Massimo's picks

* The American Museum of Natural History displays a collection cabinet that belonged to Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection.

* Academic careers ain't all they are cracked up to be. Duh.

* Steven Pinker's review of "What the Dog Saw," by Malcolm Gladwell.

* CFI's "blasphemy contest" is over: the winner entry says "Faith is no reason." I liked better one of the runner-ups: "I wouldn't even follow your god on Twitter."

* Steven Novella on the physical basis of consciousness.

Inverted qualia

A couple of months ago I attended a lecture by Saul Kripke at CUNY’s Graduate Center. Kripke is one of the most influential philosophers of the late 20th century, someone who you simply have to go see give a talk if you have the chance, on the sole basis of his legendary status. As in many such cases, it is not unlikely that one is going to be disappointed, given the extremely high expectations. Sure enough, Kripke was not at his best that day, and his legendary extemporaneous style of lecturing fell short of the mark, resulting in an interesting, but somewhat chaotic and hard to follow talk. Still, I’ve seen the genius at work. Which reminded me of the problem of inverted qualia, about which Kripke has an ongoing disagreement with other philosophers of mind, chiefly Colin McGinn.

What on earth are “qualia,” and what’s so problematic about having them inverted? Daniel Dennett famously said that qualia is “an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us” (think of colors, or sounds, or taste). He also added that qualia is “one of philosophy's most virulent memes,” and although I don’t buy into the whole memetics spiel, I must admit that he has a point.

The problem of inverted qualia goes back to John Locke, who asked us to imagine a situation in which we wake up one day and — without any physical change having occurred in the world or in our brain — we suddenly perceive colors in a different way: what used to be red now gives the sensation formerly known as green (and vice versa). Ok, one might say, cute little thought experiment, but who cares? We are supposed to care because the inverted qualia argument allegedly shows that secondary qualities (like colors), and particularly first person “phenomenological” experiences of said qualities, do not depend on a particular physical substrate in the brain, i.e. they have no physical basis.

What? Well, here is the actual formal argument, as far as it goes:

Premise 1: If X is possibly false, then X is not necessary.

P2: It is conceivable that the relationship between qualia and physical states of the brain be different from what it actually is.

P3: What is conceivable is possible.

Conclusion 1: Qualia are therefore not identical with brain states.

C2: Also, qualia are not physical.

Got that? That’s the beauty of analytic philosophy: its arguments can be expressed in a formal fashion, which is meant to make as clear as possible what one’s premises and conclusions are, so that others can fairly examine them and either accept them or knock them down one by one. (For comparison, try doing the same with anything by Derrida or Foucault, good luck.)

With the case in question, we could of course attack any or all premises. I am going to let P1 stand, because it does actually tell us that if something is logically possible then it is physically possible, and I do believe that the set of physical possibilities is nested within the set of logical ones (though one could of course argue that that depends on which type of logic one is using, etc.).

P2 is tricky: yes, it is conceivable that the relationship between qualia and physical states of the brain be different from what it actually is, all one has to imagine is different physical properties of light, or different chemicals perceiving light falling on our retinas, or a different type of signal transduction in the brain. But the crucial part of the inverted qualia argument is not just that the relationship between qualia and physical states could be different, it is that qualia could be inverted with no physical change at all with respect to the way things are at the moment. That, I maintain, is impossible. In other words, we certainly could have brains wired in a way so that what to other animals looks red would look green to us, but that can only be accomplished by a physical change in the way the brain works (indeed, we do have empirical examples of something like this: the bewildering phenomenon of synesthesia).

P3, as appealing as it superficially is, is also highly debatable. I can conceive, for instance, of a universe with different physical laws, like a different gravitational constant. But that doesn’t guarantee that such a universe is possible: there may be very good reasons, unknown to modern physicists, why such a universe could actually not come into existence. This is a fascinating area of inquiry, concerned with the relationship between logical and physical possibility. But it’s treacherous territory, and if I were a non-physicalist, I wouldn’t stake too much on it. (This is, of course, why I don’t buy David Chalmers’ silly arguments about zombies and the hard problem of consciousness.)

