

Dennett Daniel Consciousness Explained Boston Little Brown and Company 1991

mdashmdashmdash Sweet Dreams Cambridge MA The MIT Press 2006

Descartes Rene The Philosophical Works of Descartes 4th ed translated and edited by Elizabeth S Haldane and G R T Ross New York Cambridge University Press 1967

Ellul Jacques The Technological Bluff trans W Geoffery Bromiley Grand Rapids Michigan W B Eerdmans Publishing Company 1990

Habermas Juumlrgen The Theory of Communicative Action Vol 1 Reason and the Rationalization of Society London Heineman 1984

mdashmdashmdash The Theory of Communicative Action Vol 2 Lifeworld and System A Critique of Functionalist Reason Boston Beacon Press 1987

Hacker P M S Wittgenstein Meaning and Mind Volume 3 of an Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations Oxford Blackwell 1990

Haugeland John Artificial Intelligence The Very Idea Cambridge MA The MIT Press 1986

Henry Michel Barbarism translated by Scott Davidson Chennai India Continuum 2012

Hobbes Thomas Leviathan edited by Ian Shapiro New Haven CT Yale University Press 2010

Kenny Anthony Wittgenstein (revised edition) Oxford Blackwell Publishing 2006

Kothari Ashish and Aseem Shrivastava Churning the Earth New Delhi India Viking 2012

Kurzweil Ray The Singularity Is Near When humans Transcend Biology New York Viking 2005

Lin Patrick et al Robot Ethics Cambridge MA The MIT Press 2012

Laringng Fredrik Det Industrialiserade Helsinki Helsingin Yliopistopaino 1986

Malone Matthew ldquoHow Artificial Intelligence Will Shape Our Livesrdquo ZDNet July 19 2012 httpwwwsmartplanetcomblogpure-genius how-artificial-intelligence-will-shape-our-lives8376 accessed October 2013

Mendelssohn Kurt Science and Western Domination London Thames amp Hudson 1976

Mumford Lewis Technics and Civilization 4th ed with a new foreword by Langdon Winner Chicago University of Chicago Press 2010

Nykaumlnen Hannes ldquoMusic and the Frailness of Wonderrdquo In Economic Value and Ways of Life edited by Ralf Ericksson and Markus Jaumlntti UK Avebury 1995

Oudeyer Pierre-Yves et al ldquoIntrinsic Motivation Sytems for Autonomous Mental Developmentrdquo IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation 11 no 2 (2007) 265ndash86

Pereira Winin From Western Science to Liberation Technology 4th ed Kolkata India Earth Books 2006

Proctor Robert Value Free Science Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 1991

Robinson Guy Philosophy and Mystification London Routledge 1997

Taylor Charles A Secular Age Cambridge The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2007

Toivakainen Niklas ldquoMan and His Inventionrdquo Njohja 3 (2014) 25ndash40

Turkle Sherry Alone Together New York Basic Books 2011

Wilson Margaret ldquoSix Views of Embodied Cognitionrdquo Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 9 no 4 (2002) 625ndash36

Wittgenstein Ludwig Philosophical Investigations 3rd ed Translated by GE M Anscombe New Jersey Prentice Hall 1953

von Wright G H Vetenskapen och Foumlrnuftet Vetenskapen och Foumlrnuftet Stockholm Maringnpocket 1986

Uberoi J P S The European Modernity New Delhi Oxford University Press 2002

van der Zant Tijn et al (2013) ldquoGenerative Artificial Intelligencerdquo In Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence edited by Vincent Muumlller Berlin Springer-Verlag 2013

van Erp Jan B F et al ldquoBrain Performance Enhancement for Military Operationsrdquo TNO Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research 2009 httpwwwdticmilcgi-binGetTRDocAD=ADA567925 accessed September 10 2013

Increase or Decrease of Entropy To Construct a More Universal Macroethics

(A Discussion of Luciano Floridirsquos The Ethics of Information)

