Bill Koslosky points to some clever vegetarian propaganda: The Meatrix. And he links to a less light-hearted commentary on meatiness: The defeat of legislation that would have required that “downed” animals be killed humanely and that would have prohibited their slaughter for human food.

Sure, people are suffering, too. But we ought to avoid inflicting unnecessary pain. (Go ahead, try to argue against that one!) I see no reason to think that we escape that moral obligation when it comes to non-human animals. The argument ought to be over what makes pain necessary and exactly what it means to avoid inflicting it. For the past 25 years or so, I’ve voted with my digestive system that eating factory-farmed meat fails that test. Hell, I wouldn’t even eat a Republican.

Happy vegetarian new year to all my sentient animal friends!

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[I’ve been a bad blogger and am now catching up on the blogreading that events kept me from for about a week.]

AKMA is once again doing the hard work for us, worrying about how our ways of talking about literalism are themselves infused with non-literal metaphors:

Am I being perversely literalistic if I ask, “If the world is behind the text, why can?t I reach around and touch it?”

And in a follow-up entry he writes:

…metaphors such as “the text is a mirror” should help us understand something that would otherwise be obscure, or they risk further obscuring the topic by introducing problems with the metaphorical representation of the topic that aren’t already implied by the topic itself. And that phenomenon matters all the more urgently since “clarity” and “obscurity” are themselves metaphors…

Hofstadter’s book should have been titled Gödel, Escher, Bach and AKMA (where “AKMA” is in fact a metaphor for the best of post-modernism). You want to understand our relationship to the texts and meanings of the world, asks PoMo with it’s sharp-edged and often superior air? (Not AKMA!) Then you’d better recognize that there’s a metaphysics concealed within the concept of understanding: foundations, things “standing for” or “representing” other things, understanding as an “inner” state, etc. That metaphysics is self-contradictory: it says it’s only real when it stands on a firm foundation, but such foundations are neither firm nor foundational. So, what then is understanding to do?

Welcome to the 21st century where we can no longer say “A metaphor is a bridge for understanding” without falling off the bridge. Laughing.

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According to an article by Alok Jha in The Guardian, “Scientists have been given the biggest ever grant to build a ‘conscious robot’. ” The grant is for 500,000 pounds and it repeats the most persistent — because it’s metaphysical — error (IMHO) in AI: thinking that consciousness consists of an internal representation of the world. In this case: “Mr Holland’s idea is that a conscious robot would have to build up internal models – one for the ‘self’ of the robot and another for the world around it. ”

Thanks to Gred Linuxman Cavanagh for the link.

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Scott Rosenberg replies to my reply to his wonderful appreciation of JS Mill. I’d said that I find Mill’s rationalism overly optimistic. Scott writes:

I think it’s probably impossible that Mill, given who he was and how he was raised to be the Ultimate Utilitarian, could avoid seeming overly rational to us – steeped as we are in all the irrationality that followed his era, in heaps of Freud and gobs of Nietzsche and decades of 20th-century horrors that have made us justifiably suspicious of Victorian progressives’ optimism. And yet it’s also clear to me that “On Liberty” intended to expand the boundaries of that utilitarianism in what, to Mill himself at least, probably felt like profoundly non-rational ways – to encompass all of the eccentric traits and organically developed characteristics that make us individuals

Yup.

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Scott Rosenberg has written an excellent appreciation of J.S. Mill’s On Liberty. (It requires a Salon premium membership or the willingness to sit through an ad.) Scott contextualizes Mill brilliantly, getting past the standard “take-away” that one person’s liberty ends only where another’s begins. He writes:

The opposing force that elicited Mill’s redefinition of liberty was nothing so old-fashioned as an oppressive king. Nor were encroachments on freedom of the press his concern… Mill’s eloquence on behalf of liberty was inspired by what he saw as a deadening sameness of opinion infecting his contemporaries. He looked around at mid-century England and saw it filled with “conformers to commonplace, or timeservers for truth.” His fellow citizens had become containers of received wisdom, receptacles of “dead dogma.”