What about the conclusions, then? Obviously, all we need to do is to refute one of the three premises and we are done, the conclusions no longer follow. Still, I’ll probably buy into C1, if we modify it thus: qualia are not necessarily identical with the particular brain states we happen to have. Different brain states could generate the same qualia, depending on the complex pathways connecting the physical objects in the external world, their perceivable properties, and the evolutionary history and physical makeup of our own perceptual systems.

C2, on the other hand, I think is simply daft: qualia are not physical? Really? So why do we need physical objects, physical eyes, physical neurons, and so on, to perceive them? Alter any of the above, and our perception of qualia changes, a really strong reason to believe that qualia are in fact physical. (Similarly, the minimally reasonable position about consciousness is what some philosophers refer to as the “no ectoplasm clause”: however consciousness works, it’s grounded in a functional physical brain; take the brain away, you’ve got no more consciousness.)

So, whatever disagreement Kripke and McGinn are still having about inverted qualia, I doubt it matters in the long run: secondary qualities are better and better explained by neurobiology and cognitive science, and philosophers should make use of such explanations to inform the many interesting debates still open in philosophy of mind.

Massimo's picks

* MSNBC, the liberal-leaning news channel, criticizes President Obama's performance so far, for pretty goot reasons.

* Wendy Grossman explains why Karen Armstrong's take on religion and morality is frankly annoying, although hard to criticize too loudly.

* Earl Blumenauer, the author of the (non-existent) "death panels" provision for health care reform, explains why the Republicans went nuts about it.

* One problem with public acceptance of global warming: apocalypse fatigue.

* No compulsory hugging for humanists!, argues CFI president Ronald Lindsay. I agree.

* The problem with so-called "conceptual art." (It may not be art.)

* Why the Italian courts got it right, and the Americans wrong, on the CIA rendition program.

* No such thing as virtuous bankers, argues (convincingly) Maureen Dowd. At least, not at Goldman Sachs.

* The placebo effect explains the apparent effectiveness of many "natural" cures. Duh.

* Americans apparently didn't really want SUV's for all those years: Detroit auto companies simply fudged the data because that's what their CEO's wanted to drive.

* A short essay on justice in the Guardian.

The incoherence of free will

I recently re-read a classic piece by J.L. Mackie (April 1955), entitled “Evil and Omnipotence,” a stupendous philosophical essay about why theologians like Richard Swinburne are forced by their belief in an omnipotent, omnibenevelont and omnipowerful god into incredible and rather painful feats of mental gymnastics. One of Mackie’s minor points in the essay is that the so-called “free will defense” for the existence of evil in the world is problematic because the concept of free will itself is incoherent. Although, sometimes accusations of incoherence are thrown around a bit too easily in philosophy, I think this one has the potential to stick. (Mackie goes on with a devastating critique of the free will defense, a critique that remains effective even if the core concept should in fact prove to be coherent.)

Philosophically speaking, I still think that the best treatment of free will is the one given by Dan Dennett in his Elbow Room, which is a delightful book to read in its own right. Nonetheless, one may wonder whether the concept that emerges from Dennett’s analysis is in fact what most people would recognize as “free will.”

Of course, both words making up the term have the potential to be problematic, since it is not necessarily clear what we might mean by “will.” However, for the purposes of this discussion I will simply say that the will — insofar as human beings are concerned — is whatever set of motivations (and underlying neurological mechanisms) are behind the fact that we do certain things rather than others or, indeed, that we do anything at all. (Indeed, patients affected by severe damage to their amygdalas, for instance, seem to loose the will to do anything, likely because they've lost any emotional attachment to themselves and to things in the world: just like David Hume famously predicted, without emotions “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”)

Moreover, I do not see a problem in, for instance, the Aristotelian concept of “akrasia,” or weakness of the will. Some people find it contradictory, because if I end up doing something out of my own volition — like eating a piece of chocolate cake — I cannot simultaneously claim that I did this “against my will,” because I knew that eating chocolate cake isn’t healthy. However, any human being who has struggled with food, sex, and other desires can make perfect sense of the idea of a weak will that makes you act against your own best interest even when you know perfectly well where such interest lies.

