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  • Luis Rosa 12:50 pm on February 22, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Adam robot, human mind, mental states, robot scientist, robotics, , scientific discovery   

    What robots can and cannot be? (Part 1) 

    Have you ever heard about a scientist called just “Adam”? As far as I know, he wrote no papers, but at the same time he made a scientific discovery about yeast genes. Adam isn’t human – Adam is a robot designed to do scientific works, such as surveying hypotheses and doing experiments.

    Who tells us is Ross D. King, from the Scientific American. He is concerned with building a robot scientist and with understanding science itself. The robot were developed by computational biology, and is a laboratory robot. Without humans manipulating input data, Adam is able to test hypotheses at the laboratory by means of independent experiments. He is actually working at the Aberystwyth University.

    I think this whole achievement is marvelous and exciting – and that this really can help us understand scientific work and scientific theories themselves. But now we could ask: is it possible for a robot to be a scientist? We will have a major philosophical problem if we take the following thesis as true:

    A) If x is a scientist, then x has mental states

    Why? Because the harder question is answering if it is possible to devise a cognitive mechanism capable of having mental states – we even don’t know exactly what is a mental state! And if (A) is true, prior to answering the question if it is possible for a robot to be a scientist, we must answer if it is possible for a robot to have mental states – or to have a mind. Now, what do you think?

     

    (Comic found here: http://www.bcs-sgai.org/micomp2/2006entries.html)

     

    • Chris 3:45 pm on February 22, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      I think that (A) is a false statement. If “being a scientist” means “doing scientific research and scientific achievements”, there does not need to be mental states. we can think of the scientist, in the wider sense, as a cognitive system manipulating certain kind of data and verifying hypotheses. This system need not be conscious of his own cognitive activity.

      • CD-4 7:34 pm on February 26, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        but having mental states is not fully analyzed by “being conscious of his own cognitive activity”. certainly, there are mental states whithout self-consciousness. Now, how do you conceive what it is a ‘cognitive activity’?
        another remark: fsopho said that prior to answering the question if it is possible for a robot to be a scientist, we must answer if it is possible for a robot to have mental states. And I would say that prior to answering the question if it is possible for a robot to have mental states, we must say what is a mental state – we must give a description which all along applies to the same things that ‘being a mental state’ apply.
        let me know your thoughts guys

    • fsopho 10:06 pm on February 28, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      well, I think you’re right CD-4 (are you the same as the CD-R from the previous posts?). The conceptual problem of the mental strikes again. BUT, we need to start from somewhere. Let us all just achieve some agreement with respect to what has been discussed already: we take for granted that having mental states is not fully analyzed by “being conscious of its own cognitive activity’, right?
      Let us just let aside the question of self-consciousness. What is at stake is the truth of (A) – and it seems that Chris suggested that having a certain kind of cognitive activity would be sufficient for an x to be a scientist. Trying to simplify things, we could also take for granted that there is a certain description of this specific cognitive activity. Now, the question is: the properties referred by that description also apply to ADAM (or any other artifficial mechanism supposed to do scientific work)?

      • CD-R 1:55 pm on March 1, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        Where is that descrition? We’re supposed to take it as a general description of the scientific BEHAVIOR or of the scientific REASONING. I think that Fsopho is interested in the second option. So, scientific reasoning involves deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, empirical data gathering, the rising of hypotheses, the testing of hypotheses. Is this cognitive activity supposed to take place in ADAM?

        • CD-R 1:56 pm on March 1, 2011 Permalink | Reply

          Oh, I forgot. Yes, CD-R and CD-4 are the same guy. Sorry for that.
          ; )

      • Chris 2:01 pm on March 1, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        The cognitive activity you just described, CD-R, is something like what I meant to be sufficient for an individual being a scientist. Of course, this is a very wide description of what it is to be a scientist – and it certainly apply to ADAM.
        So, I insist, we must give up of (A) – it is a false statement.

