What is consciousness?

One of the more interesting philosophical ideas of the past few years is the concept that "machines" might be able to think.  Most of the Sci Fi books I read today include at least 1 character who is an Artificial Intelligence, or AI.  When the author embraces the concept and imbues the AI with a quirky personality, or some sort of noble purpose, he makes them into a human-sort of character we can all identify with and enjoy.

At the root of all this is the idea that a machine, a computer in most cases, can think in the same way we all believe we think, including having emotions, feelings, motivations, and so forth.  Collectively we might call the running cognitive process in our minds consciousness and identify it as something special that only humans and other biologic close relatives might be capable of having.  Can your computer be said to have consciousness?  Can a collection of silicon chips and metal wires be conscious?  What is the underlying essence that makes human consciousness so special?

If you haven't run across John Searle's Chinese Room Experiment, please look it up.  In this thought experiment Searle shows how, at the level of actually manipulating machine code, a computer of any kind does not actually know what it is doing - it only manipulates information according to the programming that runs it.  For this reason the machine cannot be said to actually "understand" the information it is dealing with, it only manipulates 1's and 0's.  Searle goes on to talk about how a computer can be made to run in almost any sort of medium, not just the silicon chips we talk about commonly today, so we need to keep a very broad concept of what a computer might be in our minds.

Alan Turing's AI Test, which I like to call the If It Walks Like A Duck, It's A Duck Test, says that if you cannot tell the difference between a machine and a person in a blind test (you send in questions and read the answers without knowing which is which, for example) there is no difference.  If a computer can be programmed to replicate any nuance of human responsiveness you can think of, and could then respond in a way indistinguishable from a human response, then the machine can be said to have all the cognitive properties a human has. In the movie Blade Runner you might recall that the future robot police developed very sophisticated tests to identify the androids/robots among us, since their responses to human life and situations were indistinguishable from almost all human responses.

Which brings me back to consciousness, and what it is.  Like free will, where we are free if we believe we are free, is consciousness ours to claim if we simply believe we are conscious?  Is a dolphin not conscious only because a dolphin has never asked itself that question?  Or your dog?  Are these other biologic creatures, who are clearly intelligent in some ways but who act predominantly according to some genetic or basic survival programming and not with willful intent, actually conscious in the same way we feel we are?

And for the Trekkies out there, are the “individuals” in the Borg conscious?

What ought we to do?

Ethics.  Always a difficult subject for people.  Where do we find the blueprint for our actions that help us live healthy, happy, productive lives, free of worry and in harmony with others?  Philosophical thinkers have weighed in on this issue down through the ages, and their thoughts can be roughly sorted into categories we might want to take the time to explore.

Main Ethical Theories

Religion Based:  Divine Command Theory  -  The divine command theory asserts that an action is morally right if the action is in harmony with God's commands.

Consequence Based:  Utilitarianism  -  A utilitarian believes that an action is morally right if it maximizes overall well-being and happiness.

Duty Based:  Deontology  -  A deontologist believes that an action is morally right if the motive behind the action is good.

Agent Centered:  Virtue Ethics  -  A virtue ethicist holds that an action is morally right if an agent who has all the virtues would have performed the action.

To prepare for the meeting you might want to look these up in your favorite search engine and see where your ideas fall.  Where would an atheist most likely feel comfortable?  A person strongly committed to the Bible?  A pagan?  A Buddhist?  A humanist?  You can see where I am going.

Enjoy the process.  If we were doing this "the old way", I'd have several volumes of books arrayed on my coffee table when you arrived that address this topic in many different ways.  The popularity of the concepts leads to a plethora of authors who like to talk about it.  Including me, apparently.

Leave a comment, please.  I'd like to know where you all stand.

What is the ideal society?

 A common theme that runs though ancient and modern societies is the idea that, if isolated and handled properly, humankind can life in a more harmonious and fulfilling way than we typically do today.  History is filled with the stories of Utopian groups who have conceived of a way to live where all aspects of life may be different than world from which they have come, but the new "order" leads to better lives better lived.

I came across Thomas More's Utopia recently, which sparked my thinking.  If you Google it you will come across the Wiki summary, which is not bad.  I encourage you to find a copy of the English translation and read it.  I direct you to a chapter called, A Day In Utopia, in which More outlines the basic way of life for the people living there, and points out the advantages of the new way of living.  Along the way he points out that the basic problem with normal society is that it is based on the principle that The Rich Get Richer, and the Poor Get Poorer.  It was first published in 1516, in Latin, in Belgium.   He was hanged for heresy in 1535.

You remember Ralph Waldo Emerson, of course.  His Transcendentalists formed a utopian compound in the Concord, MA area in the 1820's.  It ran out of food in the first winter and didn't really succeed.  If you get a chance to read any of the accounts of the group and how they operated, it was a real collection of special people.  One guy would not wear clothes and would only eat crackers, for example.

