Next Semester's Schedule

I can hardly believe it, but next week I'll be finished with my first semester here at Columbia.  I'm planning on posting a retrospective discussing my initial impressions of graduate school then--I'm still writing final papers right now--but in the meantime, here are the courses I'll be taking in the Spring, for any who are interested.

PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

The logic of inquiry in natural sciences: substantive as well as methodological concepts such as cause, determination, measurement, error, prediction, and reduction. The roles of theory and experiment. 

This should be fun.  It's being taught by a professor that I've gotten to know reasonably well this semester, and have enjoyed working with immensely (Jeff Helzner).  I'm very interested in the philosophy of science, but have never had an opportunity to take a formal course on the subject.  I'm looking forward to rectifying that.

DIRECTION OF TIME 

A survey of the various attempts to reconcile the macroscopic directionality of time with the time-reversibility of the fundamental laws of physics. The second law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy, statistical mechanics, cosmological problems, the problems of memory, the possibility of multiple time direction. 

This course is being taught by David Albert, who achieved minor celebrity status a few years back because of his participation in the rapturously terrible "pop metaphysics" film What The Bleep Do We Know?! , which was, in Prof. Albert's words, "wildly and irresponsibly wrong."  The film purported to explore the connection between quantum mechanics, spirituality, and free will, but more-or-less just ended up as propaganda for J.Z. Knight's cult.  I've been toying with the idea of trying to pick up an MA in the Philosophical Foundations of Physics (which Columbia offers) while I'm here, and this class will hopefully give me an idea as to whether or not that's a good idea.

FORMAL ONTOLOGY

Parts, wholes, and part-whole relations; extensional vs. intensional mereology; the boundary with topology; essential parts and mereological essentialism; identity and material constitution; four-dimensionalism; ontological dependence; holes, boundaries, and other entia minora; the problem of the many; vagueness.

This one's taught by quite possibly one of the coolest professional philosophers I've ever met: Achille Varzi.  He's got a great sense of humor and seems sharp as a tack.  This will probably be the toughest class I'll take this semester, but it sounds interesting.  Basically, it seems like we'll be covering how parts of things relate to wholes; it's usually the courses with descriptions that I don't understand that I end up getting the most out of.

PROSEMINAR

The course aims to promote weekly writing by each student. A paper, or section of a book, wioth which every philosopher ought to be familiar, will be selected each week, adn one student will make a presentation on that target paper, while the others will hand in a brief essay about it. Essays will be returned, with comments, before the next meeting of the seminar. Each week a different member of the faculty, in addition to Professor Rovane, will participate in the discussion.

And, of course, the Proseminar.  It sounds mundane, but I actually got quite a lot out of the first half this semester.  It's great to get to meet the various members of the faculty, and the individualized attention and constant feedback on my writing were helpful.  Also, my cohort pretty much rocks.

Internal and External Language

As I start putting together my formal paper about ethics as a social technology, I've been researching the relationship between language and cognition. A few researchers have called the "inner monologue" phenomenon essential to (or even constitutive of) cognition--we talk to ourselves (either out loud or in our heads) as a way of working out problems. This seems right to me: as most people who have done any kind of deep thinking know, it helps tremendously to have an interlocutor (real or imaginary) off which to bounce ideas. This point has led me to consider something related (albeit tangential), though, about which I'd love to get some input.

I'm certain that everyone has had the "inner monologue" experience of speaking to oneself silently--you might rehearse a speech in your mind before you give it, silently repeat the list of things you need to pick up at the grocery store, or try to work out a philosophical problem by talking to yourself in your head. While it's certain that this sort of process is linked to language--it's hard to see how a pre-linguistic animal could think linguistically--I wonder how close this relationship is. Jerry Fodor (among others) holds the position that mental representation happens in a meta-linguistic form that he terms "Mentalese"--while thinking in Mentalese might feel like thinking in (say) English, it differs in slight but important ways. If this theory is correct, it would seem that different brain processes would have to govern true language and Mentalese language (or inner monologues); we should expect, then, to see the two occasionally come apart. 

Here's my question, then: when a person suffers a stroke (or some other kind of brain injury) that interrupts speech functions (as damage to certain parts of the left hemisphere often does), is the inner monologue similarly interrupted? If so, is this always the case, or is it possible to lose the ability to express our thoughts symbolically (either through speech or writing) but still be able to represent thoughts to ourselves in Mentalese? If the latter is correct, that would seem to bolster the Fodorian position that inner speech is fundamentally different from linguistic representation; if the two faculties are inseparable, though, that would seem to cast doubt on the principled distinction between inner monologue and public language. 

