The Language Instinct

The best summary of the Language Instinct I found in another Pinker book, The Blank Slate:

"Language is based on a combinatorial grammar designed to communicate an unlimited number of thoughts. It is utilized by people in real time via an interplay of memory lookup and rule application. It is implemented in a network of regions in the center of the left cerebral hemisphere that must coordinate memory, planning, word meaning, and grammar. It develops in the first three years of life in a sequence from babbling to words to word combinations, including errors in which rules may be overapplied. It evolved through modifications of a vocal tract and brain circuitry that had other uses in earlier primates, because the modifications allowed our ancestors to prosper in a socially interconnected, knowledge-rich lifestyle."

What Pinker does is present Noam Chomsky's revolutionary theory of deep grammar as an evolved adaptation of the species. Chomsky was skeptical that universal grammar could be explained by the process of natural selection, and so that is where this book takes off: to match cognitive linguistics to the Neo-Darwinian paradigm.

Chomsky's theory is that language has an innate structure in the mind, like a computer has built in hardware. Though languages may differ in gender pronouns or the order of noun to verb, all languages have a universal structure. Latin has gendered pronouns compared to English, but whether pronouns are gendered or not is a reality all languages have. Every language has a noun phrase and a verb phrase regardless of the word order.  "Pigs fly" is about a simple sentence as one can get; pigs is the noun phrase and fly is the verb phrase. Also universal is the auxiliary which tells something about the relation of noun and verb. "Pigs don't fly." The auxiliary is parallel to the copula in logic (are, are not): ScP. The auxiliary belongs to the noun phrase. In every language there is an object an action, just as in logic there is a subject, a copula and a predicate.

This fundamental division of language and logic into the relation of noun-verb and subject-predicate is related to the perception of the world into space and time. Things can be separated into objects which persist in time in different spaces and do different things in particular times and places. This is advantageous for the survival of the species.

"It's a jungle out there, and the organism designed to make successful predictions about what is going to happen next will leave behind more babies designed just like it. Slicing space-time into objects and actions is an eminently sensible way to make predictions given the way the world is put together...Look away, and the rabbit still exists."

There are two rules used to convey meaning: Saussure's arbitrariness of the sign which pairs sound with conventional meaning and Wilhelm Von Humboldt´s "language makes infinite use of finite media." A sign can stand for just about anything, and the combination of words with recursion, reuse of phrases, can produce seemingly infinite words with different meanings.

"The way language works, then, is that each person's brain contains a lexicon of words and the concepts they stand for (a mental dictionary) and a set of rules that combine the words to convey relationships among concepts (a mental grammar)."

Pinker criticizes the influential Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of: that language determines or is necessary for any conscious awareness. It would be strange if animals had no awareness at all. From an evolutionary standpoint this is absurd as humans evolved from a non speaking common ancestor. The hard version of Sapir-Whorf is linguistic determinism, the weak version is linguistic relativity that language shapes our perception. Infants and animals exhibit a basic cognitive ability to differentiate things. The claims Sapir-Whorf relies on are reports of languages which lack words for certain colors. What experiments show, in particular the one by Elizabeth Rosch with the Dani people,  is that people are able to understand a color in relation to ones they have words for. As Pinker says, it would be incredulous that language could alter what the physiological senses give us, and rewire the cones, rods, and retina of our eyes. Language is an adaptation itself rooted in physiology, though I think sentient awareness is a different thing than self-consciousness which requires language.

"Though most common words have many meaning, few meanings have more than one word. That is, homonyms are plentiful, synonyms rare."

This goes to dissuade fears of a George Orwell 1984 future where language is used to alter people´s perception of reality. In his famous essay Politics and the English Language Orwell argued that totalitarian regimes justified their actions by debasing language into simple emotional phrases that are either totally positive or totally negative. Ideas can be condensed into unambiguous phrases and ideally into single words which will invert the natural human suspicion of power into total submission, like Miniluv for the ministry of love which tortures people. While this may be a more effective means of state communication and propaganda, it isn´t going to destroy our perception of reality.

"The twenty first century toddler may be Winston Smith's revenge."

