Category: Philosophy

Oh, the Humanities!

Mark Davis1 Comment

I often laugh out loud at Ross Douthat’s New York Times columns that worry over strange spiritualisms taking over America, or try to unravel cultural knots that he always suggests might best be resolved by Catholicism (or even one of those lesser faiths), but I did enjoy his take today on the perishing of the humanities in America’s universities and colleges. I routinely read into the 18th and 19th centuries as an exploration of how language was once used. I read analytically, that is. Plots are picked apart. Characterization is considered. Clausal embedding is almost always more ornate than contemporary writing where such elaborations are pretentious or, at least, overwrought. I also (try to) read original versions of Balzac or Flaubert as an exercise in improving my French. What is less interesting to me are the class conflicts, racism, and gender roles from those bygone days. People are rotten enough today; I hardly need a reminder that we were always rotten and had reinforcing institutions and traditions overlaying that malaise.

But is there a threat to a decline in the participation in the humanities and a shift to STEM fields among university students? The argument is that it impacts our understanding of history and the drivers that got us here today. Perhaps it also diminishes our knowledge of logic and reason when philosophy is subtracted from the curriculum. Or just that the student never learns to articulate complex ideas and arguments.

An alternative to Douthat’s calls for monastic recitation and memorization as a grounding for the transmission of ideas is to make it more relevant to the STEM fields that have money and mindshare. In other words, inveigle the humanities into STEM; don’t fight, infiltrate.… Read the rest

Follow the Paths

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There is a little corner of philosophical inquiry that asks whether knowledge is justified based on all our other knowledge. This epistemological foundationalism rests on the concept that if we keep finding justifications for things we can literally get to the bottom of it all. So, for instance, if we ask why we think there is a planet called Earth, we can find reasons for that belief that go beyond just “’cause I know!” like “I sense the ground beneath my feet” and “I’ve learned empirically-verified facts about the planet during my education that have been validated by space missions.” Then, in turn, we need to justify the idea that empiricism is a valid way of attaining knowledge with something like, “It’s shown to be reliable over time.” This idea of reliability is certainly changing and variable, however, since scientific insights and theories have varied, depending on the domain in question and timeframe. And why should we in fact value our senses as being reliable (or mostly reliable) given what we know about hallucinations, apophenia, and optical illusions?

There is also a curious argument in philosophy that parallels this skepticism about the reliability of our perceptions, reason, and the “warrants” for our beliefs called the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). I’ve previously discussed some aspects of EAAN, but it is, amazingly, still discussed in academic circles. In a nutshell it asserts that our reliable reasoning can’t be evolved because evolution does not reliably deliver good, truthful ways of thinking about the world.

While it may seem obvious that the evolutionary algorithm does not deliver or guarantee completely reliable facilities for discerning true things from false things, the notion of epistemological pragmatism is a direct parallel to evolutionary search (as Fitelson and Sober hint).… Read the rest

Sentience is Physical, Part 3: Now with Flaming Birds

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Moving to Portland brings all the positives and negatives of urban living. A notable positive is access to the arts and I’m looking forward to catching Stravinsky’s The Firebird this weekend with the Oregon Symphony. Part of the program is a new work by composer Vijay Iyer who has a history of incorporating concepts derived from African rhythms, hip hop, and jazz into his compositional efforts. I took the opportunity this morning to read his 1998 dissertation from Berkeley that capped off his interdisciplinary program in the cognitive science of music. I’ll just say up front that I’m not sure it rises to the level of a dissertation since it does not really provide any significant new results. He notes the development of a microtiming programming environment coded in MAX but doesn’t give significant results or novel experimental testing of the system or of human perceptions of microtiming. What the dissertation does do, however, is give a lucid overview and some new insights about how cognition and music interact, as well as point towards ways to test the theories that Iyer develops during the course of his work. A too-long master’s thesis might be a better category for it, but I’ve never been exposed to musicology dissertations so perhaps this level of work is normal.

Iyer’s core thesis is that musical cognition and expression arise from a physical engagement with our environments combined with cultural situatedness. That is, rhythm is tied to a basic “tactus” or spontaneously perceived regular pulse or beat of music that is physically associated with walking, heartbeats, tapping, chewing, and so forth. Similarly, the culture of musical production as well as the history that informs a given piece all combine to influence how music is produced and experienced.… Read the rest

Vaguely Effective Altruism

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In “Killing John Galt” in my new collection, Entanglements, the first-person narrator muses that:

Reaching the moon was easy but conquering poverty was impossible. Watching Sonya’s animated hopefulness—perfection!—almost made me want to call Winborn and recommend that he just pay more taxes with the same money. Let the organizations and bureaucrats build institutions that could chisel away at the edifice, slowly and steadily; look at giant statistical outcomes to guide changes in policy over time. It would convert the problem from individual heroism into a technocratic game. I could play that game, running regression models and factor analytic comparisons to tease out what was and what was not working effectively. Social change then became policy management.

