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Information > 140chars Quickie

Does the very word “information” imply a consciousness to be informed by it?

Simple answer is no, but that’s about defining what we mean by information – a language problem – but there are important underlying concepts worth unpicking.

Let’s separate two issues first.

Firstly, in theory – Verb-Nouns – nouns whose root is a verb, in this case a transitive verb – one thing informing another, where our first question is between simple causation and something intentional, interpretation for a purpose, and so on. (Often a good ploy with verb-nouns to take the activity / process view rather than the objectivity of the noun (even when not a transitive verb.) But, more importantly:

In the science of information theory (eg Shannon / Turing et al) we’re detached from subjective questions and the topic is disembodied / free-floating information and the processing is machine-like. That ranges from the simplest temperature change flipping a thermostatic switch, to the most generic computation of a Universal Turing Machine.

Like Shannon, here I tend to use a “significant difference” idea for an incoming “bit” of information – the news – what’s new? In any stream of “data” – anything physical – that which is different from yesterday / existing / expected / predictable / default / steady-state etc. But “significant” already shifts us to questions of meaning – significance. In the machine world it is already normal to suggest information as the input and meaning or purpose as simply the output, however non-intelligent the processing and non-intentional the causation – which is why such theory is important to our understanding, given current AI-hype.

(Note also that this significant – detectable – difference view of information at some fundamental level, is becoming important at an even more fundamental level underlying physics as well as biology – life, the universe and everything – evolution of the cosmos from the energy and particles of the big-bang to “Bach” – that recurring metaphor for the pinnacles of creativity of human consciousness. Information underlies physics AND consciousness.)

Secondly there is a more pragmatic human world of information management in practice – in organisations and systems, in systems that are embodied in technology – where there is a kind of sliding scale, however informally it is recognised:

  • Data – the raw detectable “bits” of difference – the information potential of the info-scientists.
  • Information – data presented in a form intended for human consumption and interpretation.
  • Knowledge – information that embodies some human interpretation in some encoded form.
  • Wisdom – aye, and there’s the rub, the stuff that can’t really be codified (if we’re honest).

In practice there is really no private language, so no-one’s definitions can rule the discourse.

Data & Information are probably best thought of as interchangeable unless you’re inside a well defined technical discourse and you know where you are relative to the fundamental science.

Knowledge & Wisdom – remain intuitively distinct, but in lay (and even expert) AI discourse it is all too easy to forget the non-codifiable aspects, where the extreme AI enthusiasts would try to convince us there is nothing that can’t be codified or machine-learned, and the more cautious among us would think “yeah, right”. And to be clear the difference between knowledge and wisdom is not just “context” either – much context is codified and codifiable too. If it is codified, it’s just content – more Information (Data) grist to the processing mill.

These issues are thoroughly in the spotlight right now, not just because of the overreaching claims of AI and Big-Data towards full-blown Transhumanism – beyond humans, not just prosthetically aided humans – but also because a kind of scientism is giving a really hard time to all questions of conscious will and creative intelligence in both philosophy and (say) neuroscience.

[Hat tip to Andy Martin’s piece on Transhumanism and AI in The Independent, but also for the tweeted question in the opening line that prompted this response. Witty read as usual, bringing us all back to earth with the reminder that prosthetic “technology” is as old as flint stone tools and pointed sticks.]

“I already have students in the classroom correcting me, about two seconds after I have come out with some clearly inadequate answer to a tricky question: “But my phone says…” You too can become a transhumanly annoying fact checker.”

Need to dig up that Harari Homo Deus reference.

Dennett and the “Little People” #3

Here (#3) below is the David Hamill piece from the Free Thought Prophet blog that triggered the two … previous (#1) … posts (#2) as well as a lot of comments and tweets. Most of my earlier thoughts concerned the Jerry Coyne post given as a reference and the linked Dan Dennett Big Think video. In addition to that, we have the inevitable “baying mob” of commenters around Coyne and the various linked YouTube videos on the topic.

To paraphrase innumerable comments, the new-atheist scientistic world and its bulldogs believe:

“The behaviour of all matter and energy in the real world is determined by the laws of physics. Therefore free will does not exist, it is entirely illusory. End of.”

(My own paraphrase. There’s a dogmatic presumption in that “therefore”. And quoted here, these are Hamill’s actual words:

“Free will is an illusion and our actions are fully determined by the laws of physics.”

where the “and” is the “because>/<therefore”).

(#3) Anyway, to the matter at hand. The quoted sections below are the full text of the Hamill piece, with my critique inserted between. I love the irony that a blog dedicated to free-thought is in denial of our freedom of will to think and act. But, let’s go …

Hamill’s text in blockquotes:

Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens are often referred to as the ‘Four Horsemen Of Atheism’. They haven’t had too many public disagreements but perhaps the most prominent ongoing dispute, relates to free will. This is a topic that is not unrelated to religion, of course. Most of the world’s faithful are taught that the difference between eternal paradise and eternal agony, lies in how we each exercise our free will.

OK, not unrelated to religion, but there are two separate issues tangled-up since original Cartesian dualism as well as two further separate religious angles. The original reason for seeing “will” as something outside the “physical” world, was partly to give somewhere for will to reside since determinism appeared to have banished it from the natural world, particularly so that God’s will could be saved in this supernatural space. Exactly how the supernatural mental world could act upon the natural physical world is left unexplained – essentially, miraculous. Moral teachings on how we should use our will incentivised by the rewards & penalties in the this life or the next were another artificial religious device. Obviously these are connected, but it is not necessary to bring any religious interest into this human free-will debate, where our interest is really the question “does the natural physical world really banish free will?” The science vs religion wars have thrown the question into the spotlight, and raised the dogmatic stakes for the new-atheists, but …

Either there is free will
in the natural world
or there isn’t.
[This is not (need not be)
a religious question.]

Sam Harris is a strong determinist and he argues that free will is an illusion. That is, since the contents of the human skull are no more immune to the laws of physics than any other matter in the universe, our behaviour is always exactly commensurate with deterministic causality. Dan Dennett agrees that science comprehensively rejects the mind-body dualism on which religious ideas of free will are based. However, as a compatibilist he also argues that free will can be reconciled with the deterministic physical laws.

