Category: Philosophy

The Dynamics of Dignity

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My wife got a Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon a few days back. It has necessitated a new education in off-road machinery like locking axles, low 4, and disconnectable sway bars. It seemed the right choice for our reinsertion into New Mexico, a land that was only partially accessible by cheap, whatever-you-can-afford, vehicles twenty years ago when we were grad students. So we had to start driving random off-road locations and found Faulkner’s Canyon in the Robledos. Billy the Kid used this area as a refuge at one point and we searched out his hidey-hole this morning but ran out of LTE coverage and couldn’t confirm the specific site until returning from our adventure. We will try another day!

Billy the Kid was, of course, a killer of questionable moral standing.

With the Neil Gorsuch nomination to SCOTUS, his role in the legal and moral philosophies surrounding assisted suicide has come under scrutiny. In everyday discussions, the topic often centers on the notion of dignity for the dying. Indeed, the autonomy of the person (and with it some assumption of rational choice) combines with a consideration of alternatives to the human-induced death based on pain, discomfort, loss of physical or mental faculties, and also the future-looking speculation about these possibilities.

Now I combined legal and moral in the same sentence because that is also one way to consider the way in which law is or ought to be formulated. But, in fact, one can also claim that the two don’t need to overlap; law can exist simply as a system of rules that does not include moral repercussions and, if the two have a similar effect on behavior, it is merely a happenstance.… Read the rest

Twilight of the Artistic Mind

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Kristen Stewart, of Twilight fame, co-authored a paper on using deep learning neural networks in her new movie that she is directing. The basic idea is very old but the details and scale are more recent. If you take an artificial neural network and have it autoencode the input stream with bottlenecking, you can then submit any stimulus and will get some reflection of the training in the output. The output can be quite surreal, too, because the effect of bottlenecking combined with other optimizations results in an exaggeration of the features that define the input data set. If the input is images, the output will contain echoes of those images.

For Stewart’s effort, the goal was to transfer her highly stylized concept art into the movie scene. So they trained the network on her concept image and then submitted frames from the film to the network. The result reflected aspects of the original stylized image and the input image, not surprisingly.

There has been a long meditation on the unique status of art and music as a human phenomenon since the beginning of the modern era. The efforts at actively deconstructing the expectations of art play against a background of conceptual genius or divine inspiration. The abstract expressionists and the aleatoric composers show this as a radical 20th Century urge to re-imagine what art might be when freed from the strictures of formal ideas about subject, method, and content.

Is there any significance to the current paper? Not a great deal. The bottom line was that there was a great deal of tweaking to achieve a result that was subjectively pleasing and fit with the production goals of the film.… Read the rest

Apprendre à traduire

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Google’s translate has always been a useful tool for awkward gists of short texts. The method used was based on building a phrase-based statistical translation model. To do this, you gather up “parallel” texts that are existing, human, translations. You then “align” them by trying to find the most likely corresponding phrases in each sentence or sets of sentences. Often, between languages, fewer or more sentences will be used to express the same ideas. Once you have that collection of phrasal translation candidates, you can guess the most likely translation of a new sentence by looking up the sequence of likely phrase groups that correspond to that sentence. IBM was the progenitor of this approach in the late 1980’s.

It’s simple and elegant, but it always was criticized for telling us very little about language. Other methods that use techniques like interlingual transfer and parsers showed a more linguist-friendly face. In these methods, the source language is parsed into a parse tree and then that parse tree is converted into a generic representation of the meaning of the sentence. Next a generator uses that representation to create a surface form rendering in the target language. The interlingua must be like the deep meaning of linguistic theories, though the computer science versions of it tended to look a lot like ontological representations with fixed meanings. Flexibility was never the strong suit of these approaches, but their flaws were much deeper than just that.

For one, nobody was able to build a robust parser for any particular language. Next, the ontology was never vast enough to accommodate the rich productivity of real human language. Generators, being the inverse of the parser, remained only toy projects in the computational linguistic community.… Read the rest

Boredom and Being a Decider

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tds_decider2_v6Seth Lloyd and I have rarely converged (read: absolutely never) on a realization, but his remarkable 2013 paper on free will and halting problems does, in fact, converge on a paper I wrote around 1986 for an undergraduate Philosophy of Language course. I was, at the time, very taken by Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter’s poetic excursion around the topic of recursion, vertical structure in ricercars, and various other topics that stormed about in his book. For me, when combined with other musings on halting problems, it led to a conclusion that the halting problem could be probabilistically solved by an observer who decides when the recursion is too repetitive or too deep. Thus, it prescribes an overlay algorithm that guesses about the odds of another algorithm when subjected to a time or resource constraint. Thus we have a boredom algorithm.

