Speaker A
In this episode, there's a fantastic paper by Joe McAffrey, and I'm going to tell you the name now in a second, which talks—it gives you a history of the problems of localization and this localization debate. It is called
Exploring dialectical science and the role of continental philosophy in AI research with Dr. Tim Elmo Fon.
Key Takeaways
- Scientific research is deeply influenced by underlying theoretical frameworks, affecting data interpretation.
- Dialectical thinking offers a dynamic way to understand and challenge scientific concepts and assumptions.
- Continental philosophy provides valuable insights that can enrich AI and cognitive science research.
- Engaging with philosophy, especially dialectics, can enhance intellectual development and critical thinking.
- Bridging analytic and continental traditions is crucial for a more comprehensive philosophy of science.
Summary
- The podcast discusses Joe McAffrey's paper on the history and debate of functional localization in cognitive science.
- It highlights how scientific data is theory-laden and how findings can destabilize foundational research assumptions.
- Dr. Tim Elmo Fon, a philosopher of science, bridges continental and analytic philosophy with AI and cognitive science.
- The conversation shifts to dialectical thinking and its misunderstood role in philosophy and science.
- Dialectics is presented not as a fixed definition but as an ongoing process of intellectual engagement.
- The podcast emphasizes the importance of continental philosophy for advancing AI research and cognitive science.
- Dr. Fon's work includes embodied cognitive science and new interpretations of Jakob von Uexküll's biology.
- The host reflects on the value of the discussion for intellectual development despite its abstract nature.
- The episode includes a personal note on podcast funding and the host’s motivation for supporting free content.
- The dialogue also touches on the theory-ladenness of machine learning and interdisciplinary philosophical approaches.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Joe McAffrey's Paper on Localization
- 07:31Theory-Ladenness of Machine Learning and Philosophy of Science
- 15:17Embodied Cognitive Science and Philosophical Background
- 23:17Discussion on Dialectics and Its Misunderstandings
- 37:40Philosophical Implications for AI and Cognitive Science
- 46:34Interdisciplinary Approaches and Intellectual Development
- 57:23Closing Remarks and Podcast Support Information
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Evolving Concepts of Functional Localization. It's a fantastic paper. I highly recommend reading that, and I think it's a great example of how I think science is dialectical. Okay, so now this gets spicy because you start with concepts about the mind, and
Speaker A
those concepts are the condition of possibility for a specific kind of research that generates all these results over time. So you have lots of lesion studies and other things. I wait a second, I have some more notes on this
Speaker A
here somewhere. Over time, you get more results that are generated by these theoretical presuppositions, right? And then eventually, you get enough of those that someone like Michael Anderson can do this large-scale analysis and find out that actually the results
Speaker A
themselves undermine the presuppositions that made possible the research that collected the data. So at this point, it disconnects back to this conversation about how data isn't neutral, but the data was generated in this extremely theory-laden way,
Speaker A
and this theory-laden over generations of researchers. So we have the findings, and the findings themselves create the kind of contradictions that draw into question and destabilize the conceptual foundations of the research tradition itself. Hey everyone, welcome to
Speaker A
my conversation with the philosopher of science Dr. Tim Elmo Fon. This conversation certainly took an interesting turn because initially, when I reached out to Elmo, my intent was to discuss the relationship or, let's call it, the insights that conal
Speaker A
philosophy has, in particular, for research in AI and more of the positive cognitive sciences. However, in the middle of the conversation, it sort of shifted into a discussion on dialectics and the relationship between science and dialectics and dialectical thinking, and
Speaker A
he even mentioned the book The Dialectical Biologist, which I've already ordered and put on my list to read. And in fact, if Elmo is open to it, once I've read it, I'd probably love to invite him again to
Speaker A
have a discussion just on that book, because he beautifully outlined and articulated how science, in fact, is dialectical and what dialectical thinking entails. And, you know, let's be honest here: whenever the word dialectics is mentioned in any kind of philosophy
Speaker A
or even a scientific environment, people either roll their eyes or give you a bit of a funny look because, well, the term dialectics has been misused, overused, misappropriated, and everything else you could add on to that,
Speaker A
because yeah, it's just one of those things that's very murky. It's not well defined, and in fact, I think in the true Hegelian sense, the point of dialectics is not to give it a definition but rather to engage in the
Speaker A
process of dialectics. And I think that's sort of what, when I mean the process, I mean the process of dialectical thinking, and I think that's sort of what Elmo kind of illustrated to us in this podcast, and I found that part
Speaker A
deeply satisfying and enlightening. And above all, the best part is that—and this is kind of why I love these podcasts—I wasn't expecting to go there. I didn't even have any questions on dialectics
Speaker A
in what I shared with him before the conversation. In any case, it was really fun. If I might say this with a bit of audacity, I guess, I do feel like I've struck gold. I found a gem in the world of philosophy,
Speaker A
because I don't think he's done many public appearances, public podcasts, and I hope this can give a bit of a platform for him to give him some exposure to his work
Speaker A
and his sort of thinking, with a lot of thinkers that I personally aren't that familiar with. And it's just really—he sits in both camps of both analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, and he's read both these quite deeply, which I can say
Speaker A
unequivocally, yes, quite deeply, because there's someone trying to do this with the lack of time and energy we have trying to read across all of these philosophers. It can be quite the arduous task,
Speaker A
let's say. In any case, with that as it may, now a quick PSA. As you may know, I've mentioned multiple times I'll never have advertisers or sponsors on this podcast. Frankly, I think we live in a
Speaker A
society of excess and overconsumption, and I don't want to contribute to that by selling you more things. That being said though, forgive me for the apology, but for better or worse, we live in the world we live in. I run this podcast on top of
Speaker A
doing a full-time job while doing my master's, and if I am to sustain this project, I need some kind of financial backing. So if you have the means, please do consider financially supporting this podcast through Patreon, Substack, or PayPal. All
Speaker A
the links will be in the show notes. And if you're wondering, what are the perks? The honest answer is nothing. That's right. There's no exclusive behind-the-paywall perks. You're simply supporting this project if
Speaker A
you think the already free content that's publicly available is of any value to you. I sincerely do want to thank the existing supporters on Patreon, Substack, and even PayPal. However, if you're considering supporting the project, please do so only if you have
Speaker A
the means. All right, back to the episode. Dr. Tim Elmo Fon is a philosopher of science with a focus on the sciences of life, mind, and artificial intelligence. His work brings the history of and philosophy of science into dialogue with
Speaker A
other fields, especially continental and classical German philosophy. He has used the philosophy of embodied cognitive science to develop new readings of Jakob von Uexküll, Max Turner, and to ask questions about the relationships between arts, science, technology, and society. Dr. Fon
Speaker A
is currently an assistant teaching professor at Penn State University and did his PhD at the University of Cincinnati. I really do hope you enjoy this one. I was, in fact, very glad when I was editing the podcast. I listened to it,
Speaker A
and I was really happy with what had come out and what we produced. For me at least, it was very edifying. And yes, certain parts of the conversation, as per usual with philosophy, it gets quite
Speaker A
abstract, especially the part on dialectics. However, push through, and I think it'll be well worth it for your thinking and, let's call it, if I could put it in this pretentious way, intellectual development. With all that being said, here's my conversation
Speaker A
with Dr. Tim Elmo Fon. But what I was going to say was, Elmo, I think it's worth mentioning kind of how I came across you and why I was interested in, you know, looking into your work and
Speaker A
then kind of eventually inviting you on the podcast. I had Mel Andrews on probably about a year ago now, close to a year ago, and it was a fantastic conversation. I really enjoyed reading Mel's work, especially her work on
Speaker A
kind of like the theory-ladenness of machine learning. I really thoroughly enjoyed that paper just at a philosophy of science level. And then I reached out to Mel, and Mel mentioned your name, saying that I'm trying to
Speaker A
find more thinkers who are seriously considering concepts in, let's call it, European philosophy, also called continental philosophy, and trying to bridge them with more of the ongoing work in the natural sciences and then more analytic philosophy and philosophy of
Speaker A
mind in that Anglo-American world. And then your name came up, and I looked you up, and I really enjoyed it. So, okay, now you got to correct me here: the paper you did on the biologist Jakob von Uexküll isn't
Speaker A
it? It's one of those vowels that I think you don't really have an English. Jakob von Uexküll was a German-speaking biologist from Estonia who worked,
Speaker A
um, as a—he did lots of empirical research on the physiology of marine animals in the last decade of the 19th century and then most of the stuff...