Several organs are used in the production of speech: the vocal cords, the trachea, the tongue and the mouth. Air leaves the lungs through the trachea (windpipe) which opens into the larynx (voice box, visible as the Adam's apple). The larynx is a valve with an opening covered by two flaps of muscle tissue called vocal cords but really are vocal folds. The frequency of vocal folds opening and closing determines pitch. Our brains process language in the left hemisphere: Wernicke's area is associated with language understanding and Broca's area is associated with production of language. Language production usually begins at age one, word combination at one and a half, and fluent grammatical sentences at two or three. Infants can already distinguish between sounds and have a basic mental language, ¨mentalese.¨

We think with representations, not just with a particular language. "People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought...There must be extra paraphernalia that differentiate logically distinct kinds of concepts." "People without a language would still have mentalese", like non-human animals and infants do.¨

From Karen Wynn´s experiments we see that five month infants can do simple mental arithmetic: show a baby a bunch of objects long enough and the baby gets bored and looks away; change the scene and the baby notices the difference and is interested. Five day old babies are also sensitive to number, they notice if when screen removed and more objects are there such as when two Mickey Mouse dolls is placed behind a curtain and notice if the second one taken away. Given these abilities and others also observed in animals we see it is possible to have mental software which can build towards language comprehension and production.

For language to be an instinct, there needs to be credible evolutionary mechanisms. BF Skinner whose view of language was opposite Chomsky said that instinct just means what we haven't found an explanation for. Instinct for Pinker means innate, having a basis in our biology and shared by all humans in normal course of development. Natural selection requires different forms of language which can be selected from. Proto-languages would include chimp signing, pidgin, child language in two word stage, and partial language of children raised by children. "The languages of children, pidgin speakers, immigrants, tourists, aphasics, telegrams, and headlines show that there is a vast continuum of viable language systems varying in efficiency and expressive power, exactly what the theory of natural selection requires." Pidgin is a language formed by speakers of different languages, and aphasia is damage to the left brain hemisphere which impairs language.

One must be careful with speculations for how language began, otherwise we end up with just-so stories which may be useful and entertaining but lack proof. Pinker mentions the Throwing Madonna hypothesis that the reason why most people are right-handed is because prehistoric mothers held their babies with their left arm to calm them with the heartbeat, and so the right hand was free to throw stones at small game. These women survived and passed on their genes, by both pacifying their fussy babies and contributing to the hunt. It´s a fascinating story but its hard to imagine how to prove this is the reason why most people around the world are right-handed and left brain dominant. Such stories tend to discredit evolutionary psychology in the minds of critics, so we can come up with scenarios for how language could evolve but it is better to search for data.

The language mutant baby could have had siblings to talk to, and other family members would have had other more primitive means of communication, which would have given an advantage to the language mutants. Pinker does think language serves important services for our survival against the environment and in social life. "If contemporary hunter gatherers are any guide, our ancestors were not grunting cave men with little more to talk about than which mastodon to avoid. Hunter gatherers are accomplished toolmakers and superb amateur biologists with detailed knowledge of the life cycles, ecology, and behavior of the plants and animals they depend on. Language would surely have been useful in anything resembling such a lifestyle...People everywhere depend on cooperative efforts for survival, forming alliances by exchanging information and commitments."

I think sexual selection could also have been a mechanism. Sexual selection occurs when males compete with other males for females and the females choose who to mate with. The selection process is about what can signal greater fitness, in terms of resource provision among other things. The book The Mating Mind argues that intelligence evolved this way by sexual selection as an ornament to impress females like the feathers of the male peacock. Much of our intellect is not about struggling against the environment and definitely doesn´t reflect reality, but demonstrates our ability to expend energy and time to such superfluous activities like a handicap.

Keep in mind that written language is not an instinct. Written language is a late development in human history and is not universal. This is why reading disorders like dyslexia are with us even in our literate societies. Alphabets don't correspond to sounds, at best they correspond to the phonemes of the mental dictionary. Foreigners can usually spell better than they pronounce, as according to Bernard Shaw fish can be spelled as ghoti.

Just because language is an instinct doesn't make it not special, just as the fact that birds are designed to fly doesn't make the feat less impressive. The big takeaway of The Language Instinct is language is a universal human adaptation with a basis in biology and evolution. No matter how different various human languages are, they share basic structure. This means accepting that there is such a thing as an objective human nature that has something to do with biology and evolution. This belief may be politically incorrect for some people, but it also means on a fundamental level we are the same and can understand one another. 