I thought this was rather brilliant at the time and I ended up having a one-on-one with my prof who scoffed at GEB as a “serious” philosophical work. I had thought it was all psychedelically transcendent and had no deep understanding of more serious philosophical work beyond the papers by Kripke, Quine, and Davidson that we had been tasked to read. So I plead undergraduateness. Nevertheless, he had invited me to a one-on-one and we clashed over the concept of teleology and directedness in evolutionary theory. How we got to that from the original decision trees of halting or non-halting algorithms I don’t recall.

But now we have an argument that essentially recapitulates that original form, though with the help of the Hartmanis-Stearns theorem to support it. Whatever the algorithm that runs in our heads, it needs to simulate possible outcomes and try to determine what the best course of action might be (or the worst course, or just some preference).… Read the rest

Traitorous Reason, Facts, and Analysis

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dinoObama’s post-election press conference was notable for its continued demonstration of adult discourse and values. Especially notable:

This office is bigger than any one person and that’s why ensuring a smooth transition is so important. It’s not something that the constitution explicitly requires but it is one of those norms that are vital to a functioning democracy, similar to norms of civility and tolerance and a commitment to reason and facts and analysis.

But ideology in American politics (and elsewhere) has the traitorous habit of undermining every one of those norms. It always begins with undermining the facts in pursuit of manipulation. Just before the election, the wizardly Aron Ra took to YouTube to review VP-elect Mike Pence’s bizarre grandstanding in Congress in 2002:

And just today, Trump lashed out at the cast of Hamilton for lecturing Mike Pence on his anti-LGBTQ stands, also related to ideology and belief, at the end of a show.

Astonishing as this seems, we live in an imperfect world being drawn very slowly away from tribal and xenophobic tendencies, and in fits and starts. My wife received a copy of letter from now-deceased family that contained an editorial from the Shreveport Journal in the 1960s that (with its embedded The Worker editorial review) simultaneously attacked segregationist violence, the rhetoric of Alabama governor George Wallace, claimed that communists were influencing John F. Kennedy and the civil rights movement, demanded the jailing of communists, and suggested the federal government should take over Alabama:

editorial-shreveport-60s-m

The accompanying letter was also concerned over the fate of children raised as Unitarians, amazingly enough, and how they could possibly be moral people. It then concluded with a recommendation to vote for Goldwater.… Read the rest

A Big Data Jeremiad and the Moral Health of America

Mark Davis2 Comments

monopolydude2The average of polls were wrong. The past-performance-weighted, hyper-parameterized, stratified-sampled, Monte Carlo-ized collaborative predictions fell as critically short in the general election as they had in the Republican primary. There will be much soul searching to establish why that might have been; from ground game engagement to voter turnout, from pollster bias to sampling defects, the hit list will continue to grow.

Things were less predictable than it seemed. During the 2008 and 2012 elections, the losing party proxies held that the polls were inherently flawed, though they were ultimately predictive. Now, in 2016, they were inherently flawed and not at all predictive.

But what the polls showed was instructive even if their numbers were not quite right. Specifically, there was a remarkable turn-out for Trump among white, less-educated voters who long for radical change to their economic lives. The Democratic candidate was less clearly engaging.

Another difference emerged, however. Despite efforts to paint Hillary Clinton as corrupt or a liar, objective fact checkers concluded that she was, in fact, one of the most honest candidates in recent history, and that Donald Trump was one of the worst, only approximated by Michelle Bachman in utter mendacity. We can couple that with his race-bating, misogyny, hostility, divorces, anti-immigrant scapegoating, and other childish antics. Yet these moral failures did not prevent his supporters from voting for him in numbers.

But his moral failures may be precisely why his supporters found him appealing. Evangelicals decided for him because Clinton was a threat to overturning Roe v. Wade, while he was an unknown who said a few contradictory things in opposition. His other moral issues were less important—even forgivable. In reality, though, this particular divide is an exemplar for a broader division in the moral fabric of America.… Read the rest

Desire and Other Matters

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“What matters?” is a surprisingly interesting question. I think about it constantly since it weighs-in whenever plotting future choices, though often I seem to be more autopilot than consequentialist in these conceptions. It is an essential first consideration when trying to value one option versus another. I can narrow the question a bit to “what ideas matter?” This immediately externalizes the broad reality of actions that meaningfully improve lives, like helping others, but still leaves a solid core of concepts that are valued more abstractly. Does the traditional Western liberal tradition really matter? Do social theories? Are less intellectually-embellished virtues like consistency and trust more relevant and applicable than notions like, well, consequentialism?

Maybe it amounts to how to value certain intellectual systems against others?

Some are obviously more true than others. So “dowsing belief systems” are less effective in a certain sense than “planetary science belief systems.” Yet there are a broader range of issues at work.