I'm researching this question as we speak, but I'm interested in seeing if anyone out there has any first-hand experience with this--have you ever suffered a stroke, or known someone who has? If you lost language, did you also lose the ability to form thoughts with propositional content? Did one faculty return before the other, or are they mutually supportive? Any input is appreciated.

Quicklink: What Makes the Human Mind?

Harvard Magazine ran a short but interesting piece this week about what makes the human mind unique.  The article's not terribly in-depth, but at least they point out the complexity of the human/animal cognition problem.  Too often, we simply see the claim that human intelligence isn't unique superficially substantiated by pointing out chimpanzee tool use or bee dances--Harvard's piece points out that the issue isn't nearly that simple.  If you're interested in exploring this topic further, I'd recommend Michael Gazzaniga's newest book, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique.  It's written in reasonably accessible language, but still has enough hard science to interest those with more technical backgrounds.

A Kripkean Limerick

I got bored this evening:

There once was a man named Saul Kripke
Who said I will force you to pick me
I designate rigidly
Yet you look at me frigidly
So come on, dear girl, and just lick me.

Oh come now, my dear Mr. Kripke
I know not what you mean by 'just lick me.'
For the word 'me,' you see
Is indexed to thee
And your theory of reference can't trick me

"Ah ha!" then said old Mr. Saul
I can tell that you're trying to stall
But with a theory so long
How can I be wrong?
By my side those descriptivists pall

I don't care about size, Mr. Kripke
And I know you're still trying to trick me
Proper names still refer
As descriptions I'm sure
And your rigid old theory shan't stick me


It's likely that no one will find this funny without some background in the philosophy of language (and even then it's still pretty likely, probably). For reference: rigid designation, Saul Kripke, descriptivism, indexicals.

Quicklink: Neurons and the Universe

This is just unspeakably awesome.  A side-by-side shot of a neuron and a mock-up of the visible universe show the remarkable similarities between the two:



Badass.

DNA and Representation

A few different conversations today have gotten me thinking about a topic that bothers me from time to time: the idea that DNA in some sense is a code, language, design, blueprint, representation, or other word that implies some degree of intentionality (in the technical sense).  I see this claim made very frequently--most notoriously and nefariously by more clever Intelligent Design theorists as part of an argument for God's existence, but also by well-meaning philosophers of biology and language both--but rarely see it challenged.  I would like to at least briefly meet this challenge here; as is sometimes the case, I intend to likely turn this post into a more formal paper sometime in the future, so many of the ideas I present here are not fully fleshed out or argued for.  Comments and criticisms are, of course, always welcome.  I'm going to focus here on why this sort of approach doesn't work as a means to prove the existence of God, but I'm going to say quite a lot that's more broadly interesting along the way, I expect.

First let me try to state the argument as clearly and charitably as I can. DNA is a design simply because it is a code for us! That is, because every single cell in my body has a complete genome, and because that complete genome carries all the necessary information to build my body, DNA must be a design. Prima facie, it meets all the criteria of information: it is medium independent (I can change the DNA molecule into a string of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs and it will still retain its information-carrying capacity), and it stands for something more than itself (i.e. my body). DNA, put simply, is a language--a code for me--and that means that it is a design. DNA has semantic content in the same way that the English language does: all those chemicals have a meaning, and that meaning is me. Any design implies a designer, and thus DNA had a designer. Humans didn't design themselves, so something else must have done the job. God is the most likely culprit.

I trust a design theorist would find this formulation acceptable--now I'm going to tell you why it's not. A common extension of this metaphor is to refer to DNA as a "blueprint for you;" I think this metaphor is pedagogically useful, so let's adopt it for the purposes of this discussion. A blueprint, to be sure, represents a building, but before we're going to decide if my DNA represents me in the same way, we're going to have to be clear about what precisely we mean by 'represent' here; it seems that there are at least two primary senses in which we might be using the term, so let's consider DNA in light of each of them.

First, by 'blueprint B represents building X' we might mean something like what we mean when we say that a map represents a nation: that is, that the blueprint corresponds to a building in that each line can be matched with a wall, door, or similar structure in reality. But wait, this does not seem entirely adequate: to adapt Hilary Putnam's famous example, we can imagine an ant crawling in the sand which, by pure chance, traces with its tracks a perfect duplicate of the original blueprint for the Eiffel Tower. It does not seem right here to assert that the ant has created a blueprint for the Eiffel Tower (for a more detailed argument for this, see Putnam's Reason, Truth, and History, pages 1-29). Representation in this sense--in the sense of a map of New York or a painting of Winston Churchill--requires more than mere correspondence: it has to come about in the right kind of way. How exactly to define "the right kind of way" is a deep question, and it is not one that I intend to pursue here. Suffice it to say that the right kind of way involves agentive production by beings with minds at least something like ours (minds that are themselves capable of semantic representation); other methods might produce things that look very much like representation, but this resemblance is not sufficient.