Anyway, back to the “free” part of free will. The obvious question is: free from what? That’s where coherence quickly becomes a problem. Unless you are a dualist — a thankfully dying breed among philosophers — you can’t possibly mean free from causal interactions with matter/energy, i.e. independent of the laws and materials of the universe. The will, whatever it is and however we like to conceptualize it, is grounded in the biological activity of our neurons. And last time I checked our neurons are made of matter, exchange energy (in the form of electrical currents and chemical reactions), and are subject to the laws of physics. So if that’s what you mean by “free,” it’s a no starter.

The next popular argument for a truly free will invokes quantum mechanics (the last refuge of those who prefer to keep things as mysterious as possible). Quantum events, it is argued, may have some effects that “bubble up” to the semi-macroscopic level of chemical interactions and electrical pulses in the brain. Since quantum mechanics is the only realm within which it does appear to make sense to talk about truly uncaused events, voilà!, we have (quantistic) free will. But even assuming that quantum events do “bubble up” in that way (it is far from a certain thing), what we gain under that scenario is random will, which seems to be an oxymoron (after all, “willing” something means to wish or direct events in a particular — most certainly not random — way). So that’s out as well.

It now begins to look like our prospects for a coherent sense of free will are dim indeed. If it ain’t random-quantistic or independent from causal interactions with the rest of the world, in what sense is it “free”? But if the will is not free, are we then not simply lumbering robots at the mercy of a mechanical, uncaring universe? (Or, worse yet, puppets in some god’s hands?) This conclusion strikes most people as intuitively deeply unsatisfactory. Moreover, wouldn’t that mean that human behavior would be predictable, at least in principle, if reductionist/mechanistic science became sufficiently advanced? That also strikes many as clearly off the mark.

One possible response is that, frankly, if the conclusions of a rational analysis go against your deepest held intuitions, so much the worse for your deepest held intuitions. But of course we also know that there are in fact non-deterministic physical systems (the time of decay of an individual atom, for instance), and we even know of perfectly deterministic systems whose behavior is for all effective purposes impossible to predict (chaotic, i.e. highly non-linear systems whose status at any given point in time is highly sensitive to initial conditions). So having a will that is causally connected to the rest of the physical world does not imply that our behavior is rigid or predictable.

Still, does that mean that we are in fact lumbering robots, whose illusion of being free is a combination of our ignorance of the causal web within which we are embedded and of our limited ability to compute our own future status? I think the best answer here comes from research in the cognitive sciences, which increasingly points to (at least) two levels of decision making in the brain: on the one hand, we now know that our subconscious makes a lot of decisions before we are consciously aware of them (think of those experiments showing the time-delay in electrical potential between when a muscle is being activated to perform a given action and when the subject becomes aware of having made the decision to perform that action, for instance). On the other hand, consciousness still seems to be a bit more than just a “rationalizing” process, taking on instead the role of high-level filter, or moderator, of unconscious brain processing (e.g., we can still stop an ongoing action if our conscious attention becomes focused on it).

What all of this seems to suggest is that the undeniable feeling of “free will” that we have is actually the result of our conscious awareness of the fact that we make decisions, and that we could have — given other internal (i.e., genetic, developmental) and external (i.e., environmental, cultural) circumstances — decided otherwise in any given instance. That’s what Dennett called a type of free will that is “worth having,” and I consider it good enough for this particular non-dualist, non-mystically inclined human being.

Massimo's picks

* xkcd's take on the vacuousness of some academic specialties...

* One more from xkcd, on the meaning of life, if you will.

* A New York Times article about the possible physiological function of dreams.

* In defense of metaphysics (though not entirely in a convincing way).

* A UK judge ruled that belief in climate change has the same protection as religious belief. Not a good move, in my opinion.

* Austin Dacey on why religion has nothing to do with ethics.

