Category: Philosophy

The Elusive in Art and Artificial Intelligence

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Per caption.
Deep Dream (deepdreamgenerator.com) of my elusive inner Van Gogh.

How exactly deep learning models do what they do is at least elusive. Take image recognition as a task. We know that there are decision-making criteria inferred by the hidden layers of the networks. In Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), we have further knowledge that locally-receptive fields (or their simulated equivalent) provide a collection of filters that emphasize image features in different ways, from edge detection to rotation-invariant reductions prior to being subjected to a learned categorizer. Yet, the dividing lines between a chair and a small loveseat, or between two faces, is hidden within some non-linear equation composed of these field representations with weights tuned by exemplar presentation.

This elusiveness was at least part of the reason that neural networks and, generally, machine learning-based approaches have had a complicated position in AI research; if you can’t explain how they work, or even fairly characterize their failure modes, maybe we should work harder to understand the support for those decision criteria rather than just build black boxes to execute them?

So when groups use deep learning to produce visual artworks like the recently auctioned work sold by Christie’s for USD 432K, we can be reassured that the murky issue of aesthetics in art appreciation is at least paired with elusiveness in the production machine.

Or is it?

Let’s take Wittgenstein’s ideas about aesthetics as a perhaps slightly murky point of comparison. In Wittgenstein, we are almost always looking at what are effectively games played between and among people. In language, the rules are shared in a culture, a community, and even between individuals. These are semantic limits, dialogue considerations, standardized usages, linguistic pragmatics, expectations, allusions, and much more.… Read the rest

Poetics and Humanism for the Solstice

Mark Davis4 Comments

There is, necessarily, an empty center to secular existence. Empty in the sense that there is no absolute answer to the complexities of human life, alone or as part of the great societies that we have created. This opens us to wild, adventurous circuits through pain, meaning, suffering, growth, and love. Religious writers in recent years have had a tendentious tendency to denigrate this fantastic adventure, as Andrew Sullivan does in New York magazine. The worst possible argument is that everything is religion insofar as we believe passionately about its value. It’s wrong if for no other reason than the position of John Gray that Sullivan quotes:

Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.

Many religious people absolutely disagree with that characterization and demand an entire metaphysical cosmos of spiritual entities and corresponding goals. Abstracting religion to a symbolic labeling system for prediction and explanation robs religion, as well as reason, art, emotion, conversation, and logic, of any independent meaning at all. So Sullivan and Gray are so catholic in their semantics that the words can be replanted to justify almost anything. Moreover, the subsequent claim about religion existing because of our awareness of our own mortality is not borne out by the range of concepts that are properly considered religious.

In social change Sullivan sees a grasping towards redemption, whether in the Marxist-idolatrous left or the covertly idolatrous right, but a more careful reading of history proves Sullivan wrong on the surface, at least, if not in the deeper prescription. For instance, it is not faith in progress that has been part of the liberal social experiment since the Enlightenment, but a grasping towards actual reasons and justifications for what is desired and how to achieve it.… Read the rest

Indifference and the Cosmos

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I am a political independent, though that does not mean that I vote willy-nilly. I have, in fact, been reliably center left for most of my adult life, save one youthfully rebellious moment when I voted Libertarian, more as a statement than a commitment to the principles of libertarianism per se. I regret that vote now, given additional exposure to the party and the kinds of people it attracts. To me, the extremes of the American political system build around radical positions, and the increasingly noxious conspiracy theories and unhinged rhetoric is nothing like the cautious, problem-solving utopia that might make me politically happy, or at least wince less.

Some might claim I am indifferent. I would not argue with that. In the face of revolution, I would require a likely impossible proof of a better outcome before committing. How can we possibly see into such a permeable and contingent future, or weigh the goods and harms in the face of the unknown? This idea of indifference, as a tempering of our epistemic insights, serves as a basis for an essential idea in probabilistic reasoning where it even has the name, the principle of indifference, or, variously, and in contradistinction with Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, the principle of insufficient reason.

So how does indifference work in probabilistic reasoning? Consider a Bayesian formulation: we inductively guess based on a combination of a priori probabilities combined with a posteriori evidences. What is the likelihood of the next word in an English sentence being “is”? Indifference suggests that we treat each word as likely as any other, but we know straight away that “is” occurs much more often than “Manichaeistic” in English texts because we can count words.… Read the rest

Structure and Causality in Political Revolutions

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Can political theories be tested like scientific ones? And if they can, does it matter? Alexis Papazoglou argues in the New Republic that, even if they can be tested, it is less important than other factors in the success of the political theory. In his signal case, the conflict between anti-globalist populists and the conventional international order is questioned as resulting in clear outcomes that somehow will determine the viability of one theory versus the other. It’s an ongoing experiment. Papazoglou breaks down the conflict as parallel to the notion that scientific processes ultimately win on falsifiability and rationality. In science, as per Kuhn’s landmark The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the process is more paradigmatic agendas, powerful leaders, and less calculated rationality.