Xiaohong Wang DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHYINTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR PHILOSOPHY OF INFORMATION XIrsquoAN JIAOTONG UNIVERSITY PR CHINA

Jian Wang DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHYINTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR PHILOSOPHY OF INFORMATION XIrsquoAN JIAOTONG UNIVERSITY PR CHINA

Kun Zhao SCHOOL OF ELECTRONIC AND INFORMATION ENGINEERING XIrsquoAN JIAOTONG UNIVERSITY PR CHINA

Chaolin Wang SCHOOL OF FOREIGN STUDIES XIrsquoAN JIAOTONG UNIVERSITY PR CHINA

ICTs are radically transforming our understanding of ldquoselfshyconceptionrdquo ldquomutual interactionsrdquo ldquoconception of realityrdquo and ldquointeraction with realityrdquo1 which are concentrations of ethics researchers The timing is never more perfect to thoroughly rethink the philosophical foundations of information ethics This paper will discuss Luciano Floridirsquos The Ethics of Information2 particularly on the fundamental concepts of his information ethics (IE) the framework of this book and its implications on the Chinese IE and Floridirsquos IE in relation to Chinese philosophical thoughts

1 THE BOOK FULFILLS THE HOPE IN ldquoINFORMATION ETHICS THE SECOND GENERATIONrdquo BY ROGERSON AND BYNUM In 1996 Simon Rogerson and Terrell Ward Bynum coauthored an article ldquoInformation Ethics the Second Generationrdquo3 They suggested that computer ethics as the first-generation information ethics was quite limited in research breadth and profundity for it merely accounted for certain computer phenomena without a strong foundation of ethical theories As a result it failed to provide a comprehensive approach and solution to ethical problems regarding information and communication technologies information systems etc For this Luciano Floridi claims that far from being as it may deceptively seem at first sight CE is primarily an ethics of being rather than of becoming and by adopting a level of abstraction the ontology of CE becomes informational4 Here we also refer to a vivid analogy a computer is a machine just as a washing machine is a machine yet no one would ever conceive the study of washing machine ethics5 From this point of view the prevalence of computer ethics resulted from some possible abuse or misuse Itrsquos therefore necessary to develop a paradigm for a second-generation information ethics However as the saying goes ldquothere are a thousand

Hamlets in a thousand peoplersquos eyesrdquo Luciano Floridi mentioned that information ethics has different meanings in the beholders of different disciplines6 His fundamental principles of information ethics are committed to constructing an extremely metaphysical theory upon which computer ethics could be grounded from a philosophical point of view In a macroethical dimension Floridi drew on his theories of philosophy of information the ldquophilosophia primardquo and constructed a non-standard ethics aliened from any excessive emphasis on specific technologies without looking into the specific behavior norms

The four ethical principles of IE are quoted from this book as follows

0 entropy ought not to be caused in the infosphere (null law)

1 entropy ought to be prevented in the infosphere

2 entropy ought to be removed from the infosphere

3 the flourishing of informational entities as well as of the whole infosphere ought to be promoted by preserving cultivating and enriching their well-being

Entropy plays a central role in the fundamental IE principles laid out by Floridi above and through finding a more fundamental and universal platform of evaluation that is through evaluating decrease or increase of entropy he commits to promote IE to be a more universal macroethics However as Floridi admitted the concept of ldquoentropyrdquo that he has been using for more than a decade has indeed led to endless misconceptions and misunderstandings of the concept of ldquoentropyrdquo in thermodynamics and Shannonrsquos information theory Then how can we solve the alleged contradiction or divergence of Floridirsquos concept of ldquoentropyrdquo (or metaphysical entropy) from the informational and the thermodynamic concept of entropy We think as a matter of fact that the concept of entropy used by Floridi is equal to the latter two concepts rather than not equal to them though strictly relating to as claimed by Floridi7

The key is to differentiate the informational potentiality (informational entropy) from the informational semantic meaning (informational content)

