Recently in Philosophy Category

Are we addicted to information? Is there something hardwired into our beings that makes us unable to resist compulsive Twittering? Every other day there's a news article or radio story on how studies show that... well, really, not much more than scientists like to publish things.

The Mind Hacks folks do a good job of demolishing the "studies show" myth with respect to information-seeking behaviour here. If you've ever nodded to one of those articles going on and on about how we're natural information addicts, then go read this one. Now. GOOGLE COMMANDS IT.

In case it's not obvious, I think those theories are, like a lot of the rest of pop psychology, bullshit. Yet we techie types eat them up like coffee ice cream or something. If you'll excuse me, I have some bark to examine now.

On my walk in to work this morning, I listened to a rebroadcast of the 30 September 2006 Quirks and Quarks show. Aside from some small disappointment that Ted Bundy made their list of serial killers, but not Alan Legere, there was a question raised in my mind by the conclusion.

One of the researchers interviewed posited that psychopathy is a mental disorder, just like chronic depression and others, and as such ought to be fairly understandable - and treatable. Well, we can tell when treatment for chronic depression is working; the person is no longer so severely depressed, or indeed, is "cured".

How can we tell when a psychopath is made better? It's not actually in the best interests of a psychopath to cooperate with treatment or the law, except insofar as it might get them released. Reliance on self-reporting is foolish in this case.

The tone of the podcast reminded me of the conclusion of a movie about another psychopath: "I was cured, all right!"

(From the archives of "posts I intended to publish a year ago." First written 2007-07-17, published 2008-10-04.)

Tangentially related to a paper I wrote for my cognitive science seminar, I've been collecting references to stories on CBC, CTV, and other outlets that allow commenting. What I'm interested in is the popular reaction to matters related to what can loosely be described as justice. For instance, I've bookmarks to stories on Robert Pickton, Thomas Svekla, street racers who've killed people, Gregory Despres's trial, some child pornography cases, and so on.

Besides the obvious effect of the stories themselves - litanies of the indignities which we visit upon one another with depressing regularity - I've found a couple of other things. First is an extension of that thought; it's similarly depressing how people who are presumably largely Canadian citizens, my peers, presumably fairly well-educated and in the top 10th or 20th percentile worldwide, folks who are well-enough off to have both the free time and access to read and comment on these stories online, are able to so casually dismiss and pass judgement on other human beings with a minimum of information. Second is now every time I see a story that's likely to get such comments, I mentally grin and rub my hands in anticipation. Then I feel guilty, because each one of those stories means something horrible has happened to one or more human beings, and chances are something horrible is going to happen to at least one more person.

I have a rough idea where I'd like to go with this stuff, and I even have a rough idea about the direction in which I'd like to see our society headed. But given that we live in a democracy, it's fairly unlikely we'd even come close to what I'd like to see, at least in my lifetime.

From a marginal note I made in class last term: talking about computers simulating emotions makes me think of virtual machines.

Is my iMac running VMWare Fusion creating a Windows box, or simulating one, or is it even attaining Windows?  An emulator like VICE doesn't somehow turn my Mac into a C64. Look at the difficulty of emulation: it takes a P2-400+ to emulate a C64, a 1MHz CPU with 64kb of RAM.

So what would it take to emulate a human brain?  Would that emulation be sufficient to simulate emotions?  (Ignore the obvious physiological issues; assume that those also are emulated, or are unimportant.)

If you read no other magazine article summarizing an academic study, read this one.  I wish I'd had it when I did my paper.  Summary of the summary: the general public is fairly credulous when it comes to articles with pretty pictures of brains included, even if the conclusions drawn by those articles is counterintuitive.

My initial thoughts were that this could be dangerous, but Western society is pretty firmly libertarian (in the philosophical sense, not the political one) and dualist.  It should be interesting to see how this cognitive dissonance - trust in science, yet a fervent belief in truly free free will - plays out.

(Via the Neuroethics and Law Blog.)

I wrote a 15 page (ok, 17 page, but some of that includes bibliography) paper for my cogsci course on consciousness, centred on fMRI scans and their application in the law.[0]  So articles like this tweak my interest. 

I'm of two minds on the "drunken defense".  On the one hand, I do think it's possible to be so blotto that you don't know your own name, never mind what you did.  On the other hand, what the fellow did was reprehensible and he should be locked away.  Clearly he lacks the controls that we ought to expect of our citizens.  I don't think second degree murder is the most appropriate crime to convict him with, but I don't know that our legal system has exactly the best way to handle this sort of case anyway.

[0] Summary: fMRI scans are here and they're not going away.  I take a generally compatibilist approach to matters of cognition, which is to say I'm too wussy to pick a side.  So, I argue that society is pretty much going to have to accept that we don't have as much free will as we think we do, and laws are going to have to change as a result - our concept of mens rea is entirely incorrect.

Some philosophy humour:



This is pretty much the same thing I thought this spring when I was first introduced to the Chalmers-zombie.  Qualia, by the way, is subjective experience.  The "what is it like to be" is a reference to a famous paper by Tomas Nagel published in 1974.

(Comic from chaospet, there's a fair few more comics there of a philosophical bent as well.  Comic reproduced under CC license.)

Germane to the course I'm taking now, Tim Crane is interviewed for Philosophy Bites, a podcast I enjoy.  Unfortunately, I can't seem to download the podcast either this morning or this evening, but I will summarise once I can and get a chance to listen to it.

Speaking of my course, my prof has asked for a slight change in format that will make it extremely difficult to keep my readings discussions to 100 words, so I fear that experiment must come to an end.  (Perhaps I'll try to restrict myself to no more than 150 words instead.)  However, I did find that it became much easier to remain concise the more I did, until the last couple where I composed in my head what I wanted to say, typed it in, and was pleased to find myself within a dozen words or so either way.  I recommend this as an exercise in concise writing.  Unfortunately, MovableType's editor lacks a word count feature.

In class we're discussing models of describing cognition. One thing that strikes me is that humans seem capable of retaining two beliefs that are inherently contradictory. How do you model (as a for instance) racism in an artificial intelligence? Is this even desireable? If you believe the assertion that most people - even those who are otherwise perfectly rational - possess at heart some base level of an -ism based on race, class, nationality, or some other relatively artificial division, is it possible that in order to create a true artificial intelligence, we would need some way to program these presumably negative biases in. (Indeed, the Turing test may even require it: if the person I'm talking to always exhibits perfect logic and rationality, I do not believe that they are a person. They are either a living saint, or a computer.)

Strictly rules-based systems cannot model this - they're insufficiently flexible. One could train up a neural network, but would that even be sufficient? We don't even know what causes this inherently irrational behaviour in humans, so how can we model it? We can make educated guesses about social influences and perhaps an inherited tribalism that was formerly essential to survival, but those are just theories, and still doesn't help us when we want to code up our Turing-test AI.

What other sorts of inherently irrational behaviours and beliefs might we want to give to an AI?

(I originally wrote this post in March, but just now unearthed it. I'd previously thought I would polish it up, but I think it's ok as is.)

Science Daily had a writeup about a study which suggests that forgetting things is important to how human memory works. I believe it's possible that we will one day be able to create an artificial intelligence with a perfect memory, but I do not believe that we would be able to consider that AI to be human-like if its memory does not behave as ours does. We will at least require an associative memory, and I believe (with no real reason for believing such yet) that it will be necessary for it to be able to forget things as well. Memories fading and disappearing appears to be part of the human condition; it will be necessary for a human-like AI as well. (Will it be necessary for the AI to be 'mortal'?)