Fair enough. But the key thing here is the distinction between strong (or hard) determinism and the kind of determinism that might be compatible with free-will. It is a definitional question about what we really mean by determinism, and the kind of free-will whose existence is worth considering. [And in fact, contrary to polular myth, Harris doesn’t actually say that free will is an illusion …. but that will become apparent.]

As it happens, I’m convinced by the determinist argument and I find compatibilist positions to be rather slippery.

No surprise. I’m happy with determinism too, but open to working definitions of what we mean. Clearly with a hard – dare I say dogmatic – view of determinism, compatibilism looks like a slippery concept. That slipperiness simply shows that we have some work to do on agreeing definitions. (Let’s not forget that both philosophically and physically even causation is hard to get a fundamental handle on. Seems to me the slippery concept here is determinism itself.) Working on definitions as part of our discourse, rather than as pre-defined beforehand, is fundamental to Dennett’s ways of argument and explanation by exploration and discovery – the evolution of species of argument.

The conclusion that our decisions are determined by the matter in our brains obeying the laws of physics, rather than by some ethereal mind or soul, is one that is of great import. Since the dualism on which so much of religion depends is false, explaining the implications of that would seem to be a good use of any philosopher’s time. Instead, it seems that compatibilist philosophers quite often prefer to spend their time inventing new definitions of free will, which can accommodate determinism.

Not sure this adds anything to the free-will debate, except to express annoyance at philosophers. Obviously philosophers and theologians can debate the natural vs supernatural dualism of religion too, but our topic here is free-will in the natural world. Rather than “inventing” new definitions, the whole progress of natural science is one of discovering and evolving new definitions and explanations.

I think that a better analogue for our subjective experience of volition, is found not in new definitions of free will, but rather in computational intractability. When discussing this topic, philosophers often like to return to a famous Austin thought experiment involving a golfer.

OK, now we’re getting onto the topic at hand. I personally use the Wegner example of a top-class tennis-player returning a serve, where not only the inevitable-repeatability aspect becomes apparent, but also the largely pre-determined and fine-tuned (supervisory free-won’t) aspects are also apparent.

If a great golfer misses a simple putt, should we consider that she could have holed it, based on some degree of freedom that she had? Alternatively, if every atom in the golfer is returned exactly as it was before the missed putt and the shot is replayed, must she miss it again, as the invariant laws of physics consistently produce the same results?

Not sure this is the key question affecting free-will. Although there appears to be an inevitability of the same deterministic result, everything hangs on the “if” thought-experiment in that second sentence. Not just if every atom, every blade of grass, every spec of earth, but how every atom not to mention every historically if and how of every entangled force and particle in the cosmos. Gödel might have something to say about this too. (I’m not heading to some mysterious “quantum” explanation for proto-consciousness, simply pointing out the enormity of that IF, especially since we’re about to consider tractability.)

Many debates around free will and determinism have considered this question (including the often heated exchanges between Harris and Dennett).

That was true in 2014, but don’t forget that the Dennett-Harris exchange returned to respectful dialogue in 2016.

Considering the issue from the perspective of computational intractability, may allow for a different starting point.

OK. Something new, and the particular point of this Hamill piece. Computational tractability and predictability.

For example, if a rain cloud moved over the golf course, could we calculate which blade of grass will be first to be struck by a raindrop? Certainly, the rain cloud does not have free will, so there will be one blade of grass that will be first to get wet and that will be the result of deterministic laws of physics acting on the relevant atoms and particles. If we were able to observe which blade of grass was struck by a raindrop first, and then replace all of the atoms in the atmosphere exactly as they were before the rain started, what would happen if we then replayed the events?

Of course, since the laws of physics don’t change, the same arrangement of atoms will give rise to the same results.

Hmmm. That’s some claim. Partly again, because of the enormous IF in that repeatable situation, partly because there will be chaotic aspects in predicting patterns of statistical distribution of trajectories of populations of raindrops, not just the same one raindrop, and partly because we are about to come to some tractability questions in any computation to predict the behaviour of raindrop(s).

Quantum indeterminacy can’t deliver free will either. Even if relevant at the scale of the particles and molecules that exist in human brains and rain clouds, quantum indeterminacy would offer some randomness but no free will.

Not sure where we’re headed here? Has anyone ever suggested clouds and raindrops have free-will? Some (Penrose-Hameroff) have proposed quantum-level mechanisms consciousness, but there’s nothing being suggested here by Dennett (or myself).

However, the vast number of particles and interactions involved in rain clouds, and the even greater complexity of human brains, means that any calculation to predict either outcome would be intractable.

I believe that to be true, as noted above, given the scale of variables and degrees of freedom.

Even if we could measure the position and momentum of every relevant atom in advance, there will be no more practical way to see where the raindrops fall, or where the putt comes to rest, than to allow the laws of physics to play out and just watch.

OK, good, so we’re agreed on this. Empiricism rules, and involves the same golfer – body and soul – on any given day, another day when the starting point can only be approximately the same, not the literal particle-level identical re-run. The tractability question applies just as much to that “even if” starting point as to running the computation.

Trying to prove mathematically whether the brain state of the golfer will result in her sinking her putt or not, is tangentially related to Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem). In our case, the decision problem asks if we can analyse the complete configuration of the golfer’s brain along with the laws of physics, and prove in advance whether her putt will be holed or not. Alonso Church and Alan Turing showed that there is no solution to the Entscheidungsproblem (a previous blog on this site discussed Turing’s 1936 paper on the topic, which introduced the Turing Machine).

For example, if we view a rain cloud as a Universal Turing Machine that is configured to calculate the interactions between all of the relevant particles, then we cannot prove in advance which blade of grass will get wet first. The only practical approach is to ‘run the program’ on the machine (the cloud) and observe which blade of grass is first struck by a raindrop.

Similarly, if we consider the golfer to be a Universal Turing Machine, then Turing’s 1936 paper on computable numbers shows that even if we could know her complete configuration in advance, we still could not prove what the outcome of the putt would be.

OK, my preference is to translate Hilbert as “the decidability problem” (it’s about computational decidability, not about a mind making a decision, necessarily), but no issue with any of this.  Dennett too uses UTM machine views of ourselves and our minds, but this is saying nothing about free-will?