As Floridi explicitly interpreted entropy in Shannonrsquos sense can be a measure of the informational potentiality of an information source ldquothat is its informational entropyrdquo8

According to this interpretation in a system bearing energy or information the higher the entropy is the greater the disorder and randomness are and consequently the more possibilities for messages being potentially organized in the system you have Suppose in a situation of maximized disorder (highest entropy) a receiver will not be able to recognize any definite informational contents but nothing however nothing can mean everything when people say ldquonothing is impossiblerdquo or ldquoeverything is possiblerdquo that is nothing contains every possibilities In short high entropy means high possibilities of information-producing but low explicitness of informational semantic meaning of an information source (the object being investigated)

Though higher degree of entropy in a system means more informational potentiality (higher informational entropy ) a receiver could recognize less informational content (the semantic meaning of information) at the time making it difficult to decide what exactly the information is Inversely the lower degree of entropy in a system means less informational potentiality (lower informational entropy) and less degree of randomness yet a receiver could retrieve more informational content (the semantic meaning of information) at the time making it less difficult to decide what the exact information is Given the above Floridi set the starting point of four IE ethical principles to prevent from or remove increase of entropy Or we revise it a little and remain ldquoto remove increase of entropyrdquo From this point of view we can say that Floridirsquos concept of entropy has entirely the same meaning as the concept of entropy in thermodynamics and Shannonrsquos information theory Entropy is a loss of certainty comparatively evil is a ldquoprivation of goodrdquo9

From Shannonrsquos information theory ldquothe entropy H of a discrete random variable X is a measure of the amount of uncertainty associated with the value of Xrdquo10 and he explicitly explained an inverse relation between value of entropy and our uncertainty of outcome output from an information source

H = 0 if and only if all the Pi but one are zero this one having the value unity Thus only when we are certain of the outcome does H vanish Otherwise H is positive11 And with equally likely events there is more choice or uncertainty when there are more possible events12

A philosophical sense of interpretation of Shannonrsquos mathematical formula runs as follows

The amount of information I in an individual message x is given by I(x) = minuslog px

This formula can be interpreted as the inverse of the Boltzmann entropy and by which one of our basic intuitions about information covered is

If px = 1 then I(x) = 0 If we are certain to get a message it literally contains no lsquonewsrsquo at all The lower the probability of the message is the more information it contains13

Letrsquos further the discussion by combing the explanation above with the informational entropy When the potentiality for information-producing is high (high informational entropy) in an information source the occurrence of each event is a small probability event on average and a statement of the small probability event is informative (Popperrsquos high degree of falsification with ruling out many other logical possibilities) More careful thinking reveals however that before the statement of such a small probability event can be confirmed information receivers will be in a disordering and confusing period of understanding the information source similar to the period of anomalies and crisis in the history of science argued by Kuhn Scientists under this disorder and confusion cannot solve problems effectively

For example Einsteinrsquos theory of general relativity implied that rays of light should bend as they pass close to massive objects such as the sun This prediction was a small probability event for those physicists living in the Newtonian paradigm so are for common people living on the earth So ldquodark cloudsrdquo had been haunting in the sky of the classic physics up until Einsteinrsquos prediction was borne out by Edingtonrsquos observation in 1919 Another classical case is in the history of chemistry when Avogadrorsquos hypothesis was originally proposed in 1910 This argument was a small probability event in the background of chemical knowledge at that time and as a result few chemists paid attention to his distinction between atom and molecule so that the confronting situation among chemists had lasted almost for fifty years As an example of that disorder situation Kekule gave as many as nineteen different formulas used by chemists for acetic acid This disorder finally ended after Cannizarro successful revived this hypothesis based on accumulated powerful experimental facts in the 1960s

A period with high informational entropy is necessary for the development of science in which scientific advancement is incubated Only after statements of such small probability events are confirmed howevermdashand small probability events change to be high probability eventsmdashcan science enter a stable and mature period Only during this time can scientists solve problems effectively As a result each progressive step in science must be accompanied by a decrease of informational entropy of the objects being investigated Comparatively information receivers need to remove increase of entropy in an information source in order to have definite knowledge of the source