The antidote to such stagnation, he maintained, was not simply toleration of nonconformists but vigorous engagement with “heretical positions”…

I love On Liberty – although I officially haven’t read it in a Long Time – because of its elegant radical reframing of the question of rights. Rather than being legislated by kings, God or nature, they are simply the default and their limits are defined operationally: how long is your arm and where exactly is my nose?

But I don’t share Mill’s optimism about rationality. If we were entirely rational creatures, disengaged from our own opinions and committed only to an abstract truth, then every day we could have deep conversations with positions we are convinced are thoroughly wrong. But, we are rooted in our times, in our culture, in our psychology, in our interests, in our voice, in our bodies. We cannot escape those roots to have lofty, toga-clad discussions in which all points of view are welcomed and considered equally.

Scott’s essay is subtler than I’m being about this. He reminds us that Mill understood that “every era must accept the inevitability of being revised, corrected and judged by those who come after.” Nevertheless, Mill has always struck me, in his views on liberty as well as his utilitarianism’s calm calculus of interests, as being overly rationalistic in his proposed methodologies, even while repudiating authority and legislated principle.

Scott ends by pointing to the Internet as “the vastest marketplace of ideas that mankind has yet managed to create,” an “unbounded and still growing embodiment of Mill’s ideals.” Lovely point, yet I think Mill would also find the Net vastly disappointing because of its frequent lack of reason and the commonplace of “echo chambers” that exclude views that are one degree to the left or right.

But we should not be disappointed, IMO. Yeah, sure there are appallingly stupid and nasty arguments and gangs that exist simply to think the same thought over and over and over. We are all guilty of this. I certainly am. Now, we could be elitists about this. Mill was, as Scott points out. Heidegger, with his criticism of the inauthentic jibber-jabber of mass man (das Mann), was. But, hell, if history’s taught us one thing it’s that we’re the jibber-jabbering animals. There’s no escaping it; there’s just better or worse, more or less. The fray of bad ideas passionately expressed and commonplace ideas intersecting at impossible angles is our condition, and it’s been made grand by the Internet.

Fittingly, while checking the spelling of “das Mann,” I came across a lively debate over Heidegger’s Nazism.

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Our daughter just selected her courses for her first year at college. Among the four: Existentialism. Which has me a little scared.

Existentialism did a good job on me in my freshman year of convincing me that life is meaningless. I moped. Ordinary objects lost their significance even as I gazed at them. I looked around for a local Seine to plunge into. It took several more years for me to figure out why I think existentialism is wrong: the sort of meaning it laments hasn’t been with us since God died, but other (lesser) meaning has always been with us. It’s like me saying I’m unloved because Uma Thurman hasn’t fallen for me, while ignoring that Ann Geller has. Well, maybe it’s a little like that. [Note: I’m Ann’s husband.]

I’d been thinking about exisentialism anyway — and why I like it — because of the conversation the Happy Tutor and AKMA had last week. Akma began by being offended by Bush’s bald-faced lying. The Happy Tutor wondered how a post-Modernist can distinguish truth and lie, and then reflected further. Akma, disdaining the pomo label, replied. Wonderful stuff.

As the Tutor notes, his words may sound like a personal attack on Akma, but they do not indicate any lack of respect. Truly. Tutor’s question is: How can a deconstructionist hold moral truths? Hasn’t post-modernism pulled its own ground out from underneath it?

Is there a harder question? In this newly connected world we’re more aware than ever that other cultures hold beliefs contrary to ours but with as much conviction. Even after we weed out the cultures that we count as crazy or evil (and that weeding out is, of course, fraught with its own problems), we’re left with “legitimate” ideas that others hold and we reject. So, do we let ourselves be paralyzed into inaction? Do we take absolute actions — like killing people in war — as if our beliefs had absolute foundation? Isn’t this the story of the past century? Isn’t it what western culture has been building to for two millennia?

And in this situation, existentialism offers an answer that is unsatisfactory but is at least self-aware. Sartre knew that he held his beliefs and values largely because of the historical situation into which he was thrown, but he didn’t let that keep him from the important work of killing Nazis. He got his hands dirty (directly or indirectly) because there is no choice. He acted absolutely while aware of the limits of his own understanding and the arbitrariness of his own situation.

