Never forget that there are many more ways to worship something than lighting candles around an altar.
If I’d said, “Huh, that does seem paradoxical. I wonder how the apparent paradox is resolved?” then I would have hit Explain, which does sometimes take a while to produce an answer.
And if the whole issue seems to you unimportant, or irrelevant, or if you’d rather put off thinking about it until tomorrow, than you have hit Ignore.
Select your option wisely.
*
44
“Science” as Curiosity-Stopper
Imagine that I, in full view of live television cameras, raised my hands and chanted abracadabra and caused a brilliant light to be born, flaring in empty space beyond my outstretched hands. Imagine that I committed this act of blatant, unmistakeable sorcery under the full supervision of James Randi and all skeptical armies. Most people, I think, would be fairly curious as to what was going on.
But now suppose instead that I don’t go on television. I do not wish to share the power, nor the truth behind it. I want to keep my sorcery secret. And yet I also want to cast my spells whenever and wherever I please. I want to cast my brilliant flare of light so that I can read a book on the train—without anyone becoming curious. Is there a spell that stops curiosity?
Yes indeed! Whenever anyone asks “How did you do that?,” I just say “Science!”
It’s not a real explanation, so much as a curiosity-stopper. It doesn’t tell you whether the light will brighten or fade, change color in hue or saturation, and it certainly doesn’t tell you how to make a similar light yourself. You don’t actually know anything more than you knew before I said the magic word. But you turn away, satisfied that nothing unusual is going on.
Better yet, the same trick works with a standard light switch.
Flip a switch and a light bulb turns on. Why?
In school, one is taught that the password to the light bulb is “Electricity!” By now, I hope, you’re wary of marking the light bulb “understood” on such a basis. Does saying “Electricity!” let you do calculations that will control your anticipation of experience? There is, at the least, a great deal more to learn. (Physicists should ignore this paragraph and substitute a problem in evolutionary theory, where the substance of the theory is again in calculations that few people know how to perform.)
If you thought the light bulb was scientifically inexplicable, it would seize the entirety of your attention. You would drop whatever else you were doing, and focus on that light bulb.
But what does the phrase “scientifically explicable” mean? It means that someone else knows how the light bulb works. When you are told the light bulb is “scientifically explicable,” you don’t know more than you knew earlier; you don’t know whether the light bulb will brighten or fade. But because someone else knows, it devalues the knowledge in your eyes. You become less curious.
Someone is bound to say, “If the light bulb were unknown to science, you could gain fame and fortune by investigating it.” But I’m not talking about greed. I’m not talking about career ambition. I’m talking about the raw emotion of curiosity—the feeling of being intrigued. Why should your curiosity be diminished because someone else, not you, knows how the light bulb works? Is this not spite? It’s not enough for you to know; other people must also be ignorant, or you won’t be happy?
There are goods that knowledge may serve besides curiosity, such as the social utility of technology. For these instrumental goods, it matters whether some other entity in local space already knows. But for my own curiosity, why should it matter?
Besides, consider the consequences if you permit “Someone else knows the answer” to function as a curiosity-stopper. One day you walk into your living room and see a giant green elephant, seemingly hovering in midair, surrounded by an aura of silver light.
“What the heck?” you say.
And a voice comes from above the elephant, saying,
SOMEBODY ALREADY KNOWS WHY THIS ELEPHANT IS HERE.
“Oh,” you say, “in that case, never mind,” and walk on to the kitchen.
I don’t know the grand unified theory for this universe’s laws of physics. I also don’t know much about human anatomy with the exception of the brain. I couldn’t point out on my body where my kidneys are, and I can’t recall offhand what my liver does. (I am not proud of this. Alas, with all the math I need to study, I’m not likely to learn anatomy anytime soon.)
Should I, so far as curiosity is concerned, be more intrigued by my ignorance of the ultimate laws of physics, than the fact that I don’t know much about what goes on inside my own body?