Additionally, if the golfer actually wanted to perform the full calculation to work out what kind of putt her brain state would produce, that would take exponentially more time than just taking the putt.

True, but I believe this is irrelevant to how decisions to act are made. Much more stochastic, heuristic, statistical prioritisation of sub-conscious and consciously significant components of making a putt. (As I say, Wegner uses the speed of reaction of the receiving tennis-player to illustrate the enormous preparatory short-cuts to any actual calculation.)

That is, the problem is computationally intractable not just in practice but in principle. The only way to discover the outcome is to ‘run the program’ on the machine (the golfer) and watch where the ball goes.

Again we are talking about the intractable predictability of the problem. What about free-will?

In Programming the Universe, Seth Lloyd describes the implications of Turing’s Entscheidungsproblem proof as follows …

“… once we set a train of thought in motion, we do not know whether it will lead anywhere at all. Even if it does lead somewhere, we don’t know where that somewhere is until we get there.”

The reason why we can’t predict the actions of a human being with full confidence, is not because people have free will or an ethereal soul. It is because either under a classical deterministic universe or under a quantum probabilistic universe, the problem is computationally intractable.

OK. This simply says that this unpredictability has nothing to do with free-will. It says nothing about free-will?

Free will is an illusion and our actions are fully determined by the laws of physics.

How does this even remotely follow from the previous statement(s)? This is incidentally the position of all the bulldogs in the Coyne and YouTube comment threads noted above. A prejudiced statement, but no kind of proof or explanation.

The path of a golf ball rolling on an undulating green is also fully determined by the laws of physics and easily predictable.

I doubt that. Determined, but not easily and certainly not fully predictably. More reasonably, to some precision within statistical bounds of predictability and chaotic attractors. Even to build the set of would-be deterministic rules – eg, the possible states of every blade of grass? – would be intractable and need to involve judgemental and empirical short-cuts.

However, Turing distinguishes between some problems that are computable and others that are not. The path of a golf ball on an undulating green is an easily computable differential equation. The proof of a decision problem for the brain state of Austin’s golfer either sinking or missing a putt, is impossible in principle.

Austin’s golfer will miss the putt every time. Even if before each replay, a computer is given her complete configuration in advance, Turing shows that it will still always be impossible to prove the outcome beforehand. Each time we replace every atom in the golfer exactly as it was, we will still need to replay the putt by ‘running the program’ on the machine (Austin’s golfer) and watching her miss.

Even if true, this simply seems to say, she will always miss, even though we can’t prove it. Does it say anything about free-will?

Religion says that god gave man free will,

I think we’re well past this intelligent-design / creationist position in this debate? Anyone rational person who believes in free-will – certainly Dennett – believes it to be a naturally evolved capability of sentient beings.

Turing shows that it only seems like we have free will, because we’re computationally intractable and so we cannot know what we’re going to do next.

No he doesn’t. He simply shows that whatever free-will we do (or don’t) have, the outcomes of our decisions and actions, and all the deterministic processes of physics, are not fully predictable. Free-will or not.

Turing: “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”

And Turing agrees with me, it seems. How could anyone see free-will as some superhuman capability to direct and predict the entire future locus of every particle (and sentient being) in the universe. Obviously, that kind of free-will doesn’t exist outside some hypothetical omniscient god or thought experiment. It would be a straw man to suggest any rational person ever suggested it did.

The issue left unaddressed here is:

IF the universe is deterministic, how can we explain free-will?

Now that’s an interesting question.

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[Post Note: A new source for me on this is Max Tegmark – on the trail of both AI and Consciousness – here on “Substrate Independence”.

“consciousness is substrate-independent twice over!”

Determinism crosses levels and achieves independence from earlier levels (Hofstadterian strange-loopy. Pirsigian too? Woohoo!).]

[Post Note: Another new source Fern Elsdon-Baker at Newman Uni. Confirming even atheist believers in Evolution struggle to accept evolutionary explanations of consciousness (and will) – but as I say that’s because the more extreme “scientistic” struggle to accept consciousness anyway.]

Dennett and the “Little People” – Round#2

Recasting the arguments from the previous post, it’s comments – and a twitter thread of disagreements.

How this started:

Public tweet – FTP – recommending “Brother Hamill’s great blog”.

Public response – Me – a two word response “[great, but] wrong, though”.

All arguments / debates start with a gap or a point of contention. The content of any possible argument being multiple points, many levels, highly interconnected. My agenda (and Dan Dennett’s) is to get argument going that is dialogue based on shared understanding intended to extend understanding and evolve explanation NOT arguments that simply aim to disprove, by the evidence and logic of existing science, the points or theses of one side or the other. (Necessarily circular, strange-loopy arguments, with poorly defined objects and potentially incoherent initially …. but which evolve by iterations.)

When asked to explain “wrong” – Me to FTP – there “seems” to be a disagreement with Dennett based on a misunderstanding of his position on free-will, determinism and compatibilism.

Hamill responded @me directly, confirming the disagreement …

“Dennett is wrong.
Not least because his reasoning is based on the little people”

…. and we’re off, we have a (possible) dialogue. He also provided – in defence of my suggestion of his misunderstanding, or misrepresentation of Dennett’s position, I supposed – a link to Jerry Coyne citing Dennett’s 2015 Big Think piece and the so-called “little people” argument.

At this point there are many possible threads of discussion, “solicited” by the personal interaction above, all potentially entangled in the terse 140 char interaction up to this point. Some directed to Hamill and Hamill’s specific points, but most directed at the topics and arguments generally. After all, I’d never heard of Hamill until 24 hours ago.

My agenda is epistemology – arising out of practical concern with cybernetics and decision-making controls in human organisations – and an evolving thesis that information is the most fundamental “particle” of (physical) reality. As an evolutionary philosopher with a keen focus on “free-floating” information, Dennett is close to the core of my work, but of course Turing and Shannon are pretty much the godfathers of information and computation in cybernetics. Some of the most obvious topics start with:

(A) Dennett’s position on consciousness and free will. 50 years of work, hundreds of publications, already many in 2017.