So, while I disagree with how existentialism understands the problem, I am in sympathy with its “solution.” I don’t like it. I just don’t know of a better one.

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Gerry Gleason responds in the comment area to my blogging on Kurzweil’s fallacious (well, I think so anyway) reasoning about the self. Kurzweil thinks that consciousness is a pattern of neural states caused by the “software” that runs the brain. If we instantiate that pattern and its rules on a computer, that computer should be considered conscious, according to Kurzweil. Gerry wonders:

But following [Buckminister] Fuller, the essence of this particular “pattern integrity” is something related to emergence through evolutionary linking of system and environment; by what argument do you exclude this evolution based pattern of development and emergence from all possible complex synthetic systems?

Great question. Too hard. But I don’t think the argument against Kurzweil, as put forward brilliantly by Searle, rules out all synthetic systems. The argument is against considering symbolic processors — today’s computers — as conscious. And the reason is that they are only instantiations of the patterns of consciousness because we take them as such.

Let’s say we did the Kurzweilian experiment successfully: through advanced science, we model his 100 billion neurons and their states and we figure out the rules by which they work. The computer chugs along and answers questions as if it were Kurzweil. We can grant all that and still say that the computer isn’t conscious. Let’s say it takes a byte of information to represent one neuron. The fact that memory address 100-107 represents neuron #212 in Ray’s brain is completely arbitrary. The pattern of high and low voltages in those transitors only represent a neuron because we say so. The relationship between the computer and Ray’s brain is symbolic.

Consider a different scenario. You’re getting a tour of the M&M factory. There are 20 huge bins that together hold 2 trillion M&M’s. Giant paddle arms are stirring them to randomize the mix. By freakish luck, if you count an M&M with the M showing on top to be “on” (or 1) and one with the M on bottom to be “off” (or 0), the paddles stirring the first 10 bins — which hold 100 billion M&M’s — happen to be producing a series of brain states identical to what’s going on in the computer. (We’ll have to slow the computer down or speed the paddles up to get them in sync.) Are those bins conscious? No, because the pattern is only there because we chose to see up-facing M&M’s as on and because we happen to be looking at the first ten bins: we could just as sensibly look at every second bin or count down-facing M&M’s as on. Or maybe if we count raindrops larger than n to be on and ones smaller than n to be off, yesterday’s rainstorm was also conscious.

You want the formal proof? If the candy bin is conscious because we take up-facing as meaning on, then it is simultaneously unconscious if someone else takes up-facing as meaning off or as meaning nothing. Thus, the candy bins are both conscious and non-conscious in the same way at the same time, which is a contradiction. QED.

Now, because the computer is running a program rather than acting randomly, we can probably learn stuff about Kurzweil that we can’t from the candy bins. But so long as the pattern exists only because we see it as a pattern, it can’t be conscious.

This doesn’t mean that only carbon-based flesh like ours can be conscious. But it does mean that patterns aren’t enough and that there’s something special — not necessarily unique — about flesh.

If this is right, what does it mean for theories that stipulate that the universe is itself a computer? What does it mean for Wolfram’s attempt to explain It All through a few simple programs?

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Here’s Ray Kurzweil on the nature of the self, in his generous and excellent article on Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science:

If I ask the question, ‘Who am I?’ I could conclude that, perhaps I am this stuff here, i.e., the ordered and chaotic collection of molecules that comprise my body and brain.

However, the specific set of particles that comprise my body and brain are completely different from the atoms and molecules than comprised me only a short while (on the order of weeks) ago. We know that most of our cells are turned over in a matter of weeks. Even those that persist longer (e.g., neurons) nonetheless change their component molecules in a matter of weeks.

So I am a completely different set of stuff than I was a month ago. All that persists is the pattern of organization of that stuff. The pattern changes also, but slowly and in a continuum from my past self. From this perspective I am rather like the pattern that water makes in a stream as it rushes past the rocks in its path. The actual molecules (of water) change every millisecond, but the pattern persists for hours or even years.