Floridi agrees with Weinerrsquos view the latter thought that entropy is ldquothe greatest natural evilrdquo14 for it poses a threat to any object of possible values Thus the unnecessary increase of entropy is an irrational action creating evil Inversely any action maintaining or increasing information is good Floridi therefore believes any object or structure either maintaining or increasing information has at least a minimum worth In other words the minimal degree of moral value of inforgs could be measured by the fact that ldquoany change may be morally good or bad not because of its consequences motives universality or virtuous nature but because the infosphere and the informational entities inhabiting it are affected by it positively or negativelyrdquo15 In this sense information ethics specifies values associated with consequentialism deontologism contractualism and virtue ethics Speaking of his researches in IE Floridi explained the IE ldquolooks at ethical problems from the perspective of the receiver of the action not from the source of the action where the receiver of the action could be a biological or a non-biological entity It is an attempt to develop environmental and ecological thinking one step further beyond the biocentric concern to develop an ontocentric ethics based on the concept of what I call the infosphere A more minimalist ethics based on existence rather than on liferdquo16 Such a sphere combines the biosphere and the digital infosphere It could also be defined as an ecosphere a core ecological concept envisioned by Floridi Within the sphere the life of a human as an advanced intelligent animal is an onlife a ldquoFaktizitaet des Lebensrdquo by Heidegger rather than a concept associated with senses

and supersenses or transcendental dialectics From this perspective Floridirsquos information ethics actually lay a theoretical foundation for the first-generation computer ethics in a metaphysical dimension fulfilling what Simon Rogerson and Terrell Ward Bynum hope for

2 THE BOOK DEMONSTRATES ACADEMIC IMPORTANCE AND MAIN FEATURES AS FOLLOWS

IE is an original concentrate of Floridirsquos past studies a sequel to his three serial publications on philosophy of information and an even bigger contribution to philosophical foundation of information theories In the book he systematically constructed IE theories and elaborated on numerous information ethical problems from philosophical perspectives Those fundamental problems are far-reaching covering nearly all issues key to ethical life in an information society from an interdisciplinary approach The author cited rich references and employed detailed materials and meticulous analysis to demonstrate a new field which is created by information and ethics across their related disciplines They include ethical problems meriting immediate attention or long-term commitment based on the authorrsquos illustration of IE era and evolution IE methods and its nature and disciplinary foundations In particular the book constructs a unique framework with clear logic well-structured contents and interconnected flow of thoughts from the beginning to the end demonstrating the authorrsquos strong scholarly commitment

The first chapter studies the ethics construction drawing on the previously described information turn ie the fourth turn The pre-information turn era and the text code era are re-localized with the assaults of information and communication technologies The global infosphere is created ie the informational generation of an ecological system Itrsquos in fact a philosophical study of infosphere and inforgs transformation

The second chapter gives a step-by-step examination and definition of the unified model of information ethics including informational resources products environment and macroethics

The third chapter illustrates the level of abstract (LoA) in epistemology to clarify the interconnection of abstractness with ontological commitments by taking telepresence as an example

The following chapter presents a non-standard ethical approach in which the macroethics fosters a being-centered and patient-oriented information ethics impacted by information and communication technologies and ethical issues

The fifth chapter demonstrates that computer ethics is not a discipline in a true sense Instead itrsquos a methodology and an applied ethics CE could be grounded upon IE perspectives

The sixth chapter illustrates the basic stance of information ethics that is the intrinsic value of the infosphere In an object-oriented ethical model information occupies a

certain place in ethics which could be interpreted from the axiological analysis of information and the discussions on five topics

The seventh chapter dwells upon the ethical problems of artificial intelligence a focal point in current information ethics studies The eighth chapter elaborates upon the constructionist values of Homo Poieticus The ninth and tenth chapters explore the permanent topics of evil and good