The scientific process may have been all of those things, of course, and may continue to be so in the future, but there are ongoing developments that make it less likely that sociological factors will dominate. And this is why the comparison with political theories is perhaps wrongheaded. There may be a community of political theorists but they are hardly the primary architects and spectators of politics, unlike science and scientists. We are all political actors, yet very few have the time or inclination to look carefully at the literature on the threat of successful authoritarian Chinese civilization versus Western liberal democracy, for instance. But we are not all scientific actors, despite being governed by the reality of the world around us. Politics yells and seethes while science quietly attends a conference. Even the consequences of science are often so gradualistic in their unfolding that we barely notice them; see the astonishing progress on cancer survival in the past decades and note the need for economic discounting for global climate change, where the slow creep of existential threats are somehow given dollar values.… Read the rest

Hypersensitive Conspiracy Disorder

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I was once cornered in a bar in Suva, Fiji by an Indian man who wanted to unburden himself and complain a bit. He was convinced that the United States had orchestrated the coups of 1987 in which the ethnically Fijian-dominated military took control of the country. The theory went like this: ethnic Indians had too much power for the Americans to bear as we were losing Subic Bay as a deep water naval base in the South Pacific. Suva was the best, nearest alternative but the Indians, with their cultural and political ties to New Delhi, were too socialist for the Americans. Hence the easy solution was to replace the elected government with a more pro-American authoritarian regime. Yet another Cold War dirty tricks effort, like Mossaddegh or Allende, far enough away that the American people just shrugged our collective shoulders. My drinking friend’s core evidence was an alleged sighting of Oliver North by someone, sometime, chatting with government officials. Ollie was the 4D chess grandmaster of the late 80s.

It didn’t work out that way, of course, and the coups continued into the 2000s. More amazing still was that the Berlin Wall came down within weeks of that bar meetup and the entire engagement model for world orders slid into a brief decade of deconstruction and confusion. Even the economic dominance of Japan ebbed and dissipated around the same time.

But our collective penchant for conspiracy theories never waned. And with the growth of the internet and then social media, the speed and ease of disseminating fringe and conspiratorial ideas has only increased. In the past week there were a number of news articles about the role of conspiracy theories, from a so-called “QAnon” advocate meeting with Trump to manipulation of the government by Israel’s Black Cube group.… Read the rest

The Retiring Mind, Part IV: Phenology

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An unexpectedly quick move to Northern Arizona thrust my wife and me into fire and monsoon seasons. The latter term is debatable: monsoons typically involved a radical shift in winds in Southeast Asia. Here the westerlies keep a steady rhythm though the year. The U.S. desert southwest has also adopted the Arabic term “haboob” in recent decades to refer to massive dust storms. If there is a pattern to loanword adoption, it might be a matter of economy. Where a single, unique term can take the place of an elongated description, the loanword wins, even if the nuances of the original get discarded. This continues our child language acquisition tendencies to view different words as being, well, different, even if a strong claim of “one word per meaning” is likely unjustified. We search for replacement terms that provide economy and even relish in the inside knowledge brought by the new lexical entry.

So, as afternoon breaks out into short, heavy downpours we dart in and out of hardware stores getting electrical fishing poles, screw anchors, and #10 8/32nd microbolts to rectify an installation difficulty with a ceiling fan. We meet with contractors and painters who rush through the intermittent squalls. And we break all this up with exploring new restaurants and hitting the local galleries, debating the subterfuge of this or that sculptor in undermining expectations about contemporary trends in southwestern art.

But there is a stability to the forest and canyon around our new house. Deer wander through, but less so as the rain has filled the red rock canyons with watering holes, allowing them to avoid long sojourns to Oak Creek for water. A bobcat nestled for half a morning on our lower deck overlooking the canyon, quietly scanning for prey.… Read the rest

Incompressibility and the Mathematics of Ethical Magnetism

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One of the most intriguing aspects of the current U.S. border crisis is the way that human rights and American decency get articulated in the public sphere of discourse. An initial pull is raw emotion and empathy, then there are counterweights where the long-term consequences of existing policies are weighed against the exigent effects of the policy, and then there are crackpot theories of “crisis actors” and whatnot as bizarro-world distractions. But, if we accept the general thesis of our enlightenment values carrying us ever forward into increasing rights for all, reduced violence and war, and the closing of the curtain on the long human history of despair, poverty, and hunger, we must also ask more generally how this comes to be. Steven Pinker certainly has rounded up some social theories, but what kind of meta-ethics might be at work that seems to push human civilization towards these positive outcomes?