        • susie 7:23 pm on March 3, 2011 Permalink | Reply

          (A) is certainly true: all the properties described by this very wide description you talk, Chris, supervene on ”having mental states’. try it! What is it for someone, or something, to reason? it is to operate with sentences or any bit of information, doing inferences from certain sentences to another – the conclusion. but it is a mental proccess. a computer isn’t reasoning just because it is processing data by means of an algorithm…
          Another way: what it is for someone, or something, to gather empirical data? it is to have sense data and empirical beliefs based on that data. now, we can only have this kind of data if we have a mind – there’s no other way, sorry…
          so, if the general description of the scientific work encompasses deductive reasoning and gathering data from the external world, I can’t

          • susie 7:23 pm on March 3, 2011 Permalink | Reply

            sorry, continuing:
            I can’t be a scientist if I have no mind !!!

            xx guys

            • Lucas 2:23 am on March 4, 2011 Permalink | Reply

              Hello Louis!

              It just seems absurd to claim that a robot like the one described it’s a scientist, at least in any reasonable way. Does the robot thinks? Dos he have toughts of any kind? Does he understands anything at all about the activity he is doing?

              I supose the answer it’s negative to all questions. I also supose tha a scientist must have toughts of some kind, and must have beliefs about something. It must also do some kind of purposeful activity .

              Just think how strange , and how absurd, it would be to say that a robot like that has thoughts or beliefs about anything or even desires to find a solution to some kind of scientific problem .

              To me, the real and harder question it’s not IF they have minds and thoughts, but why they can’t think and reason, and why they don’t have minds.

      • fsopho 3:40 am on March 4, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        Hello man,
        I think we get things right when we say that robots like ADAM don’t have self-awareness – none whatsoever. Now, with respect to a robot having a reasoning process, the question is certainly more doubtfull: we can conceive reasoning as a structural process operating in certain bits of information and producing certain outputs. These outputs can even be practical, In fact, the major concern at the very start of Artificial Intelligence was to design machines capable of planning, of doing something according to a limited input data.
        If we understand the concepts of ‘thinking’ and ‘reasoning’ apart from the mental hue, it turns out not being that absurd to conceive a robot like ADAM thinking or reasoning. BUT, the problem concerning belief and desire is serious. I myself can’t conceive a concept of ‘scientist’ or of ‘doing science’ without involving propositional attitudes as beliefs and suspensions of judgments. Yet, it could be that other states representing the same values as propositional attitudes in our reasoning were functional substitutes of these very propositional attitudes occuring in an artificial device. Let us say that the device can operate with 3 information-values (not to confuse with truth-values): 0, 0.5 and 1, each of them doing the same as disbeliefs, suspensions of judgment and beliefs do in our cognitive system.
        What do you think?

        P.S: (I wouldn’t take for granted the thesis that robots CAN’T think and reason and just ask why this is so. What evidences we have for or against it?)

    • Lucas 4:39 pm on March 4, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      I think you’re right in your P.S . We shouldn’t take for granted that robot’s can’t reason and think. We must have some strong evidence that this is impossibile ( in any sense of impossibility).

      Your question is interesting. If you conceive reasoing as simply producing certain outpts ( very similar to an inteligent action or the product of conscious thought), in response to information inputs , following an algorithm made by an inteligent and conscious being, you can say ADAM ( or the computer i’m using right now, for that matter) do reason and think. But it would be reasoning ( or even thinking) whith no tought involved, and that’s quite odd. You can’t ask what ADAM is thinking anymore than i can ask what my computer is thinking right now .

      I’m not even sure if we are using ” thinking” and ” reasoning” in the same sense.To me, it sound’s like an analogical use of ” reasoning” and ” thinking”. based on the similarity of results and products. It is similar to claim that a parrot trained to utter some sentences in response to human voice is speaking and engaging itself in a conversation. It is certanly not,!

      PS: i hope you can understand my bad english!