(B) Hamill’s piece from his declared position as a (strict) determinist, expressed contrary to Dennett’s “slippery” compatibilist position, but whose main point is an argument claiming Turing’s support for free-will being an illusion.

(C) Dennett’s “Stop Telling People They Don’t Have Free Will” Big Think piece. (And secondarily, Coyne’s interpretation of it also suggesting compatibilism is …. untenable …. and promoting the deterministic Free-will is an Illusion position. ) Both referenced by Hamill, in his piece and individually in his tweeted responses.

Dennett and Free-will run through them all. Given my agenda, I’d very much like to get to constructive dialogue on the information processing fundaments of free-will (and everything else in our naturally evolved world) but there is some ground clearing to do before there is any chance of shared understanding. Since Dennett’s position (and mine) is that free-will is real and naturally evolved I need to unpick any point that “he’s wrong” before we can progress any constructive avenues. Compatibilism is indeed a slippery concept, one I prefer not to use, since free-will either is or isn’t part of the natural world. What more is there to say? It goes without saying, any suggestion Turing, Turing machines and computability can “prove” that consciousness is an illusion, I am going to take issue with by default, until we can clear some common ground.

CAVEAT, arguing the Dennett way, towards increased explanatory understanding, involves constructive and iterative evolutionary dialogue, not simply proving the other guy wrong or being proven wrong by the other guy. Being wrong is something each discovers in order to improve their own position in the shared understanding. Objective facts may not change, though they may change if they turn out not to have been so well-defined objectively in the first place, but more often the interpretations and relationships between information and understandings will be the things to evolve.

I am only responding to “Dennett is wrong” because that is the assertion being made, right from the very first piece. So, focussing first on (C)

(1) “The little people” is an SMBC parody of Dennett’s position on compatibilism and the illusory nature of free will as picked-up by Coyne et al (*). Nowhere in Dennett’s Big Think piece does he use such an argument, nor does he choose to identify as compatibilist. Dennett does of course talk about Surgeons and their patients, Judges and offenders, Researchers and their subjects, like any typical scientific neurosurgeon might. The pejorative suggestion that those with less expert knowledge are “the little people” of this world is a travesty extrapolated from the otherwise fair-game parody. A “ludicrous characterisation” as one of the commenters on the Coyne thread said. Hear, hear, I say.

(2) Notwithstanding the little people slur, what does Dennett say about actual free-will in his piece? Absolutely nothing. Right from the off, it’s a thought experiment in both reality and science fiction, one of his thinking tools or intuition pumps. And, furthermore, even as a thought experiment, it is simply addressing the private and public denial of free-will. In his words – and in the trajectory of the piece:

“A thought experiment” …
“Devised to jangle the nerves of those who claim free will is an illusion”.

It is part of the rhetorical “war” intended to get deniers to stop and think and to honestly consider alternative arguments (*). It contains no attempt to explain what free-will is or how it arises and functions. It is simply part of a rhetorical plea. To suggest Dennett’s scientific and philosophical position of free will is based on the little people argument or on a denial-of-free-will thought-experiment is at the very least misleading, and more a straw-man positively misrepresenting his position on consciousness and free will more generally.

Go. (Do not pass)

=====

If deniers can stop denying, and trying to prove others wrong, we can switch the focus to what Turing really does tell us about the reality of free will (B) and maybe for those interested, what Dennett’s position on free-will (A) really is. I’m pretty sure we’ll find Dennett’s position (and mine) legitimately – at least debatably – takes Turing into account.

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(*) Appendix.

Argument as warfare – with winners, losers and casualties – is very much the flavour of the millennial new-atheist God vs Science debates and various evidence-based campaigns against potentially anti-science and political-correct positions on public issues. Being introduced as “brother Hamill” suggested to me he was  another brother-in-arms in the science vs religion wars. Trouble is that style of argumentation is dominating would-be science and philosophical topics that should be advancing basic understanding of the natural world more generally. Political campaigning is infecting science itself.

As I said in the previous post “Coyne et al” is simply a symptom of this warlike infection, and having been part of the four horsemen – the least apocalyptic of the four, as Baggini put it – Dennett now disagreeing with Harris and several of Dawkins’ bulldogs finds himself the target of warlike arguments rather than constructive dialogues. For this reason his main thrust has switched from arguing with his critics on their established terms, to simply a plea that his actual position be considered on the terms that might arise, and a bet that if we do so we might learn something new. Life’s too short to do otherwise.

If that sounds patronising, I’m sorry, but I’m serious we need to get to first base before we can pass go. However sincere, it will certainly appear incoherent until we do so.

Dennett and the “Little People”

I came across a twitter thread of Free Thought Prophet (FTP, otherwise anon) recommending a blog post by John Hamill (Atheist Ireland National Committee) about Dennett’s position on free-will.

FTP I know as a knockabout humorous commentator in the space occupied by the four horsemen. As a rationalist, atheist, humanist myself, “free-thought” is the traditional tag I also cling to in the shifting and overlapping debates in this space, so I have a soft-spot for FTP.

Hamill I know no more about at this point.

[TL;DR? – Long story short: This post (and a second post) drew lots of comments. My inclusion of Jerry Coyne and Dan Dennett ideas meant that it wasn’t clear where my comments related specifically to what Hamill had actually said – so I put that right in “Dennett and the Little People #3“.]

Dennett has been ploughing his furrow on consciousness and free-will for some 50 years, so his evolving “position” is obviously tricky to represent, and leaves plenty of scope for confusion if you dip into specific snapshots. Most of my own thought journey has evolved with Dennett’s so I feel I have a pretty good grip on where he’s coming from, summarised several times recently in response to his 2017 From Bacteria to Bach and Back (B2BnB). [Links at the end.]

I was a bit puzzled when this recommended post referred to “brother Hamill” claiming:

At which point it becomes apparent Hamill’s point relies on Jerry Coyne’s post on Dennett’s 2015 Big Think contribution. That’s been done to death before and, like Dennett in 2017, I find myself in the “life’s too short” position for continuing to argue with one’s critics on their terms.

