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Welcome to Maverick Philosopher

My name is William F. Vallicella, I have the doctorate in philosophy (Boston College, 1978), and I have published a couple of books and 70 or so articles in the professional journals. A confirmed blogger in the grip of cacoethes scribendi, I’ve been online since May 2004 on various platforms.  This is MavPhil Gen IV.  I publish online here, at Substack, on Facebook, and at X.  I began posting at Substack in early 2021 under the rubric “Philosophy in Progress.” The Substack entries are intended to assist educated non-philosophers in clarifying their thinking about matters of moment.  My PhilPeople page links to my Substack articles and provides a list of my professional publications. 

Two-line biography:  I taught philosophy at various universities in the USA and abroad. At the relatively young age of 41 I resigned from  a tenured position to live the eremitic life of the independent philosopher in the Sonoran desert. 

Interests: Everything. Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. (Terentius) “I am a man: I consider nothing human foreign to me.” 

Motto: “Study everything, join nothing.” (Paul Brunton)

Comment Policy: This site is not a discussion board.  Comments must address directly what the author says or what the commenters say.  Other comments will not be allowed to appear. Comments should be pithy and to the point. In these hyperkinetic times, the regnant abbreviation is TL;DR.  If you are a cyberpunk needing to take a data dump, please relieve yourself elsewhere.

My politics?  From Democrat to Dissident

Political Burden of Proof: As contemporary ‘liberals’ become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof. The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

Much more below the fold. Best wishes to all men and women of good will who love truth, seek it, and strive to incorporate it in their lives.

 

Continue reading “Welcome to Maverick Philosopher“

Semantic Engines, Consciousness, Intentionality, and Understanding

John Haugeland:

The basic idea of cognitive science is that intelligent beings are semantic engines – in other words, automatic formal systems with interpretations under which they consistently make sense. [This puts]  psychology and artificial intelligence on a more or less equal footing: people and intelligent computers [are] different manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon. (p. 15)

“The basic idea of cognitive science” is what John Searle calls Strong Artificial Intelligence.  “On the Strong AI view, the appropriately programmed digital computer does not just simulate having a mind, it literally has a mind.” (Mind: A Brief Introduction, Oxford UP 2004, p. 66) Searle does not, however, endorse Haugeland’s view. The latter — call it H — implies that there is no good reason to think that the  (natural) intelligence in us  must be any different  in kind from the (artificial) intelligence that is now present in some computers.   My view is that there is good reason to doubt it, and what’s more, deny it.

But if I have reason to deny (H), then it is incumbent upon me to explain why. No bare assertions allowed. (Quod gratis asseritur gratis negatur.) I will defend what Hauegeland calls the Hollow Shell Strategy.  The following quotations are from an  accurate summary of Haugeland’s above-cited article, a summary  written by someone else.

Hollow Shell: however well a semantic engine acts as if it understands, it can’t really do so because it’s missing some vital ingredient “X”. A robot based on a semantic engine would be a sham no matter how good it got. Candidates for “X” are consciousness, original intentionality and caring.

I will consider in this post just consciousness and original intentionality.

X = Consciousness: however smart computers might seem, they can’t really understand anything because they aren’t conscious. It’s natural to suppose something difficult and important has been left out. Haugeland responds by saying that no one understands consciousness – it’s mysterious regardless of your viewpoint. So, how do we know (a) that understanding is impossible without consciousness or (b) that semantic engines won’t ever have consciousness?

NON-INTENTIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The first step  is to distinguish between consciousness (no-intentional conciousness) and consciousness-of. The latter is what philosophers call intentionality or object-directedness.  A conscious state need not be an intentional or object-directed state.  Felt sensations of pain and pleasure, for example, needn’t present an object: they needn’t be of or about anything in the way my noticing that the door is about the door’s being ajar. I have found that it is very difficult to get this distinction across to some people. I’ll try once more.

You are pedaling your bike and you feel  something you describe as ‘pain in the right knee.’ Is that felt pain literally in your knee? No.  What is literally inside the knee is at most the cause of the felt pain:  an X-ray reveals that you are ‘bone-on-bone’: the meniscus has worn away and the femur is grinding against the tibia.  The X-ray reveals the cause. The cause is physical; the pain you feel is not physical, but mental. Follow me so far?

The felt pain — the pain as sensory quale — does not show up on the X-ray slide, nor will the felt pain be empirically detected by an orthopaedic surgeon who cuts into the knee and looks around in there.  The point is this: the felt pain is a conscious state that is not an intentional state.  The conscious state has no intentional object;  it is not object-directed; it does not present an object to the person in the state; it does not ‘take an accusative.’ These are four different ways of saying the same thing.