      • fsopho 6:48 pm on March 4, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        Reasoning is a process, right?
        Let us just agree that it is a process. Now, if you agree with me, maybe adding some description of what kind of process is that, we can try to verify the thesis that this process only occur in humans, or in natural cognitive agents with central nervous system. This is true? What the concept of reasoning involves or entail that makes it impossible for an artificial device to have this kind of process?
        Emphasizing: the concept of reasoning, in order to be true the thesis that reasoning doesn’t apply to robots at all, must entail NECESSARILY a property inconsistent with the properties of these artificial devices.
        Maybe we would do better talking only about “reasoning”. “Thinking” is a more ambiguous concept. Some take it to be a process, others take it to be the same as the proposition, the content of reasoning, and still some others take it to be a propositional attitude “I think that P”, etc.

    • lucas 4:07 am on March 5, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Right, it’s a process. That entails that it’s not a state or an atribute, and it must be temporal : it flows in time .

      Anyway, i’m not claiming that it is impossible that an artificial device could reason. I’m only claiming that there are no one that do reason at the present time, because that would mean that there are artifical devices capable of judging or believing. I would change my mind if anyone could show me someone with these capacities.

      In reasoning, we conclude that something is true because something else is true. Therefore, it’s a process of acquiring new beliefs( or making new judgments) because we judge or beleve that something else it’s true. It’s the opposite of of direct or imediate beliefs, and it’s building blocks are judgments or beliefs, which are ropositional attitudes. Reasoning it’s a way of forming beliefs or making new judgments, and It is also a way of acquiring knowledge.

      That’s not a definition, but it is, at least, a partial caracterization of the concept. Maybe there are other conceptions of reasoning. But that’s a quite plausible conception, and also widespread.

      But what do you think about it? How do you conceive reasoning?

    • elusivethoughts 6:23 pm on March 5, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      This reminds me a distinction that, in my point of view, can be very insightful here. A distinction between “animal” and “human” (reflexive) Knowledge.

      It seems that if “Adam” is able to perform any sort of reasoning, or having something even close to beliefs these performances are completely distinct from what we humans have, and very distinct from what we are willing to accept as counting for knowledge.

      In this quotation Sosa says something about this:

      “Admittedly, there is a sense in which even a supermarket door ‘‘knows’’ when someone approaches, and in which a heating system ‘‘knows’’ when the temperature in a room rises above a certain setting. Such is ‘‘servo-mechanic’’knowledge. And there is an immense variety of animal knowledge, instinctive or learned, which facilitates survival and flourishing in an astonishingly rich diversity of modes and environments. Human knowledge is on a higher plane of sophistication, however, precisely because of its enhanced coherence and comprehensiveness and its capacity to satisfy self-reflective curiosity. Pure
      reliabilism is questionable as an adequate epistemology for such knowledge”. (SOSA, 1991)

      I can’t see how different ADAM is from the supermarket door. I don’t think that ADAM is able to perform self-reflective actions. Consequently , I don’t think it can have Knowledge as resulting from carefully examining its beliefs in order to determine which, if any, deserve to be maintained or excluded.

      • fsopho 6:32 pm on March 5, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        Hy ElusiveThoughts!
        I have a suggestion: maybe that matter of animal/human knowledge deserver a post of its own. Let us talk about it and go to an epistemological talk, instead of keeping with this endless talk of mind in robots (hahhahahhaah). Can you post it with Sosa’s quotation?

  • Luis Rosa 6:09 pm on August 30, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: analogic and digital, cognition, Computer, contemporary life, data processing, hardware, human, software   

    Us and computers (I’m back) 

    I wrote this post to apologize me with my few (up till now) fellow readers! Chris wrote me in a mail: “U think i’m an idiot? I often enter on your blog and there’s nothing new. What about the topic on logic?…”. Sorry Chris – no media, no information (I hope you’ve laughed at this mail you sent me! These nerds are so funny…).

    Well, I’ve been without my PC around 15 days or more, and that’s why I haven’t published anything around last 2 weeks. During this time, I felt a kind of emptiness: I was incomplete. It’s striking how computers are important nowadays, not only as a work tool, but also as a communication device, a sociability resource, and even as an element of our personality.

