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.
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