So far I have made two simple distinctions. The first is between the physical/material cause of the felt pain and the felt pain as mental /conscious sensory quale. The second is between conscious states that are not object-directed and those that are.

What is a conscious state? A conscious state is an occurrent episode of awareness. I have just alluded to a third distinction between the occurrent and the dispositional.  Another technical term is ‘act,’ not to be confused with ‘action.’ (A fourth distinction.) An act is an occurrent episode of awareness (consciousness) that takes an object. No act without an object and no object without an act.  ‘Object’ in this context means intentional object, where such an object may or may not exist without prejudice to its being an intentional object.  So we distinguish between merely intentional objects and intentional objects that also exist in reality, i.e., extra-mentally. (I’ve just made a fifth distinction).  If I ever get a tattoo, it will read Distinguo ergo sum.

There are other points to be made but I must move on.

If we use ‘qualia’ to refer to the non-intentional conscious states one of which I  have just  described, then Daniel Dennett is a qualia-denier. His opposite number is Thomas Nagel, a qualia-affirmer. To put it bluntly and polemically: Thomas Nagel is for me the real thing as philosophers go; Daniel Dennett is a brilliant sophist. But he is indeed brilliant and creative and his work cannot be ignored. His work functions as a very useful and richly elaborated foil against which to develop saner and sounder theories, theories that have a chance of being true.

Killer Quotation from Nagel from a  NYRB review.

I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.”

That’s right. When a line of reasoning issues in an absurdity such as the absurdity that consciousness and its deliverances are illusions, then what you have is a reductio ad absurdum of one or more of the premises with which the reasoning began.  Dennett assumes physicalism and that everything can be explained in physical terms.  This leads to absurdity. But Dennett, blinded by his own brilliance — don’t forget, he counts himself one of the ‘brights’ — bites the bullet. He’d rather break his teeth than examine his assumptions.

Another thing struck me. Dennett makes much of Wilfrid Sellars’ distinction between the manifest and scientific images. ‘Image’ is not quite the right word. An image is someone’s image. But whose image is the scientific image? Who is its subject? It is arguably our image no less than the manifest image.  Nagel quotes Dennett as saying of the manifest image: “It’s the world according to us.”  But the same, or something very similar, is true of the scientific image: it’s the world in itself according to us.  Talk of molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, and strings is our talk just as much as talk of colors and plants and animals and haircuts and home runs.

The world of physics is the world as it is in itself according to us.  Arguably, the ‘according to us’ gets the upper hand over the ‘in itself’ relativizing what comes within the former’s  scope much like Kant’s transcendental prefix, Ich denke.  Das ‘ich denke’ muss alle meine Vorstellungen begleiten koennen . . . .  “The ”I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations.” (KdrV, B 131-2)

Arguably, the world of physics is a mind-involving construct arrived at by excluding the mental and abstracting away from the first-person point of view and the life world (Husserl’s Lebenswelt) it reveals.  I am alluding to an idealist approach to the problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view.  It has its own problems. But why is it inferior to a view like Dennett’s which eliminates as illusory obvious data that are plainly not illusory?

Time was when absolute idealism was the default position in philosophy. Think back to the days of Bradley and Bosanquet. But reaction set in, times have changed, and the Zeitgeist is now against the privileging of Mind and for the apotheosis of Matter.  (But again, matter as construed by us. Arguably, the scientific realist reifies theoretical constructs that we create and employ to make sense of experience.)  Because idealism is out of vogue, the best and brightest are not drawn to its defense, and the brilliant few it attracts are too few to make much headway against the prevailing winds.

Now I’ll tell you what I really think. The problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view is genuine and perhaps the deepest of all philosophical problems. But it is insoluble by us.  If it does have a solution, however, it certainly won’t be anything like Dennett’s.

Although Dennett’s positive theory is worthless, his excesses are extremely useful in helping us see just how deep and many-sided and intractable the problem is.

IS CONSCIOUSNESS MYSTERIOUS?

Haugeland says it is above.

My response is that consciousness is mysterious only if you insist on trying to understand it in materialist or  naturalist terms.  For if you try to understand it in these terms, then you are approaching it from a third-person point of view and are bound to miss it.  From the first-person point of view, it is self-evidently certain that there is consciousness.  Nagel 1; Dennett 0.

It is also self-evidently certain that there is consciousness of objects. ‘Consciousness of objects’ is a genitivus objectivus. So consciousness of objects = object-directed consciousness.  If something is appearing to you, you are conscious of it.

Is anything appearing to you right now?  How about the computer in front of you, the desk upon which it sits, and so on.  Plenty of objects are appearing. This is undeniable.  The question is not whether appearing objects exist apart from their appearing. The question is whether any objects are appearing. You will miss the simple point I am making if you think that consciousness, to be real, must itself appear as a particular object among objects.  It does not and cannot since it is what makes possible the appearing of objects in the first place.