    I would like to say a few words about our relation to computers. It seems to me that the human being built the computer in his image and likeness. Let me explain that. Human cognition performs electronic data processing. The operation mode of this data processing can be analogic or digital, or both. These are modes of data processing. So, for example, when we process an image representing a set of objects and its relations with sensorial qualities, we are operating analogically. However, when we infer from x>y and z>x that z>y, we are operating digitally. Still, we can operate both, analogically and digitally (as showed in statistical graphics, for example).

    But the similarity between us and the computers is not bound to processing mode. We are similar also in structure. We can divide the computer as a whole as constituted by i) hardware, and ii) software. Our hardware is our body. Our sense organs are like the input/output unity, and our brain is like the Central Processing Unity (CPU), where we have also memory. Accordingly, we could say that our softwares are cognitive patterns – models of reasoning and cognitive means of producing output data, given some input data.

    The similarity is impressive – and it is amazing that we can discover something about ourselves reflecting on computers, as we can about computer itself. Surely, that is not to say that human and computer are equal – rather, we could just say that they are inseparable. I’m very happy to take my PC back. I was really missing it.

    I wish you a very good week, my fellow reader!!! =]

     

    • nythamar 1:15 am on August 31, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Hi, Luis! Congrats on the blog, very cool and thought-provoking! I liked your comparison of computers and humans, it made me think of a 1970 book I read in the early 80s while I was an engineering student and worked as a computer operator — “Chance and Necessity” (in French, Le hasard et la nécessité), by Nobel laureate Jacques Monod, who also wrote the preface to the French edition of Karl Popper’s “Logic of Scientific Discovery”… Monod’s scientific existentialism was quite appealing, esp his argument against teleology, and yet it’s quite unconvincing to buy into the idea that chance and necessity can explain the origin of life or the emergence of meaningful, semantic networks out of the blue –regardless of belief in G-d or any intelligent design… After all, what makes software meaningful for any hardware, what’s the point in running a program or performing any single task, not necessarily to accomplish anything in an efficient subordination of means to ends, but just for fun, like in a game? Perhaps that’s precisely what Monod’s book was all about, but then it makes me wonder whether it could be compared to a Wittgensteinian-like view of games and rules, such as the one offered by Bernard Suits’s “The Grasshopper” — in which case there is no such a thing as the gaem of life…

      • clementine 9:12 pm on August 31, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        scientific existentialism? how’s that? why you’re saying chance AND necessity?
        as a woman, I would like to remember you guys, that pc’s are incapable of love!
        kisses to everyone!

        • nythamar 12:38 am on September 1, 2010 Permalink | Reply

          Well, Monod was a brilliant scientist (he was awarded the Nobel for his contributions to biochemistry) and his existentialist style is very reminiscent of Camus, check this out:
          “The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below; it is for him to choose.” Human freedom is like a self-asserting fiction, a desperate attempt to make sense of our lives and everything else as we find out that the telos is lacking and existence is quite meaningless –this book really reminds me of Camus’s “Myth of Sisyphus,” a sort of sober nihilism, a joyful embrace of contingency

          • clementine 12:13 pm on September 1, 2010 Permalink | Reply

            I just don’t understand the philosophical link between human life emerging by chance and meaningless of existence. why the fact that we emerged by change makes our existence meaningless? do u have the pdf.?