The most successful group of that time was John Noyes' quasi-religious community in Oneida NY in the 1850's.  It persisted until a tornado almost wiped it out in 1878, but it exists today as the flatware company Oneida Ltd.  I don't think there remains the sort of living arrangement Noyes set out in his original vision (read about it and you will see just how different it was).  He had some strong feelings about sex, I can tell you.

Jim Jones and his band of religious zealots who "drank the Kool-Aid" in Guyana in the 1970's are another kind of societal group seeking to create a new way of living.  For many years we had the garlic-growing Love Isreal group in Arlington.  Remember them?

So, the question to be discussed is, What is the Ideal Society?  What sort of norms and values need to be shared in common to make one successful?

What is Becoming? What is Being?

One of the most reliable participants of this blog, Michelle, sent me an excerpt from Appendix G of Abraham Maslow's "Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences".  I believe this is the same Maslow who developed the Hierarchy of Need.  Anyway, this excerpt dealt with his attempt to describe the characteristics of Being, what he calls B-Values.   This got me to thinking...

I find that I need to sync with the “voice” the writer uses, especially when reading philosophy.  When I started reading the section, at first I thought I wasn’t going to make it.  Choppy sentences, half statements, and repeated phrases all leave me cold, often.  When I got to the 14 points and he offers what is essentially a “definition by thesaurus” I needed to scan ahead to see if it was going to make any sense.  I then went back and read through the words, and I started to get into his head a bit. 

The Becoming/Being process isn’t intuitive for most people, and it took me a long time to take the concept seriously.   The final paragraph in this section deals with this, of course.  Joining with the universe on a primal level and being fully human are not my personal definitions for Being, but they are certainly lofty ideals.  My favorite statement in this arena is “become who you are”.  This is the essence of Becoming, to me.  I believe that when we are in harmony with our personal essence, we can just Be, as in Be Ourselves.  This is Being.  Becoming and Being.  Finding harmony in our essences.

I looked up the origin of Becoming, and found this:

In the philosophical study of ontology, the concept of becoming originated in ancient Greece with the philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, who in the sixth century BC, said that nothing in this world is constant except change and becoming (i.e., everything is impermanent).

As usual, all of modern philosophy is but a footnote to the Greeks.

What is fear?

This past Sunday we listened to a TED Talk speaker talk about fear ("What fear can teach us" by Karen Thompson Walker).  She proposed that fear was a narrative we tell ourselves that might have bad outcomes, which creates anxiety in us which we interpret as fear.  By re-casting the narrative we can convert our fears into opportunities, she posits.  She provides several stories as fear narratives to demonstrate how this works.

If Socrates were to tackle this topic, how would he do it?  I am not aware that he did, in any of the dialogues, but someone with more time to search this out might find it.  A quick Google comes up with very little from Socrates, except the fear of death question he was asked after his sentence was handed down by the elders of Athens.  Fear has been studied by others, and a review of their concepts might be in order for our discussion.

Socrates responds: For to fear death, gentlemen, is nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. For no one knows whether death might not be the greatest of all goods for a human being, but people fear it as if they knew well that it is the greatest of evils.

Socrates replied that it was because of the immortality of the soul that death was no evil. The purpose of philosophy was to free the soul by guiding it to the eternal truths, and so when death came, it was a liberation. The body, he asserted, was a messy pit of passions and rude cravings. 

I feel that fear might be broken into categories.  Precognitive fears (fear of heights, fear of spiders), and cognitive fears (fear of failure, fear of death) are 2 that jump out at me. If we can think about something that creates anxiety within us, and we can identify the key element causing this anxiety, can we name the key element as the thing we fear?

The lines between psychology and philosophy might become blurred with fear as the discussion topic, so come prepared to share your insights with an open mind.  My goal is not to reduce or rid anyone of their fears, but to hold them up to the light for an examination of the processes that create them.  Watch the TED Talk again.  Search TED Talks that might be on a similar or related topic, and if you fine one, please leave the link in the comments below.

August 14 BQ Topic

Socrates hated democracy.  He hated it because 1 man, 1 vote sounded like mob rule to him, and mobs did not act in their own best interests.  They were swayed by orators, not facts, and orators (whom he called sophists) would argue for any cause someone was willing to pay them to argue for.  They didn't have to believe what they were saying, only be clever with their words.

The best form of government is a philosopher king, in Socrates' opinion.  A wise, philosophically-minded monarch with complete control, making decisions in the best interests of all the citizens of the realm, and able to compel compliance.  Think Solomon, only smarter.  Not affected by popular opinion, or being swayed by rhetoric alone.  Able to see the true issue and understand it.  

What form of government is best, in your opinion?  

The BQ Question for 7/24/2020

I know this comes late, but I wanted to offer a few words for folks that might be interested in the topic tonight.

How does life stick each of us into roles we may or may not like to be stuck into?

Christopher Phillips tackles this question in Socrates Cafe, and I think there is a lot of latitude to discuss this, from positive and maybe negative angles. 

Hope to see you tonight!