Speaker A
continue with what you were saying let's keep going it's fine yeah go ahead uh okay well I can just um I can explain how I ended up writing a dissertation on U and um I also how I ended up like doing a PhD
Speaker A
in philosophy at all so I um yeah that' be a fun place to start start at yeah originally I studied I majored in English at a minor in cognitive science and then I did a masters in cultural studies a long time ago and towards the
Speaker A
end of that I got more into the theoretical parts of and cultural studies that means there's going to be some Marxism some French structuralism and poststructuralism and so on so a lot of the theory that we were reading um is
Speaker A
what we call Continental philosophy and I started working on a project on Max sterer who um was a young hegelian at the drinking body of Fred Angel so he was part of a group of philosophers in the 1840s who had um gotten their
Speaker A
philosophical training within higel system which was very dominant in German philosophy at the time but they in with increasing speed sort of over maybe a decade they develop very radical criticisms of higgles views and also basically of everything else and um
Speaker A
that's exciting because the for example the roots of Marxism as a philosophical system as a world view and so on um are in that period and also um other views in German philosophy um like systematic ideas about atheism and liberalism and
Speaker A
so on um were like a lot of progress was made in different areas by the agans um and sterer is sometimes described as an anarchist because he um took this General uh impetus that they had of this method of criticizing the
Speaker A
presuppositions of the kind of philosophy they were doing and he didn't really stop anywhere so he um the context for this was a criticism of religion so they started by they said if we take hegel's philosophy seriously then we have to
Speaker A
look at the Bible in a different way and ask whether Jesus was really a historical figure or not um this got pretty spicy because religion was a dominant social force in a way that it isn't nowadays in Germany at the time so
Speaker A
you get this movement of um the people who are working on this philosophically are hurting their own career chances so some of them lose their jobs or they can't find a job as a professor once get their phds um so they also get
Speaker A
radicalized by that so now that they have tanked their careers their thought becomes even more radical so have these two things uh reinforcing each other and um I started working on that and um that was interesting because at the time I
Speaker A
got I was more interested generally in how anarchism works as like a system of thought and um there was something called post anarchism which stands most of the time for post structuralist anarchism M so the basic story of that
Speaker A
is that um classical anarchism comes out of the 19th century and it is based on a critique of the authority of the state and so on but it also seemed at least according to the story to involve ideas
Speaker A
about human nature where you might think for example that the kind of political organization that Nation States force on its subject um make humans behave in ways that are bad for everyone or that are bad for most of us um but if we were
Speaker A
free to organize our societies through a voluntary Association then because human nature is generally positive we is less terrible than it looks within the current uh social organization um that will be better and the people who develop post anarchism took on board
Speaker A
criticisms of this idea of a human nature which they call essentialist that they got in part from French philosophers like fuku and Del or maybe d da and um they tried to develop an theory of anarchism that is informed by
Speaker A
French philosophy from it's sometimes called post structuralist and then people object to that label for various reasons but um I thought that a lot of the um juice that these people got out of French critiques of humanism actually
Speaker A
were was already present in Sterno so sterner's critique of humanism is very comprehensive he thinks that humanism has just replaced Christianity as an ideal where before um people would internalize Christianity as a normative system and then you have the idea that
Speaker A
to be a good Christian you have to live in a certain way and you can never live up to this ideal so you always feel bad about yourself and you also do this work yourself right you judge yourself to
Speaker A
fail to live up to some standard and then you feel bad about yourself and he said that his colleagues the other young agans were right to criticize that foak is a one of the most famous ones um and
Speaker A
he's criticized foak for instead of Christianity advocating humanism as what sterer thinks is just the new religion so the idea is that now you have an idea about human Essence and you judge yourself according to how well or how
Speaker A
badly you live up to this idea of realizing your human Essence and some of behaviors might be called inhuman or you're maybe debasing your human essence or something like that and he said you're just still doing the same thing
Speaker A
you are internalizing a set of norms that um someone has told you is in some way more important than your own desires um and all the arguments for those sets of norms are ultimately uh without firm ground they um if you if you think about
Speaker A
them critically they can't really be justified and especially they can't be justified in such a way that you would have to take them on and police your own behavior and like um set aside your own desires and your own
Speaker A
happiness in order to live up to some ideal um so I worked on that and I I was still publishing on that um slowly while I was working a normal job I uh realized that I didn't really have a prospect in Academia
Speaker A
working on that because um there aren't any jobs if you wrote a dissertation on sterer and post anarchism that's extremely unhirable um but while was working a normal job and working on St I also got really interested in embodied
Speaker A
cognition and part of that is because subjective experience um is such a weird problem and I was very dissatisfied with how analytic philosophy of Mind deals with subjective experience and like kind of the the the only sense in which these
Speaker A
are connected and I think this is uh something about me as a thinker is that um the way that sters often criticizes that people say he's an individualist in some way that is supposed to be uh obviously and
Speaker A
straightforwardly both bad and wrong so if you call someone an individualist in certain circles not just academic but like in just certain kinds of conversations calling someone an individualist comes with like an automatic connotation that this is objectional in some way and I think
Speaker A
often that's true but there are probably 12 or more uh possible meanings of to the term individual IST in any given conversation um and I think that some uh things some some versions of individualism are just true and I think
Speaker A
for example about subjective experience um I think that I am the only one who has access to my own subjective experience if I experience something that is my experience if someone else experiences something that is their experience there this is also kind of
Speaker A
baked into the way we use the words but for example um if I look at a red book I look at this book cover and it's red the phenomenal subjective experience those are like the ways best ways we
Speaker A
have for talking about it even though they people can ask you to explain what you mean by that and then you have whole literatures um that are often unfulfilling but like the experience that I have when I see red isn't somehow
Speaker A
contained or isomorphic to the linguistic description that I can give of what's going on like the word red doesn't really contain the visual experience in any meaningful way um neither does a mathematical description of what's going on in my brain right the
Speaker A
math isn't red the word isn't red if someone cut open my skull and looked inside like find redness you know I mean maybe some parts of your brain are red but um it's not like find there definitely colors that I see that aren't
Speaker A
present in my brain If you look inside right um and there is some there seems to be something about subjective experience um that is fundamentally individual um and in sterer the the kind of way that sterer fits into different theoretical
Speaker A
contexts is that often he's contrasted with Marx and Marx really um hated sternos theories and wrote um a very seric and sometimes funny but extremely negative and spicy takedown of sterer basically which was never published but then became part later of something
Speaker A
called the German ideology which is it looks like a book but it's really a collection of unpublished manuscripts that was published after Marx's death um and the big conflict or one of the big problems is that sterer seems to have
Speaker A
this extremely radical individualism he calls it egoism so he thinks that ultimately you are you care about your own happiness and a lot of the things that you're doing the way like the judgments that you make about what you should be doing
Speaker A
for example like those are judgments that you make as an individual so his different ways of thinking all bottom out with you the individual and um people find that objectionable I think it's important to differentiate between um different perspectives so for
Speaker A
example if you're trying to explain someone's behavior from the outside and you're doing sociology then there are there's something called methodological individualism you might think that all Behavior has to ultimately be explained as the behavior of individuals and you
Speaker A
someone else might say no we have to look at social institutions we have to look at like larger historical constraints that actually determine the action of the individuals um and those are different methodological options from the outside um I think it's important to acknowledge
Speaker A
that it makes a difference whether you are talking about a perspective that you adopt on some phenomenon outside of yourself that you are trying to understand as a philosopher or as a scientist or whether you are um understanding and navigating your own
Speaker A
life from your own perspective and that perspective is the perspective that is made up by your subjective experience right so when I open my eyes in the morning everything I see is my subjective experience and when you describe it like this and you're trying
Speaker A
to explain what you mean by subjective experience if you for example in a grad seminar people will just call you an cartisian dualist or they call you an idealist and they mean it as a slur so it's supposed to show that you I
Speaker A
shouldn't be saying this because the views that I'm committed to when I talk about my subjective experience being private are um it's supposed to be obvious and well understood and we all agree that you can't be a cartisian because that's
Speaker A
absurd and wrong and like the last few hundred years since de card the work that we as a collective have done in philosophy is to get beyond that and make sure that we will never make the same mistake again
Speaker A
um and I'm like sure there are many things about dick hard that seem uh wrong or implausible or like things I don't want to buy into as a philosopher but what are the Alternatives like do we have okay
Speaker A
assuming that we don't want to say that they're two different kinds of substance like a race extensor so the idea that bodies are extended in space and then we have um a mind that is not located in space at all and that's where all the
Speaker A
thinking happens that's where all the experience happens and then you have this problem of how the two interact that's cartisian dualism U but if you don't believe in that the way that this story Works um is that you get different responses you
Speaker A
have behaviorism so maybe we just want to instead of thinking that mental processes or mental states are these separate kinds of entities we just think that those words describe observable behaviors um and you have different version of physicalism or functionalism
Speaker A
and different ways of trying to um identify things that happen in the world as mental and but the weird thing about those conversations in philosophy of Mind in the 20th century is that all of those those work very well unless you
Speaker A
ask about subjective experience so if you're for example interested in what are moral judgments moral judgments are like a mental process seem like a pretty good example of something that involves like maybe even a way you feel about
Speaker A
something but you make a moral judgment you say something is morally wrong or it's morally right um the way that we can study that is uh different from the way that we can study subjective experience itself so um when so you have to also like
Speaker A
interrupt me and bring me back on course because I'm just no please keep going although I was going to ask you something it seems to me and I this question already uh was on my on my notes while you were while I
Speaker A
was reading your work on uh um that that concept which again I picked it up from you uh it seems to me uh first of all great great uh segue that you made into to the the first question I was going to
Speaker A
ask appropo subjective experience and kind of how let's call it analytic philosophy views it uh but before we even get get there and fles that out more it seems to me you're still in some way defending dayart and you're still
Speaker A
saying we probably should stick to some kind of have some kind of ontological commitment to toward the dualism between the the physical and the mental world is that right or am I just kind of a caricaturing you here yeah well I'm not
Speaker A
no I don't um there are several I don't think that I'm a cartisian for several reasons so deart has a specific methodology where he says okay I want to start by doubting everything I can possibly doubt and then I arrive at this
Speaker A
one thing that I can't doubt which is that I exist and so on and then he argues for why we can also believe that the external World exists and at some point you actually need God in that reasoning and I don't yes none of that
Speaker A
not beone of that is something I take on board um to justify my philosophical beliefs and I also I think one thing that's important when we uh compare the things that we believe nowadays to the history of philosophy and this will come
Speaker A
up again when we talk about emuel Kant and embodied cognition is that even though in some ways our views may look like the views that philosophers had hundreds of years ago if we don't work within the same conceptual Frameworks
Speaker A
that they worked in and if we don't for people are very systematic like hun if you don't buy the system then your ideas probably are very different and like the constraints on your thinking are very different from the constraints on K's
Speaker A
thinking but let me explain this with reference to uh to Dart so I don't think that uh the majority of the people who have views and philosophy of mind and think that dualism is bad I mean and many of them have good reasons for
Speaker A
