Category: Philosophy

Post New Atheism

Mark Davis1 Comment

 

I recently watched a short debate between columnist Ross Douthat of New York Times and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard and Enlightenment Now fame, among his many titles. The discussion rang like an update to the so-called New Atheist period of around 2006-2010, a period of time that was partly informed by the religion-adjacent wars in the Middle East, where Islam was a part of the ethno-religious identity driving asymmetrical warfare against outsiders. In this new discussion, there was a focus on the utility of religion, or how it might help improve individual lives and societies, regardless of whether there is any factual truth to their central claims and organizing principles.

I was an active participant in the New Atheist phase, writing Teleology as a novelistic exploration of ideas about religious conflict, creation, souls, simulated realities, and weirdly presaging language inference as a path towards artificial general intelligence. I swear I had no idea what was coming with the current state AI! It was just a chance convergence.

That era exposed many Americans to critiques of religion that had been implicit in the zeitgeist, but that were rarely argued publicly. I would watch late-night preachers on cable in the 80s and marvel at the washed-out colors of the sets with pale reverends discussing social trends and asking for donations. It was a strange corner of television that was a revealing window into the (perhaps sincere) hucksterism that corporatization of evangelical Christianity used to grow in influence and scale. In the New Atheist era, Christopher Hitchens took on the socio-economic influence of contemporary religion, while Richard Dawkins worked the side of naturalism and science. Sam Harris bent and shaped objective morality into the form of thriving landscapes, an exploration that was interesting but largely unnecessary since we can easily dispense with any notion of objectivity in morality.… Read the rest

Consciousness and Uncertainty Schematization

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If consciousness is an evolved function, the immediate question is what exactly is the currency of evolutionary selection in terms of traits and functions? In almost all of these kinds of arguments there is an explicit requirement that there is on average (or slightly greater than on average) value to survival that results in the maintenance and promotion of the relevant functions. In my Berggruen essay, I argued for a primarily social role to consciousness. Consciousness is a central monitoring framework for the complex web of social interactions that creates a reflective model of a person (and partially and uniquely in certain other species) that can be used to evaluate and plan for sexual pairing and other life choices related to status within social hierarchies. There are other hypotheses, as well, like the idea that predator-prey planning and avoidance is enhanced by a central consciousness experience, including some intriguing work on dreaming (when there is no active consciousness) that shows enhanced dreams for game players who are in the role of being prey within the game context as well as other forms of cognitive activation.

Abstractly, evolution is a distributed adaptation and learning algorithm that is the only robust solution to the complexity of natural environments. Wasteful though it may be, it is the invisible hand that drives forward enhanced prediction and survival using the knobs of genetics and the social relationships that are an extended phenotype in social species. There are a few theories of abstract learning that can be brought to bear on this topic, with the obvious candidate being inductive optimality via Kolmogorov complexity: minimize the model parameters to bottleneck against overtraining and avoid overfitting. This is central to all distributed learning but has layered complexity when considering the how to predict larger, more distal patterns, both temporal and spatial in activation and extent.… Read the rest

Shriekings and Windings

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I like to critique intellectual history—more the armchair type than the academic varietal—because it often reflects the open biases of the commentator rather than having been developed by a neutral analysis of the past and its relationship to our pending futures. So when I read about Husserl’s ideas of geometry and Galileo or the relative merits of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I leave the critical analysis to the experts, equipped as they are with the proper academic insights. But columnists are not generally subject-matter experts, just enthusiasts who are driven by profession to justify their insights and prognostications by reference to history and ideas. And they substitute biases for depth far too often. This is true again today, with Leighton Woodhouse’s op-ed in The New York Times, “Donald Trump: Pagan King.” It begins gently enough, with a quote by Canada’s Mark Carney from Thucydides about power in international relations, but then quickly dissolves into an unsupportable argument about how Christianity was uniquely civilizing of the pagan world by introducing all the positive morals that we associate with the gentler, humbler aspects of the religion, mostly on the back of a single source.