* Why did 30 Republican Senators vote against a bill that gives rape victims the right to sue when the crime happened outside the US? Because they take money from the corporations that would be sued.

On the difference between science and philosophy

Attentive readers of this blog may have noticed that those who post comments to my entries often show two interesting and complementary attitudes: a fundamental distrust of (if not downright contempt for) philosophy, coupled with an overly enthusiastic endorsement of science. Take, for instance, my recurring argument that some (but not all!) of the “new atheists” engage in scientistic attitudes by overplaying the epistemological power of science while downplaying (or even simply negating) the notion that science fundamentally depends on non-empirical (i.e., philosophical) assumptions to even get started. Since my personal career, first as a scientist for 27 years, now as a philosopher, has been marked by experience in both fields, and moreover by a strong belief that the two enterprises are complementary and not adversarial, I feel it is time to make some extended comment on this general issue.

It is perhaps appropriate to tackle the problem at the end of 2009, the year that marks not just the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the arguably even more momentous On Liberty by John Stuart Mill), but also the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow’s famous essay “on the two cultures,” on the intellectual divide between the sciences and the humanities.

In his essay, Snow (rightly) chastised what he saw as an unjustifiable attitude of intellectual superiority on the part of people from the humanities’ side of the divide: “A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?” Indeed, it ought to be indefensible that someone is considered ignorant for not having read Shakespeare, and yet the same charge is unthinkable when it comes to fundamental scientific concepts, like the second principle of thermodynamics.

But the problem cuts equally deeply on the other side, just consider the following quote from physicist Steven Weinberg (in his Dreams of a Final Theory): “The insights of philosophers have occasionally benefited physicists, but generally in a negative fashion—by protecting them from the preconceptions of other philosophers ... Philosophy of science at its best seems to me a pleasing gloss on the history and discoveries of science.” Here Weinberg makes the all-too common mistake of thinking of philosophy as of an activity whose entire worth is measured by how useful it is to solve scientific problems. But why should that be so? We already have science to help us solve scientific problems, philosophy does something else by using different tools, so why compare apples and oranges? By the same token, why not ask why art critics don’t produce paintings, for instance, or editors write books?

For the purposes of this discussion, I assume that most people have at least some idea of what science is, if not of the intricacies of the epistemological and metaphysical problems inherent in the practice of science (and there are many: as Daniel Dennett put it in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, “There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.”) Science, broadly speaking, deals with the study and understanding of natural phenomena, and is concerned with empirically (i.e., either observationally or experimentally) testable hypotheses advanced to account for those phenomena.

Philosophy, on the other hand, is much harder to define. Broadly speaking, it can be thought of as an activity that uses reason to explore issues that include the nature of reality (metaphysics), the structure of rational thinking (logic), the limits of our understanding (epistemology), the meaning implied by our thoughts (philosophy of language), the nature of the moral good (ethics), the nature of beauty (aesthetics), and the inner workings of other disciplines (philosophy of science, philosophy of history, and a variety of other “philosophies of”). Philosophy does this by methods of analysis and questioning that include dialectics and logical argumentation.

Now, it seems to me obvious, but apparently it needs to be stated that: a) philosophy and science are two distinct activities (at least nowadays, since science did start as a branch of philosophy called natural philosophy); b) they work by different methods (empirically-based hypothesis testing vs. reason-based logical analysis); and c) they inform each other in an inter-dependent fashion (science depends on philosophical assumptions that are outside the scope of empirical validation, but philosophical investigations should be informed by the best science available in a range of situations, from metaphysics to ethics and philosophy of mind).

So when some commentators for instance defend the Dawkins- and Coyne-style (scientistic) take on atheism, i.e., that science can mount an attack on all religious beliefs, they are granting too much to science and too little to philosophy. Yes, science can empirically test specific religious claims (intercessory prayer, age of the earth, etc.), but the best objections against the concept of, say, an omnibenevolent and onmnipowerful god, are philosophical in nature (e.g., the argument from evil). Why, then, not admit that by far the most effective way to reject religious nonsense is by combining science and philosophy, rather than trying to arrogate to either more epistemological power than each separate discipline actually possesses?