Do you understand the sentences you are now reading? You do. So  the  sentences and the words  in them are  appearing.   If there were no object-directed consciousness, you would not understand anything you are reading or hearing.  Indeed, you would not be reading or hearing at all. Are the words appearing to a Cartesian res cogitans, an immaterial thinking substance? I didn’t say anything about that. I am simply pointing out the obvious phenomenological fact that objects are appearing. The words you are reading are appearing to you as objects of visual consciousness.

So the answer to (a) above in the second quotation is this:  we know that understanding without consciousness is impossible because  without consciousness nothing would appear that could be understood or not understood.  ‘Consciousness’ here is of course  consciousness-of.

As for (b) — How do we know that semantic engines (automatic formal systems) won’t ever  have consciousness?  — the question makes no sense since it contradicts the very idea of a semantic engine.  For Haugeland, a semantic engine is one in which the “semantics takes care of itself” once the proper syntactic operations are up and running. But there is no semantics in such a contraption and the semantics cannot “take care of itself” because you cannot get meaning from merely syntactic manipulations of uninterpreted symbols.   What makes a symbol a full-fledged symbol is its interpreation by an Original Intender (an Original Sinn-er, to make Fregean un out f it).

Computers running programs are wholly meaning -free in and of themselves. All meaning originates from us.

X = Original Intentionality: a semantic engine’s tokens only have meaning because we give meaning to them; their intentionality is derivative, and they don’t mean anything by their tokens any more than books do. Genuine understanding is intentional in its own right and isn’t derived from something else. Haugeland’s response is that actions prove intentionality. Books don’t act, so their intentionality is the author’s, but this isn’t a real counter-example. Robots might be made which act in an intelligent, self-motivated and responsive manner – and seem to act on its opinions, defend them or modify them, which would suggest that they were the robot’s own opinions. So, the response is similar to the last one; original intentionality depends on whether the object has a suitable structure and / or dispositions relative to its environment, so how do we know semantic engines can’t have it?

Haugeland’s response to the objection from original intentionality gives me no good reason to change my view.  He allows that the derivative intentionality of a book comes from the original intentionality of its author but disallows books as counterexamples because they don’t act. That’s true of most books: they just ‘sit’ on the shelf and don’t do anything.  But audio books speak to us, thereby acting.  Will Haugeland say that audio books are self-motivated and act in an intelligent way?  I hope not. As for robots, all Haugeland is able to show is that robots SIMULATE human actions and SIMULATE human thought processes. Beyond that, he is simply begging the question.

I do grant, however, that it really would be wonderful if we could understand the mind-brain relation in us as just a special case of the relation of software to hardware /wetware in a machine running a program. It it easy to understand how cognitive scientists got unduly exited over the prospects of this research program.

The fundamental error of Dennett, Haugeland, et al. is the mistake of thinking that an exhaustive understanding of everything is achievable from a third-person point of view.  And so Dennett attempts the absurd task of explaining consciousness by explaining it away — which issues in the self-refuting claim that consciousness is an illusion.  I explain this in detail in my Substack article Can Consciousness be Explained? Dennett Debunked.

The Overeducated

Stack topper. On the misuse of ‘higher education.’ It begins like this:

I once had a graduate student with whom I became friends. Ned Flynn, to give him a name, one day told me that after he finished high school he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and get a job with the railroad. His mother, however, wanted something ‘better’ for her son. She wanted him to go to college, which he did, in the desultory fashion of many. He ended up declaring a major in psychology and graduating. After spending some time in a monastery, perhaps also at the instigation of his Irish Catholic mother, and still not knowing quite what to do with himself, he was accepted into an M.A. program in philosophy, which is where I met him. After goofing around for several more years, he took a job as a social worker, a job which did not suit him. Last I saw him he was in his mid-thirties and pounding nails.

I Smelled a Scam; Didn’t Bite

This just over the transom. It piqued my vanity, and that in tandem with my ongoing search for high-level interaction with like-minded interlocutors, almost seduced me. But my inherent skepticism and sober understanding of just how wretched we human beings can be kicked in and I did not respond. For a brief exploration of the topic, see my Why are People so Easy to Swindle?

Dear W. F. Vallicella,

I hope you are doing well. My name is David Hartley, and I am the Organizer of The Glasgow Book Club, a reading community that enjoys discovering and discussing challenging works in philosophy and metaphysics.