Here, then, is the problem for the the intelligent design advocate attempting to endorse the first horn of this dilemma: using it to demonstrate God's existence is straightforwardly question-begging, as we saw above. Arguing that DNA represents in the same sense that a map represents terrain or a portrait represents a person requires the assumption that DNA was produced agentively by a being with minds like ours; this assumption is precisely what the design-theorist wants to prove, making this line of argumentation invalid. As I said, though, there is a second horn of the dilemma that the design-theorist might instead endorse--let us return now to our blueprint metaphor and see if DNA fares any better here.

The second way we might intend to use 'blueprint B represents building X' is what we might call "the instructive sense." This is the case if building X has not yet been constructed: blueprint B represents not because it corresponds to anything in reality, but because it contains instructions for how one should proceed when constructing building X. What does it mean, though, for one thing to contain instructions for the creation of another? Consider computer programming: when I type something like the following into a compiler:

#include 
main()
cout << "Hello World!"; return 0; 

am I writing instructions for the creation of something? Prima facie, this looks just like the blueprint case, but there's an important (and relevant) difference here: in typing the code into a compiler, I'm not making instructions for the program's creation, but rather creating the program itself. That is, the "code" for the program just is the program looked at in a certain way (e.g. through a decompiler); to watch someone write a computer program and then say "Well yes, I've seen you write the instructions for the program, but when are you going to make the program itself?" would make you guilty of a category mistake, it seems--again, writing the program just is writing the code. Program and code are identical. This case, I think, is instructive. We'll see how in just a moment.

Let's set aside the philosophical struggle with this second horn for a moment and remind ourselves what DNA actually is and how it works. DNA consists of two long polymers composed of phosphate groups and sugar groups conjoined by organic esters. Attached to this scaffolding, four "bases"--adenosine, ctyosine, thymine, and guanine--do the real "work" of DNA: adenosine always attaches to thymine, and cytosine to guanine, meaning that the entire sequence of both sides can be deduced from just one given half. DNA's primary function in the body is to regulate the creation of proteins, which in turn regulate virtually all of the body's functions. DNA does this by creating strands of RNA through the process alluded to above; units of three base pairs at a time on the relevant portions of the RNA (there are huge parts of our DNA that seem to play no active role in anything) then interact with cellular objects called ribosomes, which produce corresponding proteins. This is obviously a very basic account of how the protein creation process happens, but it should suffice for our purposes here.

The most salient part of the above, it seems, is the emphasis on causation. The entire process of protein synthesis can be done without involving an agent at all. In this way, DNA stands in sharp contrast to the blueprint from our earlier discussion--the sense in which we're using 'instruction' when we're discussing blueprints (at least in the second horn of the dilemma) necessarily includes a concept of conscious builders; to put it more generally, instructions must be instructions for someone to follow. DNA, then, is somewhat more like a computer program than it is like a blueprint in the second sense: rather than being instructions for something's creation, it _just is_ that something viewed from a lower level. Still, though, there is an important element of disanalogy here--to assert that DNA is just like a computer program would be to assert that it represents in the first sense we discussed. This assumption, we saw, leads to a fallaciously circular line of reasoning, and thus is unacceptable. As with a blueprint, if we make the comparison between a computer program and DNA, we must be careful to remember that it is just a metaphor. This, I think, is the central point that I am making: while the blueprint metaphor is apt in many ways, we must take care to remember when we use it that it is just a metaphor--while DNA and blueprints share things in common, there are important difference that prevent the two from being completely equated, no matter which sense of 'represent' we're using.

We've said a great deal here about why thinking of DNA as representing organism is incorrect, so let's take a moment to sketch a positive argument and suggest what the correct way to think about DNA might be. Let's begin by remembering that DNA causes protein synthesis, which causes other necessary organic functions. If we keep this observation squarely in mind, DNA's metaphysics aren't all that difficult to articulate: DNA, mediated by other chemicals and environmental considerations, regulates the causal chain that leads to the occurrence of all the various functions we mean by the cluster-concept 'life.' These include, but are not limited to, metabolism, reproduction, cell growth, cell regeneration, gas exchange, and many, many others. DNA is just one link--albeit a very important link--in the naturalistic chain that both causes and is constitutive of life.

As I said, I'm aware that there are a great many holes here that need to be plugged before this theory is really solid, but I think the rough outlines are clear.  Thoughts?