believing what they do obviously but they don't have uh strong opinions about the concept of substance in the card right it's not like the concept of a substance the way that the card used it is part of how we think about the mind
Speaker A
today so I definitely don't think that there are two separate substances um and I also wouldn't really say that I have a strong metaphysical commitments about the mind um I think that a lot of the my frustration with philosophy of mind is
Speaker A
that met physical commitments I feel like we don't have very good justifications for believing in in them um and part of that is how um Theory choice in metaphysics works but I also think that um it's more it's more
Speaker A
that I it's not that I have a view that I think is more robust than the other views it's just that I don't see how any of them account for subjective experience and like let me explain why I
Speaker A
think that a little bit so if you ask what do I mean by experience I try to talk a little bit about like what it feels like to LED and one of the phrases that people use in philosophy is like
Speaker A
what's it likeness or something like that that's supposed to be less technical the more technical term that is used as qualia and I am going to talk a little bit about the problem with the qualia debate in a second um but another
Speaker A
thing that you could point out is also that um when you say experience you could have something like a thin or a thick notion I'm not sure whether that's actually the best way to explain that but Emmanuel k for example in the
Speaker A
polyoma which is the book that he wrote after his first critique turned out to be too difficult to read for most people he wrote the proba to any future metaphysics very explicitly as an attempt to say the same stuff but in a
Speaker A
way that people can understand um which is why that's the main cont book that I've actually read every word of um and he says that what it means to have an experience is to bring intuitions under a concept and the way that you do that
Speaker A
is to like that is a judgment so you have an experience by making a judgment that brings intuitions under a concept and depending on what you think a concept is um this is a relatively demanding notion of experience right
Speaker A
this means that in order to have an experience you have to do something and um it also involves a concept I don't think about subjective experience in this way and it's possible that what I mean by subjective experience is closer
Speaker A
to what K would call just the intuitions um of course K says that well I'm going to get this one wrong it's going to be embarrassing but intuitions without concepts are blind and Concepts without intuitions are empty I think that's maybe what he
Speaker A
says um so the problem is he thinks that you can't really think unless you have both intuitions which is like something that comes from the outside and impinges on your senses in some way and Concepts that allow you to experience those
Speaker A
inputs as a structured in a meaningful way and I don't I'm not disagreeing with that in general I just don't think that that's how we use the term experience when we try to talk about subjective experience as a philosophical problem
Speaker A
sometimes people also say Consciousness or conscious experience the problem with Consciousness as a concept is that it can also involve more higher level intellectual capacities for reflection and planning and what whatever and I'm not interested in those I'm interested
Speaker A
in something very close to what people mean when they say qualia okay when they say qualia they would say for example a singular Quail might be the redness that I see when I look at this um and one thing that happens when
Speaker A
you talk about subjective experiences that people tell you to read Daniel Dan Quin and qualia it's a paper very famous and I think that's in general a good idea one should do that uh I've done it probably five times because once a year
Speaker A
every year in while I was in grad school I would talk about subjective experience on Twitter in some way um back when philosophy Twitter was uh pretty interesting and volatile place but also famous philosophers like Keith Frankish for example would be super generous and
Speaker A
very engaged with random Anonymous nobody's like me in good faith and talk about philosophy which is amazing um and then they tell me to re Quin qualia so those are the two things that happen to me when I talk about subjective
Speaker A
experience a someone calls me a cartisian and then also they tell me to read Quin qualia and I do and it's always more confusing than the last time because I don't see any good arguments in the paper for thinking that
Speaker A
subjective experience doesn't exist and okay now this is already a problem because then it later clarified in an exchange with David papino an email or was published or something like that that he doesn't deny that subjective experience exists he just thinks that
Speaker A
qualia are a theorist illusion or something like that so there's something uh wrong with the concept of qualia as a technical term however I think when you actually read Quin and qualia the article it's pretty obvious that he means not just
Speaker A
the technical term in some specific constr but he does actually deny that subjective experience exists um can try to pull up the article and read it but if someone has the PDF then they can look for the section where he says he
Speaker A
talks about what other people mean by qualia he doesn't really give a full definition but he says if you believe any of those things then you believe in what I mean by qualia there a phrase that is like that I'll find I'll find
Speaker A
the except and I'll put an overlay it's it's all good when I'm editing this so what he does in the paper in general is that he presents what he calls intuition pumps he says I'm not going to argue
Speaker A
that there is no subjective experience or that there aren't any qual I'm just going to present a bunch of scenarios that are supposed to pump our intuition so they are going they're supposed to um get our brains jogging in a way that
Speaker A
will us make us more likely to travel towards his View and where we believe oh maybe qualia actually is not a useful word at all for talking about the mining we should just drop that but one of his
Speaker A
examples it's intuition pump number two is the wine testing machine he says imagine you had a machine and you can pour a glass of wine into the machine example the machine prints out a piece of paper that describes oh the smell and
Speaker A
the taste of the wine how it lingers on your pallet or whatever and this is indistinguishable from what a professional wine taster would say and then he says if you think that there's any difference between what the machine
Speaker A
does and what the wine tester does then you uh believe in qualia in the way that he thinks is objectionable or philosophically um untenable and it's completely bizarre to me how anyone could think that the machine is doing
Speaker A
the same thing as a human tasting the wine like I think that's a great way to describe what subjective experience is because subjective experience is not pouring the wine into an opening that happens to be my mouth subjective
Speaker A
experience is not when I say the words oh this is Corky or whatever subjective experience is about what it tastes like when I drink the wine and it doesn't taste like anything to a machine um well the I mean it's as simple as saying if
Speaker A
let's say you read the output by an AI agent on a wine tasting you aren't going to taste wine by doing that it's like I I know I mean this is Dennis's wine tasting thing is like his famous example
Speaker A
and frankly uh before I read some of it I thought people were kind of you know caricaturing denn's speci and kind of like almost you know using it to kind of uh attack him but then he kind of does
Speaker A
say essentially that yeah it's an illusion The Experience uh what's the the truth is in how you can philosophically let's say articulate what wine tastes like which of course to any any almost like in in a colloquial sense or to any like General
Speaker A
lay audience that sounds absurd because in fact uh one way you'd say is that what's what's first in like a phenomological sense is the experience before you even try to articulate it in like a sensor used using language okay
Speaker A
so um I think one thing that might be interesting here as well is to say like when D published the paper our imagination of a wine tasting machine is probably something where it's more obvious that it doesn't have experience
Speaker A
nowadays if because of the progress of AI if you think about maybe not C gbt but like whatever we have in 20 years down the line um to some people it's not like people actually ask questions about whether
Speaker A
large language models have mental properties right so we are can ask whether chpd actually has beliefs about anything or whether llms can have intuitions and things like that and um I think it's important to point out that even though I think the wine tasting
Speaker A
machine as described by dennit like we have no reason to think that it would have subjective experience um it's possible for me to imagine a robot that has subjective experience but there's an important difference like it's it's important to note that I think it's
Speaker A
possible to imagine that and it's possible for me to understand the difference between a machine that has experience and a machine that doesn't have experience but I don't think that there's actually any empirical method for finding out whether the machine has
Speaker A
experience or not and I don't mean this in the terms of the current science that we have I've never even heard a description of an experiment that would allow you to tell whether a machine has experience or not um and we can contrast
Speaker A
this again to the all the whole rest of the mind so if you think about moral judgment um imagine it's the middle of the 20th century we are philosophers of mind and one of us thinks that moral judgment is primarily irrational
Speaker A
activity you have Concepts you have beliefs about morality and then you judge rationally whether something's good or bad and the other person thinks no it's actually very emotional and it's more about like some scenario makes you feel good or bad and then that motivates
Speaker A
your judgment now I can imagine an experiment where you put people in a scanner and then this we have to assume for a for a moment that we believe that like certain mental processes are easily uh localized in the brain and that's a
Speaker A
very contentious issue and I'm generally on the side of people who criticize uh the localization Paradigm in general but let's just assume that that was a thing so we are trying to imagine a scient science like we can
Speaker A
um even being able to imagine a scientific experiment that can make this distinction is something that I think we can't do for subjective experience so let's do the one for more judgment right we imagine that we know that rational
Speaker A
thought is may be located in the prefrontal cortex or whatever and emotions are maybe located somewhere else we have strong scientific evidence and all kinds of other research that suggests that when we are emotional when we exercise our emotional capacities
Speaker A
there's certain area of the brain that has lots of blood flowing through it that's what we actually you know what we measure um and when we think rationally the blood goes to the prefontal cortex now this is like a cartoon description obviously but
Speaker A
we could put people in the scanner and then we could ask them to make moral judgments and it's possible for us to imagine that the data would show us one side is right and the other is wrong right it would show us there's very
Speaker A
little activation in the part of the brain associated with emotions and a lot in the part that's associated with rationality or the reverse so I can describe to you what it would look like to have empirical neuroscientific evidence for a hypothesis about more
Speaker A
judgment and against another but I can't come up with an experiment that would allow me to adjudicate between for example different theories about the metaphysics of mind when you're like an eliminative materialist so you think that there are only brain processes and
Speaker A
there aren't any mental properties over and above those um the interesting thing and I think maybe this is why I don't really fit into the debate very comfortably is that I'm willing to give up everything except subjective experience so if you've asked about Free
Speaker A
Will for example I'm willing to say that like in the sense that we talk about the world as existing objectively and publicly available to scientific investigation maybe Free Will doesn't exist there's just stuff that happens in the brain
Speaker A
the only part about the mind that even conceptually I cannot understand how we could tell a story about that being physical is subjective experience and um yeah there there like heterodox versions of for example physicalism where people just
Speaker A
imagine that physics is something completely different from what it is now sure if you if you you can be a materialist if you have an asterisk and by material you mean something completely different from everyone else sure then you can make make everything
Speaker A
work but beyond that I don't think that there is um I don't well I I can't imagine an experiment that would allow us to actually for example show whether a sufficiently advanced AI has subjetive experience or not and I also think that
Speaker A
the way the way that um there are people in philosophy of Mind who have done great work showing how Neuroscience is relevant to philosophy and vice versa and I think all of that's great I'm super into that but I think that they
Speaker A
also sometimes pretend that the advances of Neuroscience count as evidence for specific metaphysical views like materialism for example and they don't um uh with the asterisk that they like those might that might be ammunition against someone who is like a dualist
Speaker A
about moral judgment and thinks moral judgment is something that is not physical but happens in your mind and or something like that I mean there are some but if if you think about subjective experience nothing that Neuroscience has
Speaker A
[Music] shown it doesn't exert any force on the scales of metaphysical commitments at all and the M the materialists in philosophy of mind believe essentially the same things that French materialists in the 17th century also believed and they didn't have Neuroscience so like
Speaker A
it's just it just does not fall out of empirical scientific results yeah if I may if I may interject for a moment here Elmo I think we need to flesh this out a bit more so and I think you're a good
Speaker A
person to answer this um yes as you did outline can you tell us a bit more as to why and this is more a research oriented question why you think uh you know AI research both people are working more on
Speaker A
the philosophy of AI but also certainly uh the AI research is in like the engineering computer science sense and then cognitive science why you see Concepts ideas theories in soal colal philosophy being almost critical for this kind of research if we are to kind
Speaker A
of make I don't I don't know what the word progress would really mean here but at least for us have a better understanding of what we're doing here in in AI research like why do you think AI research needs a colonal