From this Kurzweil seems to conclude — fallaciously — that the self is merely formal. That is, the substance is irrelevant. Therefore, other stuff with the same form is just as much the self. Thus, strong AI is possible.

The fallacy is in thinking that if the stuff of X changes, all that counts is what remains constant, i.e. the pattern, and the pattern could be moved onto new types of material which would be an X just as real and fully as the original. Here’s a counterexample: A restaurant is constantly bringing in, cooking, and serving new food-stuff. All that remains constant are the patterns: the menus and the recipes. Therefore, if we instantiated the same menus and recipes in non-food stuff, it’d still be the same great restaurant. (Remember, Kurzweil isn’t talking about re-creating the pattern of person X in flesh but in an entirely different medium, a program running on silicon, where the pattern is actually even more abstract than a 1:1 relationship.)

I’m perfectly happy to say that life is an emergent property of our carbon-based molecules. Consciousness, too. I am not an essentialist who thinks that somewhere there’s a soul, ghost or life force that exists independent of the body. (Actually, I’m agnostic on the topic, mainly because a universe in which my wife’s soul doesn’t continue is not only unjust, it’s just plain stupid.) But emergent properties often (always?) inhere in that from which they emerge: if, say, democracy emerges from the interaction of free individuals, you can’t say that the same pattern when expressed on paper is a democracy; you need the free individuals for that.

I can put this more simply: We are bodies. Flesh rulz.

By the way, I’m going to go to the first day of Wolfram’s 3-day conference on his new kind of science.

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Michael Swaine, editor-at-large of the estimable Dr. Dobb’s Journal, doesn’t like Small Pieces Loosely Joined. But he doesn’t like it for the right reasons: He disagrees with the ideas in it. The way he disagrees points to a deeper problem with the book. And with my life.

Apparently, I set his teeth on edge in Cluetrain by insisting, in Michael’s words, “that the fundamental unit of life is the group and that individual human beings only have meaning or worth as members.” In fact, Michael is so convinced that that’s wrong that he assumes that I must be doing some well-intentioned lying, in the good ol’ fashioned “The poets tell many a lie” sense:

Now, I suspect that he realizes that this is not the case: He regards it as a useful fiction, and offers it up as one of several Lies to Live By. Personally, I think that valuing bloodless abstractions above flesh-and-blood humans is both antihuman and dangerous…

Actually, I have to agree with myself on this one. I don’t think groups are fictions. They aren’t the same sort of thing as individuals, of course, but a view that says that only individuals are real — and that groups like families and communities are therefore fictions and lies — strikes me as overly strict in its understanding of what the meaning of “is” is. (Who would have thought that Bill Clinton would be remembered as a metaphysician?) Nor do I think groups are abstractions any more than the concept of a self is an abstraction. (Humans aren’t just “flesh and blood.”) But it doesn’t follow from the acknowledgement that groups are real and are formative of individuals that groups should have totalitarian power over individuals. It’s just not that binary. We’ve been working for millennia on getting the complex mix of rights and obligations right.

The same issue arises for Michael in Small Pieces. He says the book recommends abandoning ideas like individualism and that the world is independent of our awareness:

He is only suggesting that we jettison these truths and live by lies on the Web, as I understand him. He’s not talking about “real” life. The Web is a new world that we are creating, Weinberger says. Why not make up better rules than those we live by in the “real” one?

Michael then reasonably objects that we’re unlikely to be able to agree on the new values we’re creating in cyberspace. No arguing with that. As he says, “we can’t settle on rules for running a mailing list…”

But, the book doesn’t suggest that we jettison truths about reality and individuality, etc. Rather, it says that our traditional ideas about such things are alienating. For example: (1) The focus on reality as that which exists independent of us drives a wedge between reality and meaning. (2) This split is untrue to our everyday, real-world lived experience, which is of a world of meaning. (3) The dismissing as fictitious of all that is dependent on our awareness — i.e., the claim that groups are unreal because they aren’t flesh-and-blood — is itself a value judgment. So, in Small Pieces I’m not arguing that we adopt some “Lies to Live By.” I’m suggesting that a description of our life on the Web unveils some truths we already live by in the real world. Further, the Web appeals so deeply to so many of us because it offers a haven free of our real-world alienation from those truths.