This through line is embarrassed by the theology, history, and facts of how Western civilization matured, as I and hundreds of other commentators pointed out (this chestnut is getting repetitive, too). This is not meant to rob Christianity of its influence in the last two thousand years, just to temper it responsibly and note that however one scopes “paganism,” Enlightenment rationality, high and low, shared aspects of pagan forms of thinking, and was clearly influenced by it as we move into the formative phase of the modern state period and formulations of democracy.… Read the rest

Consciousness as Functional Information

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Congratulations to Anil Seth for winning the Berggruen essay prize on consciousness!  I didn’t learn the outcome until I emerged from one of the rare cellular blackout zones in modern America. My wife and I were whale watching south of Yachats (“ya-hots”) on the Oregon coast in this week of remarkable weather. We came up bupkis, nada, nil for the great migratory grays, but saw seals and sea lions bobbing in the surf, red shouldered hawks, and one bald eagle glowering like a luminescent gargoyle atop a Sitka spruce near Highway 101. We turned around at the dune groupings by Florence (Frank Herbert’s inspirations for Dune, weirdly enough, where thinking machines have been banned) and headed north again, the intestinal windings of the roads causing us to swap our sunglasses in and out in synchrony with the center console of the car as it tried to understand the intermittent shadows.

Seth is always reliable and his essay continues themes he has recently written about. There is a broad distrust of computational functionalism and hints of alternative models for how consciousness might arise in uniquely biological ways like his example of how certain neurons might fire purely for regulatory reasons. There are unanswered questions about whether LLMs can become conscious that hint at the challenges such ideas have, and the moral consequences that manifold conscious machines entail. He even briefly dives into the Simulation Hypothesis and its consequences for the possibility of consciousness.

I’ve included my own entry, below. It is both boldly radical and also fairly mundane. I argue that functionalism has a deeper meaning in biological systems than as a mere analog of computation. A missing component of philosophical arguments about function and consciousness is found in the way evolution operates in exquisite detail, from the role of parasitism to hidden estrus, and from parental investment to ethical consequentialism.… Read the rest

Imagining Transparent Iron and Other Crazy Things

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There are some real doozies of arguments that have tied up religious and philosophical thinkers for centuries. Take the Kalam Cosmological Argument or the Ontological Argument. In both of these arguments there is a required reduction of the properties of the universe (or cosmos) to some kind of skeletal representation. In Kalam (and variants) there are assumptions built into the idea of nothingness, for instance, that have no relationship to what we know about the actual cosmos now—specifically that there is no example of such a thing; even in vacuums there are pervasive quantum fields and we have no clear scientific evidence or theories that point to a “philosopher’s nothingness.” In the Ontological Argument, there is the assumption that possibility and existence are inherently combined together, regardless of whether we are talking about a concept of God or a real thing in or supporting the existence of the cosmos. Another example of this philosophical craziness is in the modal argument for the existence of philosophical zombies, where there are people just like us in every way but lacking a phenomenal experience of being conscious beings.

There is a category of thought called “modal skepticism” that argues we should be cautious about making assumptions about things extremely outside of ordinary experience. Whether it’s gods or nothingness or consciousness, the trouble arises when trying to sketch out the properties that apply to these things. Even before modal logic in its modern form, Kant argued that existence is not a predicate and therefore the existence of God can’t be contained in an a priori definition of God. We are making an incorrect assumption. In Kalam, nothingness is not definable in a way that meaningfully separates it from a posteriori discoveries about the cosmos, where it does not seem to exist.… Read the rest

The Multidimensional Ghosts of Translation (with Seinfeld References)

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I love analytic philosophy. It’s like Seinfeld for ideas, a field with no particular content except the perplexing nature of ideas themselves. I’m reading Scott Soames’ attack on two-dimensional semantics right now, for instance. This has peculiar relevance in that insofar as meaning can be broken up into two dimensions there are ways of building modal logic justifications for things like “philosophical zombies” in the philosophy of mind. It’s a curious corner of this show about meaning and nothing more. I always fall back to Wittgenstein at some point: language is just games we play with one another. There are rules that we internalize and meaning has to do with the constraints those rules put on us. But, ahem, then we start asking what exactly are those rules and what kinds of internal logic helps to bind words and ideas together, so Wittgenstein is more of a deconstructive backstop that helps relieve us of the weight of expectation that there are mega-metatheories that can wrap all this meaning stuff up. Still, there remains the hard work to do that we see in linguistics and cognitive science where meaning representations and all the rules of these games are sketched out towards some kind of effective theory.