Speaker A
philosophy yeah that's a great question sorry one second um sorry because I'm talking myself into a rage I'm trying to get the lay of the land of what I've just said and how maybe that's totally fine don't don't yeah I
Speaker A
mean but um so um this is a good development so I think that's that's why I kind of wanted to interject yeah I think the like so the the reason why I hesitate a little bit is because I think the the problem of
Speaker A
subjective experience might be useful it might be useful to talk about uku for like as short as possible um just because like I got interested in schol originally because at this point we have um we know that there are some people
Speaker A
who take seriously subjective experience right and we both came to the point where we said well if you're a human being actually subjective experience is what comes first and the like judgments we make in language come second so um if
Speaker A
you do for example phenomenology it was in as a philosophical school or method goes back to p and is the idea that we want to use direct systematic investigation of our subjective experience to ground philosophical knowledge in general now I
Speaker A
we can bracket the part about grounding all of knowledge for a second and just uh take on board this idea that our subjective experience is that something that we can directly and systematically investigate um and that is something else than
Speaker A
investigating someone when you're the scientist and the other the person you're investigating is a subject who is not you um then you're investigating them from the outside and it allows you to do empirical science in a way that is
Speaker A
objective in certain senses and reproducible and so on so the conditions for standard Natural Science um require you to do science on other people normally and not on yourself the way that you do in phenomenology um by which I didn't mean
Speaker A
to imply that phenomenology is naturally is part of Natural Science but um the investigation of your own experience in a systematic way can be very useful for doing cognitive science or psychology um and this in this way phenomenology
Speaker A
has been very influential for cognitive science so there's already a presence of phenomenology in cognitive science especially in what it's called embodied cognitive science and interestingly if you go back to one of the most important early books the embodied
Speaker A
mind um they actually get a lot of their methodology for investigating your own experience from Buddhism um and less explicitly I mean they talk about phenomenology but I think in terms of going into details of procedures that you can do in order to investigate your
Speaker A
mind Buddhism is strong here in the book in a way that is easy to forget when you think about in body cognition um so that's one part in which continent Al philosophy is relevant to the study of the mind in general and by extension the
Speaker A
study of AI um I think there's also a very broad sense in which I just think it's good to have familiarity with different ways of doing philosophy and different ways of thinking other than a like you could say
Speaker A
postanalytic philosophy of science um by which I mean that there's like a narrow sense of analytic philosophy that is not what people for the most part do in anglophone philosophy departments there's a broader sense of analytic philosophy if you think of this as this
Speaker A
like broad cultural constellation that's opposed to Continental philosophy um which in the US happens also a lot in other departments like French in English departments or in Divinity schools and other exciting places um but I think it's just useful to have
Speaker A
other perspectives so if I for example as a philosopher of science I think that's Continental philosophy is very useful um but it's equally useful to learn about the history of science so there's something called HPS history and philosophy of science which is um very
Speaker A
useful corrective to a lot of standard philosophical perspectives and there's also STS which is science and technology studies and some of that is also very useful for thinking differently about the topics you're interested in like AI um and
Speaker A
I think there's just a way of thinking philosophically about phenomena that is too strongly influenced you might even say like railroaded by the kind of philosophy of language that you learn when you get a normal philosophy education um and that can just limit it
Speaker A
can lock you in into very specific ways of thinking that are often not like the most useful or necessarily even accurate ways of understanding a problem um um my favorite example for why the history of science is basically the like the
Speaker A
antidote to the potentially lethal snake bite of philosophy of language is um Pam's ideas about the extensions of natural kind terms in uh the famous twin earth story and um history of crystallography so um if you're familiar with Trin Earth or you
Speaker A
and also you The Listener um that's great if not you can look it up very easily there are many YouTube videos probably that summarize it but the basic idea is that we're trying to this happens within a debate
Speaker A
about uh the meaning of terms and the view that Pam is attacking is what is called internalism so the idea that in some sense meaning is in our heads he's what is called an externalist so he thinks that in some important way the
Speaker A
meaning of our words depends on things that are out there on the world and the way he motivates his view is by saying imagine that astronauts discovered a planet that is identical qualitatively identical to earth in every way except
Speaker A
that the stuff that fills their glasses that comes out of their tabs and that they drink and brush their teeth with that looks like water tastes like water smells like water is not H2O but it's something else that is some other
Speaker A
microstructure we can just call it XYZ as a placeholder so instead of water they have XYZ he's says that if we discovered this planet and then at some point well in the beginning we just called it water because we don't know and then
Speaker A
eventually we discover that it's not H2O it's XYZ he would say we wouldn't call that water and that is supposed to demonstrate that um we can discover the extension of the natural kind term water when we discover its micr structure so like when
Speaker A
we discover that water is H2O we also discover which of the liquids that taste like water are actually water and which are something else because their micr structure is different um that sounds very nice but it's also not true because
Speaker A
when modern crystallography was invented we had these gemstones that are called Ruby and topaz right topaz is mostly yellow Ru is red and we discovered that they have specific micr structures and the color is actually not because most
Speaker A
of the material doesn't cause the color the colors caused by small impurities of like aluminum or Titanium or something like that and um we discovered that there are different crystals that have the same general like lettuce makeup but they
Speaker A
have other imp impurities so we discover that they are different colors of topaz you have the same basic uh Crystal and then the impurities might be instead of titanium you have aluminum so you get a different colored topaz but for Ruby we
Speaker A
made the same Discovery we discovered that there are other crystals that have the same general structures they have different impurities they have different colors and and we decided that the other stuff isn't Ruby we only call the red
Speaker A
ones Ruby so clearly the discovery about the micr structure did not determine the extension of the terms the discovery of the microser is just an occasion for a social choice that we have to make as a community of speakers that includes both
Speaker A
scientists and other people and um all kinds of pre-existing feelings and commitments about gemstones and their maybe value and so on um that determines what we do with our terms um and I think that's useful I think everyone who
Speaker A
learns about twin earth should also learn about ruby and toaz in philosophy classrooms that's my uh little r/ pitch here for using history and philosophy of science to correct philosophy of language misconceptions well well yes I mean if I
Speaker A
may add one more thing here and I feel like you'll agree with me and this is again why I was initially drawn towards uh Mel Andrew's work this notion uh and this is It's kind of bizarre cuz you
Speaker A
know you're talking about the history of Science History of philosophy this idea of uh Theory free science or Theory free let's say uh machine learning research or whatever you may call it it's it's it's not a new thing like The Logical
Speaker A
positivists for instance uh had this notion that oh we could do uh kind of almost automate the scientific process and we can do science with pure empirism and logical analysis of language and then in machine learning there's like
Speaker A
this ideology that you can get AI agents to do the science for us bereft of any Theory but then of course what I find interesting in especially studying I think here I would I would defend more conal philosophy is that we always come
Speaker A
into whatever the the the the act or whatever the with the the Enterprise with Myriad metaphysical presuppositions like we can't we can't do something without metaphysical presupposition and again even for people that aren't overly keen on let's say philosophy and
Speaker A
especially like the speculative philosophy just knowing that we always start with some kind of within a symbolic order within certain presuppositions I think can be valuable as a thinker because it makes you a more for lack of a better term self-aware
Speaker A
thinker knowing that you always come with certain metaphysical presuppositions and it's not just merely like saying oh I've got like a confirmation bias or whatever but rather know it's more saying to use again a German term here I think like
Speaker A
everyone has a welon sh almost unconsciously you know whether they you say it or not um so I find that that that's one reason uh again I think it's important to pay attention to some of these thinkers along with the other
Speaker A
stuff you mentioned for sure that's um super interesting I reminds me of two things and I can actually connect this to something else that's on our uh docket which is dialectics and going to be a little out there so I'll try to
Speaker A
make it make sense but the first the first part that makes sense is that um yes there's a certain tendency um of thinking about machine learning and in general data analytics uh in the way that has become more successful and
Speaker A
popular in like the last decade or so um as if the computational methods are neutral and then whatever we don't worry too much about what data we have as long as we have enough data this will just be
Speaker A
able to answer basically any question so um and the problem of course is that the data that you have comes from somewhere like the data has a history it's not just that like you personally humans have biased and the bias also influen
Speaker A
both how we like interpret the data later on and also how we how generated data but the sources that we have for data themselves are Downstream of other theoretical commitments that we already had and I think a nice example for this
Speaker A
is uh Neuroscience now I'm not a like I don't get paid to work on Neuroscience but I'm very interested in it um so uh I do like kitchen sync philosophy of Neuroscience sometimes and kind problem of um well I already mentioned the
Speaker A
localization debate but when I something that sometimes happens is I go to a conference and two people independently recommend the same book if that happens that means the book is really good you have to read it and the one book that where that happened to
Speaker A
me was Michael Anderson's after phenology which is pretty uh early it's like 2008 I think where he did this very uh Broad and systematic analysis of neuroscientific research search that localizes specific uh functions to areas of the brain and he
Speaker A
did this as different levels so he said well there are studies that try to ask what parts of the brain are about involved in action or in perception or in memory and then you can also break those down to smaller parts you can also
Speaker A
in instead of looking at larger regions of the brain you can look at smaller areas of the brain and he compared all of these kind of different combinations of scales to see whether any of can be robustly localized in such a way that
Speaker A
you can say well this part of the brain does action but not but not memory and this other part does memory but not action and he uh the result is that in general every part of the brain that has
Speaker A
been identified as being like for X turns out to also be for three or four other things at least so um that's interesting and it's like throws a wrench into the way that we especially in popular culture get communicated
Speaker A
how Neuroscience Works in general it always sounds as if there are different parts of your brain like little modules that are for doing some specific task and then there also there's like an Unholy alliance between neural localization and evolutionary psychology
Speaker A
where people then think that um relatively recent human evolution had uh was structured in such a way that selection pressures would have been able to Target individual of these modules such that could be adaptations for specific things and then
Speaker A
you can get all these uh weird madeup stories about why we behave in certain ways nowadays because our ancestors evolved to do X Y and Z and those are all methodologically untenable is like the short version but um interestingly
Speaker A
this localization research is very old and has made it's F it's interesting because it's based the part of the complaint is that the kinds of terms we use to talk talk about psychology are 100 years old and if you look at
Speaker A
Psychology papers nowadays the concepts that we use to distinguish between like beliefs and emotions and other things that are kind of the furniture of the mind that we use to study is are super similar to what psychologist did 100
Speaker A
years ago when you compare that to other disciplines where all the concepts from 100 years ago were uh discarded and we have new ones because we have new methods for setting it um but those Concepts that people used in what's
Speaker A
called faculty psychology um they have structured the kind of data that we collected right because when you come up with a study you have a phenomenon you're interested in and then you come up with a task that is supposed to involve that specific
Speaker A
faculty or capacity and then you come up with a way to measure something in the brain and so on but like the kind of data that we generate is structured according to the pre-existing theoretical beliefs that we have about
Speaker A
the furniture of the mind or you could call this the ontology of the mind um and there's a fantastic paper by Joe mcaffrey and I'm going to tell you the name now in a second which talks it gives you like a history of the problems
Speaker A
of localization and this like localization debate it is called evolving concepts of functional localization it's a fantastic paper I highly recommend reading that and I think it's a great example of how I think science is dialectical okay so