Michael thinks I’m up to something different because my description of Web life — and of the real world — seems just so thoroughly wrong to him. He and I are left without a lot of recourse. At one point when discussing my claim that our rugged individualism makes us unhappy and lonely, Michael writes “I’d like to see the data on that, David.” Even if there are some statistics (e.g., Putnam’s Bowling Alone), the correlation of psychology and metaphysics is always going to be, um, a little shaky.

Small Pieces proceeds, to put it grandly, phenomenologically. Phenomenology tries to uncover experience. Of course, “uncover” is a loaded term since it implies there’s something there to be uncovered. So, perhaps I should say that phenomenology points at stuff and says “See?” If you don’t see, phenomenology doesn’t have a way of proving it to you. That’s a huge stinking problem. And, of course, it introduces the observer into the equation: could it be that you don’t see what I see because I’m who I am and you’re not? To which the phenomenologist replies: “Oh yeah? You wanna make something out of it??” After which the phenomenologist puts an ice pack on his broken nose and replies that the whole point is that the observer is always already in the equation and that experience is indeed and obviously conditioned by culture and language and that the idea that certainty is the only acceptable criterion for truth is itself a highly cultural/historical idea. But what it comes down to is: “See?”

I wish I had another way to proceed. I like the cool slap of a clean proof. But for the sort of issues I care about, I’m stuck with a way of thinking that is indeed more like writing fiction than like writing science, not because it’s less true than science but because it’s clarifying only if it clarifies. But that’s inevitable if you want to talk not about the world so much as about our world. And both are conversations worth having, IMO.

If you’re not a subscriber to Dr. Dobbs but want to read Michael’s review, it’ll cost you $5 for 72 hours of access, which strikes me as pretty pricey for a narrow time-slot.

Michael’s blog is lively, informative and opinionated. No surprise there.

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Trevor responds to my response to AKMA‘s posting that was in part a response to my worrying about what the Web tells us about the importance of being embodied.

A quick recap (in order to get everything wrong or at least overstated). I said that since Web selves are so important and yet so disembodied, doesn’t this reinforce our alienated belief that bodies don’t matter? Trevor said that bodies aren’t primarily material: look at communal bodies. I replied that communal bodies, lovely though they are, lack something essential to embodiment. It’s not they’re immaterial (for Trevor and I agree that bodies aren’t just atoms…and Trevor has been helpful in clarifying my thinking on this, for which I thank him). It’s that they can’t have sex, feel pain, or die. Then I presented a four-step line of thought that allows me to hold the two beliefs I’m trying to coordinate: Our Web selves mirror (or shadow) the consequences of having a body in the real world, e.g., our perception is formed by the fact that we care about ourselves and our world, we have a point of view, etc.

In his latest entry, Trevor takes the four-part “argument” and applies it to communal bodies. It seems to me to fit well in some places and not so well in others. In particular, my way of caring about what happens to my body — the whole pleasure and pain thing — seems to me to work only in a metaphorical or extended sense for communal bodies. Sure, a communal body cares about what happens to it, but its pleasure and pain is way different from what I feel if I break a finger or come to orgasm. But, so what? Once we say that the essence of a body isn’t the atoms but what being embodied means to us, we can apply that to immaterial bodies like Web selves and communal selves. We just have to go back afterwards and remember the difference between enjoying a blog thread, finding satisfaction in improving the neighborhood, and having an orgasm. Forgetting that difference would be a real sign of alienated thinking.

Laura and Tripp, students of AKMA’s and Trevor’s, comment on my four-part argument from their faithful Christian perspectives, raising a whole bunch of deep questions that I am in no position to address but that sound spot on. For example, what’s the connection between voice and the Word? And what does incarnation mean, both for us mortals and for a particular carpenter born at the cusp of BCE and AD? Tough for a Jewish atheist-leaning guy to talk about.

Trevor has finished his first year teaching. I can tell from how he talks to students outside of the classroom, including how he blogs, that he is an inspiring teacher.

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