Another common misconception is that philosophy, unlike science, doesn’t make progress. This is simply not true, unless one measures progress by the (scientific) standard of empirical discovery. But that would be like accusing the New York Yankees of never having won an NBA title: they can’t, they ain’t playing the same game. Philosophy makes progress because dialectical analysis generates compelling objections to a given position, which lead to either an improvement or the abandonment of said position, which is followed by more critical analysis of either the revised position or of the new one, and so on. For instance, ethical theories (moral philosophy), or theories about consciousness (philosophy of mind), or about the nature of science (philosophy of science), have steadily progressed so that no contemporary professional philosopher would consider herself a utilitarian in the original sense intended by Jeremy Bentham, or a Cartesian dualist, or a Popperian falsificationist — just in the same way in which no scientist today would defend Newtonian mechanics, or the original version of Darwin’s theory.
It is also interesting to note that the process I just described may never reach and end result, but neither does science! Scientific theories are always tentative, and they are always either improved upon or abandoned in favor of new ones. So how come we are willing to live with uncertainty and constant revision in science, but demand some sort of definitive truth from philosophy?

Now why is it that so many people take sides on a debate that doesn’t make much sense, rather than rejoice in what the human mind can achieve through the joint efforts of two of its most illustrious intellectual traditions? I think the answer here is no different from the one available to Snow fifty years ago: people in the humanities are afraid of cultural colonization (which is actually the expressed agenda of scientistic thinkers like E.O. Wilson, see his Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge), while scientists have been made arrogant by their recently acquired prestige and enhanced financial resources, so that they don't think they need to bother with activities that don’t bring in millions of dollars in funding every year.

It’s a rather sad, and indeed positively irritating, state of affairs, which is being fought by a handful of activities (usually, though not always, initiated by philosophers), like my own “sci-phi” effort, or like the Permanent Observatory on Integration between the Human and Natural Sciences in Italy. It’s an uphill battle, especially in an era of ever increasing academic specialization, not to mention the ease with which people can now customize their intellectual experiences online, reading only the sort of things they are already interested in, or authors with whose positions they already agree. Which is actually one of the things that make this particular forum somewhat unusual and, to me at least, stimulating. So fire away your opinions, let the sci-phi discussion begin!

Massimo's picks

* How to build secular communities, by Emily Cadik, published in the New Humanist.

* My review of "Understanding Philosophy of Science," by James Ladyman.

* An absolutely brilliant satire by Jon Stewart of news networks' punditry.

* Philosopher's pick: Anthony Appiah.

* A somewhat old, and yet insightful, article in the New York Times on the historic repealing of obscenity laws in the United States.

* The "other" 150th anniversary (other than Darwin's Origin): John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty," a foundational classic of the open society.

* A commentary by National Center for Science Education's Genie Scott on the latest creationist trick: releasing a new edition of Darwin's "Origin of Species," with a few chapters mysteriously missing...

* More evidence that Einstein was right, and that the speed of light really is a universal limit (darn, no warp speed for us!).

* Kierkegaard's distinction between depression (of which he probably suffered) and despair. Not a cheerful piece, but a good thoughtful read.

David Chalmers and the Singularity that will probably not come

David Chalmers is a philosopher of mind, best known for his argument about the difficulty of what he termed the “hard problem” of consciousness, which he typically discusses by way of a thought experiment featuring zombies who act and talk exactly like humans, and yet have no conscious thought (I explained clearly what I think of that sort of thing in my essay on “The Zombification of Philosophy”).

Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing Chalmers in action live at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He didn’t talk about zombies, telling us instead his thoughts about the so-called Singularity, the alleged moment when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, resulting in either all hell breaking loose or the next glorious stage in human evolution — depending on whether you typically see the glass as half empty or half full. The talk made clear to me what Chalmers’ problem is (other than his really bad hair cut (1)): he reads too much science fiction, and is apparently unable to snap out of the necessary suspension of disbelief when he comes back to the real world. Let me explain.