But, Hamill continued the discussion, so in the spirit of free-thought, here goes:

[Post Note: Everything that follows here, as noted explicitly, is about the Gerry Coyne contributions referenced in the piece above – as I said I knew little about Hamill’s actual position at this point. In view of the critical comments that continued below, I did do a subsequent review of what Hamill said in some detail.]

Firstly “meta”. We need to look at the nature of the arguments before we can constructively unpack their content.

Coyne I have previously characterised as a bulldog (one of several) on the side of the four-horsemen. And Coyne’s “Why Evolution is True” blog has it’s own bulldogs and “brothers in arms” in turn. As with Darwin’s original “dangerous” idea, when reason vs dogma is caricatured as a “war” between science and religion, we have a fight to the death, where aggressive supporters are seen as an asset, however good their actual arguments. The rhetorical noise has it’s value in promoting the topics into the daylight for debate, but unless defeating your opponent is the main objective, it doesn’t necessarily advance the content of any debate towards better understanding. Darwin had his Thomas Henry Huxley, but it took many later thinkers to advance our present day understanding of the underlying mechanisms of evolution by natural selection.

Dennett has been a part of the four horsemen in the millennial science vs religion wars and the rise of new atheism. He made his own contributions in Breaking the Spell (of religion) and in promoting and supporting fellow evolutionary thinker Richard Dawkins in his God Delusion and more. The difference is Dennett has also maintained his free-thought philosophical rigour and has been prepared to educate his fellow conspirators (eg Sam Harris) as well as support them. In the “contact sport” of debate and argument he has engaged with as much rhetorical weaponry as the next man, but that makes it crucial to recognise the distinction between the rhetoric of defeating or deflecting an opponent and the content of arguments that advance understanding.

Much of the argument against Dennett’s position applies all the usual rhetorical gambits – ad-hominem accusations of motives, straw-man mis-representation of his position, and so on. Hey, it’s a contact sport. But, like Dennett, when it comes to advancing understanding I prefer the “Rappaport’s principle”, an extreme version of the principle of charity. So to move closer to the content:

Coyne, picking-up on Dennett’s Big Think quotes, says:

Supposedly aimed at promulgating a better concept of free will, Dan’s video in fact doesn’t do that at all. Rather, Dennett tries to show that those neuroscientists who tell people they don’t have free will are being “mischievous” and “irresponsible.”

He’s right. And Dennett is right too, to be telling “scientists” that. But that’s part of the rhetorical war, not the content of the argument about understanding. Those more “scientistic” scientists and commentators are being irresponsible in “reducing” explanations of consciousness and free-will to “(so far as we can tell) it’s an illusion, get used to it”. That is scientists slipping back to a kind of dualism where conscious will (whatever it is) is not part of our real physical world.

It’s not a matter of “little people” – people lesser than “we” thinkers – not getting the argument, it’s an honest admission that none of us – not even the best of scientists and philosophers – get the argument yet, not the whole explanation of understanding, not even close to consensus on the root ontological point, let alone the devil in the details. Historically few have been more conscientious than Dennett in patient argument with anyone prepared to ask. His mind certainly doesn’t entertain the thought of little people, except maybe Harris and Krauss, but then that’s me being mischievously rhetorical. Whilst the free-will argument is at the ’tis / ’tisn’t level of debate, any scientist publicly promoting their conclusion – as opposed to the content of the argument – is being irresponsible.

I’ve written plenty on Dennett’s actual arguments, and even critiqued Harris take on free-will, and since it’s an evolutionary one, it’s not easy to package it in any simple definitive statement – that’s the point in fact.

Start here:

I suspect Dennett is right, Like him, I’d make a sporting bet on his being right.

If you think truth is otherwise, suspend disbelief and engage in honest constructive debate.

Start with Rappaport, and do not pass go until you can express Dennett’s position in terms he would thank you for.

Life’s too short. For any of us, that includes you, who have spent decades considering, debating and arguing this stuff, it is poor use of time to continue arguing on the basis of existing science. It’s all too easy to pay lip-service to the contingent, self-correcting and evolving nature of the content of scientific knowledge, much harder to apply that principle to the nature of the processes and discourse of science. Go on, be charitable, give it a go. (The Dennett bet is that the reality of free-will, as part of an explanation of the reality of consciousness, will evolve if we do.)

The only “little people” are those with closed minds.

If we’ve made it to first-base, we can now consider the content of any debate towards explaining consciousness and free-will?

Go.

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Some previous links:

What Sam Harris actually said.

My 2016 “noddy” presentation – Me & My Free Will.

The Harris / Dennett dialogue.

My most recent summary of Dennett’s latest position.

Dennett & David Haig’s Mind & Language piece.

Psybertron on Dennett in New Humanist Autumn 2017

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Post Notes:

By tweet, and in the comment below, we have dialogue.

OK, that’s fair. I didn’t really “represent”  Hamill’s position at all (in his post, or anywhere else). Hamill’s tweeted response to my initial contact was to share the Coyne post, so I focussed on that (and the wider “new atheist” agenda) rather than Hamill. Hamill’s responses to my tweet invoked Coyne’s post and the Dennett Big Think video. Hamill’s post …? We can put that right.

Hamill’s position nevertheless seems pretty clear:

“… I’m convinced by the determinist argument and I find compatibilist positions to be rather slippery. The conclusion that our decisions are determined by the matter in our brains obeying the laws of physics, rather than by some ethereal mind or soul, is one that is of great import. Since the dualism on which so much of religion depends is false, explaining the implications of that would seem to be a good use of any philosopher’s time. Instead, it seems that compatibilist philosophers quite often prefer to spend their time inventing new definitions of free will, which can accommodate determinism.”

(Although I didn’t represent that as Hamill’s position, I think it is implicitly pretty clear that I already got that, it is the common position, but I can address specifics explicitly.)

How my understanding of that statement differs from his own, is going to lie in how we see key concepts, and are using any definitions. The position suggests that it is “slippery” to rely on flexibility and evolution of definitions to advance an argument. Dennett’s position (and mine) is the opposite – to hold off on reifying definitions until after agreement is being reached. “Preferring to spend time” – is a point I already made. What is best use of time, to achieve understanding.