Speaker A
now this gets spicy because you start with uh Concepts about the mind and those concepts are the condition of possibility for a specific kind of research that generates all these results over time so you have lots of lesion studies and other things I wait a
Speaker A
second I have some more notes on this here somewhere over time you get more results that are generated by these theoretical presuppositions right and then eventually you get enough of those that someone like uh Michael Anderson can do this large scale analysis and
Speaker A
find out that actually the the results themselves undermine the presuppositions that made possible the research that collected the data so at this point like this connects back to this conversation about how data isn't neutral but the data was generated in
Speaker A
this extremely Theory Laden way um and this like Theory Laden over generations of researchers um so we have the findings we and the findings themselves create the kind of contradictions that um draw into questions and destabilize the conceptual foundations of the
Speaker A
research tradition itself um yeah that's a brilliant Point Elmo I couldn't agree more it's really interesting right like when people speak of the philosophy of science people talk of like uh something like falsifiability by POA and all of that but I think in in
Speaker A
in the true sense science is really dialectical in the sense that if you think of even how falsification Works yes you have these presuppositions that a scientist engages in I mean utilizes to engage in a certain scientific Endeavor but then but it's true in some
Speaker A
really odd interesting sense those presuppositions end up becoming self-defeating as they follow the logic and that's kind of it's a very dialectical process because it's it's it's imminent imminently within the system the system itself ends up kind of
Speaker A
contradicting the system of like yeah being contradictory within the system there there are some things I want to point out about this because I had been I was very happy when I realized this is a nice example for how thinking about
Speaker A
dialectical science because I think dialectics is a difficult and interesting concept um and there is a way of thinking about dialectics in science that is less satisfying than this so the reason why this is satisfying is because we are talking
Speaker A
about like an in imminent or internal dynamical development of of a system that contains contradictions so they all sounds very dialectical but the nice part is that this development contains the ideas themselves as well as the objects that we apply the concepts to
Speaker A
and so on so um the normal version of how dialectics is supposed to relate to like material reality and science can often um lack this conceptual or subjective aspect now what do I mean by this so if you by Di itics in general
Speaker A
I'm going to mean something that is Downstream from higle right and um there's a way of explaining what higle means by dialectics that is allegedly wrong so if you say here dialectics is a movement where you start with a thesis then you realize
Speaker A
something's wrong about this and you you going neate that you get the antithesis and then eventually you get a synthesis um people point out that this is actually in fish not in higle he doesn't use those three words but it's like a that can be a
Speaker A
first step so we have this idea that you have a view and then you realize something about it doesn't work that leads to a reaction you come up with with an opposing view the opposing view is maybe also doesn't work quite or it's
Speaker A
not stable in some way it also leads you to realize new things and then you eventually come to a different position now what I think is important here is um that the word of ofh in German um and it has three different meanings
Speaker A
so we say using this terminology let's just pretend that it's correct we would say in the synthesis the thesis and the antithesis are both um of goob which in one sense means conserved so what are the three senses of ofhe it means to lift up it
Speaker A
means to lift as in lifting a band so in a sense it means to get rid of but it also means to conserve so uh to keep something so means both to elevate something to a new level potentially um
Speaker A
to get rid of something and also to keep it which itself of course a little bit contradictory but why do I think that this evolution of concepts of functional localization is dialectical in this sense well it's because in some way the
Speaker A
history of these of this cognitive ontology that enabled the collection of the data and then en enabled these tensions to occur that ultimately lead to the emergence of new Concepts like neural reuse neural degeneracy neural context um in those new ways of thinking
Speaker A
about the brain this history of Neuroscience and the history of these Concepts is in a way uh still contained and I mean that's a weird claim that would have to be unpacked in some way but the what happens when you ask
Speaker A
someone to explain how dialectics is related to the natural world is that you get for example FR Angel's text dialectics of nature where he talks about three laws of dialectics he says that okay uh this is I'm paraphrasing the beginning of the second
Speaker A
book he says dialectics is abstracted from the history of Nature and Human Society so dialectic is something we abstract from the actual World um so this is part of trying to present it as a material rather than idealist
Speaker A
philosophical project or method and the three laws are the law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa the law of the interpenetration of opposites and the law of the negation of the negation and the first one of those the
Speaker A
transformation of quantity into quality you could tell the kind of story about like for example when you boil water right you you have water that is room temperature it gets one degree warmer that's a change in Quant in quantity of
Speaker A
temperature and the quality of the water otherwise doesn't change much but then when you get to 100 degrees celsus suddenly you have a change the change in quantity turns into a change in quality so there's a way of telling the story of
Speaker A
dialectics as something that happens in nature but as you you notice there's no interesting interaction between our concept of temperature and our description of the phenomenon so there's a way of talking about dialectics that kind of stays on the level of the
Speaker A
phenomenon and I think if we want science to be dialectical we it has to roll into one so to speak the dynamical development of the phenomena we're studying and this is uh often compared to like dynamical systems theory or
Speaker A
complexity theory for good reason because some of these things that happen quantity turning into quality uh are very similar to emerging phenomena um there's also a great example in the dialectical biologist about the co-evolution so this I'm going
Speaker A
to talk about this in a second this is cool but it's unsatisfying to have an account of dialectics that merely deals with the material systems that we're interested in and if you want to be convinced that that's not a full throated account of
Speaker A
dialectics you can read [ __ ] introductory lectures to dialectics so I believe that there's an English translation of this I think Adon is very difficult to read in his actual books the transcripts of his lectures are way
Speaker A
more readable so that's nice and he emphasizes that dialectics um is something that describes not merely the internal dynamics of phenomena that we study but also the Dynamics of the concepts themselves so that's an important I think that's a desideratum for a
Speaker A
dialectical science now the book other book I just held up the dialectical biologist is a collection of essays by Richard leuin and Richard leontin and it's those guys are fantastic in general but there's in particular one essay called dialectics and reductionism
Speaker A
in ecology where they have an example of dialectics that is predator prey co-evolution which is very interesting because you have a predator population a pre population and it seems that the population growth of each is opposed to the growth of the other population or
Speaker A
like in contradiction somewhere well at least the growth of the Predator population is in contradicts the growth of the pr population in a sense you could say because the more Predators you have the lower the prey population gets
Speaker A
and then if the prey population gets low enough this has the other effect so there's like the lotka voltera model for that but um what happens if both of these species evolve over time is that the prey gets better at avoiding the
Speaker A
Predator the Predator Gets Better at hunting the prey um so there's something like a medium-term term balance that is created by this conflict of opposed Tendencies so if the Predators get faster they evolve to get faster that would disturb the ecological balance but
Speaker A
the prey also evolves to get better at avoiding the pred so the ecological balance can be conserved by these two opposing processes in the mid-range because what also happens during that process is that conditions of possibility for that
Speaker A
process get consumed which is the capacity for these species to evolve like you can't get indefinitely faster if you're a certain kind of animal you can get indefinitely better at like hiding in a tree or whatever it is that
Speaker A
the prey is doing so you have the system of opposites that are um both contained in like a larger Dynamic that preserves itself but also consumes the possib possibilities of own um existence or process and that's cool and it um it illustrates and like
Speaker A
exemplifies many features of dialectics but I still think that it doesn't really have this um aspect of rolling the concept into its own development where Adon is very explicit that dialectics as the development of a concept in the
Speaker A
process of like tering with the phenomenon like you try to account for the phenomenon by bringing it under the concept and then it doesn't it fails in various ways some of the ways in which it fails will be um related to like our
Speaker A
actual lives the way that we like live in the world and use this concept to navigate the phenomenon in our lives as scientists or just as humans and then the history of this development gets is in some way
Speaker A
contained within the mature form of a concept so what do you mean by caring with the phenomenon U maybe that's not a great verb it's just that like there's a way of thinking about how words relate to the world where you
Speaker A
might think well you have an you have a word and then you have a certain understanding of what the word means you have like a concept rules for how to apply the word so for example like does water apply just to H2O or does water
Speaker A
apply in a more pragmatic way to things that I can drink that have a lot of H2O in it and maybe a bunch of other stuff like other Isotopes and so on um and so you have these rules for a
Speaker A
word and then you use it right you use that word in language and you navigate your environment so the phenomenon is out there like whatever whether we call it water or not that's part of our life world and the way that we navigate and
Speaker A
interpret um and communicate about our life world U makes use of the concept so if we develop a concept and for the for thinking about the brain one thing that is interesting if you if we think about how like our Concepts about
Speaker A
the brain influence how we live our lives is this Katherine malabo what should we do with our brain I think that's super interesting that kind of motivates uh some of my work on sterer as well is the idea
Speaker A
that like depending on who tells the story the dates will be different but the basic story is that we used to think that the connecto so the way in which the neurons in our brain are connected to each other not every neuron is
Speaker A
connected to every other neuron obviously some of them have hundreds of connections or maybe or might be orders of magnitude off there but um we have maybe 80 billion neurons in our brain and um more connections than that and we used to think that by the
Speaker A
time you're an adult or maybe 25 uh most of those connections are established in such a way that they might get stronger or weaker over the rest of your life but they don't actually you don't grow new uh neurons and also not really new
Speaker A
connections so the idea was that there's little neural plasticity um and then some people say this happened in the 70s and there are some other discoveries around the turn of the century that were also influential but um in either case
Speaker A
nowadays we um ascribe a way higher degree of neuroplasticity to the adult human brain than we used to and this has effects for how we might think about ourselves so if you think that uh adult human neuroplasticity is very low then
Speaker A
you might think that like whatever brain you have when you're 25 that's just what you have to deal with and like uh taking on a personal life project of trying to become a different kind of person might be a bad idea if you think that's just
Speaker A
not possible and there are other things you might believe that would be like would mesh well with the notion like a neural pessimism you might call it if you believe in evolutionary psychology and you believe in localization you would believe that like
Speaker A
the different parts of your brain and the different their whatever like their sizes and their ability to solve certain tasks or to react in certain ways are both determined in the distant past by adaptations that happened to your
Speaker A
ancestors and then they are also in a second move um kind of determined by how you grew up and now you're an adult and that's just that and your brain can get worse but there's little hope for you to develop
Speaker A
um significant uh significantly different mental capacities or dispositions or character traits and so on if you think that your brain is very plastic um that seems more feasible and um I think that's a way in which like our concept of the brain play can
Speaker A
play a role in how we live our lives right that's like in so far as the brain is a phenomenon in our lives it's not like an explicit phenomenon for the neuroscientist but it's also something that is part of our lives
Speaker A
like whether we think about it or not right almost like an existential data like an existential you start from okay this is what the brain is and then you go from and it's really interesting isn't it you s is more like you in our
Speaker A
culture just in in like the l l for like a late people let's say who aren't too interested in on like Neuroscience or or whatever uh you know they talk of things like uh the Big Five personality traits
Speaker A
or uh what's this the the M bricks all these other other ways or even then there's like astrology it's it's a g this trying to find something to hang on to trying to find I'm going to use a
Speaker A
lanan you like a big other some kind of like structure to hang on to make sense of our experience whereas something like what malabu for instance posit which I I'm a huge fan of for sure is what I
Speaker A
