I started reading this book, "How to build a mind" by Igor Aleksander – a somewhat outdated book on so-called artificially intelligent systems, and systems which model thought processes similar to animals and humans. The book touches on thoughts of what it means to "be conscious," among other things. It seems the majority of the first chapters are about philosophical aspects of brain-building from "hardware" as built by humans, and while I had grabbed it from the library thinking it would be more about the actual physical side of things, so far it has been interesting if not a little light reading (well, quick at least, I’ve been over these sorts of thought-games before from such excellent books as "The Mind’s I").
That’s more intro than I had intended. What I want to bring up is how apologetic Igor has so far seemed to be in how he deals with the naysayers for one, but more so with the matter of the philosophers who came before him – specifically, the many thousands of years of philosophical ideas which have been developed before him on the topic of "consciousness," as loose a word as that is, beyond probably the level of thought which I (nor he, likely) could hope to comprehend in some reasonable amount of time spent thinking. So there are many schools of thought on the nature of consciousness, from that it stems from the physical structure of the brain, to it being some part of an ethereal soul, e.g., and so on. Philosophers do not even agree amongst themselves on its nature, or better, how to tell if some thing has the property of "consciousness."
I’m not intending to jump in and debate this topic of mind. It is there to illustrate a feeling about philosophy which I’ve felt building up in my head. It appears to me that philosophy per se, in such topics as brain-building, where engineers and scientists can possibly build a physical model, is parallel in many ways to the type of thinking which theoretical scientists do.
It is a simple idea but I want to be clear about what I am getting at. Since I’ve been through some amount of physics, I will use that as an example: There are theoretical physicists, and there are experimental physicists. It is typical that one spends their days drawing pictures while mapping out equations and programming computers to solve them, while the other plugs together electronics and computer systems with vacuum chambers and chemicals. Never mind the often amusing banter and quarrel between the two about which of these disciplines is "better," it isn’t often that you get a physicist who is smack in the middle; there is usually a preference for building systems which take real-world data, vs. pushing the understanding and mathematics behind how the physical systems work. When you do get a thorough mix between theorist and experimentalist, I have a feeling it makes for an astounding physicist, and it seems to me that Feynman was one of these, despite his claims of being a theorist.
To put it explicitly, theoretical physicists are every bit as important as experimental physicists. Theories are necessary for experimentalists to know what to look for, and how to look for it – while experimental data is necessary in order to distinguish which theorist is closer to the truth and which one is truly off his rocker after all. One side can push the other can push the other… that is the way it is supposed to work; a dialog, like all science should be. Now I do have a preference for the experimental side of things, because for one, when I set to learning about physics, I wanted to learn about the real world, what is true about it. Theoretical physics is all in the brain, as is philosophy, and the seemingly best theoretical description of something is useless to describe the real world, if in fact the experiments show that it does not work that way. Perhaps it can be altered to match the real world at best, or prove a good model within some limits (as Newtons equations do until relativity takes over). I should note that there is a difference between theory, model, and experiment, and modeling does not relate enough to this article to spend time talking about it now.
In any case, that brings me to the point. My philosophy on philosophy, at least as it relates to for instance the study of consciousness, is that it should be treated much like theories in science. Philosophical theories may certainly be interesting to think about, whether they are true or obviously not (like ancient Greek theories of gravity). And for a long time I felt that that was just about the only use to it. In fact I must admit that I still feel this way about certain people I’ve met in the field. But like scientific hypotheses, philosophical arguments might just be able to point to answers to very real and very worthwhile things. There may be those philosophies and philosophers who remain so far removed from reality as it applies to building a brain, but in this sense, philosophy can very well provide engineers and scientists with important questions to work on; and those same engineers and scientists can produce conundrums in philosophy (and ethics!) which we simply have not faced before in human history.
To lay out some examples: It is a tough philosophical question of how one should live. Does one follow the saying, "tit for tat," or is there another, better method? Arguments can be made to justify just about any method of living. It turns out that the field of game theory has come to show that "tit for two tats" tends to give better results in the long run. There are certainly exceptions and I am not about to treat this scientifically enough to delve into it and provide sources; it is simply better for a group’s survival and so also an individuals’ to follow this model. Being too much of a pushover is not advantageous, nor is being incredibly unforgiving. So in this case a philosophical debate has been worked through by physical (or computed) models. Like theoretical physical models, some philosophies were closer to the truth than others. It is not worthwhile to be apologetic to those philosophies which got booted out, it is as useless as it is to cater to the theories which have been shown to be untrue. Not that we should now start ignoring them completely; for one there is always a chance that the experiment had been wrong somehow, or perhaps does not actually apply to the theory/philosophy as it was first assumed. For two it is dangerous to throw things out without a second look, in terms of advancing science. There are many examples of the person with the correct theory being ridiculed and ignored before the science finally caught up and proved them out. And then there is the practice of properly documenting things; why the theory is believed to be untrue, and so on. If it only to make for good history, or it may prevent others from thinking to hard about something which has already been laid out.
A second example is how science has pushed philosophical questions. Professor Vladimir Chaloupka at the University of Washington has an excellent inter-disciplinary course outlining how this is so. One such discussion is that, while many (especially including those in charge of large countries) may feel that war is a valid recourse or even first course against some wrong, never before have we had in our hands the ability to literally destroy all of human life on this planet. With that, the philosophical question of how one should lead their life may deserve a thorough revisit…
This is about as far as I’ve come in my reasoning. I’m sure this has been thought out before; I still dislike seeing the treatment of philosophy as if it is some ultimate grand thing, beyond the common person, when it has raised more questions than it has answered, and hasn’t exactly solved the world’s problems. I’ll end by saying that, in this respect, science has done exactly the same!
