John C. Wright's Journal

A reader with the angelic yet fiery name of Michael Brazier comments:

The technical term for this distinction in Aristotelian philosophy is immanent causation. This appears when a being acts of itself and for itself: the action originates with the being and is aimed at fulfilling the being’s nature and essence. So a human zygote assembled by an engineer from specific genetic sequences to produce specific traits in the eventual adult would be “designed” in the ordinary sense, but once he began to grow he would show immanent causation and thus not be a tool. And a person who loses important mental functions to brain damage doesn’t thereby become a tool; he still has some immanent causation as long as he’s still alive. He’s just a human who has lost his faculties.

The point is, I think, that if “artificial intelligence” means an intelligent being that isn’t based on organic chemistry, it’s logically conceivable, but such beings would have to be raised and educated much as humans are. If it means an intelligent artifact, a thing that’s programmed to think and be free, it’s a contradiction in terms.

In two paragraphs, Mr. Brazier explains what took me ten columns not to explain so clearly.

I lay my hand over my mouth.

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A last observation about the so-called Turing Test:

Asked about whether calculating machines could think, Alan Turing dismissed, rather than addressed, the question, saying that since “thought” was an entity science could not define, a more pragmatic and hence English way of muddling through the question would be to test empirically whether a calculating machine, for all practical purposes, could imitate the outward appearances or forms of thought.

The answer to this is both trivial and profoundly, if not vastly, uninteresting: of course calculating machine can perform calculations. That is what they are for.

Of course anything that can be reduced to a calculation can be performed by a calculation machine.

Whether or not holding a coherent conversation in English is one of those things, he does not answer nor address.

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The Cabinet of Wisdom

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Part VI
• Part VII
• Part VIII
• Part IX

PART X

 Final Questions about Finality

Nearly all the questions and objections raised to the foregoing are based on mischaracterizing what question is being discussed.

The questions of determinism and free will, while fascinating, are indifferent to this matter, as are questions of predictability and intentionality.

The question of whether or not mechanical men can spring to life, while silly, is likewise indifferent.

The question of the morality of enslaving robots designed to serve us is not only indifferent, it is a non-question.

The only question these columns sought to address was whether a self-aware thinking system, that is, a mechanical man, could be designed.

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The Cabinet of Wisdom

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Part VI
• Part VII
• Part VIII

PART IX

Emerging from the Emergent Property Argument

A frequent counter argument takes the form of a word fetish called ’emergent properties.’

The argument in some form, as best I understand it, runs as follows: the shape of the water molecule does not, for a single molecule, display the hexagonal crystalwork of a snowflake.

Nonetheless, the shape of the snowflake is a physical byproduct of the water molecule shape and the Van Der Waals forces adhering molecule to molecule. The snowflake geometry is an emergent property of the molecule shape.

Likewise, no one braincell, in isolation, is capable for thought, nor is a single letter (with the exception, in English, of I and O and A) able to form a word or sentence. But human thought is clearly the emergent property of many braincells acting in concert in the nervous system, and all sentences written in English, including this one, emerge from the combination of letter meaningless in themselves.

Therefore the mere fact that cogwheels or electronic circuits, in isolation, being inanimate and incapable of thought, cannot, by itself, justify the conclusion that electronic brains and artificial intelligence networks, with all parts acting in concert, do not, could not, and will never think as well as a human brain, possessing self-awareness and free will as much as any biological human.

Now, this argument, as far as it goes, is perfectly sound.
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The Cabinet of Wisdom

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Part VI
• Part VII

PART VIII

The Simple Error of the Argument from Complexity

There is one basic objection to the idea that non-self aware tools do not think, and it is expressed in two arguments. The first is the argument from complexity, and the second is the argument from emergent properties. Let us address the first and weaker one here, and the second in another column.

The argument from complexity, is the crux of the matter that causes so much woe and confusion.