            • nythamar 2:00 pm on September 1, 2010 Permalink | Reply

              Hi! I don’t have the whole book in pdf, but you get good reviews like this one from F. Eugene Yates, available at:
              http://www.springerlink.com/content/kl6g5t3q82524876/fulltext.pdf
              I think that Monod’s innovation was especially regarding what has been termed a cybernetic approach to nature and life processes, which can be both chance- and necessity-produced, actually a complex combination of both. I think that the point (according to an existentialist perspective) is precisely that existence is NOT necessarily meaningless insofar as we are free to render it meaningful as we become what we are and ought to be. Nihilism arises from the fact that we cannot take this freedom for granted or assume that G-d has created such a state of affairs. Usually theistic folks have argued against chance because it leads to atheism but I think this is misleading or poor reasoning in philosophy of religion. It all comes down to relating chance to necessity and possibility. As Sartre said in one of his talks in Brazil, “leave G-d out of the picture!”
              Here’s an excerpt from the review:
              “The book presents three major themes: (1) the principles of molecular biology (with selected details in brief but clear appendices) as they bear on the origin and nature of living processes, including microscopic cybernetics and molecular ontogenesis; (2) the extension of these principles into an explanation of evolutionary trends; and (3) the nature of man and his predicament with a suggested resolution.
              In the first chapters Monod emphasizes that nature is objective and not projective but that it must encompass living beings that without exception are objects endowed with a purpose or a project which they exhibit in their structure and carry out through their performances. Objective science assures us that living systems are projective, and we cannot escape the full significance of this property, one of their outstanding characteristics, referred to as “teleonomy.” Two additional
              characteristics distinguish living beings from the rest of the universe: autonomous morphogenesis and reproductive invariance. Monod’s theme is that reliable and invariant reproduction precedes purpose in all living systems; purpose being directed, coherent, constructive activity. Principles of selection operate upon living systems to achieve, above all, intraorganismic compatability whenever novelty arises by chance. Chance and selection together generate projective performance. This mechanistic view differs strongly from that of the vitalists (e.g., from Bergson’s vital force) and also from the implicit animism present in Teilhard de Chardin’s “complexification” and in dialectical materialism, according to which there is a perfect mirror of reality in the mind. According to the mechanistic view, the appearance of living organisms was not foreordained by the general laws of nature nor by the general evolution of the universe. Their appearance is compatible with, but not predictable by, such laws. Thus, this book contributes a fundamental, cybernetic view of organization at the primitive, molecular biological level in terms compatible with other branches of natural science. The second theme, which attempts to base evolutionary trends on principles of molecular biology is less well thought out, and we believe is developed erroneously.The last third of the book explodes with the ideas latent in Monod’s view of the molecular basis of teleonomy. He sets a vivid scene in which evolution appears as an irreversible process in which species react to their environments. Their purposive performance places a selection pressure on their gene pool. Chance plays upon the DNA of the genetic material. Selection pressure (the “necessity” that novelty be compatible with the preexisting system) points the direction of subsequent evolution, which is finally chosen by the requirements of external, competitive forces.
              In the last chapter, Monod discusses man’s social behavior. Simulation and language have made man master of his domain. They created pressure toward group behavior. But having mastered his environment, man finds his own species his only adversary. Tribal warfare then becomes the important evolutionary force. Cultural evolutions begin, and these in turn select the genetic direction. From his innate learning programs, and his simulation capacity, man achieves a stage of cultural evolution which appears now as a selective force upon further genetic evolution. But cultural evolution includes the need for explanation, and that need has in the past and is still in the present largely met by myth. It is myth that provides the stabilizing influence on the societies of man, and so his situation is strikingly different from that of the social insects, whose societies are stabilized by simpler, genetic determinisms. Thus, the predicament of man is that he requires myth (often in the form of religion) to stabilize his societies, and without stable societies his intelligence, his simulation capacities, his ideation drift. Yet the myths no longer serve, because they deny, avoid, or contradict the explanatory structures generated by science in its quest for objective truth. Monod concludes withthe view that man must abandon his myths and make an ethical choice in favor of objective truth as having higher value. Thus, Monod leads us from the protein molecule to the politics of man’s authentic actions in which knowledge and value combine. In such a world, man may have some say over his own future, but should he fail to make the ethical choice of objective truth over myth he is doomed. Armed as he is by the technological fall-out of science, he can save himself only by guiding his actions by its principles, which are those of objective truth.”