I also take away from The Language Instinct that folk language, like folk psychology, isn´t really wrong or useless. Of course it often is wrong from a scientific point of view and science does require precise technical language, but for the purpose of communication mentalese is fine. This was Ludwig Wittgenstein´s insight: that the nature of language is public, and so we can understand one another without a technically precise or scientific language so long as there is an agreed upon meaning of words in a language community.

Organic Repression/The First Repressions

(Read this too)

"One may suppose that the founding of families was in some way connected with the period when the need for genital satisfaction, no longer appearing like an occasional guest who turns up suddenly and then vanishes without letting one hear anything of him for long intervals, had settled down with each man like a permanent lodger. When this happened, the male acquired a motive for keeping the female, or rather, his sexual objects, near him; while the female, who wanted not to be separated from her helpless young, in their interests, too, had to stay by the stronger male." Freud Civilization & Its Discontents

Sigmund Freud's general theory throughout Civilization and its Discontents is that society is the result of repression. The drives of the individual are incompatible with the needs of the group, and even when repressed do not go away. Society must provide channels for these instincts, but in a disguised way. Sublimation becomes the most productive defense against individual desire and aggression. This is familiar to us post-Victorians who see ourselves as liberated from such a society. But if repression does have an organic basis rather than just cultural, and it does, we shall not be rid of the need of such mechanisms.

What Freud thought was that there was a physiological as well as psychological reason for greater male-female attachment. This was the increasing dominance of the sense of sight over the other senses of sound and smell. In most mammals sound and smell are very strong, stronger than in humans. Primates, our mammalian relatives, rely more on sight than sound to navigate three dimensional arboreal environments. The change to bipedalism intensified the reliance on vision and diminished the importance of other senses.

The first repressions would emerge organically from this great transition to bipedal stature. Being on two legs meant that genitals are on full display. While of course it´s also true that among all animals genitals are visible, being hunched over on all fours obscures them more than upright gait, which is like permanently showing the underside. With continuous sexual receptivity, along with the dominance of vision, the sight of genitals created greater feelings of male jealousy

"The diminution in importance of olfactory stimuli seems itself, however, to be a consequence of man’’s erecting himself from the earth, of his adoption of an upright gait, which made his genitals, that before had been covered, visible and in need of protection and so evoked feelings of shame. Man’’s erect posture, therefore, would represent the beginning of the momentous process of cultural evolution. The chain of development would run from this onward, through the diminution in the importance of olfactory stimuli and the isolation of women at their periods, to a time when visual stimuli became paramount, the genitals became visible, further till sexual excitation became constant and the family was founded, and so to the threshold of human culture. This is only a theoretical speculation, but it is important enough to be worth checking carefully by the conditions obtaining among the animals closely allied to man."
Shame at the sight of genitals and a desire to limit sexual expression to facilitate social harmony is among the first social repressions. These facts of our upright posture, visible genitals, and continual receptivity are probably why the wearing of clothing became universal, besides aesthetic/cultural reasons. All of this is presupposed by the domination of the optical sense above the olfactory due to our primate past. The shame of being naked is not truly social however. We are still fine being nude in particular situations of privacy and intimacy. It is only in the presence of others we are not sexually intimate with that there is a sense of shame, the reaction is immediate and unconscious and sexual in nature. There is more to do with instinct and physiology than intersubjectivity.

An even greater and more general reason for repression resulting from the dominance of sight over smell and hearing would be from the very nature of the senses. It is much easier to avoid/block seeing something than it is to ignore smell or sounds. One can turn one's head, close one's eyes, or fixate on something else in the vicinity to avoid offending stimuli. But say loud music is harder to avoid. Even more contentious is foul odor. 

Freud connected the change from quadruped to biped to the anal stage of psychosexual development.

"the notion was linked to the changed part played by sensations of smell: upright walking, nose raised from the ground, at the same time a number of formerly interesting sensations attached to the earth becoming repulsive...The outcome, however, is not a release of libido but of an unpleasure, and eternal sensation analogous to disgust in the case of an object." Freud letter to Wilhelm Fliess 1897

We are much more comfortable saying today that one can look how they want than we are prepared to allow someone to smell how they want. The sight of an unkempt home with an overgrown lawn may depress housing prices for others, but it is only the external appearance that would have to be changed to solve this problem. Within a defined territory one is free to do they please, not in view. Various legal doctrines such as plain view make it clear that illicit behavior if visible is not protected.