Personally I don’t hold “compatibilism” to be a helpful concept. Either consciousness and free-will are real in this real world or they’re not. If they are in this real world, then they must be explicable in nature.

Religion says that god gave man free will, but Turing shows that it only seems like we have free will, because we’re computationally intractable and so we cannot know what we’re going to do next.

In looking at the ontology of consciousness and free-will, I’m back to that same point about natural explanations of that reality, rather than questions of how religion might exploit or abuse that. So I’m parking the religious angle for now. Obviously my position is that consciousness and free-will evolved naturally, and it would be a straw-man to suggest Dennett differed on that.

Not sure whether Hamill’s position on determinism in any way distances him from Coyne et al, but it’s not his main point here. In fact notwithstanding this “determinist” position – I would say greedy-reductionist-objectivist-determinist position (maybe?) – Hamill’s main aim is not to simply state this position, but to make his main point (in his original tweet) about Turing and Computational Intractability.

This is good. My main focus on what is new about Dennett’s position (in links already provided above) has been about Shannon on information and Turing on computation (ironically these are my main interests, prior to and independent of any consciousness and free-will debates).

So apart from my suggestion Hamill mis-represented Dennett’s position – eg on determinism / compatibilism – which I would still maintain, my original point was to disagree with this statement:

“You’re just a Turing Machine but nobody can prove what you’ll do next.”

That’s a click-bait headline – a sub-title to the original post title, condensing the actual statement in the piece “Turing shows that it only seems like we have free will, because we’re computationally intractable and so we cannot know what we’re going to do next.”

My problems lie in “just” and “prove”. As Turing says (quoted in Hamill’s piece) ….

In short for now – do we still have a dialogue? –

A very complex and many layered Turning machine with emergent objects and properties. And, the predictability of (and influence over) future actions is obviously limited many ways, but like Hamill, who uses the Austin’s golfer (I use Wegner’s tennis player) we only need a very small amount of “free-won’t” to have significant and worthwhile free-will – despite determinism.

Next level?

Alt-Left Does Pollute Freedoms That Must Be Defended.

Freedoms of expression include permitted rallies, but I absolutely condemn as totally unacceptable – to be acted against by authority and leadership – the idea that a freely permitted rally can include hate-speech, open-carry uniformed militia, symbolic support for “parties” whose policies include hate. It is outrageous that such parties are permitted in US society generally, and not acted against by enforcement specifically. (This implies an “arms-race” of legislation on proscribed parties and symbols, but the principle must be established. Public statuary of historical people is a separate matter for civil governance.)

Having said that:

I do condemn the (so-called) “alt-left” – the anarchic anti-establishment rent-a-mob that jumps on every peaceful and otherwise valid protest bandwagon. They pollute and undermine the freedoms they depend on. The fact that they use uniform dress, fear and masked-anonymity in their deliberately disruptive participation – the kind that escalates to anti-property looting etc – should be stamped on hard by authority.

No idea if there were any at Charlottesville.

I can of course believe and understand that otherwise peaceful counter protesters might turn threateningly abusive towards a hateful rally but I don’t condone it. I condemn that too. When we were anti-Nazi-League protesters in the 70’s the point was to defy the threats of the assembled fascists not to physically block or threaten. Prevention by force is by the authorities and the terms of permitting.

Freedoms also come with responsibility and respect for civil authority. Planned and coordinated law-breaking can be part of a protest, may be the point of some protests, but that right comes with the responsibility to accept prosecution in enforcement of current law – until such time as laws change.

Finally, I don’t call the car-attack on the anti-protest crowd an act of “terrorism” – it was part of an otherwise authorised event. It was simply an illegal – criminal, murderous – action by one of the otherwise expected participants. A failure of policing by the permitted parties and authorities. Terrorism implies violent threat to otherwise normal public activity. By definition a permitted protest event is not normal.

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Post Notes:

Nick Cohen on the bonkers US freedom of armed expression.

And – Trump vs Witness ? Not a question of “equivalence”. Explicitly hateful and violent expression and behaviour met with physical resistance. It’s the (alt-left) “resistance” taking the law to it’s own hands that undermines the (enormous) strength of their (correct) argument. Collect evidence and drag law enforcement in FFS. We all know the alt-right is despicable (deplorable, someone said already). What fewer accept is the the alt-left are also a – different but related – problem. (Again, I’ve seen no evidence of any orchestrated – masked, uniformed, opportunistic – alt-left in the Charlottesville events. If you are aware of any, let me know.)

Sleeping With The Fishes and Other Messages

Reading the Dennett / Haig piece I’d bookmarked from Mind & Language, thanks to Dennett’s tweet captured earlier.

I see already – only partially read Dennett’s contribution at this point – that it picks up on the Papineau exchange – the competence without comprehension inversion of reasoning – and on the Shannon-Turing informational focus that I highlighted in my reading of Bacteria to Bach and Back (B2BnB). As he says:

Dennett (2017) [B2BnB] was completed before I had digested Haig’s ideas, and Chapter 6 of that book, ‘What is Information?’, now stands in need of revisions just weeks after appearing in print. This essay is a first installment of that editorial process.

And as Haig says:

My written text attempts to rearrange the associations of ‘meaning’ and ‘information’ in your private texts to change how you interpret and use these words. It is an invitation to join a language-game in which these new definitions are the rules of play.

Evolution of meaning by usage of information in a (Wittgensteinian) word game. I’m all ears. Especially as it not only leads to explanation of comprehending consciousness on the one side, but also the decisive application of will on the other.

[Haig] shows why and how we may contrive all manner of intermediate levels of expression or interpretation but need not hunt for a dividing line that distinguishes comprehension from mere reaction.

That range of levels of consciousness, from subconscious to comprehending awareness, without needing to establish a hard dividing line to define what we might call “conscious” is precisely the point I picked-up from Tim Crane’s summary of the Dennett-Papineau discussion.

And Dennett continues, the inversion proposed is:

Instead of coding and syntax [of meaning > information] “all the way down”
it’s interpretation [of information > meaning] “all the way up”.

Which explicitly leads in to Haig’s title: “Making sense: Information Interpreted as Meaning” and is straight in with an entropy reduction view of Shannon information leading to a meaningful choice [encoding > semantics].