With the plunge of Effective Altruism (EA) from its hubristic trajectory across the sun of cryptocurrency, how and why to do good by wealthy people has become a renewed topic for discussion. At the New York Times, for instance, we have the regularly vague Ross Douthat complaining that if every oil magnate wants their money applied to just saving kids from malaria we would have fewer quaint state parks. Perhaps more interesting at the same publication is Ezra Klein’s discussion of the goals and limits of EA as well as the philosophical underpinnings of the movement. There is plenty of room for a spectrum of responses to the basic problem of how to give away money, but the key concept of “effectiveness” is what forces EA and EA-adjacent proponents to analyze their approaches and goals towards making the world a better place. Historically, much large-scale giving was intended to create a legacy for the industrialist families (Carnegie-Mellon University, Rockefeller Foundation, … ahem, Sackler Institute and related organizations).… Read the rest

Entanglements: Collected Short Works

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Now available in Kindle, softcover, and hardcover versions, Entanglements assembles a decade of short works by author, scientist, entrepreneur, and inventor Mark William Davis.

The fiction includes an intimate experimental triptych on the evolution of sexual identities. A genre-defying poetic meditation on creativity and environmental holocaust competes with conventional science fiction about quantum consciousness and virtual worlds. A postmodern interrogation of the intersection of storytelling and film rounds out the collected works as a counterpoint to an introductory dive into the ethics of altruism.

The nonfiction is divided into topics ranging from literary theory to philosophical concerns of religion, science, and artificial intelligence. Legal theories are magnified to examine the meaning of liberty and autonomy. A qualitative mathematics of free will is developed over the course of two essays and contextualized as part of the algorithm of evolution. What meaning really amounts to is always a central concern, whether discussing politics, culture, or ideas.

The works show the author’s own evolution in his thinking of our entanglement with reality as driven by underlying metaphors that transect science, reason, and society. For Davis, metaphors and the constellations of words that help frame them are the raw materials of thought, and their evolution and refinement is the central narrative of our growth as individuals in a webwork of societies and systems.

Entanglements is for readers who are in love with ideas and the networks of language that support and enervate them. It is a metalinguistic swim along a polychromatic reef of thought where fiction and nonfictional analysis coexist like coral and fish in a greater ecosystem.

Mark William Davis is the author of three dozen scientific papers and patents in cognitive science, search, machine translation, and even the structure of art.… Read the rest

Sentience is Physical, Part 2

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Having recently moved to downtown Portland within spitting distance of Powell’s Books, I had to wander through the bookstore despite my preference for digital books these days. Digital books are easily transported, can be instantly purchased, and can be effortlessly carried in bulk. More, apps like Kindle Reader synchronize across platforms allowing me to read wherever and whenever I want without interruption. But is there a discovery feature to the shopping experience that is missing in the digital universe? I had to find out and hit the poetry and Western Philosophy sections at Powell’s as an experiment. And I did end up with new discoveries that I took home in physical form (I see it as rude to shop brick-and-mortar and then order via Amazon/Kindle), including a Borges poetry compilation and an unexpected little volume, The Body in the Mind, from 1987 by the then-head of University of Oregon’s philosophy department, Mark Johnson.

A physical book seemed apropos of the topic of the second book that focuses on the role of our physical bodies and experiences as central to the construction of meaning. Did our physical evolution and the associated requirements for survival also translate into a shaping of how our minds work? Psychologists and biologists would be surprised that there is any puzzlement over this likelihood, but Johnson is working against the backdrop of analytical philosophy that puts propositional structure as the backbone of linguistic productions and the reasoning that drives them. Mind is disconnected from body in this tradition, and subjects like metaphors are often considered “noncognitive,” which is the negation of something like “reasoned through propositional logic.”

But how do we convert these varied metaphorical concepts derived from physicality into something structured that we can reason about using effective procedures?… Read the rest

A Mammoth Undertaking: Interviewing the Future of Art

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The following is my interview of DeepAI and Stable Diffusion running on an AMD Ryzen with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090.

Thank you for taking the time to discuss this important and interesting topic. Why are mammoths so important to the art world?

That the mammoths were domesticated before the start of the human era seems implausible from a historical perspective. In fact the majority of mammoths that people find in museums, libraries, and other collections are not domesticated mammoths. This suggests there might have been a greater need for mammoths within culture than before. This would make sense, considering that Neanderthals likely hunted other types of other species before settling in our world more than 400 years ago. Because they were not domesticated, they were only adapted to hunting rodents and other plant and animal species that were less domesticated in their wild form such as rabbits, snakes, etc.

Starting at the earliest part of your collection, the mammoth is an unusual theme for Rembrandt, isn’t it?