The Law of Battle: Seeing the Primal Horde in Darwin

Charles Darwin Descent of Man 1871:

"The primeval man aboriginally lived in small communities, each with as many wives as he could support and obtain, whom he would have jealously guarded against other men."

Sigmund Freud Totem & Taboo 1913:

"Darwin deduced from the habits of the higher apes that men, too, originally lived in comparatively small groups or hordes within which the jealousy of the oldest and strongest male prevented sexual promiscuity."

"One day, the brothers who had been driven out, came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end to the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually."

"What had up to then been prevented by his actual existence was thenceforward prohibited by the sons themselves, in accordance with the psychological procedure so familiar to us in psychoanalysis under the name of 'deferred obedience.'"

"Repetition and commutation of the memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things-of social organization, of moral restrictions, and of religion."

The theory of the primal horde as the original "social" organization depends on the logic of sexual selection as opposed to natural selection: males compete with one another of the same species for the choice of females to be sexual partners.

"This form of selection depends, not on a struggle for existence in relation to other organic beings or to external conditions, but on a struggle between the individuals of one sex, generally the males, for the possession of the other sex. The result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring. Sexual selection is, therefore, less rigorous than natural selection. Generally, the most vigorous males, those which are best fitted for their places in nature, will leave most progeny. But in many cases, victory depends not so much on general vigor, as on having special weapons, confined to the male sex...How low in the scale of nature the law of battle descends, I know not...The war is, perhaps, severest between the males of polygamous animals, and these seem oftenest provided with special weapons." Darwin Origin of Species 1859

Bird sexual competition more peaceful, and most birds are monogamous. "Amongst birds, the contest is often of a more peaceful character. All those who have attended to the subject, believe that there is the severest rivalry between the males of many species to attract, by singing, the females."

If humans did descend from small polygamous patriarchies, then there should be lingering differences in the size of men and women, called sexual dimorphism. "The war is, perhaps, severest between the males of polygamous animals, and these seem oftenest provided with special weapons." Because the alpha male gets primary reproductive access to all the females, competition among males is fierce as the loser doesn't get to continue their genes.

For the evidence for human polygamy, see my review of David Barash´s Out of Eden. I do think it is plausible that humans share an ancestor who was polygamous.

The primal horde isn't a true society, it isn't "eusocial" in the way ant, termite, or bee societies are. An expression in sociobiology by Michael Tomasello is "you will never see two chimps carrying a log." Most animals, even most insects, do not practice true altruism, sacrificing their own lives for the good of the group. Most observed altruism is either towards kin who share the genes of the individual or is reciprocal altruism, helping someone in return for the expectation of individual benefit. Chimps will call out when a food source is found, but they don't share the food they find.

“In a typical primate group, the toughest individuals can have their way and dominate everybody else in the group,” said Dr. E.O Wilson. “Chimps are very smart, but their intelligence is predicated on distrust.”

There are additional elements which make the human primal horde different than the harems of gorillas, to exacerbate the extreme jealousy of both the patriarchal alpha male who restricts all sexual access to the beta males, and the hurt feelings of beta males who are so attached to the females and resentful of the ubermensch. The most important is the long time it takes for humans to mature, which means greater physical and mental dependency on others. In particular the dependency is greater towards the mother. Paternity uncertainty means that a mother knows a child is hers since she gave birth, whereas a father doesn´t always know for sure.

The dissolution of the primal horde comes when the brothers identify with the role of the father and with each other, as equal partners, willing to execute the father and take his role together. This change in social consciousness, away from brute individualism, occurs when our ancestors left behind the primate diet of fruit, nuts and roots and became omnivores. See my reviews of The Naked Ape and The Hunting Hypothesis. 