Chalmers’ (and other advocates of the possibility of a Singularity) argument starts off with the simple observation that machines have gained computing power at an extraordinary rate over the past several years, a trend that one can extrapolate to a near future explosion of intelligence. Too bad that, as any student of statistics 101 ought to know, extrapolation is a really bad way of making predictions, unless one can be reasonably assured of understanding the underlying causal phenomena (which we don’t, in the case of intelligence). (I asked a question along these lines to Chalmers in the Q&A and he denied having used the word extrapolation at all; I checked with several colleagues over wine and cheese, and they all confirmed that he did — several times.)

Be that as it may, Chalmers went on to present his main argument for the Singularity, which goes something like this:

1. There will soon be AI (i.e., Artificial Intelligence)
2. There will then soon be a transition from AI to AI+
3. There will then soon be a transition from AI+ to AI++

Therefore, there will be AI++

All three premises and the conclusion where followed by a parenthetical statement to the effect that each holds only “absent defeaters,” i.e., absent anything that may get in the way of any of the above.

Chalmers was obviously very proud of his argument, but I got the sense that few people were impressed, and I certainly wasn’t. First off, he consistently refused to define what AI++, AI+, or even, for that matter, AI, actually mean. This, in a philosophy talk, is a pretty grave sin, because philosophical analysis doesn’t get off the ground unless we are reasonably clear on what it is that we are talking about. Indeed, much of philosophical analysis aims at clarifying concepts and their relations. You would have been hard pressed (and increasingly frustrated) in finding any philosophical analysis whatsoever in Chalmers’ talk.

Second, Chalmers did not provide a single reason for any of his moves, simply stating each premise and adding that if AI is possible, then there is no reason to believe that AI+ (whatever that is) is not also possible, indeed likely, and so on. But, my friend, if you are making a novel claim, the burden of proof is on you to argue that there are positive reasons to think that what you are suggesting may be true, not on the rest of us to prove that it is not. Shifting the burden of proof is the oldest trick in the rhetorical toolbox, and not one that a self-respecting philosopher should deploy in front of his peers (or anywhere else, for that matter).

Third, note the parenthetical disclaimer that any of the premises, as well as the conclusion, will not actually hold if a “defeater” gets in the way. When asked during the Q&A what he meant by defeaters, Chalmers pretty much said anything that humans or nature could throw at the development of artificial intelligence. But if that is the case, and if we are not provided with a classification and analysis of such defeaters, then the entire argument amounts to “X is true (unless something proves X not to be true).” Not that impressive.

The other elephant in the room, of course, is the very concept of “intelligence,” artificial or human. This is a notoriously difficult concept to unpack, and even more so to measure quantitatively (which would be necessary to tell the difference between AI and AI+ or AI++). Several people noted this problem, including myself in the Q&A, but Chalmers cavalierly brushed it aside saying that his argument does not hinge on human intelligence, or computational power, or intelligence in a broader sense, but only on an unspecified quantity “G” which he quickly associated with an unspecified set of cognitive capacities through an equally unspecified mathematical mapping function (adding that “more work would have to be done” to flesh out such notion — no kidding). Really? But wait a minute, if we started this whole discussion about the Singularity using an argument based on extrapolation of computational power, shouldn’t our discussion be limited to computational power? (Which, needless to say, is not at all the same as intelligence.) And if we are talking about AI, what on earth does the “I” stand for in there, if not intelligence — presumably of a human-like kind?

In fact, the problem with the AI effort in general is that we have little progress to show after decades of attempts, likely for the very good reason that human intelligence may not be algorithmic, at least not in the same sense in which computer programs are (2). I am most certainly not invoking mysticism or dualism here, I think that intelligence (and consciousness) are the result of the activity of a physical brain substrate, but the very fact that we can build machines with a degree of computing power and speed that greatly exceeds those of the human mind, and yet are nowhere near being “intelligent,” should make it pretty clear that the problem is not computing power or speed.