What particularly caught my attention in A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated is the distinction between two fundamental questions about existence: the “nature question,” concerning what it is for a contingent thing to exist, and the “ground question,” concerning why any contingent thing exists. Presenting these as separate but closely connected problems gives the discussion a clear point of departure, especially as the book places them against more deflationary and eliminativist approaches associated with thinkers such as Quine and Russell.

I would like to invite A Paradigm Theory of Existence to be featured in an upcoming reading session with The Glasgow Book Club. Its focus on questions that have remained central to metaphysical inquiry would give our readers a substantial subject to consider and discuss.

If you would like to know more about the session, I would be happy to share the details.

Warm regards,
David Hartley
Organizer, The Glasgow Book Club

ᐧ

Saturday Night at the Obituaries

A re-post from 10 June 2023. Some busted links. May fix tomorrow, or not.

Astrud Gilberto, the Girl from Ipanema, has passed on at age 83. The genre, Bossa Nova, was popular from the late ’50s to the mid-’60s.

“Blame It on the Bossa Nova” is a song written by Cynthia Weil (lyrics) and Barry Mann which was a 1963 hit single for Eydie Gormé, reaching number 7 on the Hot 100 in Billboard in March 1963.

‘Route 66’ actor George Maharis is dead at 94.

Jack Kerouac in a letter from 17 January 1962: “Everybody is making money off my ideas, like those “Route 66″ TV producers, everybody except me . . . .” (Selected Letters 1957-1969, ed. Charters, Viking 1999, p. 326; see also p. 461 and pp. 301-302.)

Here is the Nelson Riddle theme music from the TV series.  And here is part of an episode from the series which ran from 1960-1964.  George Maharis bears a striking resemblance to Jack, wouldn’t you say? And notice Maharis is riding shotgun.  Kerouac wasn’t a driver.  Neal Cassady (The Dean Moriarty of OTR) was the driver. Neal at the wheel.  One in the hand, four on the road:

Now dig Bobby Troup.  Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, Dr. Feelgood,  and others have covered the tune. How should we describe the good doctor’s performance? Energetic? Nay, manic. Makes this old man want to hit the road, which he will be doing before too long. Every true American loves the open road. And if you don’t? Then you are not a true American. The version by Asleep at the Wheel is especially good.  “Four on the road, one in the hand,” as Neal Cassady says somewhere.

Tina Turner died recently at 83.  Some of us remember her mainly in connection with the abusive Ike.

It’s Gonna Work Out Fine 

Enough death for one night.

John Searle on AI

Below, a  Searle-y observation which I suspect is on target. “Next token prediction,” which is the ‘magic’ that drives Claude & Co, is just super-sophisticated and super-fast auto-completion. But I’ll go Searle one better: it’s not the brain that thinks or any part thereof, but a spiritual substance ‘metaphysically behind’ it. I wish I could prove that, but I doubt that anyone can. It is, however, reasonable to believe, or so say I.

I don’t buy the idea that “automatic formal systems” (John Haugeland) are semantic engines. They are syntactic engines only. “Computers are defined in terms of symbol manipulation, and symbol manipulation by itself is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for meaning.” (John Searle, MIND: A Brief Introduction,  Oxford UP 2004, p. 101.)

Vlastimil asked over at Facebook:

If many many mutually incompatible, substantive, philosophical views are reasonable, what makes you prefer a given one over the other?

I replied:

That’s a fair question. Obviously there is no algorithm (decision procedure, ‘effective procedure’) that we can apply. Suppose the question is whether we as individuals have a higher destiny beyond the grave. Nobody KNOWS the answer to that, and anyone who thinks he can PROVE it one way or another is engaged in what I call metaphysical bluster. (G. K. Chesterton is an example of a blusterer.) So in the end it all comes down to a free personal decision based on many factors including religious and mystical experiences, hints, intimations, glimpses, not to mention careful examination of all the arguments pro and con of all the philosophers, sages, mystics, religionists, and theologians  East and West throughout the ages.  Even if no argument or set of arguments is rationally COERCIVE, some arguments or sets thereof are better than others. For example, the arguments of the doctor angelicus count for more than those of a hack like Ayn Rand. I’ll send you a copy of my book if I can finish it before “shuffling off the mortal coil.” In the end you must ‘cut off’ yap and scribble and DE-CIDE (you know Latin) what you will believe and how you will live, and then live according to what you decide where belief and action are mutually reinforcing and limiting.

Artificial Intelligence in Medicine

Recently over the transom from an M. D. friend:
I became very interested in [Michael] Polanyi some twenty years ago when I was trying to write a book with an economist on what we previously termed ‘knowledge management’ in medicine.  The book never came to fruition (some free advice – never write anything with an economist) but it did prepare me for when I taught healthcare informatics several years later.
The challenge with AI in medicine is the temptation to reach the conclusion depicted in Figure 1.  to say that generative AI is superior to human medicine.