The Eye Is The Window of the Soul: Videodrome, The Renaissance, And Capitalism

1983 film Videodrome. Barry Convex the head of Spectacular Optical Corporation, which develops eyeglasses and NATO weapons technology, is giving a speech to unveil a new line of glasses, the Medici line. The theme of the event is the Renaissance, the backdrop consists of the Michelangelo fresco The Creation of Adam and in front of the fresco a giant pair of glasses with stain glass windows for the lenses. There are two quotes on each side.

Barry Convex tells the audience "we're here to celebrate our spring collection - the Medici line. And our theme for this year is based on two quotes from the famous Renaissance statesman and patron of the arts Lorenzo de Medici. 'Love comes in at the eye', and 'The eye is the window of the soul'."

The first quote according to website TV tropes isn't from Lorenzo de Medici but a William Butler Yeats poem A Drinking Song. The second quote is commonly attributed to Lorenzo, but a similar quote appears in the New Testament:

Jesus “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness.” Matthew 6:22&23

Convex' plan in Videodrome is to use televised transmission of snuff torture to induce tumors in the brains of those who watch. This will eliminate the undesirable reprobates of the population. Convex's organization plans to use the violence and sexuality of modern media to further right wing ends using new technology.

"North America is getting soft, patrón, and the rest of the world is getting tough. Very, very tough. We're entering savage new times and we're going to have to be pure and direct... and strong... if we're going to survive them. Now, you and this... cesspool you call a television station... and your people who wallow around in it and your viewers... who watch you do it... you're rotting us away from the inside. We intend to stop that rot. We're going to start with Channel 83. We'll use it for our first transmissions of Videodrome."

Though a petty capitalist Renn´s product, the softcore porn/hardcore violence channel 83, is in conflict with the bourgeois moral values which gave rise to capitalism, and therefore must be destroyed. The continuing competitive pressures and international scope of capitalism make this necessary. The ideology of Convex and company is the bourgeois morality of capitalism. Convex has an outwardly friendly and clean exterior even while he is a ruthless businessman with little sympathy for his potential viewers. That his company produces eyeglasses for the third world and weapon technology for NATO attests to this.

The way to save bourgeois society is to manipulate the new technology to destroy the body through the visual stimulation of television. The new flesh which Max Renn commits to is polymorphically perverse, making the entire body and its technological extensions an erogenous zone.

What struck me recently was that the Renaissance getup of Convex's trade show was intentional. Recently it dawned on me, the Renaissance was the beginning of capitalism. The Renaissance is the aesthetic of capitalism.

Much is made of the influence of Protestantism on the spirit of capitalism, but Protestantism was more ascetic than aesthetic in its attitude toward enjoyment in life. The work ethic Max Weber described was built on self-denial of the fruits of one's labor for the value of the labor itself. Nevertheless Protestantism is very worldly in its attitude towards the world, making wealth a sign of god's favor rather than the church hierarchy.

It was the Renaissance that first brought back an interest in the human body, in the world itself after the Middle Ages. But the interest way only in certain aspects of the body and he world. The printed word from the movable type led to the dominance of the individual's vision, reproduced on a mass scale to give individual authorship. Eyeglasses and weapons technology.

I know the connection between Convex and the Renaissance was intentional in Videodrome. David Cronenberg was influenced by media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who was his college professor at the University of Toronto.

McLuhan's is known for two phrases, "the medium is the message" and "the global village." McLuhan wrote about the telecommunications and the effect it would have on society before the Internet really existed. His big idea is that technology is an extension of the body. Certain technologies empower sense organs in different ways and this has a major effect on the kind of society we have.

"The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media."

The written word activates only the visual sense, in a linear fashion as one's eyes cross the page. The authorship is clear and the words are mass produced so everybody experiences the same reality. Television activates hearing as well as the visual sense, making the experience very different. This was exemplified in the Nixon Kennedy debate in 1960 which was the first to be televised. Those who listened on radio thought Nixon did better while those who watched television thought Kennedy did better, with his tan rested posture compared to Nixon sweating under his make up (though I'm not sure how visible this was on old black & white screens...).

Telecommunications like television, film, and later the Internet McLuhan predicted make linear narrative and individual authorship more complicated and difficult. We are not captive to the author's telling of events as our eyes move across the page. Television provides an uninterrupted stream broken up by commercials which can be very different than the program. With sound movies and television we can take in media through several senses which enter our thoughts even if we're not paying direct attention. Sound is harder to isolate a single space. Video games make the tactile sense active in our enjoyment of media.