If I raised my hands and cast a light spell, you would be intrigued. Should you be any less intrigued by the very fact that I raised my hands? When you raise your arm and wave a hand around, this act of will is coordinated by (among other brain areas) your cerebellum. I bet you don’t know how the cerebellum works. I know a little—though only the gross details, not enough to perform calculations . . . but so what? What does that matter, if you don’t know? Why should there be a double standard of curiosity for sorcery and hand motions?
Look at yourself in the mirror. Do you know what you’re looking at? Do you know what looks out from behind your eyes? Do you know what you are? Some of that answer, Science knows, and some of it Science does not. But why should that distinction matter to your curiosity, if you don’t know?
Do you know how your knees work? Do you know how your shoes were made? Do you know why your computer monitor glows? Do you know why water is wet?
The world around you is full of puzzles. Prioritize, if you must. But do not complain that cruel Science has emptied the world of mystery. With reasoning such as that, I could get you to overlook an elephant in your living room.
*
45
Truly Part of You
A classic paper by Drew McDermott, “Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity,” criticized AI programs that would try to represent notions like happiness is a state of mind using a semantic network:1
HAPPINESS ---IS-A---> STATE-OF-MIND
And of course there’s nothing inside the HAPPINESS node; it’s just a naked LISP token with a suggestive English name.
So, McDermott says, “A good test for the disciplined programmer is to try using gensyms in key places and see if he still admires his system. For example, if STATE-OF-MIND is renamed G1073 . . .” then we would have IS-A(HAPPINESS, G1073) “which looks much more dubious.”
Or as I would slightly rephrase the idea: If you substituted randomized symbols for all the suggestive English names, you would be completely unable to figure out what G1071(G1072, G1073) meant. Was the AI program meant to represent hamburgers? Apples? Happiness? Who knows? If you delete the suggestive English names, they don’t grow back.
Suppose a physicist tells you that “Light is waves,” and you believe the physicist. You now have a little network in your head that says:
IS-A(LIGHT, WAVES).
If someone asks you “What is light made of?” you’ll be able to say “Waves!”
As McDermott says, “The whole problem is getting the hearer to notice what it has been told. Not ‘understand,’ but ‘notice.’” Suppose that instead the physicist told you, “Light is made of little curvy things.” (Not true, by the way.) Would you notice any difference of anticipated experience?
How can you realize that you shouldn’t trust your seeming knowledge that “light is waves”? One test you could apply is asking, “Could I regenerate this knowledge if it were somehow deleted from my mind?”
This is similar in spirit to scrambling the names of suggestively named LISP tokens in your AI program, and seeing if someone else can figure out what they allegedly “refer” to. It’s also similar in spirit to observing that an Artificial Arithmetician programmed to record and play back
Plus-Of(Seven, Six) = Thirteen
can’t regenerate the knowledge if you delete it from memory, until a
nother human re-enters it in the database. Just as if you forgot that “light is waves,” you couldn’t get back the knowledge except the same way you got the knowledge to begin with—by asking a physicist. You couldn’t generate the knowledge for yourself, the way that physicists originally generated it.
The same experiences that lead us to formulate a belief, connect that belief to other knowledge and sensory input and motor output. If you see a beaver chewing a log, then you know what this thing-that-chews-through-logs looks like, and you will be able to recognize it on future occasions whether it is called a “beaver” or not. But if you acquire your beliefs about beavers by someone else telling you facts about “beavers,” you may not be able to recognize a beaver when you see one.
This is the terrible danger of trying to tell an Artificial Intelligence facts that it could not learn for itself. It is also the terrible danger of trying to tell someone about physics that they cannot verify for themselves. For what physicists mean by “wave” is not “little squiggly thing” but a purely mathematical concept.
As Davidson observes, if you believe that “beavers” live in deserts, are pure white in color, and weigh 300 pounds when adult, then you do not have any beliefs about beavers, true or false. Your belief about “beavers” is not right enough to be wrong.2 If you don’t have enough experience to regenerate beliefs when they are deleted, then do you have enough experience to connect that belief to anything at all? Wittgenstein: “A wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.”