Figure 1
When I was teaching informatics, I used the concept in Figure 2, known as Friedman’s Fundamental Theorem of Biomedical Informatics, which I think applies to Philosophy as well – that human reasoning and AI together are superior to AI alone.  Maybe as AI models evolve, it will be a larger amount of AI that accompanies the human thought.
Figure 2
“That human reasoning and AI together are superior to AI alone” is certainly a  plausible line to take. But the saying and the cute graphics raise some questions. I’ll raise a couple of philosophical questions and then point out a pretty obvious worry for medical practitioners.
1) Is it the brain that thinks when we think? (I mean an embodied living human brain adequately supplied with oxygenated blood and hooked up via the central nervous system with nature’s input and output devices, e.g. eyes, ears, vocal cords.)  That our brains think when we think is what the graphic suggests.  Might that be a misleading suggestion?  It rules out  mind-body (mind-brain) substance dualism which has deep roots in religion and philosophy (Plato, Augustine, Descartes, et al.) and is still defended today by a minority of philosophers, Richard Swinburne for example.  Or do we think using our brains?
2)  But suppose materialism is true and it is the brain that thinks when I think, and there is no immaterial, unextended,  res cogitans along Cartesian lines that is the thinker of my thoughts.  Then the question arises: Is the human brain an “automatic formal system” that operates in the same way that a computing machine operates? If so, then human psychology and cognitive science will coincide such that natural and artificial intelligence are both equally robust kinds of intelligence .  “An automatic formal system is a physical device (such as a machine) which automatically manipulates the tokens of some formal system according to the rules of that system.” (John Haugeland, Semantic Engines, p. 5)
Or is it rather the case that, while materialism is true, and dualism false, the natural human brain and the artificial mechanical ‘brain’ are brains in such different senses of the term that only human brains are genuine semantic engines and truly intelligent. This is essentially John Searle’s view. “Computers are defined in terms of symbol manipulation, and symbol manipulation by itself  is neither constitutive of not sufficient for meaning.” (Mind: A Brief Introduction, Oxford UP, 2004, p. 101.)
Whatever the implications of AI for the philosophy of mind, there are other questions ‘closer to the ground.’
3) For example,  advanced AI will drastically reduced the need for MDs to do all sorts of things such as interpret the results of CT  scans and other diagnostics.  You don’t need a face-to-face consultation with a radiation oncologist to learn  that a scan has revealed that a neck tumor is lousy with squamous cell carcinoma.  And what about the techs who prepare patients for scans?  Advanced robotics can replace many if not all of them. And the oncology nurses who administer chemotherapy? Ditto.

Voices, Shadows, and the Possibility of Bilocation

Carlos Eire writes, “How can millions of us humans be in multiple locations simultaneously via the internet, day after day, but still feel the need to scoff at bilocation?” (They Flew: A History of the Impossible, Yale UP, 2023, p. 23.) Eire defines bilocation as “the act of being present at two distinct locations simultaneously.” (p. 2) By this (inadequate) definition, I am bilocated right now inasmuch as my head and my feet are in two distinct locations simultaneously.  What is correctly meant by ‘bilocation,’ however, is that one and the same body, together with all its  parts, is in two numerically distinct locations at one and same time. Despite what Eire says, it remains easy to scoff at this notion.

“Do you really mean to tell me that Padre Pio was at one and the same time both on the ground in his monastic enclosure  and up in the air warding off Allied bombers approaching his beloved town?” C’mon, maaan (as Joe Biden might say.)

But instead of scoffing, let’s try thinking. Consider a human voice, by which I mean a particular human vocal utterance.  It is a physical item, albeit rather less substantial than the human being whose vocal utterance it is.  It is physical in that it is spatiotemporally qualified and empirically discernible.    It can be far or near from the one who hears it, and can last for a short or a long time. Voices can move.  Voices can be literally heard, recorded and transmitted, by telephone, for example. They are therefore physical items.

The same goes for shadows. A shadow can be a measurable distance from the one who sees; it can have a specifiable shape; it can last for a measurable period of time.  Shadows can move: the shadow cast by a moving car against an embankment moves with the same velocity (same speed, same direction) as the car.  Shadows are empirically discernible in that we see but cannot hear them, just as voices are empirically discernible in that we can hear  but cannot see them.  Shadows can be photographed and otherwise depicted.  Voices and shadows can be either hallucinated or real.  Both voices and shadows are intersubjectively verifiable: you and I can corroborate each other’s perception of a voice or a shadow.

But surely a shadow cannot be bilocated. So you might infer that since shadows and voices are ‘on all fours’ (to use an old U.K. expression), a voice cannot  be bilocated either.  Suppose we try thinking a little harder.