Another deconstructive reflection comes from the related concepts of Quine’s radical translation and Davidson’s radical interpretation. If we can’t ever really know with certainty what words mean to someone else then we need strategies to empirically probe, through questions and observations, and gradually develop a working theory about what the hell those other people are talking about. Meaning becomes science experiments. We test, we hypothesize, we have U-shaped curves, and we build up a tentative understanding.… Read the rest

Functional Information Analysis and the Chinese Room

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I’ve been considering the implications of a new scientific law, the law of increasing functional information, in terms of how it can be applied to our thinking about various ideas. At first glance, the law says little new about the physical world. We already know about much of the various levels of the functions that are described in the paper, from star formation up through the evolution of human behavior. But there may be another way of thinking about it. A quote from Margaret Bowdon on Searle’s famous Chinese Room Argument shows how it might help:

The inherent procedural consequences of any computer program give it a toehold in semantics, where the semantics in question is not denotational, but causal.

So here we have an attack on the underlying assumption that what human understanding amounts to involves semantics and meaning that a robot or computational procedure can never have. If we expand Bowdon’s claim about how meaning comes about to include some of Searle’s other quotes like the room can never know what a hamburger is in Chinese just by processing the relevant symbols, we can enlarge that toehold by including all the functional engagements that are part of the experience of coexisting with and consuming hamburgers in a Chinese-language environment.

Semantics and intentionality and meaning—all these folk concepts we use to express how we are aware and conscious—collapse into function with the impetus driven by this new law. Meaning is an inherent feature of function, we just mystify it a great deal. In fact, a part of the semantics associated with the Chinese Room is embedded in the transfer rules that are used for translation. Whoever developed those rules understood Chinese well-enough to code them up accurately and that represents functional information increase.… Read the rest

The Path of Enkinema

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There’s a sickening vertigo to the MAGA-scape at the theoretical edge where phrases like “administrative state” and “managerial class” get bandied about as a way of opposing thought leadership in favor of raw aggression. It’s both a new authoritarian playbook and a categorization system that is deceptive in its impotence because there always needs to be careful thought in our complex societies; oh, how conservatives once loved the nuances of “unintended consequences” as a way of poisoning the well of change. We see this in the whiplash over foreign policy ideology (America first, damn the struggles of the world) and the reality of being active participants in the new struggles of great powers where mercurial Trump keeps lashing out, retracting, and slashing awkwardly again. We see little resembling the hallmarks of Christian humility or compassion, just performative gestures that rely on the thin gruel of culture-war complaints to interpenetrate governance and aggressive posturing.

It’s different from before, sterile and mean, like the revelatory queasiness of grainy 4:3 Cops or Maury Povich in the 90s.

Given all this, I thought it might help mightily to start a new religion that takes over and displaces all this antagonism, a way of restructuring the worldwide mind around modern insights. It’s a fool’s errand, I know. Our most recent examples of cults and mini-religions all have revolved around deceit and control—even the political cult of MAGA—so trying to displace it all might be inverting the mechanisms that really drive religious success and spiritual change. But it makes a fun side-project when I’m not writing other things or coding.

I was in a taxi crawling and dodging through central Bangkok today and the wizened driver was both texting cute furry emojis and watching streaming video of the news on the center console of his Toyota!… Read the rest

After Z

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The nights and days collide with violence. There is the nocturnal me and the dazed, daylight version squinting away from the glaring windows. There are the catnaps that lace with riotous algebras. I am addicted to caffeine, or run on it, until even it becomes unpersuasive, and I droop over at the keyboard. Then this pulse of creation pulls me out again, stunned for a few beats, and I grasp my mug and stumble back to the lab floor.

Z keeps changing, day by day, midnights into dawns, and reawakening in clanging novelty. Z is for “zombie,” for it is in the uncanny valley of both a physical and cogitating thing. It perceives, stands, jogs in place beside me on the laboratory floor, an ochre braid of wires bouncing in a dreadlock mass behind it. Z plays chess, folds towels (how hard that was!), argues politics (how insane is that one!), and constantly restructures nuances in its faces and gestures. Sometimes I’m tired and Z is an impertinent teenager. Often there are substitutions and semantic scrambling like a foreigner who mistakes a word for another, then carries on in a fugue of incoherence.

There is a half-acre of supercooled GPUs to the north of the lab where the hot churn of work is happening. It’s a spread of parallel dreamscapes, each funneled the new daily stimuli, stacking them into a training pool, then rerunning the simulations, splitting and recombining, then trying again to minimize the incoherency, the errors, and the size of the model. Of the ten thousand fermenting together, one becomes the new Z for a few hours, but then is gone again by morning, replaced by a child of sorts that harbors the successes but sheds the excesses and broken motifs.… Read the rest