Now with social media we interact with the content we consume. Also the new media invades our lives in new ways which can't be isolated from our personal lives.

"The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions— the patterns of mechanistic technologies—are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank—that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early "mistakes."

The mindset of Max Renn who runs the softcore porn/hardcore violence channel 83 is still within that of the old technology, the old flesh. Max defends his programming as being a harmless cathartic outlet for desire and aggression as opposed to real life sex violence. "Better on TV than in the streets." Max comes in conflict with this view as he searches for harder new material, which he finds in Videodrome. Supposedly from Malaysia, the signal changes the body of the viewer by inducing a brain tumor. Max's own perception of reality alters and objects like a gun and a videotape become part of his body. Max comes to accept his role as social revolutionary when he points his gun-hand to his head and following what played before him on the television proceeds to shoot himself in the temple.

¨Long live the new flesh.¨

Science, Immortality, Head Transplants, Cryonics and the Like

“But is it, conceptually, possible? Probably not. The body doesn’t really work on electricity. It mostly works on chemical energy, generated by enzymes in the process of breaking down sugars. Nerve cells manage to transmit messages across the body via electrical impulses, which is probably what you’re thinking of.

“Contrary to your statement, DNA isn’t eternal. There are certain types of enzymes in the body, called DNAases, that chop DNA up into little tiny bits. They defend the body against inappropriate DNA activities. Your DNA is usually kept safe inside the nucleus of the cell (think of it as the Bastille), where there are no DNAases. But maintaining that sort of barrier takes energy, which your cells get from sugar. And they get sugar from your blood, which gets to your cells ‘cause your heart pumps it there.
Starting to get the picture? You die, heart stops, blood flow stops, cells run out of energy, and things fall apart. The walls of the Bastille come tumbling down, and in come the DNAases, with pitchforks and torches, and they lynch your DNA, chopping it up into tiny bits. This is also why you aren’t going to visit Jurassic Park any time soon.”

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1869/would-frankensteins-monster-be-possible-today

It’s been nearly two hundred years since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein came out. Her book popularized the reanimation of the dead in fiction, but the purpose of the story is cautionary. It was written during the romantic era as a sort of broadside against Faustian attempts to become godlike using science, to unlock the ultimate mystery of the production of life.

Shelley described the process Victor Frankenstein used for reanimation as galvanism. Galvani’s theory was that the life force was electricity. Passing electricity through a dead body made it reflex, the frog legs kicking from an electrical charge. The 1930s film depicted Doctor Frankenstein using lightning to bring the monster to life. Galvani did public demonstrations of his theory, famously with a dead man who opened his eyes to the horror of the crowd.

The body doesn’t actually work on electricity however. Life is actually a chemical process, of breaking down sugars with enzymes. The nervous system however does operate with electricity, which is what Galvani’s experiments demonstrated. So we can’t do what Victor did in the book and the movie and get the same results.

There are other proposed means of reanimation of dead matter. The most “popular” for those who want to be reanimated and have a lot of money is cryonic freezing, in which the body is frozen to an inanimate state to be unfrozen in the future. Some organisms, like the frog can be revitalized after being frozen. Nobody yet however has been unfrozen from a cryonic chamber, so it remains to be seen.

A more plausible means of extending life, though not reanimation, is through the transplant of vital organs, particularly the brain. No successful human brain transplant has been performed, but that may change. In 2017, Italian surgeon Canavera will attempt a head transplant with a Russian programmer who has a debilitating body disease.

I think that such attempts at immortality are doomed to failure. We can only learn by copying nature which exists independently and is more powerful than us. Whatever we produce is secondary to nature. The reality is that the good is determined by limits. Human nature determines what activity leads to flourishing. Our physical existence imposes certain demands on us which constrain us to certain ends, which are the standard of excellence. This is a fundamentally Aristotelian view, though more limited, which is supported by scientific realism. Health is good, friendship, love, learning, and recreation are all good in moderation.

Artificial Intelligence:Rethinking Human Nature

Evolutionary theory has rendered the non-sensibility of animals absurd. We are related to these animals from a common ancestor, and since we have feelings why shouldn’t they?