Might it be possible to argue plausibly that a physical item such as a voice  could be in two places at the same time?  And if that can be plausibly argued, would it soften us up for the idea that Padre Pio, say, could be in two different places at the same time?

Suppose I phone my friend Dave in Montana.   He picks up and, having heard me say “Hello, Dave” says, “It’s good to hear your voice, Bill.” The vocal utterance Dave hears is the very same vocal utterance I speak when I say “Hello Dave.” My voice or vocal utterance is in two distinct places, Phoenix and Billings, say, at one and the same time.  What we have here, it seems, is a physical item that is bilocated.

Objection: “It’s not numerically the same vocal utterance.  What Dave hears is a numerically distinct copy of what Bill utters, not what Bill utters. There are two utterances, not one, the original made by Bill, and  the copy heard by Dave. Two items can be indiscernible in every respect without being one item.  Suppose Bill writes Dave a note, makes a photocopy of it and sends the copy to Dave while keeping the original. It’s like that, except that transmission and receipt occur at the same time.

Reply: It’s not like that. It’s like the situation in which Bill writes a note to Dave, makes no copy, but mails the original to Dave.

But even if I’ m right about voices, and I am not at all sure that I am, I am still a long way from telling a story that renders reasonable the belief in the (real, not merely epistemic) possibility of the bilocations amply described in Eire’s fascinating book.

I am out of ideas, so I stop . . .for now.

 

Are Burden-of-Proof Considerations Relevant in Philosophy?

In the law, yes; in philosophy, no. Or so I argue over at Substack. Malcolm Pollack ‘incited’ the article with his comment:

I think the burden [the BOP] would be on whoever asserts that my chats with Claude aren’t actually conversations, and I think it would be very difficult to demonstrate without begging the very question we’re wrangling over in this thread.

It’s Saturday night, time to punch the clock, have me a  Jack and Coke, and dinner with Mark Levin who, like Trump, is blind to the AI downside.  More on that later.

And seeing as how it’s Saturday night, who put the BOP in the “bop shoo bop shoo bop”?

Trump’s Space Force

Top o’ the Stack

“I will not weaponize space,” said Barack Obama while a candidate in 2008. That empty promise came too late, and is irresponsible to boot: if our weapons are not there, theirs will be.

Some warn of the militarization of space as if it has not already been militarized. It has been, and for a long time now. How long depending on how high up you deem space to begin. Are they who warn unaware of spy satellites? Of Gary Powers and the U-2 incident? Of the V-2s that crashed down on London? Of the crude Luftwaffen, air-weapons, of the First World War? The Roman catapults? The first javelin thrown by some Neanderthal spear chucker? It travelled through space to pierce the heart of some poor effer and was an early weaponization of the space between chucker and effer.

Original and Derived Intentionality, Circles, and Regresses 2.0

I dust off, revise, and expand this old entry in connection with discussions with Malcolm Pollack, Dmitri D. et al. about artificial intelligence. One of the questions is whether AI systems are subjects of intrinsic intentional states.  I incline to the view that they are not. Since intentional states are meaning-laden, I further incline to the view that no AI system, not even the most advanced LLMs, understand language or anything else.  They are merely syntactic engines.

………………………….

1.  Intentionality: Original and Derived

All will agree that there is a distinction to be made between original (intrinsic) and derived intentionality. Intentionality is aboutness. For example, a map is not the terrain it maps; the map is about the terrain. What makes the map about the terrain? A map is not about a chunk of terrain and its geological features just in virtue of the map’s physical and geometrical properties. Consider the contour lines on a topographical map. The closer together, the steeper the terrain. Closer together means  steeper. But surely the lines and their arrangement have no representational power in themselves. That closer together should mean steeper is a meaning assigned by map-makers and agreed to by map-users.  

The point is that a map’s meaning is not intrinsic to the map qua physical object. The meaning derives from us. There has to be one or more meaning-assigners and meaning-apprehenders external to the map to give the map a meaning and determine what that meaning is.  The map’s intentionality is derivative: it derives, or has it source in, our intentionality, which is original.   

So some things, maps for example, derive their semantic properties from other things, map-makers and map-users, for example.  Semantics has to do with sense and reference.  ‘Meaning’ covers both.  Setting sense aside for now, the reference or referent of a map is that to which it purports to refer.   

But note that a map needn’t actually refer to anything to be a map.  It need only purport to refer. This is a well-known characteristic feature of intentionality or aboutness or object-directedness: the existence in reality of the intentional object does not follow from the fact that something intends it.  Thus the existence in reality of a chunk of terrain does not follow from the existence of a map of it.   The map below purports to refer to something extra-cartographically real, but fails in its purport. It is no less a map for all that.