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It’s an excellent paper.

… an author always relies on rich sources and resources in the private texts of his readers for them to make sense of his public text.

When the Mafia leave the body of an informer in a town square, the murder is both a direct means to an end (removal of an informer) and a text (a warning to potential informers).

My text is the product of multiple drafts of an evolving text. In the process of reading and re-reading, writing and re-writing, I came to understand what I meant and I mean. My meaning is the public text that you see, not some nebulous sense in my mind to which the text points. As my aging mind becomes less nimble, I rely more and more on public texts of previous selves as aides-memoire of what I wish to mean.

As a blogger, I’ve noted before how much writing (by others, pre-blogging) comprises notes-to-self, evolving to some magnum opus.

My debt to Daniel Dennett is obvious.

Special thanks are due to a long-dead butterfly in Marilia who knew not what it did.

Why waste a perfectly good horse’s head, when a butterfly will do? Meaning is simply the outcome, the end result of interpretation by an interpreter. Meaning for the interpreter. Intended meaning is the creator’s own interpretation – hence games of feigned and unintended meanings. Simple for simple interpreters (the infamous thermostat, not actually used) as many outputs as inputs to others, as complex as you like for intelligent minds. Interpretation all the way up, like anything evolved. The sky’s the limit and there are no skyhooks.

Highly recommended.

Like Dennett’s recent B2BnB, the approach is suck it and see. The bet is that if you can suspend disbelief, simply try working with the author’s own terms – you might not yet understand (accept) the author’s definitions – but you will find explanation of complex evolved behaviours and properties are more easily understood (interpreted).

Closing Out Recent Dennett Links

Mentioned bookmarking amid the chaos a couple of posts ago and I still have two three Dennett bookmarks unreviewed.

Hell yeah! I thought when I saw the Prospect link with this in the title …

“The electronic age has triggered epistemological chaos”

… and bookmarked the piece for a longer read later. I needn’t have bothered, it’s a pretty shallow interview, not quite sinking to the level of “Dan, tell us, what’s your favourite colour?” The other question that drew most click-bait quotes was the one about the (two) most overrated book(s) of all time – the Bible and Quran being the implicit, expected answers – harking back to his time as “the least apocalyptic of the four horsemen“. Dennett is too concerned with proper rationality to have been side-tracked by the negative campaigning of New Atheism, something which is itself part of the trigger for current day levels of epistemological chaos I’d say. Too right.

The final Dennett link for now is Chris Oldfield tweeting a link to Dennett’s 1991 “Real Patterns” essay in the JoP. Hofstadter is included in the credits for the discussion that went into the paper, without any specific reference. As I noted in my last Dennett piece, Dennett and Hofstadter have been on this tack for some time, that patterns of information are more real than anything we’d think of as physical and independent of any physical embodiment.

Ah, and I still have this one bookmarked!

“Making Sense – Information Interpreted as Meaning”
David Haig, Harvard Evolutionary Biology

Still to read 30-odd pages with a dozen pages of intro by Dennett, but I note one of Dennett’s own references is “Get Real” 1994. Of course the reality of information and “Turing’s strange inversion of reasoning” figure highly in his latest “From Bacteria to Bach and Back” (B2BnB). A tangled web.

Classic Classification

By most people’s standards I over-use “scare-quotes”. It’s a recognition that in many contexts use of a word to name a concept is inherently “political”. All naming is identity politics. Naming the classification of any “object” is always short-hand for a whole collection of variables, simply to get a handle on the topic of conversation, which is rarely well-defined objectively anyway. I prefer scare quotes to indicate that this is understood, rather than the PC alternative of avoiding the words and substituting neologisms or detailed-context-specific alternatives.

Race is notoriously slippery in this regard. (See previous Religious Racism post.)

The Beard / Taleb spat is exactly that same example, again.

Simply choosing “Western” as a label for European and Colonial cultural heritage back to the classical Greeks and Romans is really a recognition of that shared & overlapping cultural heritage. It has little to do with genetic DNA markers of racial heritage. The label “western” is useful for what it allows it to be contrasted with; Oriental, Arabic and aboriginal cultures. Cultures, not races that is. And even for cultures, that’s enormous short-hand for many points of overlapping co-evolution over time.

So, in a cartoon – simplistic visual, no visible culture or genes – how does one show a racial ethnic mix within Britons and Romans (and why?). Visual appearance of skin and hair is your only option. The token black-man in Roman attire as I said already. As a reminder that Romans were ethnically mixed it’s OK only with a stack of caveats. As a “heuristic” representation it’s not likely to be very representative, and it does matter what was the objective in making the Roman ethnic mix point in the first place?

This was only ever Taleb’s original point, but sadly Beard responded questioning his credentials. There’s no doubt both understand the politics of labels, and there is no doubt both have valid academic-political agendas. However whilst neither respects the other, nor acknowledges the validity of their agendas, then no useful discourse can emerge. To Beard’s “mob” Taleb is simply a loutish bully, and from his fuck you position, he’s fine with that. To Taleb and his mob, Beard represents Western “hegemony” in its entirety. Taleb followed-up with this post, lest there be any doubt. The detailed caveats that should be acknowledged around the cartoon representation are lost in the heat of battle.

Even this curious response – to the twitter traffic, not the article – needs caveats around the 140-chars choice of “narrative” and “truth”, but all considerations of the content of any debate are indeed buried by the inter-personal “hate”. On both sides. Underneath it, they’re both right of course.

On mobs:

Religious Racism Again

I’ve written before about anti-religious / anti-Islam people using the religion-is-not-race defence when accused of racism.

Today Anne Marie Waters tweeted this:

Given that it’s only a 140 char approximation to truth – it does make an actual point about religion, after all – the question of how good a point it makes is entirely down to the motives and values of the speaker.

Either from birth or literally in-the-genes, the genetics of race is a slippery topic. Genes are not as well-defined objectively as some would have us believe in general, and not specifically when it comes to ethnicity. It would be possible in a scientific context to work with a definition of race as defined only by genetic properties, but that’s not possible outside the lab. (Interesting and topical to look at current Taleb work on the statistical patterns in the distributions of selected genetic markers in different populations.)