Artificial intelligence has rendered reasoning so far as we can model it as not uniquely human. What makes human thought unique is the subjective (qualia), the introspective, willing, desiring, thinking, choosing, questioning. And really the intentionality of machines is really derived from us intentional beings. Does acting intelligent equate true intelligence as we know it? No. Artificial intelligence could be just that, artificial.

The fourfold critique of strong AI:
Gödel impossibility theorem of representing all statements in a single logical system.
The Chinese Room thought experiment which denies semantical understanding through syntactical understanding.
Mary’s Room. There is knowledge which cannot be found through physical knowledge.
Multiple realizability of mental states and second order identity theory. Basically the problem of induction establishing a necessary relationship as well as identity, as mental functions may be performed by different states of matter. collapse of straight identity of mind with brain

Nevertheless, it seems that what makes humans unique in the universe as Aristotle’s zoon logikon, the rational animal, is the conjunction of rationality and animality. It seems to be what we share with animals, some sort of subjective awareness, that is harder to explain than how reasoning works.

And of course our reasoning is not separate from our emotional functioning. See my review of The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt:
“The philosophers preceded the cognitive psychologists and so their views still set the debate today. A very popular view has been that reason is separate from emotional functioning, which has its adherents from Plato to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s metaphor was that of the two consuls of the Roman Republic who shared duties domestically and outside the country.

“This view has been undercut by neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio who point toward two pieces of evidence. 1) brain damage to the prefrontal cortex affects emotional functioning. This was demonstrated by railroad worker Phineas Gage in the 19th century who was struck by a railroad spike in his left frontal cortex. He survived with his memory and intelligence intact but his behavior radically changed. He became more impulse and obstinate to the point where he was fired. 2) Split brain operations reveal how stimuli from one half affects the operation of the other half. The left half of the brain is involved in language and abstract reasoning and the right half is involved in spatial and recognition tasks. If a word is flashed to the left eye (controlled by the right hemisphere) the left side of the body (controlled by the left hemisphere) can act without any conscious awareness.

“Even more evidence against the separation of reason and emotion came from behavioral economics. The work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the late 1970s challenged rational choice models of decision making with bounded rationality. Individuals make shortcuts to decision making called heuristics, rules of thumb. Humans are cognitive misers, meaning they economize their own expenditure of reasoning and available data to patterns of thinking which are familiar. A common heuristic is availability: a preference for information readily available is preferred to what isn’t. Heuristics are essentially intuitive and not rational and yet are a regular part of mental functioning.”

David Hume won the debate.

I checked out two years ago or so Edward Feser’s Philosophy of Mind: A Beginner’s Guide again to read the parts I didn’t finish about intentionality when I read the chapter on consciousness which I also missed (I really just wanted the bare basics).

Feser suggests that consciousness in terms of feeling is actually harder nowadays to explain than reason is, at least for the materialists. The intro said that what we share with animals, the capacity to feel, is what makes us unique from material automatons. A position Feser said Aristotle would find very strange. For thousands of years the mystery of human nature has been that we are the only species capable of language, manipulating symbols to represent something outside of our immediate environment.

This mystery began to unravel after Darwin, after all some of the primates have some means of communication and complex behavior. Since we evolved from a common ancestor ape, our intelligence should be able to be explained in evolutionary terms. And in fact this is what evolutionary psychology and neuroscience have been excelling at the last 20-30 years. There are now very plausible theories explaining how intelligence evolved. One is Machiavellian, that a big brain allows us to deceive others and predict their actions to control them to enhance our survival, particularly of our genes. Another one which I learned in a class called The Evolution of Mating Behavior is that human intelligence is the product of sexual selection. Being intelligent signals fitness, as having a big brain and intelligence is physically demanding, which would help males compete with other males for sexual access to females, who in turn would become more intelligent to recognize it in men. I think that the mechanism for this would be increasing parental investment in offspring from the male side and increasing female choice. In any case, the evolution of intelligence is most likely due to functioning in social groups.

That our minds differ in degree from the apes still bothers people. That there isn’t an absolute barrier between human beings and animals as we exist under the same laws and share common ancestry, even though we are qualitatively different. But it is artificial intelligence that worries me, and I think a good number of other people, because it suggests that what has been thought to be the mark of human uniqueness can be imitated by inorganic automatons. Darwin’s theories began and ended with organisms, describing how they branched off to the diversity of life we see today. It’s the field of psychology, a rather young field, that is relevant to the state of consciousness with artificial intelligence.