Ethics as a Social Technology

One of my classes this semester consists in evaluating my advisor's manuscript for his upcoming book. The book is on a naturalistic account of ethics, and while I can't say too much about it specifically (it's still a work in progress), I can at least say that I'm finding it rather compelling. He's concerned with showing how our evolutionary history--specifically, the development of altruism in our hominid ancestors--led to the creation/development of ethics as we know them today. In one passage for this week's reading, he made a parallel between ethics and technology, saying that ethics (like any artifact) exists to fulfill a function--that is, it was created for a purpose. I find this idea incredibly compelling--it seems to me that thinking about ethics as a social technology is precisely the right way to frame the issue--and so I'm taking it upon myself to develop this part of his account further. I've only been thinking about it for a few hours now, so my formulation is still in its preliminary stages, but here's my thought-process thus far.

First, let me say a bit about what I mean by a piece of "social technology." The paradigm case for this, I think, is language, so that's the extended metaphor I'm going to use in my discussion here. All pieces of technology have (at least) two features in common: (1) they are the products of intelligent design (no technology exists as a mind-independent part of the world--artifacts don't grow on trees), and (2) they are created to fulfill some specific function. Before we progress, let's say a bit more about how these conditions tend to be expressed.

Generally, (2) is realized by extending our natural capabilities; in their simplest forms, tools are just pieces of the environment that we use to interact with other parts of the environment in ways that our unmodified bodies could not--the most intuitive example of this is something like the use of a smooth stick to reach something (say, honey) that is inaccessible to our human hands. More sophisticated tools, of course, fulfill more sophisticated functions; the most complex tools that we've created to date actually aid us not in direct physical interaction with the world, but in cognition--computers are reliable mechanisms which, while not directly doing any "information processing," let us take shortcuts with our cognition. In short, tools are environmental changes that accomplish some function.

(1) is a bit more obvious, but I should still say a bit about it. I've argued before that there is no such thing as "natural function"--I follow Searle in saying that function is only definable relative to the beliefs and desires of some intentional agent. I'm not going to rehash this argument here (though I will have to when I do a more formal presentation of this idea), so just bear with me on this point for now. All tools have functions, functions imply users/designers, and so all tools are the products of design and/or use (I'm still not sure if these two can be made equivalent). Now on to the meat of my point here.

Language, on this definition, seems to count as a tool. Proponents of the extended mind thesis (especially Andy Clark and David Chalmers) have been counting language as a tool for quite some time, and despite other disagreements I might have with extended mind philosophy, I think they're spot-on with this point. Language consists in changing the environment (usually--but not always--through the production of compression waves with the vocal chords) in such a way as to communicate one's own mental states to another person. This allows for all sorts of developments that might not have been possible--it opened the way to collaboration, information sharing, and socialization--but that's not what I want to focus on here. Like any tool, language has a function--in fact, it seems to have two distinct functions: expression and communication.

By 'expression,' I mean something akin to what's happening in poetry generally (or metaphors specifically): the conveyance of emotion, tone, mood, and other non-conceptual mental states. In this respect, language can be considered something like music--a series of sounds put together to convey not so much a concrete message per se, but more to communicate a set of abstract ideas. Shakespearean language is paradigmatically expressive, it seems to me: it is flowery, beautiful, complex, metaphorical, and often designed to do more than simply express propositions.

On the other hand, language is also used for communication in a more mundane sense--that is, it is to convey propositional attitudes about the world. This is the use with which most of us will likely be more familiar: it is the way we are using the linguistic tool when we give directions, express philosophical ideas, make requests, describe things, and generally use symbols to represent the world as being a certain way. The constructed language Lojban is probably as close to a purely communicative langauge as we can get--it is designed to totally exclude the possibility of any ambiguity of expression by being as syntactically precise as possible. It was formulated by logicians and mathematicians to express ideas about the world in the most clear and precise way possible. Of course, this precision means that it is more difficult to formulate purely expressive sentiments in Lojban--metaphor and other poetic devices, while not impossible to use, are much more difficult to construct.

Clearly, most languages are used for both these purposes--it would be possible to do science, philosophy, and logic in Shakespearean English, and it would be possible to write poetry in Lojban--still, there are cases (as we've seen) in which a particular language is better at one and worse at another; relative to each purpose, all languages are not created equal. Still, most do passably well at both--it seems strange to say that English is a "better" language than Chinese. There are, however, cases where these sorts of evaluative judgments seem not only possible, but reasonable. One notable case is that of the Piraha tribe in South America. Their language, which has been extensively studied and debated, seems relatively unique among modern languages in lacking common features like recursion (the ability to say embed smaller clauses in larger ones, e.g. 'Jon, who is the author of this blog, went to class, which was at Columbia University, which is on 116th street, today'), discrete numerical terms, discrete kinship words, and other common features. Many of the concepts we express on a regular basis could not be formulated in the Piraha language. If language is indeed a tool--in that it was created to fulfill a function--it seems like we can say that Piraha is, at the very least, less effective in the communication sense. In a relevant sense, English is better than Piraha just because it does the job of language better.