              • clementine 4:04 pm on September 2, 2010 Permalink | Reply

                jeez!!! wonderful quoting!
                now, it remains fuzzy the relation between chance, necessity and meaningfulness (or lack of it). Look: if nature is objective and not projective, and I belong to nature, how could I be projective?
                xx to every!! =)

                • nythamar 12:44 am on September 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply

                  Regardless of projective vs objective psychological, epistemological perspectives, all that I meant is that our human, existential perspective differs from the objectivity we ascribe to nature insofar as we also participate and condition our judgments. This is basically what the so-called phenomenological perspective is all about (Tom Nagel’s “what-it-is-likeness”), as 1st person accounts differ from “the view from nowhere” or the impersonal accounts of scientific approaches to nature. “Meaning” from an existentialist, phenomenological standpoint cannot be equated with objective relations, say, between, two celestial bodies (like the distance from the earth to the moon, which can be measured in relation to other parameters or reference points) –but from an existential, phenomenological standpoint the earth is “my” or “our” abode. For existentialists like Heidegger, only humans exist, strictly speaking, insofar as humans alone are in the world and meaning has ultimately to do with worldhood (stones and inanimate beings are worldless, animals are poor in worldliness), as we understand ourselves and find meaning in the unveiling of the Being of beings through language. Meaningful existence is something that we humans have to create from scratch, at least this was Heidegger and Sartre’s take on the fundamental meaning of existentialism: “Man is all the time outside of himself: it is in projecting and losing himself beyond himself that he makes man to exist; and, on the other hand, it is by pursuing transcendent aims that he himself is able to exist. Since man is thus self-surpassing, and can grasp objects only in relation to his self-surpassing, he is himself the heart and center of his transcendence. There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity. This relation of transcendence as constitutive of man (not in the sense that God is transcendent, but in the sense of self-surpassing) with subjectivity (in such a sense that man is not shut up in himself but forever present in a human universe) – it is this that we call existential humanism.” You can read the whole text (English version of the 1946 talk by Sartre “L’existentialisme est un humanisme”) at the link:
                  http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm
                  I am not an existentialist nor was making a case for Monod’s argument, but I tend to agree with their critique of scientificism and their noncognitivist approach to ethics.
                  Cheers!

    • fsopho 2:15 am on August 31, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Thanks Nythamar! I’m happy you liked, a positive opinion comming from you sounds good!
      I once read a book on computer programming (unfortunately I didn’t remember which book was that) where the author said something like: we create and run programs to accomplish certain tasks, to achieve certain ends, but who decide which tasks to accomplish and which ends to achieve, that’s ourselves (human beings endowed with will). Well, it seems right. Our cognitive system is very complex, and if there is some ‘will software’ in us, then it’s very difficult to imitate it, and make it run in another hardware. Let alone talking about this possibility (here we go with modal concepts – hehheehe). The fact is that in the case of computers, WE make its programs, we construct it – and we make it operate by rules. If you send a certain input for two hardwares operating with the same algorithm, they will produce the same output. If one of them cannot ‘read’ the info, so the other. That is to say: the computer is too much rigid to look like an human. But like in a wittgensteinian game, we can change the software, we can change the language and its interpretation. In a certain level, the computer can also do it – but again, not exactly like us. In brief: the similarity do not go so far – but not yet (!!!). Maybe a mather of time, maybe not, who knows?
      cheers!

      • nythamar 1:11 am on September 1, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        Alright, great stuff, lots of things to unpack here! Now, do you think is there anything like a logos-structure in nature (physis) or in the kosmos, like some pre-Socratics thought of? I think the Cartesian analogy for the body-machine makes lot of sense to this software-hardware talk but it still relies on a mirror-like analogy for rationality and design, like the Biblical metaphor of humans being created in G-d’s image and likeness (imago dei). Spinoza, Leibniz and Hegel will take up the same idea in their respective ingenious attempts to think being, but again one must presuppose a divine substance, universal grammar or absolute knowledge in order to reflect on the structure of beings and our thoughts about them. It seems all these endeavors fit into the Platonist model of realism and logical forms. Brains in vat and Matrix can be very helpful to elaborate on our thought-experiments, and I actually thought of David Chalmers, an Aussie colleague who did some interesting talks on this topic, and keeps a website at:
        http://consc.net/chalmers/
        But what if I’m not convinced that there is any clear-cut continuity between being and thinking, that we are perhaps just fooling ourselves, as Nietzsche suspected, because we desire to believe in truth and in the permanence of evanescent things, and that this will to truth turns out to be an effect of a will to power, in our endless efforts to exert control over ourselves and others, to master techniques and technologies of the self, to dominate nature and endure…