But there are some areas of the liberal arts that have a vexing relationship with the modern mind. Take linguistics. The field ranges from catalogers of disappearing languages to theorists concerned with how to structure syntactic trees. Among the latter are the linguists who have followed Noam Chomsky’s paradigm that explains language using a hierarchy of formal syntactic systems, all of which feature recursion as a central feature. What is interesting is that there have been very few impacts of this theory. It is very simple at its surface: languages are all alike and involve phrasal groups that embed in deep hierarchies. The specific ways in which the phrases and their relative embeddings take place may differ among languages, but they are alike in this abstract way.… Read the rest

Subtly Motivating Reasoning

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larson-sheepContinuing on with the general theme of motivated reasoning, there are some rather interesting results reported in New Republic, here. Specifically, Ian Anson from University of Maryland, Baltimore County, found that political partisans reinforced their perspectives on the state of the U.S. economy more strongly when they were given “just the facts” rather than a strong partisan statement combined with the facts. Even when the partisan statements aligned with their own partisan perspectives, the effect held.

The author concludes that people, in constructing their views of the causal drivers of the economy, believe that they are unbiased in their understanding of the underlying mechanisms. The barefaced partisan statements interrupt that construction process, perhaps, or at least distract from it. Dr. Anson points out that subtly manufacturing consent therefore makes for better partisan fellow travelers.

There are a number of theories concerning how meanings must get incorporated into our semantic systems, and whether the idea of meaning itself is as good or worse than simply discussing reference. More, we can rate or gauge the uncertainty we must have concerning complex systems. They seem to form a hierarchy, with actors in our daily lives and the motivations of those we have long histories with in the mostly-predictable camp. Next we may have good knowledge about a field or area of interest that we have been trained in. When this framework has a scientific basis, we also rate our knowledge as largely reliable, but we also know the limits of that knowledge. It is in predictive futures and large-scale policy that we become subject to the difficulty of integrating complex signals into a cohesive framework. The partisans supply factoids and surround them with causal reasoning.… Read the rest

Euhemerus and the Bullshit Artist

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trump-minotaurSailing down through the Middle East, past the monuments of Egypt and the wild African coast, and then on into the Indian Ocean, past Arabia Felix, Euhemerus came upon an island. Maybe he came upon it. Maybe he sailed. He was perhaps—yes, perhaps; who can say?—sailing for Cassander in deconstructing the memory of Alexander the Great. And that island, Panchaea, held a temple of Zeus with a written history of the deeds of men who became the Greek gods.

They were elevated, they became fixed in the freckled amber of ancient history, their deeds escalated into myths and legends. And, likewise, the ancient tribes of the Levant brought their El and Yah-Wah, and Asherah and Baal, and then the Zoroastrians influenced the diaspora in refuge in Babylon, until they returned and had found dualism, elemental good and evil, and then reimagined their origins pantheon down through monolatry and into monotheism. These great men and women were reimagined into something transcendent and, ultimately, barely understandable.

Even the rational Yankee in Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court realizes almost immediately why he would soon rule over the medieval world as he is declared a wild dragon when presented to the court. He waits for someone to point out that he doesn’t resemble a dragon, but the medieval mind does not seem to question the reasonableness of the mythic claims, even in the presence of evidence.

So it goes with the human mind.

And even today we have Fareed Zakaria justifying his use of the term “bullshit artist” for Donald Trump. Trump’s logorrhea is punctuated by so many incomprehensible and contradictory statements that it becomes a mythic whirlwind. He lets slip, now and again, that his method is deliberate:

DT: Therefore, he was the founder of ISIS.

… Read the rest

Motivation, Boredom, and Problem Solving

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shatteredIn the New York Times Stone column, James Blachowicz of Loyola challenges the assumption that the scientific method is uniquely distinguishable from other ways of thinking and problem solving we regularly employ. In his example, he lays out how writing poetry involves some kind of alignment of words that conform to the requirements of the poem. Whether actively aware of the process or not, the poet is solving constraint satisfaction problems concerning formal requirements like meter and structure, linguistic problems like parts-of-speech and grammar, semantic problems concerning meaning, and pragmatic problems like referential extension and symbolism. Scientists do the same kinds of things in fitting a theory to data. And, in Blachowicz’s analysis, there is no special distinction between scientific method and other creative methods like the composition of poetry.

We can easily see how this extends to ideas like musical composition and, indeed, extends with even more constraints that range from formal through to possibly the neuropsychology of sound. I say “possibly” because there remains uncertainty on how much nurture versus nature is involved in the brain’s reaction to sounds and music.

In terms of a computational model of this creative process, if we presume that there is an objective function that governs possible fits to the given problem constraints, then we can clearly optimize towards a maximum fit. For many of the constraints there are, however, discrete parameterizations (which part of speech? which word?) that are not like curve fitting to scientific data. In fairness, discrete parameters occur there, too, especially in meta-analyses of broad theoretical possibilities (Quantum loop gravity vs. string theory? What will we tell the children?) The discrete parameterizations blow up the search space with their combinatorics, demonstrating on the one hand why we are so damned amazing, and on the other hand why a controlled randomization method like evolutionary epistemology’s blind search and selective retention gives us potential traction in the face of this curse of dimensionality.… Read the rest