David Hume figured this out centuries ago.
“Man is a reasonable being, and as such he gets appropriate food and nourishment from the pursuit of knowledge; but so narrow are the limits of human understanding that we can’t hope for any great amount of knowledge or for much security in respect of what we do know…It seems, then, that nature has pointed out a mixed kind of life as most suitable for the human race, and has secretly warned us not to tilt too far in any of these directions and make ourselves incapable of other occupations and entertainments…Be a philosopher, but amidst all your philosophy be still a man.’

Hume also knew that learning is an organic process, not like a Turing computer going by logical steps but constantly adjusting itself by trial and error.

Most importantly,
"our wonder will perhaps cease or diminish when we consider that the reasoning from experience which we share with the beasts, and on which the whole conduct of life depends, is itself nothing but a sort of instinct or mechanical power that acts in us without our knowing it, and in its chief operations isn’t directed by any such relations or comparisons of ideas as are the proper objects of our intellectual faculties.”

Artificial intelligence will succeed because it is artificial, it mimics the behaviors that go into performing tasks. But what tasks ought to be performed and why and for whom is largely unknown to us in conscious and especially reflective life. It turns out that our commonality with animals is what is most important for us.

Hume’s philosophy is the refuge for skeptics. Hume argued basically that causal knowledge cannot give us necessary/certain knowledge about different things. If thinking comes to be completely logical, there will be a gap between fact and value.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason

Causality is known to philosophers as the principle of sufficient reason, that everything has a reason or cause for its existence, from nothing nothing comes. A reason is sufficient as opposed to necessary if no other cause is needed for explanation (see necessary vs sufficient conditions logic). The only sufficient reason for all things is that they must have a reason, hence the name. The PSR is a law of thought along with identity, noncontradiction and the excluded middle. 

The PSR has several classes of causes such as Aristotle's four causes: 

Material- what the cause is made of. "Wood." 

Final- the end or purpose to which a cause occurs. "Write on"

Formal- what is the essence, nature, of the cause. "Rectangle."

Efficient- what brought the cause into existence. "Carpenter." 

Together we get the causes of "table."

There are also four different roots of the PSR which relate to Aristotle's causes from by Arthur Schopenhauer which distinguish valid uses for phenomena as opposed to objects (Kant): 

Becoming (material) - physical cause and effect

Knowing (final) - representation of causal relationships

Being (formal) - relation of representations

Acting (efficient) - internal motivation of causal agent

Schopenhauer's roots, I think, also relate to the four basic laws of thought.

1) Law of Identity- Becoming- Material

2) Noncontradiction- Knowing- Final

3) Law of the Excluded Middle- Being- Formal 

4) Principle of Sufficient Reason- Acting- Efficient 

Gottfried Leibniz came up with the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic relations from his pioneering predicate logic, as opposed to Aristotle's syllogisms. A subject either contains its predicate or is predicated of another subject. If a predicate is contained in the subject, its existence is necessary, if the predicate is contained in another subject, its existence is contingent, dependent on the existence of something else. A necessary being is self-caused, causa sui, and a contingent being is caused by something else. Thus there are two fundamental sufficient reasons. Reason is different from cause, the former intrinsic to something's nature and the latter intrinsic. Leibniz used this distinction to criticize the mechanical philosophy 

For the purpose of conducting science, efficient causality applied to the phenomena of becoming (being individuated in time and space) is the most appropriate.  

Nowadays in science causal language is used more carefully. The mantra is correlation does not equal causation, thanks to Hume's skeptical doubts about induction. Instead of cause and effect we have an independent variable and a dependent variable. The DV is supposed to be changed in the presence of the IV, and the IV isn't. A causal relationship is a "change in the IV means a change in the DV." Causality as distinguished from correlation is a logical argument, giving some reason for a relationship between the variables. 

“[A]ll causes are of the same kind, and that in particular there is no foundation for that distinction, which we sometimes make betwixt efficient causes, and formal, and material … and final causes” (Treatise of Human Nature, I.iii.14)