The eleventh chapter puts the perspective back on the human beings in reality Through Platorsquos famous analogy of the chariot a question is introduced What is it that keeps a self a whole and consistent entity Regarding egology and its two branches and the reconciling hypothesis the three membranes model the author provided an informational individualization theory of selves and supported a very Spinozian viewpoint a self is taken as a terminus of information structures growth from the perspective of informational structural realism

The twelfth and thirteenth chapters seriously look into the individualrsquos ethical issues that demand immediate solutions in an information era on the basis of preceding self-theories

In the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters the IE problems in the economic globalization context are analyzed philosophically from an expanded point of view General as it appears it is thought-provoking

In the last chapter Floridi neutrally discussed twenty critical views with humility tolerance and meticulousness and demonstrated his academic prudence and dedicated thinking The exceptionally productive contention of different ideas will undoubtedly be even more distinct in his following works

3 THE BOOK COMPRISES THREE INTERCONNECTED PARTS AS FOLLOWS

Itrsquos not difficult to see from the flow of thoughts in the book that IE as the sequel to The Philosophy of Information17

is impressively abstract and universal on one hand and metaphysically constructed on information by Floridi on another hand In The Philosophy of Information he argued the philosophy of information covered a) the critical investigation of the conceptual nature and basic principles of information including its dynamics utilization and sciences b) the elaboration and application of information-theoretic and computational methodologies to philosophical problems18 The ldquotheory plus applicationrdquo approach is extended in the book and constructed in an even succinct and clarified fashion All in all the first five chapters of the book define information ethics from a macro and disciplinary perspective the sixth to eleventh chapters examine the fundamental and everlasting questions on information ethics From the twelfth chapter onward problems on information ethics are studied on individual social and global levels which inarguably builds tiers and strong logic flow throughout the book

As a matter of fact Floridi presents an even more profound approach in the design of research frameworks in the book The first five chapters draw on his past studies on information phenomena and their nature in PI and examine the targeted research object ie information and communication technologies and ethics The examination leads to the fulfillment of hope in the second generation of IE The following six chapters concentrate on studying the ethical impacts of information Internet and computer technologies upon a society Floridirsquos information ethics focuses on certain concepts for instance external and semantical views about information the intrinsic value of the infosphere the object-oriented programming methodology and constructionist ethics Those concepts are associated with the basic ethical issues resulting from diversified information technologies and are appropriately extended here for applications For example Floridi proposes a new class of hybrid evil the ldquoartificial evilrdquo which can complement the traditional distinction between moral evil and natural evil Human beings may act as agents of natural evils such as unaware and healthy carriers of a contagious disease and the allegedly natural occurrence of disasters such as earthquake tsunami drought etc may result from human blameworthy negligence or undue interventions to the environment Furthermore he introduces a productive initial approach which helps to understand personal identity construction in onlife experience and then proposes an expectation for a new ecology of self which completely accommodates the requests of an unspoiled being inhabited in an infosphere Then the book examined informational privacy in the aspects of the ontological interpretation distributed morality information business ethics global information ethics etc In principle this is a serious deliberation of the values people hold in an information era

All in all the book is structured in such a way that the framework and approaches are complementary and accentuated and the book and its chapters are logically organized This demonstrates the authorrsquos profound thinking both in breadth and depth

4 THE BOOK WILL HAVE GREAT IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF INFORMATION ETHICS IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA The current IE studies in the west have been groundbreaking in ethical implications of computer Internet and information technologies a big step further from the earlier computer ethics studies Impressive achievements have been made in different ways This book is one of the innovative works However information ethics is still an emerging cross-discipline in China Only a few universities offer this course Chinese researchers mainly focus their studies on computer ethics In other words related studies are concentrated upon prevalent and desirable topics They find it difficult to tackle the challenging topics for the lack of theoretical and methodological support for philosophy not to mention studying in an interconnected fashion Those studies simply look into ethical phenomena and problems created by information and communication technologies Clearly they lack in breadth and depth and are therefore not counted as legitimate IE studies Actually

the situation of IE studies in contemporary China is very similar to that of the western IE studies before the midshy1990s There had been little multi-disciplinary work and philosophical offerings were weak19 In China the majority of researchers are either researchers of library studies library and information science or librariansinformation researchers The information scientists ethicists philosophers etc comprising the contemporary western IE research team are seriously lacking This is clearly due to the division of scholarly studies in China and the sporadic Chinese IE studies as well