Almost as soon as I started reading about AI—even before I read McDermott—I realized it would be a really good idea to always ask myself: “How would I regenerate this knowledge if it were deleted from my mind?”
The deeper the deletion, the stricter the test. If all proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem were deleted from my mind, could I re-prove it? I think so. If all knowledge of the Pythagorean Theorem were deleted from my mind, would I notice the Pythagorean Theorem to re-prove? That’s harder to boast, without putting it to the test; but if you handed me a right triangle with sides of length 3 and 4, and told me that the length of the hypotenuse was calculable, I think I would be able to calculate it, if I still knew all the rest of my math.
What about the notion of mathematical proof? If no one had ever told it to me, would I be able to reinvent that on the basis of other beliefs I possess? There was a time when humanity did not have such a concept. Someone must have invented it. What was it that they noticed? Would I notice if I saw something equally novel and equally important? Would I be able to think that far outside the box?
How much of your knowledge could you regenerate? From how deep a deletion? It’s not just a test to cast out insufficiently connected beliefs. It’s a way of absorbing a fountain of knowledge, not just one fact.
A shepherd builds a counting system that works by throwing a pebble into a bucket whenever a sheep leaves the fold, and taking a pebble out whenever a sheep returns. If you, the apprentice, do not understand this system—if it is magic that works for no apparent reason—then you will not know what to do if you accidentally drop an extra pebble into the bucket. That which you cannot make yourself, you cannot remake when the situation calls for it. You cannot go back to the source, tweak one of the parameter settings, and regenerate the output, without the source. If “two plus four equals six” is a brute fact unto you, and then one of the elements changes to “five,” how are you to know that “two plus five equals seven” when you were simply told that “two plus four equals six”?
If you see a small plant that drops a seed whenever a bird passes it, it will not occur to you that you can use this plant to partially automate the sheep-counter. Though you learned something that the original maker would use to improve on their invention, you can’t go back to the source and re-create it.
When you contain the source of a thought, that thought can change along with you as you acquire new knowledge and new skills. When you contain the source of a thought, it becomes truly a part of you and grows along with you.
Strive to make yourself the source of every thought worth thinking. If the thought originally came from outside, make sure it comes from inside as well. Continually ask yourself: “How would I regenerate the thought if it were deleted?” When you have an answer, imagine that knowledge being deleted as well. And when you find a fountain, see what else it can pour.
*
1. Drew McDermott, “Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity,” SIGART Newsletter, no. 57 (1976): 4–9, doi:10.1145/1045339.1045340.
2. Richard Rorty, “Out of the Matrix: How the Late Philosopher Donald Davidson Showed That Reality Can’t Be an Illusion,” The Boston Globe (October 2003).
Interlude
The Simple Truth
I remember this paper I wrote on existentialism. My teacher gave it back with an F. She’d underlined true and truth wherever it appeared in the essay, probably about twenty times, with a question mark beside each. She wanted to know what I meant by truth.
—Danielle Egan, journalist
This essay is meant to restore a naive view of truth.
Someone says to you: “My miracle snake oil can rid you of lung cancer in just three weeks.” You reply: “Didn’t a clinical study show this claim to be untrue?” The one returns: “This notion of ‘truth’ is quite naive; what do you mean by ‘true’?”
Many people, so questioned, don’t know how to answer in exquisitely rigorous detail. Nonetheless they would not be wise to abandon the concept of “truth.” There was a time when no one knew the equations of gravity in exquisitely rigorous detail, yet if you walked off a cliff, you would fall.
Often I have seen—especially on Internet mailing lists—that amidst other conversation, someone says “X is true,” and then an argument breaks out over the use of the word “true.” This essay is not meant as an encyclopedic reference for that argument. Rather, I hope the arguers will read this essay, and then go back to whatever they were discussing before someone questioned the nature of truth.