I think we can make a similar case for ethics. If we look at the history of our ethical practices, it seems clear that they arose as a result of our ancestors' increasingly social lifestyles--ethical rules and norms were created to let us live together in larger groups, and they accomplished this goal by artificially extending our naturally altruistic tendencies to more and more people. Ethics, then, like language, has two distinct functions: to maintain group cohesion, and to remedy altruism failures. Like language, it is a human-created tool that arose to accomplish socially oriented goals.

With this picture, we can have our pluralist cake and eat our relativism too--just as with language, it is perfectly coherent on this picture to see different ethical systems as competing but not superior or inferior to each other. There might be many ways to solve these two problems that wouldn't be compatible with one another, but that still solve the problems equally well. To draw another tool-related analogy, we can compare two competing ethical systems to two competing operating systems: neither Windows nor OSX is inherently superior to the other, they both simply approach the computation problem differently. Still, as with language, there are cases where one is clearly better than another--both Windows XP and OSX are better than their predecessors of 15 years ago just because they discharge their fuctions (i.e. solve the releveant problems) better and more efficiently.

Similarly, we can say unequivocally that our ethical system is better than that of the Nazis--a Nazi ethical system just doesn't solve the social cohesion and altruism failure problems in an effective way. A dictatorship might well keep society together cohesively, but it does so without solving the altruism failure effectively. Since an ethical theory's function is to solve both these problems, we can say that Naziism is an objectively worse ethical system. Ethics, if understood as a tool, lets us make these value judgments at a meta-theoretical level--we can call two ethical systems competing but comperable if they both discharge their functions equally well but in different ways, or we can call one better than another one if it discharges its function more efficiently and effectively.

This seems to me to be precisely the right way to think about ethics and morality. I'm going to develop this further as the semester progresses, culminating in a formal presentation in my final paper for the course. I'll update this account as I solidify things more, but for now I would welcome comments and thoughts.

Oh Right, I Have a Blog!

So here I am. When we last met, it was the close of summer and I was getting ready to go from Lancaster, PA to New York City to start grad school. I made it--despite what you might have deduced from my sudden cessation of posting--and I'm now just about half way through my first semester. I couldn't possibly be happier. The downside to this, though, is that I've been so busy reading and writing that I basically forgot about this blog until just now; over the last year, it's been my only real outlet for philosophical musing, and now that I'm doing weekly writing (and daily discussion of the issues) it doesn't seem as necessary. Still, I think I'm going to try to keep it up. Now that I remember this place exists, stay tuned for more updates.

Chess, Computers, and Crystal Balls

I've written before about the significance (or lack thereof) of Deep Blue's now 11 year old victory over Gary Kasparov, but this is a topic that Eripsa and I invariably end up arguing over, so my recent three weeks working with him has made me think about this issue again, and I think I've come up with a few additions to my argument.

Briefly, my position is this. Contrary to what some functionalists would have us believe, Deep Blue's "victory--while undoubtedly a great achievement in design--isn't terribly significant in any deep way. However, I also don't think Dan Dennett is right in saying that the reason the question isn't interesting is that human brains aren't unique in the first place: instead, it seems wrong to me to call what happened "Deep Blue's victory" at all, as it was never in the game to begin with. Playing chess with a computer is no more a competitive affair than a game of tetherball is a competitive game with the pole or a game of solitaire is a competitive game with the cards. To truly participate in a game is an inherently intentional act--that is, an act that requires the ability to understand how one thing can be about or stand for another--and digital computers are fundamentally incapable of intentionality. In other words, ascribing a victory to Deep Blue over Gary Kasparov is to tacitly treat Deep Blue as an independent agent capable of its own successes and defeats, and that doesn't seem like the right way to talk about machines.

Clearly something is happening here--that is, Kasparov is really doing something when he sits down at the chessboard with Deep Blue and its handlers--so if that something is not a game between man and machine, then what is it? While I still find the above argument (at least in its non-brief form) compelling, it occurs to me that it is a strictly negative argument--it contends that Deep Blue is not playing a game at all and so has no real "victory" over Kasparov to speak of--leaving the question of what is actually going on unanswered. It is this question I wish to try to address here.