A machine can mimic the motions produced by a man, when he is deliberately acting in a mechanical hence non-deliberate way, that is, he is plodding through a routine task limited to unambiguous options, as in a stack of Hexapawn matchboxes, a chessplaying cabinet, or a Chinese Room made by Fu Manchu that quotes Lao Tzu.

When his possible range of actions cannot be limited, he is not acting mechanically, and a machine cannot mimic him. This is because complex rote actions can be simplified into simpler rote actions, but unlimited, that is, undefinable actions, cannot be simplified into rote actions. See Goedel for details.
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The Cabinet of Wisdom

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Part VI

PART VII

Trapped in the Chinese Room

John Rogers Searle, professor of Philosophy at the University of California, once proposed the following thought experiment: suppose there is a locked room. Into the mail slot of the back door a Chinaman slips paper cards written in black ink in the Mandarin language, containing questions. Each time, from the mail slot of the front door emerges a card containing an answer written in vermillion ink.

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The Cabinet of Wisdom

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V

Part VI: Learning about Machine Learning

Hexapawn is a simple game, simple enough that the mathematician Martin Gardner used it in famous column from the March 1962 issue of Scientific American to explain the basics of what is called machine learning to the public.

Let us establish at the outset that machine learning is not learning nor anything like learning, any more than a bootprint in the snow is like the booted Mountaineer Mailman from Maine crossing a snowy field. “Machine learning” is the phrase used when a machine is designed with several possible outputs of several different priorities, such that prior test-runs have altered the current outputs or priorities.

But first, let us mention the greatest invention of mankind.
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The Cabinet of Wisdom

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV

Part V: Cheating on the Turing Test

Alan Turing’s famous test for machine intelligence is often misquoted and misunderstood: Turing proposed that since thinking was a concept difficult to define, it was vain to ask whether a machine could think, but, instead, we should ask whether a machine could mimic the patterns of outward behavior routinely associated with thinking.

Turing called this “the imitation game.”

He coyly steps aside from the question of whether a machine can be designed to think, but instead addresses whether it can be designed to mimic outward signs of thought convincingly.

Please note that Mr. Turing, or so one hopes, is himself thinking when he says that thinking is difficult to define, by which, or so one assumes, he means define empirically, by measurement. So he turns to memetic patterns illustrative of thought, as if this were clearer. Note the irony of being unable to define the obvious but willing to define the obscure.

His proposed outward behavior was holding a conversation.

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The Cabinet of Wisdom

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III

Part IV: Mind and Body

In our last episode, we asked whether, in the matter of romance, does indeed the outward material manifestations of the inward subjective experience of romantic love describe, define, or cause that love?

Can the one be reduced to the other, that is to say, described completely, described with no loss of meaning? Can the inward reality be reduced to the outward manifestation?

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The Cabinet of Wisdom

• Part I is found here.
• Part II is here.

Part III: True Love and True Man

Because this painfully obvious difference between man and mannequin, book and author, word and object, substance and shadow, is invisible to those mesmerized by modern secularism, allow me to use an extended example.

Let us use the example of romance, since the topic is one that concerns all men born of women.

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The Cabinet of Wisdom

Part I is found here. 

Part II Brain and Mind

For this essay, we should also distinguish brain from mind, which many of modern philosophers, due to the necromancy of modern secular mesmerism, apparently cannot.

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The Cabinet of Wisdom

Part I Metaphysics and Mechanical Men

I trust the patient reader will allow a lengthy discourse on the topic of the possibility or otherwise of artificial intelligence and mechanical men, for the discourse involves some of the most contentious and confusing concepts in philosophy: physics and metaphysics, mind and body, man and nature, necessity and volition, truth, validity, virtue. None of these concepts has failed to generate volumes of dispute across generations of history.

This essay will be published over days to come in parts, of which this first part deals only with preliminary matters, clarifying what the topic statement means, what metaphysical arguments are, and what it might mean to say a machine is a man.

Alas, such a discourse necessarily involves concepts which the student of modern philosophy is spectacularly ill-equipped to investigate, if not crippled.

I submit that Artificial Intelligence is absolutely impossible.

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