On the contrary Floridi embarked upon his academic journey firstly as a philosopher He then looked into computers from the perspective of information ethics and eventually constructed a philosophical foundation of information theories Next he thoroughly and broadly built a well-developed theory on the second-generation information ethics In his book he proposed numerous pioneering viewpoints which put him in the forefront of the field And those views have great implications for Chinese IE studies Particularly many of Floridirsquos books and articles for example his forceful articles advocating for philosophy of information and his Philosophy of Information are widely known in the Chinese academia and have fueled the philosophy of information studies in China The publication and circulation of this book in China will inarguably advance the scholarship in information ethics

5 COMPARISON OF ldquoSELFrdquo UPON WHICH THE BOOK ELABORATES WITH ldquoSELF-RESTRAINING IN PRIVACYrdquo IN CHINESE CULTURE Given our cultural background we would like to share our thoughts on Floridirsquos interpretations of self from a cross-cultural point of view Floridi claimed that the IE studies he constructed were in parallel with numerous ethical traditions which is undoubtedly true In contemporary China whether the revival of Confucian studies could lead to moral and ethical reconstruction adaptable to an information society is still a pending issue Itrsquos generally thought that a liberal information society is prone to collapse and slide into chaos while the Confucian model might be rigidified and eventually suffocated to death However the reality is that much wisdom in the Confucian thoughts and other ancient Chinese thoughts is still inspiring in modern times

Floridi applied ldquothe logic of realizationrdquo into developing the three membranes models (corporeal cognitive and conscious) He thought that it was the self who talked about a self and meanwhile realized information becoming self-conscious through selves only A self is an ultimate technology of negative entropy Thus information source of a self temporarily overcomes the inherent entropy and turns into consciousness and eventually has the ability to narrate stories of a self that emerged while detaching gradually from an external reality Only the mind could explain those information structures of a thing an organic entity or a self This is surprisingly similar to the great thoughts upheld by Chinese philosophical ideas such as ldquoput your heart in your bodyrdquo (from the Buddhism classic Vajracchedika-sutra) and the Daoist saying ldquothe nature

lives with me in symbiosis and everything is with me as a wholerdquo (Zhuangzi lsquoEqualizing All Thingsrsquo) And this is the niche that the mind occupies in the universe

Admittedly speaking the two ethics are both similar and different China boasts a five-thousand-year-old civilization and the ethical traditions in Confucianism Daoism and Chinese Buddhism are rooted in the Chinese culture The ancient Chinese paid great attention to the moral function of ldquoself-restraining in privacyrdquo and even regarded it as ldquothe way of learning to be moralrdquo ldquoSelf-restraining in privacyrdquo is from The Doctrine of the Mean (Zhong Yong) nothing is more visible than the obscure nothing is plainer than the subtle Hence the junzi20 is cautious when he is alone It means that while a person is living or meditating alone his behaviors should be prudent and moral even though they might not be seen However in an era when ldquosubjectivityrdquo is dramatically encroached is this still possible in reality

Moreover the early Daoist ethical idea of ldquoinherited burdenrdquo seems to hear a distant echo in Floridirsquos axiological ecumenism21 Floridirsquos IE presents ethics beyond the center of biological beings Infosphere-based it attempts to center around all beings and see them as inforgs be they living or non-living beings As a result it expands the scope of subjects of value breaks the anthropocentric and agent-metaphysical grounds and constructs an ontological commitment into moral conducts while we and each individual evolving with information technologies as being in the world stay and meditate alone That is even though there are no people around many subjects of value do exist