        • fsopho 12:13 am on September 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply

          Well, I thing that there is a certain structure in nature or kosmos, but I don’t conceive it as a logos-structure. Now, the cartesian analogy between body and machine is not exactly based on the processing information properties. And the software-hardware talk aims to show that the structure of our reasoning can, at least in part, be reproduced by other system rather than ours. In fact, first-order logic is a condition for any basic algorithm operation. There’s no need to relate being and thinking with a necessary linkage. The similarity (not equality) is structural.
          I got your point, and I understand the philosophical worry concerning the analogy. This thesis, if were to be sustained by philosophy of mind, would need to answer too many hard metaphysical questions.

          • nythamar 1:11 am on September 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply

            I really like these 2 points you made: “There’s no need to relate being and thinking with a necessary linkage” and that their “similarity (not equality) is structural.” Now how do you relate structure to being? Of course this would be a big package, as you said, involving not only metaphysical questions but also philosophy of language, esp. semantics and logic. I am not convinced, however, that you need a big theory of truth as an Archimedean point, as Descartes (and Puntel) thought. When you say that “first-order logic is a condition for any basic algorithm operation” that sounds like a good start, as we can deal with ordinary language as well and then move on to the problem of a complete proof system, called into question by Quine. I met a mathematician who teaches ethics in New Jersey, Yvonne Raley, and she wrote a very interesting essay on Quine’s ontological commitments, realism and nominalism, which you can find at the link:
            http://philmat.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2007/05/13/philmat.nkm018.short
            Maybe we should talk more about this, since it has a lot to do with our task of making sense of constructivism…

    • Chris 2:25 am on August 31, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Wow! what a fantastic return luis! your comments are very interesting also guys (and that goes for both, luis and nythamar)
      fair enough, there is something funny here: if a have a computer, and it does not work well – say, one of its softwares is malfunctioning -, i have someone to complain with. i could complain, for example, with the Microsoft (software), or with Sony (hardware); but if I am malfunctioning, with whom should I complain?

      • nythamar 1:17 pm on September 1, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        Human malfunctioning could be dealt with empirically (medical doctors, dentists and shrinks will do it) and in a nonnatural way (some call it ethics, morals or self-help, who cares). How should we then live is just a matter of an individual decision. However individuals might have been socially conditioned (as the outcume of their socialization and subtle ways of so-called social reproduction, in our cultural setting etc) they have a certain amount of “freedom” to say yes or no, to switch soccer teams or be converted to (another) religion, to write poems and computer programs, to flick around and zap all the way –so freedom is quite a tricky concept to be defined and conceived vis a vis nature or empirical conditioning. Now, in order to address your question, to “whom should I complain?” I would say it is entirely up to you: by all means it cannot be Sony or Microsoft, but even if you take freedom for the soft and the nature-nurture conditioning for the hardware, even if we managed to unpack the natural, biological evolution from the social evolutionary features, my intuition is that we are still trying to make sense of whatever cannot be reduced to nature or determinism, precisely because this is what we mean by free acts in the first place. Freedom and nature can be thus reconciled (some analytics call this “compatibilism”) but normativity cannot be merely described as matters of fact but still needs some justification (call it metaphysics or metaethics) –that’s what I think can be done on the boundary of the passive, pathological conditioning of social reproduction, at the boundary between the quanta of power (social ontology) and its intersubjective valuing, So humans are held morally responsible as we take freedom seriously (even if this is not exclusively a human experience –who knows to what extent cats and dogs are also free– it has become our historical experience of self-understanding, as we make sense of our existence as a species, as peoples, nations, cultures, civilizations and humankind overall). I think Kant’s response to the Humean predicament can be made pretty defensible (as Rawls argues) in a nonnaturalist, cognitive justification of reasonable, moral principles (equal liberty understood both in moral and in political terms) that doesn’t do away with reality (social ontology) but cannot be reduced to rational intuitions, utilitarian or perfectionist reasoning. Antirealism is what allows for practical reason to make sense: even though there is no freedom to be found out there (“free” fall and “free” radicals simply attest to this), we find ourselves as free beings as we regard, understand and interpret ourselves, as we rationally conceive of ends and means to realize them, as we relate to ourselves, other humans and nature overall. Freedom turns out to be a big human project, just like the invention of autonomy, democracy, and rule-following games. Kantian constructivism can be thus ultimately reconciled with a Humean theory of motivation and partially identified with a naturalist program (Hume’s or Quine’s) . Now let me raise a question regarding the soft-hardware correlation: how does one oppose “zero” to “one”? how ought one to oppose “zero” to “one”? How can one assert that we do have “numbers” independently from “things” without being labelled a Platonist?