In this essay I pose questions. If you see what seems like a really obvious answer, it’s probably the answer I intend. The obvious choice isn’t always the best choice, but sometimes, by golly, it is. I don’t stop looking as soon I find an obvious answer, but if I go on looking, and the obvious-seeming answer still seems obvious, I don’t feel guilty about keeping it. Oh, sure, everyone thinks two plus two is four, everyone says two plus two is four, and in the mere mundane drudgery of everyday life everyone behaves as if two plus two is four, but what does two plus two really, ultimately equal? As near as I can figure, four. It’s still four even if I intone the question in a solemn, portentous tone of voice. Too simple, you say? Maybe, on this occasion, life doesn’t need to be complicated. Wouldn’t that be refreshing?
If you are one of those fortunate folk to whom the question seems trivial at the outset, I hope it still seems trivial at the finish. If you find yourself stumped by deep and meaningful questions, remember that if you know exactly how a system works, and could build one yourself out of buckets and pebbles, it should not be a mystery to you.
If confusion threatens when you interpret a metaphor as a metaphor, try taking everything completely literally.
* * *
Imagine that in an era before recorded history or formal mathematics, I am a shepherd and I have trouble tracking my sheep. My sheep sleep in an enclosure, a fold; and the enclosure is high enough to guard my sheep from wolves that roam by night. Each day I must release my sheep from the fold to pasture and graze; each night I must find my sheep and return them to the fold. If a sheep is left outside, I will find its body the next morning, killed and half-eaten by wolves. But it is so discouraging, to scour the fields for hours, looking for one last sheep, when I know that probably all the sheep are in the fold. Sometimes I give up early, and usually I get away with it; but around a tenth of the time there is a dead sheep the next morning.
If only the
re were some way to divine whether sheep are still grazing, without the inconvenience of looking! I try several methods: I toss the divination sticks of my tribe; I train my psychic powers to locate sheep through clairvoyance; I search carefully for reasons to believe all the sheep are in the fold. It makes no difference. Around a tenth of the times I turn in early, I find a dead sheep the next morning. Perhaps I realize that my methods aren’t working, and perhaps I carefully excuse each failure; but my dilemma is still the same. I can spend an hour searching every possible nook and cranny, when most of the time there are no remaining sheep; or I can go to sleep early and lose, on the average, one-tenth of a sheep.
Late one afternoon I feel especially tired. I toss the divination sticks and the divination sticks say that all the sheep have returned. I visualize each nook and cranny, and I don’t imagine scrying any sheep. I’m still not confident enough, so I look inside the fold and it seems like there are a lot of sheep, and I review my earlier efforts and decide that I was especially diligent. This dissipates my anxiety, and I go to sleep. The next morning I discover two dead sheep. Something inside me snaps, and I begin thinking creatively.
That day, loud hammering noises come from the gate of the sheepfold’s enclosure.
The next morning, I open the gate of the enclosure only a little way, and as each sheep passes out of the enclosure, I drop a pebble into a bucket nailed up next to the door. In the afternoon, as each returning sheep passes by, I take one pebble out of the bucket. When there are no pebbles left in the bucket, I can stop searching and turn in for the night. It is a brilliant notion. It will revolutionize shepherding.
That was the theory. In practice, it took considerable refinement before the method worked reliably. Several times I searched for hours and didn’t find any sheep, and the next morning there were no stragglers. On each of these occasions it required deep thought to figure out where my bucket system had failed. On returning from one fruitless search, I thought back and realized that the bucket already contained pebbles when I started; this, it turned out, was a bad idea. Another time I randomly tossed pebbles into the bucket, to amuse myself, between the morning and the afternoon; this too was a bad idea, as I realized after searching for a few hours. But I practiced my pebblecraft, and became a reasonably proficient pebblecrafter.
Rationality- From AI to Zombies Page 17