Suppose I draw you a map so that you can find my camp in the extra-cartographically real Superstition Wilderness. I use the Greek uppercase Φ to mark my camp and the Greek uppercase Ψ to mark the camp of a heavily-armed crazy man that you are well advised to avoid. I intend that Φ designate my camp, and Ψ his. That intending (narrow sense) is a case of intentionality (broad sense). I am the meaning-assigner.  I assign a referent to the Greek symbols, thereby making those inscriptions mean (refer to) something, symbolize something.

A symbol may be viewed for certain purposes as a purely syntactic unit. To view it this way  is to abstract  from its semantic properties. A symbol in use, however, a symbol that symbolizes, a symbol that exercises its symbolic function, is a syntactic unit that means something other than it, and is therefore more than a merely syntactic unit.  A syntactic engine is a machine that manipulates symbols qua syntactic units, ‘tokens’ is what the AI guys call them.   A computer is just a syntactic engine.  The same is true of the most advanced AI systems. The manipulation of symbols as mere syntactic units cannot confer meaning upon them.  Such ‘manipulation’  is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for meaning.

Or at least this is a question we need to consider. I incline to the view that, just as you cannot squeeze blood from a stone, you cannot squeeze semantics from syntactics.  No AI system, not even the most advanced LLM,  can by itself, mean anything or understand anything.  

It is also important to note that the very distinction between syntax and semantics presupposes languages and understanding, and thus presupposes the antecedent ‘marriage’  of  the syntactic and semantic. How then can we reduce the latter to the former?  I’ll spell this out in later posts.

I have said enough to make clear the difference between derived and original intentionality. The symbols on my map derive their intentionality or aboutness from my intentionality which, relative to theirs, is original. But if the origin of their intentionality is in me, and not in them, might it not be the case that my intentionality is itself derived? After all, it does not follow from the fact that I am the source of the intentionality of the symbols on my map that my intentionality does not itself have a source. But if so, then a regress threatens which appears to be both infinite and vicious. But before discussing this further, I need to bring in another point.

2.  Ascriptivism Versus Realism

Daniel Dennett appears to hold an ascriptivist or projectivist or imputationalist or instrumentalist theory of intentionality: nothing is an intentional system intrinsically or an sich; a system is intentional only in virtue of someone’s assigning intentional states to it. Thus there is no intrinsic intentionality in my computer (when it is running a chess program or any program).  But it may be nonetheless useful to take up the “intentional stance” vis-a-vis the computer and impute to it beliefs and desires (e.g., the desire to inflict mate) in order to explain its behavior. Given the computer’s complexity, the intentional stance promises an easier explanation than the physical and design stances do.

A realist about intentionality, on the other hand, is someone who holds that some systems really are intrinsically intentional: their having beliefs and desires and other object-directed states is not a matter of anyone’s viewing them as having such states.  I am a realist: some systems are intrinsically intentional.  But there are two ways to be a realist.

One way  is by being a reductive realist. Such a person admits the reality of intentional states but identifies them with something believed to be more fundamental such as brain states. If you believe, with Fred Dretske, that intentionality does not need naturalizing, but already is a natural phenomenon in the natural world, then you are presumably a reductive realist about intentionality. You are saying this: there is intrinsic intentionality, but it is physical in nature.

I’m a realist too, but a nonreductive one: I hold that intentionality is irreducibly real: it cannot be reduced to, or identified with, anything else. It is what it is and not some other thing. It is what it is and it is spiritual in nature. Part of the reason I believe this is because the alternatives are quite hopeless.  But what on earth or in heaven does ‘spiritual’ mean?  This is a challenge I face.

3. The Ascriptivist Regress 

Back to Dennett. Suppose one takes the ascriptivist line. Then an infinite regress appears unavoidable. Suppose I ascribe intentionality to my chess playing computer. Quite obviously, my ascribing, projecting, imputing, is itself an intentional state or a series of such states. So if ascriptivism is true, then my acts of ascribing must themselves be ascribed — otherwise they are intrinsic and Danny’s game is over. This launches us on a regress that is obviously infinite since at each level, one can “kick it up a notch.” It is also clear that this regress (unlike the truth regress) is vicious since at no level is the explanation of intentionality complete.

One might think to avoid the regress by embracing a circle: I ascribe intentional states to the computer and it ascribes intentional states to me. But surely this is even more of an absurdity for reasons that needn’t be belabored.

The upshot is that pure ascriptivism is incoherent, an utter non-starter. Dennett’s actual view is a bit different. 