Suppose you and I are standing in a room with hardwood floors arguing about whether or not the ground is level. To settle the issue, I pull out a flawless crystal ball and set it carefully in the center of the room, knowing that if the floor really isn't level, the ball will roll down the incline, however slight; sure enough, the ball rolls off to the south, and we agree that we really do need to deal with that sinkhole out back. What's happened here? On a strong externalist account like Andy Clark's, I've externalized some of my cognition into a tool, letting it do the information processing for me in a way that just my un-extended meat mind just couldn't: this is the position that lies at the root of the intuition that Deep Blue is an agent in itself capable of playing chess, and it is this position against which I want to argue.

Rather than somehow externalizing my cognition, it seems to me that I'm simply cleverly manipulating my environment in order to make my internal cognition more powerful. When I set the ball in the middle of the room, it is with knowledge that--thanks to the action of some basic physical laws--one sort of result will occur if the floor is level and another sort will occur if it is not level. In short: I don't know if the floor is level, but I know that if the floor is not level, then the ball will roll down hill; thus, I infer that since I can certainly see the ball move, placing it in the middle of the floor is a good way to find out if there is a tilt or not. The ball is not doing any information processing of its own, nor is it some kind of metaphysical receptacle for my own cognition; instead, it is just a reliable indicator that I can use to make a judgment about the environment around me.

Let's extend (so to speak) this argument to computers in general (and Deep Blue in particular), then. A digital computer is a physical system just like a crystal ball--albeit a much more complex one--so it seems that the analogy is preserved here: any apparent "information processing" done by the computer (that is, any native cognition OR extended cognition) is nothing more than a very complicated ball rolling down a very complicated hill; a computer isn't actually doing anything cognitive, it's just a physical system with a reliable enough operation that I can use it to help me make certain judgments about the environment. Given a hill the ball will--just in virtue of what it is--roll, and given certain inputs the digital computer will--just in virtue of what it is--give certain outputs. In both the case of the ball and the case of the computer the tool's interactions with the environment can be informative, but only when interpreted by a mind that is capable of consciously attaching significance to that interaction; that's all a computer is, then: a physical system we use to help us make judgments about the environment.

That still doesn't address the central question, though, of what exactly is going on in the Deep Blue vs. Kasparov game (or of what's going on when anyone plays a computer game, for that matter). Clearly Kasparov at least is doing something cognitive (he's working hard), and clearly that something is at least partially based on the rules of chess, but if he's not playing chess with Deep Blue, then--at the risk of sounding redundant--what is he doing? Perhaps he is, as others have argued, actually playing chess with Deep Blue's programmers (albeit indirectly). I've advanced this argument before, and have largely gotten the following response.

Kasparov can't actually be playing against Deep Blue's programmers, because the programmers--either individually or collectively--wouldn't stand a chance in a match against Kasparov, whereas Deep Blue was able to win the day in the end. If the competition really was between Kasparov and the people behind the design and development of Deep Blue, those people would be expected to (at least as a group) be able to perform at least as well as Deep Blue itself did in the chess match. This is an interesting objection, but one that I do not think ultimately holds water. To see why, I'll beg your pardon for engaging in a bit more thought experimentation.

I'm not much of a chess player. I know the rules, and can win a game or two against someone who is as inexperienced as I am, but those wins are as much a product of luck as anything I've done. Kasparov would undoubtedly mop the floor with me even with a tremendous handicap--say, the handicap of not being able to see the chess board, but rather having to keep a mental model of the game and call out his moves verbally. I have, as I said, no doubt that I would be absolutely annihilated even with this advantage, but we can certainly imagine a player much more skilled than I am: a player that would tax Kasparov more, and one that he would reliably be able to beat in a normal chess match, but might risk losing to were he denied the environmental advantage of being able to use the board as an aid to represent the current state of the game. The board (and who has access to it) is making a real difference in the outcome of the game--are we to say, then, that it is a participant in the game in the same way that Deep Blue is? In the case where our mystery challenger beats Kasparov, does the board deserve to be credited in the victory? It does not seem to me that it does.

Here's another example of the same sort of thing. Suppose I challenge you to an arithmetic competition to see which of us can add a series of large numbers most quickly. There's a catch, though: while I can use a pen and paper in my calculations, you have to do the whole thing in your head. You'd be right to call foul at this, I think--the fact that I can engage in even the rudimentary environmental manipulation of writing down the figures as I progress in my addition gives me an enormous advantage, and might allow me to win the contest when I otherwise would have lost--this is true in just the same way that it's true that Kasparov might lose a chess game to an "inferior" opponent if that opponent was able to manipulate the environment to aid him in a way that Kasparov was not (say, but using a chess board to help keep track of piece position).