would call as more of a ontologically open system where there's like this radical unknowing or like openness to to to whatever the the phenomena of of a brain or a subject is um one thing that I think is
Speaker A
interesting about categorization like that is that like if you believe in Myers bricks type indicators for example um there are obviously different ways of interpreting this but you might think that they reveal something about like who you are as a person and then you can
Speaker A
this can help you navigate your life if like behave in such a way that you think you are accommodating some immutable truth about yourself by adjusting your behaviors well you're actually just enacting uh the like the content of this
Speaker A
description so there is a weird feedback loop right where what you think was merely a description of your psychology that might be either true or false now becomes a guiding principle and you get something there's uh different ways of
Speaker A
talking about this um so Ian hacking called this looping effects he said that they're what he calls humankind so like words that we use to describe ourselves have looping effects because for example um it's very common nowadays to jokingly
Speaker A
or seriously talk about yourself as being Autistic or having ADHD or self- diagnosing with either of those um I am not like entirely innocent it's very possible that I may or may not have done that in the past and do that in the
Speaker A
future but um what Ian hacking thinks and wrote about I want to work more on that at some point the time is that the kinds of labels we use to make sense of our own Liv lives will have feedback effects
Speaker A
because they inform the way that we deal with our own lives situations and like make plans and strategies for the future and navigate our lives and so on in such a way that um our lives can more closely
Speaker A
come to resemble the description given by the concept in the beginning um and there's a parallel analysis of scientific models in philosophy of science that uses the term performativity is super interesting um I recommend a book by Donald McKenzie
Speaker A
called an engine not a Marketplace which is about certain models for Price developments of financial derivatives and this is a super interesting question so like imagine you come up with a new Financial instrument you repackage some mortgages or some stocks or whatever in
Speaker A
this a weird new way and people are like you start you want to sell it to PE people and they're like what is this I don't understand how this works how could I know whether the price is going
Speaker A
to go up or down well you need a mathematical formula or model that can predict the price development of this new instrument and you might think that like predicting the price development is something that is just either true or
Speaker A
false so you might think it's a description of something that just has one Criterion that's accuracy but actually what happens is that the mere existence of this model is a condition of possibility for the market right people are not going to buy
Speaker A
and sell this product unless unless there is a model that describes its price development so the model itself that people use to buy and sell it like the information that the model outputs actually creates and shapes the market that it's supposed to
Speaker A
represent um and that is a very interesting and comple sometimes complicated feedback loop um that they call performativity there's a nice taxonomy of different kinds of performativity in that book as well so that's very cool and interesting but I think it's useful
Speaker A
as a more General way to think about the kinds of Concepts that we use to make sense of Our Lives the the concept matters I I agree I mean I think this is kind of where you know I don't know I
Speaker A
don't know if I'm again misunderstanding some of the phenomenologists yeah but you know phenomenology at least just speaking very generally has this notion of you know paying attention to first person experience your firstand experience and then kind of going on
Speaker A
from there but I think Hegel and especially in the phenomenology of spirit and sense certainty he kind of outlines this um where he shows that yes what you think is your most immediate experience you know what you think is
Speaker A
the firsthand experience itself already has like an abstraction to it some kind of concept is working in it and I think it's important to understand that here's where I'm not sure myself where I would say in many ways I certainly am an and
Speaker A
especially in my philosophy of science but there you know this notion of that you can't really escape the concept let's [Music] say yeah I don't um I don't have professional opinions or takes on higle um it is something that I definitely
Speaker A
want to learn more about and I'm also very excited about it um one of the questions you had in your notes was where whether I think that there's a Hegel Revival yeah for Renaissance I think uh probably an easy answer is yes
Speaker A
there might even be several semi-independent hegle renaiss sances in different fields um with a caveat that whenever we say something like that it's um it's easy to affirm that there are lots of people are interested in hago right now I'm less
Speaker A
certain about asserting that there was less interest in Hegel at some time pass right when we say Renaissance the implication there was a lack of interest in something before and I'm just a little bit um wary of doing that because
Speaker A
the same thing has been said about like Consciousness people have said there was like a Resurgence of interest in Consciousness and philosophy and then someone else would go and point out that actually in the 70s and 60s there were
Speaker A
also all these important contributions or whatever something it's yeah I don't want to say make any statements about um what lack of hegle interest in the past but I certainly think that there are lots of things happening right now where
Speaker A
people are interested in higle and they're also interested in higle in fields where there's not a lot of um engagement with this thought so one of those is I'm actually reviewing a paper right now on Hegel and cognitive
Speaker A
science which obviously I can't say anything beyond that um but that is very interesting and I'm excited for more of that to happen [Music] um one thing that I'm just like want to point out which is kind of weird to me
Speaker A
is that when people talk about Hegel nowadays the people who talk most about Hegel are Hegel Specialists right there's a reason for that obviously there's a lot High investment you have to make in order to understand what's going on and to be able to publish
Speaker A
respectable papers on Hegel and the reason why you make this investment is probably because you think that Hegel is pretty good as a philosopher like that he's maybe correct about things or at least useful and so on so there's
Speaker A
probably a selection bias where people who write about Hegel think highly of Hegel and I don't think that's generally a problem I think that's fair but I do have this I think that something that happens is that we when we try to interpret philosophers
Speaker A
from the history of philosophy there are several things that happen so one of them which I actually think is a little bit of an epistemic trap is that what is it a successful career as in Hegel ex Jesus
Speaker A
or the ex Jesus of some other big thinker like count or whatever you have to find something you have to give an account or an explanation or reading of the Thinker that is new in some important way and it also has to show
Speaker A
that you are very good at philosophy so it has to be difficult to maintain and so sometimes this can mean that like that's reading is surprising and it's like very different from what most people think about that thinker so they
Speaker A
are like certain incentives that also make make it likely that successful people will have readings of thinkers that are perhaps skewed in certain directions but the thing that I'm actually dancing around they want to talk about is that I think we don't
Speaker A
really pay a lot of attention to what happened immediately after higle in the history of philosophy like the young hegelians so like when we want to when you want to understand higle nowadays you might go and get the phenomenology
Speaker A
of spirit and then you also need secondary probably unless you are exceptionally gifted so you will get whatever the most highly renowned secondary literature is which I think also is a good idea but their literature is very recent and most of the time
Speaker A
doesn't really care that much about what for example the young hegelians thought so like we think that our best chart at understanding what higel actually meant and whether he was correct or wrong about about some part of what he said is
Speaker A
to like Marshall our present day philosophical skills and like the best methodologies we have available and so on um and there's probably some truth to that I mean it would be very pessimistic to think that like on the back of uh
Speaker A
hundreds of years of philosophical work and interpretation that we are not in a position where we now can now better understand Hegel like obviously I'm not saying that but I do think that we are not really taking serious the idea that
Speaker A
like people who were alive at the same time as Hegel and like studied with him if they all moved away from his system in a very specific way and have these like strong convictions that hegel's philosophy was flawed in fundamental
Speaker A
ways like I think it sounds like that would be worth taking seriously um and I'm not an expert on the young hegelians well you wrote on Max sterer and mention for I'm an expert on sterer yeah yeah that was very useful I just
Speaker A
want to give a little I want to give two plugs one of them is if you're interested in the young hegelians and you can read the Germans I know this is a big constraint but there's a great scholar Wang esbach who wrote his habil
Speaker A
on the young hegelians it's called I think just dong hiana and he is a sociologist so he talks about the young hegelians um under four aspects as like a social configuration he talks about them as an atheist sect and as a
Speaker A
journalistic boham as a philosophical school and also as a political party and I think this like broad cultural political social context for philosophy is super interesting so that's like just like a general I think that's generally good if you want to understand
Speaker A
philosophy you have to understand not just like whether something is a valid argument and like what the premises are but you have to understand the context in which philosophy is done yes and I I think and okay here's another reason why
Speaker A
I think uh caral philosophy is quite useful CU I find at least people or or let me let me put it this way commentators on conal philosophy they're very good at kind of understanding the context of how certain thinkers that the
Speaker A
Mia and how they were developing their ideas and they try to to put it in like a stupid way humanize philosophy a bit more rather than making it like a a bunch of aims and premises and then you
Speaker A
you develop your ideas from there so and and this is again one reason I really do find that something in in kind of the more the European kind of philosophers that you you're mentioning here yeah I so um I definitely think that analytic
Speaker A
and Continental philosophy have very different strengths and weaknesses and I do think that's super important to be able to read both of them and a little bit like the more mental flexibility you have to like think in different ways the
Speaker A
better off you are if you're trying to make sense of anything including philosophy and in a way this contrast as we just described it between analytic philosophy caring about The Logical structure like the backbone of philosophical arguments and Continental
Speaker A
philosophy perhaps overall paying more attention to like the life of a philosopher like sart or something like that and also the like historical context in which ideas developed those correspond roughly to what in philosop history of philosophy or just
Speaker A
generally in history are called externalist and internalist explanations of developments so you could have an explanation where you try to like you ask where did the new idea come from you could say um that it was the result of
Speaker A
specific developments of concepts with and and you try to ignore all the social and other historical aspects or you could think that historical aspects were very important so for Einstein for example you could think that um Einstein's breakthroughs
Speaker A
in physics were because he had read everything in physics at the he was like uh extremely well read and was aware of all the theoretical problems in physics at the time and that allowed him to make this breakthrough and I think if you
Speaker A
want to read about that John Norton is amazing um he has and he has published a lot on that and he's done a lot to to spel like different myths about Einstein's the way that Einstein came up with his ideas but if you have a there
Speaker A
are more externalist versions that would also say well he was working in a patent office and at the time there were this like across Europe a lot of um attempts to standardize things and like to synchronize for example like time across
Speaker A
time zones I'm not sure when whether they had time zones at that point but like there were cultural efforts that are like connecting physical to technical problems of like how do you synchronize your clocks and you can see
Speaker A
the influence of some of that in for example the thought experiment about like putting clocks on trains like there's it's not like there's nothing to the externalist story and then if you are like aware cognizant of these two different modes of explanation
Speaker A
at least you can try to split the difference in a way that is good for you if you're writing about some phenomenon right you I don't think it's possible in advance to specify whether and in what circumstances you should have an
Speaker A
internal and external explanation but I think it's good to be able to like consider both of them and this is parallel to another problem in philosophy of science where sometimes if you're doing philosophy of science and you think this is a species
Speaker A
of epistemology right so this is Phil science is a method for gaining knowledge about the world philosophy of science is a method of finding out how science generates knowledge then this comes with like a normative or prescriptive aspect so you can say like
Speaker A
how is the are the claims that scientists make Justified should we believe them or not so you can be critical of individual scientific research projects or results or um whole Fields if you want to so that will be normative or prescriptive
Speaker A
but you can also have like a more descriptive philosophy of science where you say well I'm looking at some modeling tradition in biology and I'm interested in why the modelers think what they're doing Works uh so you come
Speaker A
up with a conceptual account of the kind of explanation they provide without yourself passing judgment on whether that's actually a good explanation um and again I don't think that there's a way in advance to decide whether you're going to be normative or descriptive in
Speaker A