Determined and defined are over-statements in the real world, part of the greedy reductionism that accompanies overly objective takes on anything.

In reality, both race and religious identity are matters of individual and cultural identity politics, learned tribally as much as taught directly. The real argument against the simplistic statement is that it objectivises these cultural differences – which is what leaves it open to questions of motive. Anti-Islam is perilously close to everyday racism when it is seen to be directed against people who identify as Muslim.

However the focus is right. Values. Multiculturalism fails because incompatible values expect to be accommodated by segregation. A multicultural society succeeds when a set of values is maintained in that society by all its formal and informal institutions.

A New Species of Mind-Matter Explanation

I am at last reading and considering this TLS piece in which Tim Crane presents the Papineau / Dennett exchanges on Dennett’s “From Bacteria to Bach and Back”.  I’ve had it bookmarked for over a week and so far made only passing references.

Tim Crane’s a professional, I’m an amateur, when it comes to the formalities of philosophical classifications.

“Papineau and Dennett are both well-known materialists.”

Likewise, I consider myself a materialist in the sense that the stuff of physics – the whole of the natural world including our knowledge of it – is all there is. Hence the centrality of this issue:

“one of the big debates here is between materialists ” who think the mind is wholly material or physical ” and dualists ” who think that the mind is something else, something over and above its physical basis in the brain.”

(See here for a recent public presentation by Crane on many confusing views that arise in mind-matter theories.)

Like Dennett (and Rovelli to name but one physicist) I happen to believe this physical stuff is more fundamentally information than the particles of matter, energy and force of physics’ current standard models. All that belief does is move philosophical materialism a step further from common notions of material as everyday stuff having mass occupying space, but it’s been long removed from that by both philosophy and physics. The natural world is the unity of physics, nothing more, nothing less. Given a choice I prefer to self-identify with the term physicalism rather than materialism.

Papineau’s original critique contained this:

“… it is a category mistake to think of the mind as some inner pilot guiding [our] behaviour …”
[that just shifts the problems of understanding our mind to the “mind” of this ghostly homunculus]

“This is the source of Dennett’s strange views on consciousness. The more other philosophers complained that he was missing the point, the more he condemned their idea of special access to inner brain states, and accused them of sliding towards dualism.”

Which is my understanding of (and agreement with) Dennett on two counts – that is, not in the least strange to me. Firstly, that – “we” – “are” – “our minds” – at all conscious and subconscious levels – there is no separate thing communicating with us from within. And secondly, his “life’s too short” response to continuing to address specific criticisms on his critics terms.

Crane summarises Papineau’s taking issue with

Dennett’s idea of “competence without comprehension” [using the meme analogy to blind genetic evolution]

Dennett’s view that consciousness is a kind of illusion (“illusionism”) [where Papineau] argues that materialists should have no difficulty accepting the reality of consciousness.

Again, I’m with Dennett on both counts.

On the first he’s not saying all competence is automatic or unthinking, simply that most of it can be. Here I regularly use the top class tennis player returning a serve. Only a small fraction of the action requires conscious free-won’t / fine-tuning action, most of it is pre-programmed before the actual service. Most mental activity in the moment is subconscious.

On the second, it’s important to notice use of the “kind of” qualifier – in fact Dennett uses his kinda / sorta operator all over the place. He’s not denying the reality of consciousness, simply that it has an illusory “virtual” aspect to it, like any image, like the user display on a computer. It’s not what is actually going on inside the machine, simply a representation of it. Like the finger and the moon, both are real, distinct but physical (material). Most computer activity is invisible to the user in the same way most mental activity is subconscious. Consciousness is our user interface.

And on both points Crane continues:

“For one thing, it turns out that the illusion Dennett speaks about is not consciousness itself, but our mistaken ideas about consciousness. And on this point, perhaps, Papineau can agree. On the role of comprehension, things are a bit more subtle ” Dennett and Papineau both agree that comprehension comes in degrees and cannot be completely dismissed.”

Comprehension is the knowing of the conscious mind, and the mind has degrees of consciousness from comatose to nirvana. And the level of knowing surely varies across individuals of all sentient species. How can this be remotely controversial?

I could go on cherry-picking points to respond to. Crane’s summary is a good one, and the Dennett / Papineau exchange is exemplary as philosophical discourse – progressively narrowing disagreement rather than either aiming to undermine or score a win over the other.

In fact Papineau ends the polite and respectful exchange with these:

“I am glad we agree on so much …,
our remaining differences strike me as no more than terminological.

Why then does your book go out on a limb  …,
so adamant that this is the only way to put things?

[But] there seems no route to your view that the agreed science eliminates animal thought and human consciousness.”

Excellent on all fronts.

Terminology – We are indeed suspended in language games, which is why Wittgenstein is probably the only philosopher I hold in higher regard than Dennett. As Crane suggests, perhaps more controversial is how to draw a line that says what is and is not conscious on the otherwise uncontroversial scale of consciousness (above). But that’s a definitional (linguistic) problem, and Dennett’s strategy has always been to hold off settling hard and fast definitions of terms that might limit explanations until after understanding has been achieved. This necessarily implies the need for evolutionary iteration of terms and definitions.

Out on a Limb – Dennett is indeed riskily sticking his neck out. In B2BnB he reduces his argument to a sporting bet – effectively, “I bet we’ll get the right explanation if you look at it my way” – having used up all his avuncular patience over many years entertaining all his critics criticisms on their “agreed science” terms.

The Route to a Full Explanation – There are inevitably gaps in establishing Dennett’s thesis at various levels of detail. The content of the bet concerns that route to better agreement. Current agreed science is greedily reductionist and necessarily reliant on well-defined objects in its hypotheses and logical explanations. He puts his money where his mouth is and, whilst he doesn’t actually say this, he suggests we take our own medicine. That is, if we also believe in evolution – across all of its Darwinian / Lamarkian / Human-Designed variations in the available design space – then we should let it work on our philosophical and scientific arguments too. Take the bet, work with his arguments in their current state of development, and the route to bridging the gaps will evolve without our predefining it. That route will probably involve the evolution of both science and philosophy, evolution in their forms, not just iteration of their content. Like any new species we will only recognise it for what it is with hindsight.