1 Luciano Floridi The Onlife Manifesto 2

2 Luciano Floridi The Ethics of Information

3 Simon Rogerson and Terrell Ward Bynum ldquoInformation Ethicsrdquo

4 Floridi Ethics of Information 64

5 Thomas J Froehlich ldquoRafael Capurro and the Challenge of Information Ethicsrdquo 279

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

10 Pieter Adriaans ldquoInformationrdquo Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

11 Claude E Shannon ldquoA Mathematical Theory of Communicationrdquo 390

12 Ibid 389

13 Adriaans ldquoInformationrdquo

14 Terrell Ward Bynum ldquoPhilosophy in the Information Agerdquo 175

16 Bill Uzgalis ldquoInformation Informs the Field A Conversation with Luciano Floridirdquo

17 Floridi The Philosophy of Information

18 Luciano Floridi ldquoWhat Is the Philosophy of Informationrdquo

19 Simon Rogerson and Terrell Ward Bynum ldquoInformation Ethics The Second Generation The Future of Information Systemsrdquo

20 The junzi is the ethical exemplar with the virtues making it possible to follow the daomdashthe way human beings ought to live their lives Quoted from David Wong ldquoChinese Ethicsrdquo Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy httpplatostanfordeduentries ethics-chinese

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bynum T W ldquoPhilosophy in the Information Agerdquo In Putting Information First Luciano Floridi and the Philosophy of Information edited by Patrick Allo 171ndash93 Wiley-Blackwell 2010

Capurro Rafael ldquoEthical Challenges of the Information Society in the 21st Centuryrdquo International Information amp Library Review 32 (2000) 257ndash76

Floridi Luciano ldquoWhat Is the Philosophy of Informationrdquo Metaphilosophy 33 no 12 (2002) 123ndash45

Floridi Luciano ldquoInformation Ethics Its Nature and Scoperdquo Computers and Society 35 no 2 (2005) 1ndash3

Floridi Luciano The Ethics of Information Oxford Oxford University Press 2013

Floridi Luciano (ed) The Onlife Manifesto Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era Springer Open 2015

Floridi Luciano and J W Sanders ldquoMapping the Foundationalist Debaterdquo In Readings in Cyberethics 2nd ed edited by R Spinello and H Tavani Boston MA Jones and Bartlett 2004

Froehlich Thomas J ldquoRafael Capurro and the Challenge of Information Ethicsrdquo Intl Inform amp Libr Rev 32 (2000) 277ndash82

Rogerson S and T W Bynum ldquoInformation Ethics The Second Generation the Future of Information Systemsrdquo UK Academy for Information Systems Conference 1996 httpwwwcmsdmuacuk resourcesgeneraldisciplineie_sec_ genhtml 2015-01-26

Shannon Claude E ldquoA Mathematical Theory of Communicationrdquo Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948) 379ndash423 623ndash56

Uzgalis Bill ldquoInformation Informs the Field A Conversation with Luciano Floridirdquo APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers 2 no 1 (Fall 2002) 72ndash77

Wong David ldquoChinese Ethicsrdquo Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy February 2 2015 httpplatostanfordeduentriesethics-chinese

APA Newsletter on Philososophy and Computers

From the Guest Editor

Notes from our community on Pat Suppes

Articles


Singularitarians AItheists and Why the Problem with Artificial Intelligence is HAL (Humanity A





JOHN P SULLINS GUEST EDITOR VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 2 | SPRING 2015