philosophy of science but you also have to be a little bit careful and like politically cleverly honest so you have can be honest but not too honest about um whether you can do this in like a completely ad hoc fashion because then
Speaker A
you will just be uh normative when it suits you and you'll be descriptive when it suits you and yeah certainly certainly yeah in fact Elmo I'd like to bracket this conversation for a bit because I kind of want to end uh our
Speaker A
Dialogue on a bit of a fun note regarding kind of how science works and kind of how philosophy of science works and and whatnot but and this is going to be a bit of a leap with suly completely
Speaker A
changing topics here but I kind of want to discuss this be because we might run out of time if not it is because um what the the notion of unweld right so I I'm kind of interested in that because I
Speaker A
think it is quite important especially uh given when I was reading a work I realized how much it influenced other thinkers those like haiger for instance uh but maybe we'll we'll discuss it through uh your review of Sean
Speaker A
Gallagher's book inactivist interventions and uh basically so I I'll leave a link to the the review of course in the show notes however you cannot do it's it's a review SL critique of Gaga's work and in activism and then you kind of end the
Speaker A
review saying this but what if the opposite is the case what if in order to study cognition as embodied action we first have to solve the problem of how to relate the perspectives from the inside and from the outside and then you
Speaker A
say perhaps uh umwell this is is a good concept to to understand this so just if you could uate that point a bit more thanks um I am going to like hold my own feet to the fire I guess about the
Speaker A
review because I don't think that like it I did certainly now and hopefully also back then don't consider it like a substantial critique of the actual book um and it was a little bit cheeky so like for context I wrote this review
Speaker A
when I was applying to grad school and I didn't have an actual like philosophy education I published some stuff on sterer um and I presented at conferences um embod cognition is cool in part because the community is very
Speaker A
open and they had some weird ideas about ul and just send abstracts to lots of conferences in Europe and so like the in the year or two leading up to grad school I had presented a conferences but I needed to put like actual philosophy
Speaker A
on my CV somehow so I wrote a review of The Gallagher book um and the book is fantastic I should actually read it again because there different chapters are about super Central issues in embodied cognition that are presented in
Speaker A
a way that makes it very easy to understand them so for example the word representation super problematic super Central to embod cognition there's a chapter on that that's brilliant there's a chapter on the McDow driers debate um which I
Speaker A
barely remember but know that it's super interesting as well so I highly recommend reading the book and the vast majority of what's happening in the book is also not affected by my point about the inside and the outside um however
Speaker A
the one single point where becomes relevant for this is um and I do think gigram mentions on that maybe but um he says that when I see a landscape in front of me so the the context for this
Speaker A
is that an embod cognition was a reaction to cognitivism or like Orthodox cognitive science in which the idea is that cognition in general involves the manipulation of representations where representations we think are like abstract symbols and they symbols
Speaker A
represent something in the world in this um abstract sense so it's not like an icon that is a pictorial representation of something but the relationship between these representation of the world is abstract in the same way that it is like for a
Speaker A
word the word tree and the object tree so it's like a symbolic convention um and these representations are supposed to have certain features so we can take them offline and store them and then retrieve them later and so on they can
Speaker A
be combined according to logical rules that form a syntax all that good stuff and that way of thinking about the mind that is modeled on a certain understanding of language and also historically like grows out of Chom skin
Speaker A
Linguistics and those a vast um progress that was being made at the time that gives you a approach to the mind that is you might say intellectualist and part of the embodied revolt against that was to emphasize that we are actually living animals and
Speaker A
the way that we inhabit and navigate our world for the most part is pretty similar to how other animals do it so there are lots of things about our minds that we should in principle be able to explain without anything resembling
Speaker A
language um that's not a super perfect representation of this uh historical conflict but I think it's better than nothing maybe and the um problem with the word representation is that it means different things to different people so like one aspect of
Speaker A
this is that and this is from Jerry fodor's review of a Pam book where the review is called ass signs for Tuesdays a brilliant read and there's one paragraph where he says well the problem really in philosophy of mind and car of
Speaker A
science when talking about representations is that come from EP ology and they think that the role of a representation is to justify a belief so I have the belief that there's a chair in front of me and what the representation does it it
Speaker A
justifies the belief and other people think that they come from psychology and they think that the representation is part of an explanation of why I have the belief so it's part of a causal explanation not part of an epistemic
Speaker A
justification and this immediately creates completely different job descriptions for the word representation so there's this distinction between person level and subpersonal level if you want your belief that there's a chair in front of you to be justified or
Speaker A
a representation like justification is in one sense the practice of asking for and giving reasons right so if I want to use a representation to justify something I have to have conscious access to the representation but if you're a
Speaker A
neuroscientist and you use the word representation to explain why someone believes there's a chair in front of them you don't care at all about whether the person can verbalize anything about the representation so you work on a subpersonal level you are using you have
Speaker A
some causal story that explains why something happens but that can be relatively separate from anything that the subject is consciously aware of so that's a split um and then there are also other uh other reasons why the concept of representation comes apart in
Speaker A
these debates but the galago book is a super good um first orientation to what's happening there however he um in in the course of motivating uh the possibility of a cognitive science that is not grounded in representations part of how we make that
Speaker A
argument in embodied science cognitive science is that we say well we don't really need to represent the world because the world is right in front of us so in robotics there's a robotics version of this argument from Rodney
Speaker A
Brooks who says the world is its own best model and he built these relatively simple robots that were able to like navigate worlds and they were able to like behave in ways that are surprisingly sophisticated based on very
Speaker A
minimal programming that seems to not involve representations at least not representations of the kind that classical cognitive science posi it and there's another way of thinking about this which is more about phenomenology so gager says the world is
Speaker A
right in front of me like I see a landscape I don't have to to create a map or a model of the landscape in my head because I see it right in front of me and I think there is something problematic
Speaker A
going on here because there are two different perspectives that we can have on cognition one is the perspective you have yourself when you experience the landscape the other one is the perspective of the scientist when they're trying to explain the
Speaker A
processes that happen in the brain and in the person and in the world that that happen at the same time as experience like I'm trying to be super agnostic about what the connection between experience and neural processes is you could say like you're trying to
Speaker A
explain the neural dynamics that give rise to experience I'm fine with that personally so I think those are two different things and I think they are getting mixed up in that argument because the only way in which the world
Speaker A
is right in front of you if by that you mean you experience seeing a landscape directly in kind of an unmediated fashion that analysis of your subjective experience um occurs in a different register and from a different perspective than the question that the
Speaker A
other person is asking so the reason why the neuroscientist is positing a representation um that has to be inside the head in addition to the world outside is because they think like there's some Dynamic happening in the brain like in the neurons that gives
Speaker A
rise to an experience of landscape like the experience of the landscape the heavy lifting is done by neurodynamics and for example if you can have an experience of your own hand after the hand is gone right you can have a
Speaker A
phantom limb so like the experience of your hand isn't in the hand or depending on how you feel about you know mapping experience onto space as a good cartisian uh you might say that at least if you think about the causal process
Speaker A
that gives rise to the experience of a phantom Le the causal process isn't happening in the Phantom limb it's happening in the brain predominantly right um so I think it's very important to distinguish between two different perspectives the perspective from the
Speaker A
inside of the subject having subjective experience and the perspective from the outside of a scientist trying to explain their experience and that is why I originally got into he's so you have people are roboticists they very good at the
Speaker A
outside perspective you have people who are phenomenologists they're very good at what you might call the inside perspective but ukil was the first person and maybe honestly the only one so far I've seen who has both of these
Speaker A
perspectives and has like relatively compelling and fleshed out accounts of both of these perspectives um where he came up for example with the concept of a functional cycle which is a precursor of a cybernetic feedback loop he said
Speaker A
well if you look at the animal um there are certain features of the environment that the animal can pick up on there are signs for action and then the animal takes an action and that changes the environment and then you get these
Speaker A
cycles of action and perception that are very similar to things that are later described in embod cognition by for example Tony Sham in this book um so the notion of action perception Cycles is important in EMB body cognition and you
Speaker A
have something that like seems to be a precursor of that in ukol and he also had very strict methodological criteria for scientists where he said you can never forget that you don't have access to the sensations of the animal you're
Speaker A
studying what you see are your own sensation so if you look at the beach and you look at like a sea urchin or whatever you are seeing a human umelt right umelt being the world that surrounds you like the world that you
Speaker A
experience is your own it's not just a human world it's your world you experience a world of your own the sea urchin also experiences a world but it's completely different from yours because the physiology of the SE Orin is
Speaker A
completely different and so he has these strict scientific uh methodological rules that tell us that we can never have access to the sensation of any other subject not even other humans and then he also has this these passages in
Speaker A
the his popular writing where he invites us to imagine what it would be like to be a tick and that's weird right so he knows that it's not possible to really know what it's like to be a tick but we
Speaker A
can use our poetic imagination to do it anyway and I think it's very important to separate those two things that the like intellectual activities that he's engaged in are obviously different projects but the word umelt he uses the
Speaker A
word umelt in both uh both of those contexts and the logic According to which the concept functions is just completely different in these two perspectives and if you don't take that into account you can uh come to believe
Speaker A
that you've solved problems about subjective experience because you can study the UN of the animal in the sense that you study its functional Cycles from the outside but that doesn't mean that you have knowledge about the umel of the
Speaker A
animal in the sense of the subjective experience of the animal well you probably have pretty good knowledge about the structure of this subjective experience but you don't actually have access to the experience itself so um that to me is was super interesting so
Speaker A
the basic argument is that I think that umelt has two very different meanings in U and we have to be careful when we use it in embodied cognition and um I also think that other words in embody cognition also have these two meanings
Speaker A
so it's not just that umv has two meanings but that the these two broader perspectives science from the outside where like if you read a textbook about how science Works um one of the like there's lots of different kinds of science but like one
Speaker A
of the big common denominators is empiricism right there should be some kind of observations or data that is publicly available for to others and subjective experience just isn't like I'm sorry it just isn't available to other people um
Speaker A
and the perspective that you have yourself on your own subjective experience is privileged in in this completely radical way that is different from like I I'm not aware of anything else that is like that in subjective experience you can be wrong about so
Speaker A
many things about yourself can have like false memories or whatever um but I don't know of any other phenomenon that like shares this weird philosophical and epistemic peculiarity with subjective experience that's why I think it's so important for
Speaker A
philosophy of mind and so interesting for philosophy in general um those two perspectives are completely different if you look for example at the word embodiment in embodied cognition some people get that from Rodney Brooks the the roboticist so it's very
Speaker A
important if you're thinking if you're a roboticist you become aware that cognition isn't just like this abstract algorithmic solution to a computational problem but it's an actual physical problem right like the robot has a certain components and sensors and uh
Speaker A
can like roll around or like walk in certain ways and so on maybe it has six legs or two and all of that makes a huge difference for the cognition that actually has to happen in order for the
Speaker A
robot to do its thing but if you come to embody cognition from Mau mopon what you mean by embodiment is completely different and a lot of the time when you read embod so the cool part about embod cognition is that you