I suspect that most of you can now see where I'm going with this, but let me make my point explicit: Deep Blue is nothing more than a very complicated example of its programmers' ability to manipulate the environment to give themselves an advantage. Contending that Kasparov couldn't have been matching wits against those programmers just because he could have mopped the floor with them if they'd been without Deep Blue is akin to saying that because Kasparov might lose to certain players that had access to the board when he did not (even if he'd beat them handily in a "fair fight"), the board is the important participant in the game, or that I'm simply better at arithmetic than you are because I can win the competition when I have access to pen and paper and you do not.

Deep Blue is its programmers pen and paper--the product of their careful environmental manipulation (and no one manipulates the environment like a computer programmer does) designed to help them perform certain cognitive tasks (e.g. chess) better and more quickly. So whom was Kasparov playing chess with? On this view, the answer is simple and (it seems to me) clearly correct--he was playing against the programmers in the same sense that he would have been if they'd been sitting across the board from him directly--he just had a disadvantage: they were a hell of a lot better at using the environment to enhance their cognition than he was.

Hey Look, Irony!

Shortly after finishing that last post about how awesome technology is, my laptop descended into its watery grave--that is, I spilled rum-laced Vitamin Water all over it. It is, needless to say, currently nonfunctional. I'm only at CTY for another few days (I'm posting this from Eripsa's laptop), but don't expect to see anything new until at least next week, when I will be gloriously reunited with my desktop. If anyone wants to contribute to the dirt-poor-philosophy-grad-student-laptop-repair-fund, feel free!

100th Post - An Ode to Technology

This is the 100th post on this blog, and I'm pretty happy about it. As I said in the very first post, I've tried keeping a blog before, and it's never really worked out as well as it has here. I think it is a fitting celebration, then, to talk a little bit about technology.

I'm 2/3 of the way through my second CTY session, and this time I'm teaching philosophy of mind with Eripsa, who, despite being dreadfully wrong about consciousness, is an all-around awesome dude. He works primarily on the philosophy of technology, a disappointingly underrepresented field that deals with questions like "what is the ontological status of a tool," "what is necessary to create an artificial mind," and "how does technology influence human thought?" He does a lot of really interesting work (particularly on robots), so I encourage you to go check out his blog.

Anyway, being around him inevitably gets me thinking even more about technology than I usually do (which is saying something)--I'm particularly interested in that last question I posed above, though: how does technology influence human thought? Eripsa wants to follow Andy Clark and David Chalmers in endorsing the strong-externalist extended mind thesis, which claims that there is a relevant sense in which my cognition and mental states (including beliefs) spend a lot of time in the external world. Their paradigm case for this is that of Otto, a hypothetical Alzheimer's patient who, in lieu of using his deteriorating biological memory, writes down facts in a notebook, which he carries with him at all times. Clark claims that when Otto consults his notebook for a fact (e.g. the location of a restaurant he wants to go to), the notebook is serving as a repository for his beliefs about the world in just the same way that my (or your) biological memory does; that is, his belief about the location of the restaurant is literally stored in the external world.

This thesis seems fraught with problems to me, but that's not the point I want to make (at least not in this post). While I think that Clark (and by extension Eripsa) is wrong about the ontology of technology (Otto's notebook is supposed to stand for a whole host of technological "extensions" of our biological minds into the world), I think he's precisely right about its importance in a cognitive sense. Human beings are, by their very nature, tool users; it's a big part of what makes us human. Of course other primates (and even some birds) can use--or even manufacture--tools to accomplish certain tasks, but nothing else in the known natural world comes even close to doing it as well as humans do. Technology use is a part of who we are, and always has been; we created language as a tool to manipulate our environment, learning to create compression waves in the air for the purpose of communicating our ideas to each other, and in the process beginning the long, slow march toward the incredibly sophisticated tools we have today--tools like the one you're using right now.

Language might have been our first tool--and perhaps even still our best--but in recent years, the computer (and more specifically the Internet) has proven to be one of our most important in terms of cognition. I've argued before that the advent of the information age should herald a radical change in educational strategy, but I want to reiterate that point here. Today's kids are growing up in a world where virtually any fact that want is immediately and reliably accessible at any time. I'd say that at least 1/3 of the kids I'm teaching at CTY--and these are 12-15 year olds--have Internet-enabled cell phones that they keep on their person at all times; this is a very, very big deal, and our educational strategy should reflect it.