Per the last post, I take the position that we can potentially formulate meaningful sentences about what “ought” to be done, and that those meaningful sentences are, in fact, meaningful precisely because they are grounded in the semantics we derive from real world interactions. How does this work? Well, we can invoke the so-called Cornell Realists argument that the semantics of a word like “ought” is not as flexible as Moore’s Open Question argument suggests. Indeed, if we instead look at the natural world and the theories that we have built up about it (generally “scientific theories” but, also, perhaps “folk scientific ideas” or “developing scientific theories”), certain concepts take on the character of being so-called “joints of reality.” That is, they are less changeable than other concepts and become referential magnets that have an elite status among the concepts we use for the world.… Read the rest

Bolt, Volt, and Tesla: The Experience and Ethics of Electrified Transportation

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I have now owned a triumvirate of electric/hybrid vehicles since 2012. The quest began with a Chevy Volt in 2012 that we still own but that is used by our son in college. I recently worked with him to replace tires and windshield wipers on the vehicle, which is otherwise still rolling along despite a mild fender bender when he slid into another vehicle on a snowy night. The Bolt is the newest member of the grouping, serving as my wife’s daily driver but only accumulating 1500 miles since arriving via flatbed last October. And then there are the Teslas. The first, a Model S P85, was around number 4000 off the Fremont assembly line in early 2013, with the second taking its place in early 2016.

So has it been worth it? Yes, absolutely, but with caveats, operationally and ethically, as you will see.

First, the vehicles have been paired with photovoltaic systems, a 10kW system with microinverters in Cali and now an 8kW system at our remodeled southwestern abode. This helps to offset any concerns that grid electricity may be less clean than modern, high-efficiency gasoline engines.

Second, there is range anxiety. As the name implies, it’s the fear of running out of charge that is just like running out of gas but with far fewer places to recharge than are available in the modern ecosystem of gas stations throughout the nation. Mostly, when doing everyday errand-running and brief trips out of town, range anxiety is not an issue. Freeways are manageable in the Tesla now that superchargers are available for large swaths of the United States, including recent arrivals near the relatively desolate area where I now live.… Read the rest

New Agile Governance

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John Dickerson, in his excellent Atlantic article, The Presidency: The Hardest Job in the World, combines historical analysis with quotes and insights from presidents and past advisers to develop both a critique of the expectations of the role of president and how to achieve better results. The analysis lands on a few recommendations including improving the on-boarding process for new presidents and simplifying the role itself. Having and trusting one’s cabinet leads to better delegation of the impossible responsibilities of the role. Maybe outsourcing the ceremonial aspects of the job to the VP or First Lady would allow the president to concentrate on policymaking and national security flare ups.

While all are reasonable suggestions, resetting expectations about the role of the executive branch should be balanced against reforming the legislative branch in parallel. If both are to be empowered to serve the public’s will with grace and intellect, they face concomitant challenges in overcoming the partisanship and influences of monied interests that have made them unresponsive to the people. Polls show that the public wants reduced health care costs, reasonable gun regulations, humane immigration policies, and an opening of rights for gays and marijuana consumers. But none of these are delivered because they are too complex or politically toxic for Congress to successfully navigate.

Maybe the methodology is wrong. Not in the sense of the Constitution being wrong or in need of updating, but in the sense of how decision making and information gathering is managed through the legislative and executive branches. I’d like to propose an alternative that I will label New Agile Governance (NAG) for simplicity. NAG is based on the simple idea that tracks what Dickerson attributes to H.R.… Read the rest

Running, Ancient Roman Science, Arizona Dive Bars, and Lightning Machine Learning

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I just returned from running in Chiricahua National Monument, Sedona, Painted Desert, and Petrified Forest National Park, taking advantage of the late spring before the heat becomes too intense. Even so, though I got to Massai Point in Chiricahua through 90+ degree canyons and had around a liter of water left, I still had to slow down and walk out after running short of liquid nourishment two-thirds down. There is an eerie, uncertain nausea that hits when hydration runs low under high stress. Cliffs and steep ravines take on a wolfish quality. The mind works to control feet against stumbling and the lips get serrated edges of parched skin that bite off without relieving the dryness.

I would remember that days later as I prepped to overnight with a wilderness permit in Petrified Forest only to discover that my Osprey Exos pack frame had somehow been bent, likely due to excessive manhandling by airport checked baggage weeks earlier. I considered my options and drove eighty miles to Flagstaff to replace the pack, then back again.

I arrived in time to join Dr. Richard Carrier in an unexpected dive bar in Holbrook, Arizona as the sunlight turned to amber and a platoon of Navajo pool sharks descended on the place for billiards and beers. I had read that Dr. Carrier would be stopping there and it was convenient to my next excursion, so I picked up signed copies of his new book, The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, as well as his classic, On the Historicity of Jesus, that remains part of the controversial samizdat of so-called “Jesus mythicism.”

If there is a distinguishing characteristic of OHJ it is the application of Bayesian Theory to the problems of historical method.… Read the rest