Speaker A
have all these different influences you have the super exciting mix of different perspectives from robotics from Continental philosophy and that gives you like a very rich vocabulary for talking about the mind in ways that you don't find in like more straight laced
Speaker A
analytic philosophy of mind um so that's good I like that but I also think that we are in general not clear enough about where the concepts come from that we're using and what happens when we translate or transfer them from one domain into
Speaker A
another so I think that's the case with umelt and it's also the case with embodiment as such and the way that I hold on to subjective experience and the privacy of subjective experience makes me pretty uh unpopular in basically any philosophic
Speaker A
environment which is funny um because I'm am too much of a like weirdo embodied person for like normal philosophy of Mind obviously and uh most people who are I mean I'm not sure whether most is numerically correct but like the most prominent
Speaker A
positions in analytic philosophy of mind if you like look that up or get exposed to it in public will be materialist so obviously I'm not compatible with those but then within embodied cognition almost everyone hates the idea that subjective experience is private
Speaker A
because they dislike the kind of individualism of this perspective and I mean I've got to inod you for a bit um po OMW uh I've got to ask this question I mean I can't help help it uh how would
Speaker A
you defend it against accusations of panarchism or um even clipsism oh yeah those are good um so pan psychism why don't I why am I not a pan psychist I don't think we have any reason to believe that like stones have
Speaker A
experience why would I think that and this is this is a there's a nice tie in here so this sounds like a digression but I promise it's related if you I was looking at Alan touring's paper from I
Speaker A
believe 1950 but I do have it here the paper is called Computing machinery and intelligence um and he talks about U multiple so that's where he invents the touring test yes this from 1950 and he proposes the touring test as
Speaker A
something we should test instead of asking whether machines can think like this is important there are many misconceptions where people accuse him of trying to answer the questions of whether machines can think with the T Test that's not actually what he says
Speaker A
but he addresses a several um responses or objections to his test and one of them is what he calls the Consciousness objection so he says that someone might say well maybe the machine can actually like compose a Sonata or
Speaker A
whatever but the Sonata isn't caused by feelings and experience and that's what actually matters to us so we don't care about the touring T short short version and then interestingly touring says um that according to the most extreme form
Speaker A
of this view the only way by which one could be sure that a ma machine thinks is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking one could then describe these feelings to the world but of course no
Speaker A
one would be justified in taking any notice because they don't have access to your experience right um he says likewise according to this view the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man it is in
Speaker A
fact the solipsist point of view and okay now here uh this is why someone might think that umelt is a solipsist view because if I only have my own experience there's no way for me to know that other people actually have
Speaker A
experience and I don't think that in uko for example there is an explicit argument that is supposed to convince you that other animals have experience he more or less takes this for granted but I do think that it's important to
Speaker A
point out that um when I believe that you have experience for example I have good reasons to think that and some of those reasons wouldn't hold for a machine so this is connected to the so-call other Minds problem how
Speaker A
do I know that other people have minds and dart has this nice section where he says I see people outside walking by but really I only see like coats and hats like how do I know that there are actual
Speaker A
hum with mindes walking there and not just coats and hats of course like if you see nowadays you could say like how do I know when I'm talking to customer service that it's a real human and not just in chatbot um
Speaker A
and when we make this sometimes people say Well it can't be that you only have access to your own mind and then you make an inference about other people having Minds because that inference would be very bad because uh n equals
Speaker A
one right so you if you only have access to your own mind then inferential reasoning indu inductive reasoning would be bad for knowing that other people have Minds because you're n equals 1 but that's a very narrow view of induction
Speaker A
which is purely enumerative right if you think that inductive reasoning only rests on um enumerating instances then there would be a bad judgment but I don't think that that's the kind of inference we draw when we think that
Speaker A
other people have Minds like I think that other people have Minds because they're extremely similar to me like the I'm a biological creature that's super complicated and in the vast majority of ways other people are like me right
Speaker A
they're like not numerically identical to me but they are super super similar to me especially compared to like a stone or a tree or a chair so I have good reasons to believe that other people have experience I don't have good
Speaker A
reasons I I see Zero reason to believe that a stone has experien and then I might have some reason to think that a a sufficiently advanced uh large language model or other AI system may have experienced well that's an interesting
Speaker A
question um the thing about psychism is that the reason why people believe in Psy pism as far as I can tell are like um metaphysically motivated so they say if some things have experience and others don't then you have to have some
Speaker A
kind of emergence and we don't like that we don't like the idea that something radically new some radically new uh it's not just like a a piece of furniture of the world but like a new category of furniture of the world could emerge and
Speaker A
I'm fine with that um I don't think that considerations about theoretical Elegance should rank very highly on what we believe I can cut um but so that's why I'm not a pen psychist um the interesting thing when new so one
Speaker A
thing that is weird about like thinking that CH GPT could have beliefs or experience let's just say experience if we have a it's very useful to remind ourselves that like in a sense there's the word model in llm right so CH GPT is a model
Speaker A
of something it's arguably not a model not even a model of the human mind it's not like some people use um AI systems as model systems for human Minds so they use them to do cognitive science in some
Speaker A
fashion or Linguistics in some fashion so some people treat um these systems as models of the human mind but even if we take them to be models of the human mind um for no other kind of model would we say that so if you have for
Speaker A
example the lotka voltera model of Predator prey evolution is like a system of dynamical equations um we don't think that like the changes of the numbers in the equations are an instance of evolution we don't think that there's
Speaker A
like natural selection happening within the equations right like the model uh models and represents something that happens in the Target system but just because the model is super good that doesn't suddenly make the model an instance of the category that we're
Speaker A
trying to model I mean there are models that are exemplars so you could have a model that is like an Exemplar if you have like a model organism like a fruit fly and you are interested in organisms more generally like the fruit fly is an
Speaker A
example of an organism but we don't have like we would need other independent reasons to believe that a large language model is an instance of a cognizer to think that something happening in the large language model that is very good at
Speaker A
modeling cognitive processes therefore itself counts as a cognitive process and I think for some people that's maybe like functionalism can get you there um but functionalism I don't know enough about that to like have strong opinions but I
Speaker A
don't think that it's going to help you with subjective experience let's put it that way um okay okay this is this is great I mean look uh We've covered a lot in fact I've got to say I didn't expect
Speaker A
uh such a deep dive into well at least as as deep as we could be into uh dialectical thinking and how that pertains to the philosophy of science I thoroughly enjoyed that bit and I wish I was a bit more prepared yeah no I wanted
Speaker A
to say I wanted to mention this earlier um but I want to make sure that the viewers and listeners know about this because there's a website called dialectical systems that I'm actually involved with and the platform publishes news but also
Speaker A
publishes uh posts where philosophers and scientists describe their ideas in relatively short blog posts that are super good and it's like a compendium of like so when I got into philosophy and I started discovering embodied cognition and I discovered like in activism and
Speaker A
theories of biological autonomy and like leuin and levontin and all the complexity and all this cool weird stuff there was no you can tell that there's like a tribe of people who are into the good stuff they and you meet them at the
Speaker A
same conference but there's no word for this and there also aren't any institutions there aren't any like shared journals or whatever where you could uh keep tabs on what is happening in that specific space but dialectical systems is um one of the few venues uh
Speaker A
Beau yeah thank you thank you um Elmo I mean I've never come across this either this the first time I'm coming across this so thank you I'll I'll leave a link to it in the show notes and definitely
Speaker A
check it out myself too yeah and they've mentioned just in the landing page or the first homepage theyve mentioned uh the book uh the dialectical biologist to seems like that book has been uh deeply influential to that that Community great
Speaker A
so yeah I mean again on this note of uh kind of bridging or bringing dialogue you know Ai and cognitive science with caral philosophy uh at to end at a at a fun note what do you think are some of
Speaker A
the uh misconcept ceptions or false assumptions made by those more scientifically minded in coai AI uh about caral philosophy and how caral philosophy as a system works or the methodology or perhaps even kind of how conal philosophers do
Speaker A
philosophize yeah so um I think one interesting misconception is that if you only talk to philosophers you might think that you can do philosophy in like a normal way or you just like sit down and think about stuff or you can do
Speaker A
Continental philosophy which is like you think about stuff but in a super weird way um and then you read like white hats later work or you read back song or like Del or something that is both difficult to understand and like maybe seems
Speaker A
outlandish to you because if you're like a so you you might think that there's like a baseline of doing philosophy where you basically believe what everyone else believes and you think that like philosophy involves like taking common sense intuitions and then
Speaker A
trying to like systematize all of them um which I don't think is very interesting but um you there's a Mis the misconception that I uh trying to explain is that on the one side of that you have Continental philosophy which is very
Speaker A
weird and on the other side of that you could move towards science and then you could maybe reject some of your common sense views but you could like find out what's actually true and you could like create a philosophy that is just in tune
Speaker A
with our best knowledge about the world and those two things are opposed my experience has been that um the average scientist that I've talked to is way more receptive to Continental philosophy than the average philosopher of science so
Speaker A
um I don't actually like I've read a little bit of backone but I'm not like a backone scholar or anything but the two people I've talked to who are most excited about beon were both neuroscientists one of them has his own
Speaker A
lab and the other one was a grad student was part of a reading group I was in and then we read mind and memory I think name Memory yes that's his big book and um also I uh I used to go to the lab
Speaker A
meetings of um biology lab that studies sensory Ecology of jumping spiders and I read a paper with them by hun grinberg where he talks about experimental setups and graphematic spaces which he gets from Dera which is like pretty spicy
Speaker A
like I would feel I would be more worried about like bringing that paper to a room full of philosophers and reading it with them then I am about reading it with a room full of scientists so I think that might be if
Speaker A
you are in philosophy and you're worried about combining Continental philosophy and science because you think that people will like laugh at you or think you're weird or like not think that this is interesting or useful um just try it
Speaker A
out I mean like a lot of people probably won't but I think you uh it's it's easier than you might think to find people in the different Sciences who are super interested in Continental philosophy as well I can care and
Speaker A
especially I think now with this is probably mostly thanks to the internet there is a lot of uh cross mingling and intermingling just amongst these disciplines I mean yeah thinkers you'd never think of like for instance I really like uh the people from The Loop
Speaker A
quantum gravity crowd you Le smallen K and when you read their physics I mean I'm talking here you know Popular Science that they've written to audience physics books they're deeply philosophical I mean they touch on like haiger some you know K speaks of
Speaker A
wienstein smallen I think he talks of like dareda so they they certainly are interested in these thinkers and uh I completely agree and in fact I think uh that's good advice Elmo this has been lovely I I thought this was a lot more far ranging
Speaker A
than what I expected and in fact now I feel like I could have read a bit more on kind of your dialectical thinking uh prepare more for this conversation so hopefully another dialog in the future but uh thank you so much thank you so
Speaker A
much for having me and um I actually haven't written about dialectics basically at all so the stuff that I told you about the mcaffrey paper on localization those are just um notes I have and I would love to write about it
Speaker A
at some point but that doesn't exist yet so that that'd be great well I mean I'll just say this you have a plat if you want to come and just think out loud and speculate on it this you have a platform
Speaker A
right here so anytime I'd be up for it yeah thanks a lot mate really appreciate it thank you so much
Topics:dialectical sciencecontinental philosophyAI researchphilosophy of sciencefunctional localizationtheory-ladennessembodied cognitive scienceJakob von Uexkülldialectical thinkingTim Elmo Fon