        • chris 3:58 pm on September 2, 2010 Permalink | Reply

          With that question I meant: I know who created the computers and its softwares, but I don’t know who created humans, nor if they was really created by some. I agree that human malfunctioning could be dealt with empirically and psychologically (I wouldn’t call this last an ‘unnatural’ way). But the doctor hasn’t made myself, nor the ethics philosopher created my system of values, and the psychologist hasn’t built my cognitive system either. Given our evidence, we don’t have an institution to require explanation for our malfunctioning, nor an entity, say, G-d. And this fact doesn’t undermine our freedom, which I take for granted. I think you’re right when you answer to the question “whom should I complain?” saying that it is entirely up to me – and that is the difference between the two cases of malfunctioning; in the first case, the hardware/software case, I know exactly to whom should I complain, and in the other case, that of my self, maybe I shouldn’t complain at all!! Accordingly, I would say also that I am a compatibilist: there are place for both, freedom and nature governed by laws (maybe still unknown). Still, I would not buy the antirealist package, because from the fact that ‘we find ourselves as free beings as we regard’, it doesn’t follow we are not guided by natural laws. It is just a question of epistemic perspective on our experience as human beings.
          Now, regarding the question of numbers independency, I let it to Luis. I didn’t made my point on it, but I know he isn’t a platonist, and he has an argument (according to one of our last chats).

          • fsopho 4:19 pm on September 2, 2010 Permalink | Reply

            Thanks for passing the buck to me, Chris!!
            I would ask for comprehension on the part of you: the topic requires another post (hahahah). I don’t have an argument which I think is completely cogent. I just think it is reasonable. But I think we all agree that platonism pure and simple is not a good choice. Well, we gonna talk about this as the argument is posted here.

    • dallas 3:00 am on August 31, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Amazing text, Louis in the garden!!
      Let’s see: a personal computer is a extension of our bodies, as a special tool, that make things that we can’t do without a machine like that.
      The human race can live without the tools maded by the civilization and the evolution of the technicals and technology things, but they can’t live without the ability of made the tech.
      The only way of the human is produce your own way – and this way is on the technology, now able on personal computers and all the memories that we can save on the RAM and forget about, for a few times. Anything, is just turn the computer ON and all is there! Amazing!

      (sorry for my bad english – fork without food)

    • fsopho 9:05 pm on August 31, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      This goes for you Chris: maybe we could complain with ourselves. But still, it is a hard question, and it’s entrenched on it a problem for the comparison.
      And this goes for you Dallas: i’m glad you’ve been here! surely, the personal computer is a ‘special toll’, as you say. the reference to the RAM memory is very happy. as a matter of fact, we ‘delete’ some information from our memory (and it remains the question if everything that I experienced is still there), just as we do when we clean our computer of useless files. surely, we delete files from our computer as we wish – we decide which files to delete. the computer itself don’t decide. and here we take a crucial turn: as the computer has no voluntarism in questions of deleting files from RAM memory, so we do. we dont chose it, and we desire to have this power of ‘deleting’ information.
      (obs. DALLAS, you need to see my new Spider Man comics from the 80′s!!)

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