APA NEWSLETTER ON

FROM THE GUEST EDITOR John P Sullins SONOMA STATE UNIVERSITY

November 17 2014 marked the end of an inspiring career On that day Patrick Suppes died quietly at the age of ninety-two in his house on the Stanford Campus which had been his home both physically and intellectually since 1950 At the time of his death he was the Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and a member of the departments of Statistics and Psychology and of the Graduate School of Education Pat was the first recipient of the Barwise Prize which is awarded by the APA Committee on Philosophy and Computers A more fitting individual for the prize would have been hard to find given that Pat has done significant research teaching and publishing on a vast array of subjects many of which crossed over into the areas that we now call the philosophy of computers and information This of course was neither his only nor even his most significant award In 1990 he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his work in the measurement of subjective probability and utility in uncertain situations the development and testing of general learning theory the semantics and syntax of natural language and the use of interactive computer programs for instruction any one of which could have been sufficient for an entire career This issue of the newsletter is dedicated to his memory and towards that end I have collected some interesting material

While I only knew Pat from meeting him at various conferences and events I was struck by his generosity of spirit and the way he was undaunted by age He never really retired from his positions at Stanford he just went on to find other ways to contribute and work within the academic community there and was still active with some research and teaching in the spring of 2014 The last time I saw him was at a conference at Stanford celebrating the many significant achievements that they have had in the philosophy of science Pat was there and in his glory since many if not most of those achievements were things that he had contributed substantially to He was right in the thick of the discussion the entire event The lasting legacy I will take from him is as a role model for the joyous dedication to the life of the mind and the many pleasures that can bring right to onersquos last days It is sad to lose him I think he had at least another fifty years of good ideas left in him but he has bequeathed us much that we can use and build on There have been a number of very fine obituaries written for Pat and we have links to those later in the issue

but here we wish to celebrate his accomplishments in the fields of philosophy and computing one last time

To accomplish that goal I have compiled some interesting pieces from an autobiography that Pat wrote some years ago but that he added to a bit for an event held in his honor at Stanford In this document he explains his motivations and accomplishments in various fields of study that are of interest to our community In that section you will see just how ambitious Pat was in the world of computer education particularly using the computer as a tool for philosophy education While few would argue the value of computer and online education when it comes to the formal topics in philosophy such as basic logic or aspects of critical thinking I think many would argue that these tools are grossly inappropriate for developing the Socratic symposium style of instruction philosophers have used since the beginning of the profession many millennia ago Even from the early days of personal computing Pat saw things differently He was convinced that something like an AI tutor could be developed that could act as a Socratic tutor to a student and take them through a rich discussion based educational experience that introduced them to not only the facts of philosophy but to the method of philosophical inquiry as well As you will see he also imagined the ldquoflippedrdquo classroom many decades before that term came into vogue when he suggests that the computer is best used in philosophy to prepare the student on facts and reading so that they come prepared to enter the classroom to enter into vigorous philosophical discussions Pat was also way ahead of the game when it comes to experimental philosophy He considered himself an empiricist first and foremost and he believed in testing his ideas through experimentation When Michael Friedman from the Suppes Center for the History and Philosophy of Science at Stanford and John Markoff from the New York Times were working on writing obituaries for Pat John found a news clip from the Times archive from 1966 describing one of Patrsquos first large-scale experiments in deploying computer education to first grade students in an East Palo Alto school1 East Palo Alto is very different from Palo Alto its more affluent neighbor but somehow Pat convinced IBM to put the computer with sixteen consoles costing $450000 dollars in 1966 money into a school that served underprivileged and at-risk students Pat wanted the promise of computer education to cross all the social political race and economic boundaries True to his vision this machine the IBM 1500 made use of verbal inputs and outputs through which ldquothe child gets spoken commands suggestions and encouragementrdquo2 As John Markoff notes in the obituary he wrote for the Times Pat wanted everyone to have a computerized tutor that could personally attend

2 Ibid

ndash Ron Barnette

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

2 Ibid

ndash Ron Barnette

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

32 Ibid 65-66 and 69

35 Ibid 11

47 Guerin 2008 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

7 Ibid 65

8 Ibid 66

9 Ibid 67

12 Ibid 389

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

Documents

Philosoph and Computers · 2018-04-01 · November 17, 2014, marked the end of an inspiring career. On that day Patrick Suppes died quietly at the age of ninety-two in his house on