4. Adulterated Ascriptivism : Homunculism

Perhaps the solution is to mix some realism in with the ascriptivism. Maybe it goes like this. I have a head full of homunculi. These little men and women, working together, ascribe intentionality to me. But each homunculus has its intentionality ascribed to it by other, stupider, homunculi which are constituents of it. The stupider homunculi, in turn, are composed of even stupider ones, and so on until we get to the level of individual neurons which aren’t ‘about’ anything. The base level homunculi are so stupid that one could say that they don’t even rise to the level of being either stupid or intelligent.

Does this avoid the dilemma of having to choose between a vicious infinite regress and a vicious circle? What Dennett is proposing is a finite regress that terminates with something naturalistically acceptable, namely entities that lack intrinsic or original intentionality.

Admittedly, this proposal gets rid of the infinity of the regress, but not its viciousness: we still have no explanation of intentionality. Consider the base-level homunculi. They are so primitive as to lack all intentionality. How then can they ascribe intentionality to their colleagues one level up? Surely it is obvious that the ascribing of intentionality is itself an intentional act or series thereof.

The point is quite simple. If the regress terminates with base entities utterly devoid of intentionality, then no higher level entities will be intentional. For the higher-ups get their intentionality only from the ones lower down in the hierarchy. If the ones at the very bottom have no intentionality, then they can’t transmit it up. But if, on the other hand, the ones at the very bottom possess intentionality, then it is false that all intentionality is derived.

In the final analysis, Dennett is an eliminativist about intentionality. His position amounts in the end to the denial of intentionality. To see this, you just have to think clearly. Dennett is saying that all intentionality is derivative, none is intrinsic or original. But that makes sense only if one embraces an infinite regress. But in this case an infinite regress must be vicious. On the other hand, a regress that terminates either terminates with entities that are intrinsically intentional or entities that are not. If the former, the game is over. If the latter, no intentionality gets transmitted up and Dennett is an eliminativist about intentionality just as he is an eliminativist about consciousness and qualia.

Hayek, Polanyi, Tacit Knowledge and Artificial Intelligence

On the Knowledge Problem, Tacit Knowledge, and Artificial Intelligence is an article we need to study.  It begins:

In May 2023 the MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, who went on to share the 2024 Nobel prize in economics, asked a question on Twitter. Friedrich Hayek argued in 1945 that central planning fails because no planner can collect and compute all the information an economy runs on. “What if computational power of central planners improved tremendously?” Acemoglu wrote. “Would Hayek then be happy with central planning?”

About thirty economists sent him the same reply, according to Shruti Rajagopalan, who hosts the Mercatus Center’s Ideas of India podcast: Hayek never made a computational argument. He made an argument about the nature of knowledge itself. Acemoglu reached the same conclusion in print that June. In an essay titled “Hayek vs. AI Socialism”, he quoted Hayek’s warning that the relevant knowledge “by its nature cannot enter into statistics” and concluded that “not even an all-powerful large language model” could deal with it. AI socialism, he wrote, “offers only a superficial critique of Hayek.” That distinction is the whole story, and it explains why a model trained on most of what has ever been written still cannot do what a well-trained human mind does.

The Joys of Philosophy and its Value

Top o’ the Stack.  The first joy:

1. There is the sheer intellectual pleasure that some of us derive from thinking and writing about philosophy and its problems. The strangeness of the ordinary entrances us and we find disciplined wondering about it deeply satisfying. We humans like doing what we have the power to do well, and those of us who like thinking and writing and entering into dialog with the like-minded are made happy by these pursuits even if solutions are out of the reach of mortals, as I believe they are. What Siegbert Tarrasch said of chess is no less true of philosophy, “Like love, like music, it has the power to make men happy.”

What Have We Learned from 9/11/01?

Malcolm Pollack:

What have we learned? Nothing at all, apparently. The influx of Islam into the West not only didn’t stop, but accelerated after the towers fell, and New York City — Ground Zero! — now has a Muslim mayor who advocates “globalizing the intifada”. More than 100 new mosques have opened in New York, and the Muslim population of the city’s metropolitan area has swelled to 1.5 million.

September 11th, 2026, is, yes, a grim anniversary, but for me the real sorrow is not just about that awful day, but about everything that came after, the prospect of what lies ahead, and the intractable immensity of our stupidity.

Our friend Malcolm is right.  But things are now immeasurably worse due to advanced AI capabilities at the disposal of bad human actors who want to learn how to, say, aerosolize pathogens.   But it is worse even than this given what non-human AI ‘agents’ can do.  See Niall Ferguson, Apocalypse Now.

If our cyber-astute friend Dmitri is reading this, perhaps he can explain to us how exactly ‘agent’ is used in current AI cyberspeak.  As he knows, I am a stickler for razor-sharp definitions.