After the deployment of the above mentioned highly questionable “argument,” things just got bizarre in Chalmers’ talk. He rapidly proceeded to tell us that A++ will happen by simulated evolution in a virtual environment — thereby making a blurred and confused mix out of different notions such as natural selection, artificial selection, physical evolution and virtual evolution.

Which naturally raised the question of how do we control the Singularity and stop “them” from pushing us into extinction. Chalmers’ preferred solution is either to prevent the “leaking” of AI++ into our world, or to select for moral values during the (virtual) evolutionary process. Silly me, I thought that the easiest way to stop the threat of AI++ would be to simply unplug the machines running the alleged virtual world and be done with them. (Incidentally, what does it mean for a virtual intelligence to exist? How does it “leak” into our world? Like a Star Trek hologram gone nuts?)

Then the level of unsubstantiated absurdity escalated even faster: perhaps we are in fact one example of virtual intelligence, said Chalmers, and our Creator may be getting ready to turn us off because we may be about to leak out into his/her/its world. But if not, then we might want to think about how to integrate ourselves into AI++, which naturally could be done by “uploading” our neural structure (Chalmers’ recommendation is one neuron at a time) into the virtual intelligence — again, whatever that might mean.

Finally, Chalmers — evidently troubled by his own mortality (well, who isn’t?) — expressed the hope that A++ will have the technology (and interest, I assume) to reverse engineer his brain, perhaps out of a collection of scans, books, and videos of him, and bring him back to life. You see, he doesn’t think he will live long enough to actually see the Singularity happen. And that’s the only part of the talk on which we actually agreed.

The reason I went on for so long about Chalmers’ abysmal performance is because this is precisely the sort of thing that gives philosophy a bad name. It is nice to see philosophers taking a serious interest in science and bringing their discipline’s tools and perspectives to the high table of important social debates about the future of technology. But the attempt becomes a not particularly funny joke when a well known philosopher starts out by deploying a really bad argument and ends up sounding more cuckoo than trekkie fans at their annual convention. Now, if you will excuse me I’ll go back to the next episode of Battlestar Galactica, where you can find all the basic ideas discussed by Chalmers presented in an immensely more entertaining manner than his talk.

Postscripts:

(1) Much has been made of this alleged "ad hominem" attack I made on Chalmers. People, lighten up a bit, this is a column for general observations and discussion, which I always try to pepper with some humor. Rationally Speaking (and, indeed, any blog) is not a place for scholarly discussions. Besides, have you seen Chalmers' haircut?? ;-)

(2) Perhaps predictably, this phrase has been taken out of context by several people who are sympathetic with Chalmers' notions, and who have used it to accuse me of "vitalism," the long discredited position that biological organisms rely on some sort of quasi-mystical forces outside of the realm of standard physics. Baloney. All I meant to say, as it should have been clear from my clarification ("at least not in the same sense in which computer programs are") is that I don't think human brains are directly analogous to computers, which is a much more limited, and indeed quite obvious, statement. Incidentally, "algorithm" can be defined broadly as any method to resolve a particular problem in a finite number of steps. What, exactly, is the problem that "brains" are supposed to be solving? Survival? Reproduction? What's for dinner? What movie to go to? All of the above? One needs to be weary of the fact that if a term is defined broadly enough then it inevitably subsumes everything, which means that it explains nothing.

Massimo's picks

* There is yet another book out there on one of my favorite nut jobs: Ayn Rand.

* My book review of Logicomix, a graphic novel about Bertrand Russell and the quest for the logical foundations of mathematics.

* Another book review by yours truly: The Simpsons and Philosophy, The D'oh! of Homer.

* Warwick University, in the UK, has instituted a position for the public understanding of philosophy. Imagine that!

* It's time for moral class with philosopher Michael Sandel, now available on PBS and on the web.

* More Americans believe in haunted houses than global warming. Sad, but not surprising.

* Jon Stewart's commentary on the Pope's opening toward disaffected Anglicans.

* The Obama administration is supporting several Arab countries' push to enforce "anti-blasphemy" laws and make them a UN-approved standard. Why?

* Three new books about philosophy for the general public!