100 years ago, a good education was an education of facts. Students memorized times-tables, theorems, names and dates, literary styles, and an endless list of other factual statements about the world, because that's what it took to be an "educated citizen." Information was available, but it was cumbersome (physical books), difficult to access (most areas didn't have high quality libraries), and generally hard to come by for the average citizen--even an educated one. The exact opposite is true today--students don't need to memorize (say) George Washington's birthday, because they can pull that information up within seconds. This frees up an enormous "cognitive surplus" (to borrow Clay Shirkey's term) that can be used to learn _how to analyze and work with facts_ rather than memorize the facts themselves.

I've postulated before that the so-called "Flynn Effect"--that is, the steadily increasing IQ of every generation since the close of the 19th century--might be due to the increasing availability of information, and thus the increasingly analysis and abstraction oriented brain of the average citizen. If I'm right, we're going to see a huge leap in the IQ of this generation, but only if we start to educate them appropriately. We need a radical emphasis shift as early as in the kindergarten classroom; students need to be taught that it's not what you know, but how well you can work with the almost infinite array of facts that are available to you. The spotlight should be taken off memorizing names and dates, facts and figures, and focused squarely on approaches to thinking about those facts and figures. Today's child is growing up in a world where he is not a passive consumer of information, but rather an active participant in the process of working with information in a way that humans have never been before.

This leads me to my final point, which is that you should all go read this speech by Clay Shirky, author of the book Here Comes Everyone. It's very, very well articulated, and makes exactly the kind of point I'm driving at here. Snip:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing--and when I say "we" I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that's what I'm going to tell them: We're looking for the mouse. We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes.

I'm betting the same. Thanks for reading, and here's to the next 100 posts.

Potential Course List

I'm starting to get my affairs ready to start at Columbia this Fall, and have assembled the following class list. I haven't registered yet, but I have the (perhaps wildly incorrect) perception that grad students are rarely unable to get into classes of their choice. In any case, here's my dream schedule (a long with course descriptions and some commentary) for Fall 2008:

EVOLUTION, ALTRUISM, AND ETHICS
Day/Time: W 11:00am-12:50pm
This seminar will elaborate and examine a naturalistic approach to ethics, one that views contemporary ethical practices as products of a long and complex history. I am currently writing a book presenting this form of naturalism, and chapters will be assigned for each meeting after the first. Using brief readings from other ethical perspectives, both historical and contemporary, we shall try to evaluate the prospects of ethical naturalism.
Open to juniors, seniors, and graduate students.

I'm particularly excited about this one. In my early undergraduate days, I specialized in ethical issues, but I found all of the existent ethical theories dreadfully unsatisfying, and came to suspect that if we were going to get a plausible naturalistic account of ethics, we needed a more thorough understanding of how the mind and brain worked--hence the switch to mind. This class sounds right up my alley, though, and I'm always excited to hear naturalistic defenses of philosophical concepts.

1st YEAR PROSEMINAR IN PHILOSOPHY
Day/Time: W 6:10pm-8:00pm
This course, which meets only for the first seven weeks of term, is restricted to, and required for, first-year Columbia Ph.D. students. The course aims to promote weekly writing by each student. A paper, or section of a book, with which every philosopher ought to be familiar, will be selected each week, and one student will make a presentation on that target paper, while the others will hand in a brief essay about it. Essays will be returned, with comments, before the next meeting of the seminar. Each week a different member of the faculty, in addition to Professor Peacocke, will participate in the discussions. A second seven-week segment of the ProSeminar will be held in the Spring Semester of 2009.

What can I say? It's the Pro-Seminar, so I have to take it. Still, it could be really good--the single most productive (in terms of bettering me as a philosopher) course I took at Berkeley was the "Introduction to Philosophical Methodology" class--just like this one, it was aimed at getting students writing every week. My hope is that this class will be a more rigorous and intense version of that one, and that I'll really have a chance to sharpen my writing considerably.

ADVANCED TOPICS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
Day/Time: W 2:10pm-4:00pm
This seminar will be concerned with the interactions between the theory of intentional content and thought on the one hand, and metaphysics on the other. We will first discuss the role of truth and reference in the individuation of intentional content. We will then draw on that role in discussing the following issues: the nature of rule-following and objectivity in thought; transcendental arguments and objective content in thought and in perception; the general phenomenon of relation-based thought, and its extent, nature and significance; the nature of subjects of consciousness, self-representation and first person thought.

Mind is my specialty, so this was an easy choice. I'm not entirely clear on what exactly this course description is talking about (which is a good thing), other than that the class seems to deal with intentional content and how it relates to external objects, which is a topic I'm very much interested in.

Serendipitously, all these classes are on Wednesday, so I'd be in class only one day per week, which would be pretty nice. I'm sure I'm going to have a lot of writing to do outside of class (and Fallout 3 is coming out soon, too...), so not having to make the commute to campus every day will be nice.