Author's Introduction
- Computers don’t actually do anything. They don’t write, or play; they don’t even compute. Which doesn’t mean we can’t play with computers, or use them to invent, or make, or problem-solve. The new AI is unexpectedly reshaping ways of working and making, in the arts and sciences, in industry, and in warfare. We need to come to terms with the transformative promise and dangers of this new tech. But it ought to be possible to do so without succumbing to bogus claims about machine minds.
- What could ever lead us to take seriously the thought that these devices of our own invention might actually understand, and think, and feel, or that, if not now, then later, they might one day come to open their artificial eyes thus finally to behold a shiny world of their very own? One source might simply be the sense that, now unleashed, AI is beyond our control. Fast, microscopic, distributed and astronomically complex, it is hard to understand this tech, and it is tempting to imagine that it has power over us.
- But this is nothing new. The story of technology – from prehistory to now – has always been that of the ways we are entrained by the tools and systems that we ourselves have made. Think of the pathways we make by walking. To every tool there is a corresponding habit, that is, an automatised way of acting and being. From the humble pencil to the printing press to the internet, our human agency is enacted in part by the creation of social and technological landscapes that in turn transform what we can do, and so seem, or threaten, to govern and control us.
- Yet it is one thing to appreciate the ways we make and remake ourselves through the cultural transformation of our worlds via tool use and technology, and another to mystify dumb matter put to work by us. If there is intelligence in the vicinity of pencils, shoes, cigarette lighters, maps or calculators, it is the intelligence of their users and inventors. The digital is no different.
- But there is another origin of our impulse to concede mind to devices of our own invention, and this is what I focus on here: the tendency of some scientists to take for granted what can only be described as a wildly simplistic picture of human and animal cognitive life. They rely unchecked on one-sided, indeed, milquetoast conceptions of human activity, skill and cognitive accomplishment. The surreptitious substitution (to use a phrase of Edmund Husserl’s) of this thin gruel version of the mind at work – a substitution that I hope to convince you traces back to Alan Turing and the very origins of AI – is the decisive move in the conjuring trick.
- What scientists seem to have forgotten is that the human animal is a creature of disturbance. Or as the mid-20th-century philosopher of biology Hans Jonas wrote: ‘Irritability is the germ, and as it were the atom, of having a world…’ With us there is always, so to speak, a pebble in the shoe. And this is what moves us, turns us, orients us to reorient ourselves, to do things differently, so that we might carry on. It is irritation and disorientation that is the source of our concern. In the absence of disturbance, there is nothing: no language, no games, no goals, no tasks, no world, no care, and so, yes, no consciousness.
Author's Conclusion
- The telling fact: computers are used to play our games; they are engineered to make moves in the spaces opened up by our concerns. They don’t have concerns of their own, and they make no new games. They invent no new language.
- The British philosopher R G Collingwood noticed that the painter doesn’t invent painting, and the musician doesn’t invent the musical culture in which they find themselves. And for Collingwood this served to show that no person is fully autonomous, a God-like fount of creativity; we are always to some degree recyclers and samplers and, at our best, participants in something larger than ourselves.
- But this should not be taken to show that we become what we are (painters, musicians, speakers) by doing what, for example, LLMs do – ie, merely by getting trained up on large data sets. Humans aren’t trained up. We have experience. We learn. And for us, learning a language, for example, isn’t learning to generate ‘the next token’. It’s learning to work, play, eat, love, flirt, dance, fight, pray, manipulate, negotiate, pretend, invent and think. And crucially, we don’t merely incorporate what we learn and carry on; we always resist. Our values are always problematic. We are not merely word-generators. We are makers of meaning.
- We can’t help doing this; no computer can do this.
Author Narrative
- Alva Noë is professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also department chair. His books include Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (2015) and The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are (2023).
Notes
- I read this paper a couple of months ago and now can't remember the detailed argument. So. I need to re-read the paper before commenting in detail.
- However, I remember disliking the overall thesis. Well, maybe not the thesis but the argument. It's popular to bash AI despite all its rapid advances. Probably best to wait a few years to get a more balanced view. The 'promisorry notes' are dated only a few years in the future, rather than decades as has been the case until the ChatGPT revolution. And there's Quantum Computing in the wings.
- The suggestion that 'resistance' is central to thought is just one philosopher's intuition. It seems absurd to me, and suggesting that it's impossible for machines to 'resist' runs in the face of much SciFi which - while hardly authoritative - shows that other views are conceivable.
- But I'd agree that AI-enabled machines are just tools for us to use to remove another layer of drudgery and repetitive work and free us up to do more interesting things. Just like the first few waves of computers did.
- After re-reading this Paper, I ought to read "Noe (Alva) - Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness".
- There are 29 Aeon Comments, mostly supportive, mostly confused. Some are cynical rants - claiming that all the AI developers are after is your money or to acquire cheaper slaves. The Comments do, however, require closer reading.
- This relates to my Notes on Computers, Mind, Thought ... and probably others.
Comment:
- Sub-Title: "For all the promise and dangers of AI, computers plainly can’t think. To think is to resist – something no machine does"
- For the full text see Aeon: Noe - Rage against the machine.
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