It’s hard to believe that after all the success of their latest work, The Lord’s Prayer doesn’t want to let their “biggest hit yet”, the classic The Lord’s Prayer, disappear. The actor’s latest film, The Wrestler (via Warner Bros., which produces on their own, and in the U.K.), has garnered more than 15 million views on Amazon Instant Video (the company’s preferred store for Netflix-wielding subscribers, not the usual suspects Google Video), and has become so popular that when the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, it was deemed the top film at the fest. The star-studded line-up has included the likes of Peter Lorre, Michael J Freberg, Colin Farrell, and Peter Sellers (both of whom made it to a Hollywood winery).… Read the rest

Making Everything Awesome Again

Mark Davis1 Comment

Yeah, everything is boring. Streaming video, books, art—everything. It is the opposite of “everything is awesome” and, once again, it came about as a result of the internet attention economy. Or at least that is what Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times tells us, rounding up some thoughts from a literary critic as a first step and then jumping into some new social criticism that suggests the internet has ruined snobbery.

I was thinking back to the 1990s after I read the piece. I was a working computational linguist who dabbled in simulated evolution and spent time at Santa Fe Institute studying dreamy artificial life concepts. In my downtime I was in an experimental performance art group that detonated televisions and projected their explosions on dozens of televisions in a theater. I did algorithmic music composition using edge-of-chaos self-assembling systems. I read transgressive fiction and Behavioral and Brain Sciences for pleasure. I listened to Brian Eno and Jane Sibbery and Hole while reading Mondo 2000. My girlfriend and I danced until our necks ached at industrial/pop-crossover clubs and house parties. An early “tech nomad” visited us at one of our desert parties. Both in my Peace Corps service in Fiji and then traveling in Europe and Japan, I was without a cell phone, tablet, and only occasionally was able to touch email when at academic conferences where the hosts had kindly considered our unique culture. There was little on the internet—just a few pre-memes struggling for viability on USENET.

Everything was awesome.

But there was always a lingering doubt about the other cultural worlds that we were missing, from the rise of grunge to its plateau into industrial, and of the cultural behemoth cities on the coasts.… Read the rest

Sentience is Physical

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Sentience is all the rage these days. With large language models (LLMs) based on deep learning neural networks, question-answering behavior of these systems takes on curious approximations to talking with a smart person. Recently a member of Google’s AI team was fired after declaring one of their systems sentient. His offense? Violating public disclosure rules. I and many others who have a firm understanding of how these systems work—by predicting next words from previous productions crossed with the question token stream—are quick to dismiss the claims of sentience. But what does sentience really amount to and how can we determine if a machine becomes sentient?

Note that there are those who differentiate sentience (able to have feelings), from sapience (able to have thoughts), and consciousness (some private, subjective phenomenal sense of self). I am willing to blend them together a bit since the topic here isn’t narrowly trying to address the ethics of animal treatment, for example, where the distinction can be useful.

First we have the “imitation game” Turing test-style approach to the question of how we might ever determine if a machine becomes sentient. If a remote machine can fool a human into believing it is a person, it must be as intelligent as a person and therefore sentient like we presume of people. But this is a limited goal line. If the interaction is only over a limited domain like solving your cable internet installation problems, we don’t think of that as a sentient machine. Even against a larger domain of open-ended question and answering, if the human doesn’t hit upon a revealing kind of error that a machine might make that a human would not, we remain unconvinced that the target is sentient.… Read the rest

Notes on Pumps: Sensibilities and Framing with Algorithmic Feedback

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“A sensibility is one of the hardest things to talk about.” So begins Sontag’s Notes on “Camp” in the 1964 Partisan Review. And what of the political anger and disillusionment across the United States and in the developed world? What of the gnawing desire towards superiority and control that accompanies authoritarian urges? What of the fear of loss of power to minority ethnic and religious groups? These may be the most discussed sociopolitical aspects of our modern political sensibility since Trump’s election in 2016 when a bitter, vindictive, hostile, crude, fat thug briefly took the reigns of America, then pushed and conspired to oppose the election of his successor.

What attracted his followers to him? I never encountered a George W. Bush fanatic during his presidency. Though not physically small, he talked about “compassionate conservatism” with a voice that hung in the upper register of middle pitches for men. He was neither sonorous nor mean. His eyebrows often had a look of surprise and self-doubt that was hinted at in claims he was a very reluctant candidate for president. I met people who voted for him but they seemed to accept him as an acceptable alternative to Gore or, later, to Kerry—not as a figure of passionate intrigue. Bush Jr. did receive a rally-around-the-flag effect that was based on circumstances that would later bring rebuke over the casus belli of the Iraq War. Similar sensibilities were true of the Obama years—there was a low positivity for him on the Left combined with a mildly deranged antagonism towards him on the Right.

Was the lack of Trump-like animating fanaticism due to the feeling that Bush Jr. was a compromise made to the electorate while Trump was, finally, a man who expressed the real hostility of those who vote Republican?… Read the rest