An impromptu lightning talk on Gaget Rules at Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco.
The Individual Scenario: You have $100 to donate to charity, how do you spend it? Please write where you might donate before reading further:
The Bulk Scenario: Oprah has given you $100 million and asked you to donate it to charity. What a huge responsibility! How do you spend it?
Can we create an intelligence that outclasses human intelligence as much as human intelligence outclasses a worm’s? Could we enhance the human brain, through augmentation or selective breeding, to achieve this? Or would creating a machine-based general artificial intelligence that can recursively improve itself be a better approach?
How do we reason about the motivations and behavior of a superintelligence? What unforeseen consequences could spell devastation for humanity if a superintelligence doesn’t share our values? Could we conduct a ‘controlled detonation’, powering on a potential superintelligence in a guarded environment so we can test it safely?
Jaron Lanier is a preeminent technologist and Silicon Valley pioneer. In You Are Not a Gadget, Lanier artfully and even-handedly argues that today’s prevailing Internet ethos undervalues the individual, and instead places emphasis on the misguided notion of the “hive mind”–the powerful crowd dynamic that breathes life into sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia.
In The Extended Mind, Andy Clark and David Chalmers discuss the possibility of extended minds; coupled systems in which a human organism produces cognition, beliefs, and thoughts with the aid of external entities. Clark and Chalmers give the example of Otto, a man suffering from Alzheimer’s who uses a notebook to record his thoughts and beliefs. The authors argue that our notion of belief ought to be adjusted so that Otto and his notebook constitute a cognitive system possessing beliefs that are similar in all important ways to normal beliefs. In Why There Still Has to Be a Language of Thought, Jerry Fodor argues that our thoughts have a constitutive, evaluable structure analogous to the structure of language and to the relations among entities in the world. I offer three objections to Clark and Chalmers’s concept of the extended mind, ultimately arguing that extended mind semantics allows us to make counterproductive and counterintuitive claims about minds, beliefs, and more. I will show the similarities between Clark and Chalmers’s claims about language’s role of relating the mind to entities in the world, and Fodor’s ideas of mental representations and computationalism. Although I find important differences between Clark, Chalmers, and Fodor, I will offer a plausible account of extended minds that is friendly to the representational and evaluational aspects of Fodor’s computationalism. I ultimately conclude that although extended mind semantics is sometimes useful, the line between the mind and the rest of the world should remain in the skull for the time being.
In an article entitled Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing describes the Turing test, his famous criterion for machine intelligence: a computer can be considered a thinking machine if a human interlocutor, after asking the computer a series of questions, cannot tell whether he is conversing with a machine or with another human. After describing the details of this test, Turing discusses a handful of arguments that deny the possibility of thinking machines. Turing gives special treatment to “Lady Lovelace’s Objection” (450), an argument formed around a declaration that computers cannot be creative. I will explain Lovelace’s objection, offer an interpretation of what Lovelace means by “creativity,” and argue that computers are not creative in this sense. For another perspective on the possibility of creative machines, I will frame Tom Mueller’s article, How computer chess programs are changing the game, as an argument for why some computers ought to be considered creative. I will go on to argue that notwithstanding Lovelace’s objection, Mueller’s examples amount to “Turing tests” for creativity in which the chess programs pass. Finally, I will argue that these “Turing tests” for creativity are crucially different from Turing tests simpliciter, and therefore we cannot conclude from Mueller’s article that chess-playing programs think.
In The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer offers an encyclopedic vision of a dichotomized world; half of the world is mere appearance or representation, while the other half consists of things-in-themselves, inner natures, Will. Schopenhauer borrows the language and concepts from his general system of metaphysical duality, most notably the concept of the Platonic Idea, and applies them in an account of aesthetic experience. In The Sense of Beauty, George Santayana takes a decidedly non-metaphysical approach to explaining aesthetic experience, as Santayana thinks that philosophers of art before him “have generally been audacious metaphysicians…[who] have represented general and obscure principles, suggested by other parts of their philosophy, as the conditions of artistic excellence and the essence of beauty” (6). Santayana argues that these obscure metaphysical principles are “vague [expressions] of [our] highly complex emotions” (8), which nonetheless excite our aesthetic susceptibility, but fail to tell us what is beautiful and why. I will frame Santayana’s critical response to Schopenhauer’s metaphysical excesses by first discussing Santayana’s general criticism of the metaphysical or “Platonist” approach to aesthetics. After that, I will summarize Schopenhauer’s general theory and the role Platonic Ideas play in his account of aesthetic experience. Then, I will consider Santayana’s psychological explanations of the origin of Platonic Ideas and their aesthetic function as a response to Schopenhauer’s use of the same. Finally, drawing on these discrepancies, I will argue that Santayana’s concept of Expression provides a better explanation of the immediate and intrinsic quality of aesthetic value, which Schopenhauer only expresses metaphorically in terms of “pure contemplation, absorption in perception, being lost in the object, forgetting all individuality,” etc. (197).
In The Second Treatise of Government, John Locke enumerates circumstances under which a ruler violates the trust of his people. Under those circumstances, it is the responsibility of the people to judge whether their trust has been violated, and, if they judge it has been, it is the people’s right to dissolve and reform the government. Unable to convince the British people that the “repeated injuries and usurpations” of King George III merit a drastic upheaval, Thomas Jefferson implies in The Declaration of Independence that it was necessary to circumvent the dissolution of the government of George III by instead dissolving the underlying bonds of political society, bifurcating the British commonwealth into two separate political societies: the people of the United States of America; and the loyalists and people of Britain. In order to make The Declaration of Independence more consistent with The Second Treatise, Jefferson must explain how it could be “necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another” while Locke holds that “[the] world is too well instructed in, and too forward to allow of, this way of dissolving of governments.” Alternatively, Jefferson could argue, as I will, that as of the drafting of The Declaration, political society had already been dissolved by the actions of George III and the British people.
Can we conceive of a being so great that to disbelieve its existence only leads to absurdity? St. Anselm thinks that we understand “something greater than which nothing can be thought,” and he argues that our understanding of this being is such that we contradict ourselves upon thinking that such a being does not exist. Anselm arrives at his conclusion only by befuddling object language and metalanguage, blurring the distinction between “a being that exists” (meta) and a being that exists (object). Regardless, we see that if we take care in our interpretation of his argument, Anselm delivers sound reasoning for the possibility of such a being and a reaffirming argument for those who already believe in such a being.
