A mechanics of the soul ...

If the verb is psychologico-experiential (think, know, learn, feel, trust, believe, remember, understand), and if the predication is altogether literal, then can a machine be the subject? 'Does a calculating machine calculate?' (Wittgenstein, RFM, V.§2.). Artificial intelligence (AI) theorists answer yes—but, then, they redefine the terms AI-theoretically. Humans are the primary subjects of these verbs, and humans are organisms, whereas machines are artefacts. AI theory, however, is premised on the mathematico-mechanical (i.e. dysteleologico-nominal) metaphysic, which artefactualises the organic. (Go here for more on that.) How and why these became the standard premises won't be expatiated on now. (See previous posts; or, much better, read this.) Some 400 years ago l'esprit géométrique possessed metaphysics, and all exorcisms thereafter failed. What's the major benefit of the possession? Medico-technological advancement, by which a diminution of human suffering. The major malefit? Inasmuch as the unbelievable dicta are believed—e.g. that qualia are really nothing but 'size, figure, number' (Galileo)—an augmentation of human suffering. As we'd expect, AI theory is fully possessed of the mathematising demon. It's an exercise in reduction and/or elimination, whereby (ad modum Aristotle) formal/final causes are reduced to material/efficient causes and (ad modum Wittgenstein) criteria are reduced to symptoms.

Can a machine think? Firstly, what's a machine? In l'esprit géométrique we're all machines, but in l'esprit tradition we're animals. Animals are sentient organisms; machines are inanimate artefacts. To speak in the tongue of the tradition, organisms qua organisms have intrinsic teleologies and substantial forms; artefacts qua artefacts do not. A wooden bed (e.g.) is an artefact. Its form is accidental; its teleology is extrinsic. Wood qua wood is not directed toward bedness. Bedness must be forced upon it from without. Wood 'wants' to be woody, to be treelike, not bedlike. Thus Aristotle: 'If you planted a bed and the rotting wood acquired the power of sending up a shoot, it would not be a bed that would come up' (Phys., II.193a).

Artefacts contra organisms

Secondly, what's thinking? Like all psychologico-experiential concepts, thinking is both polygenic and polyspecific. 'To think,' 'To think of,' 'To think that,' 'To think through,' 'To think with,' 'To think for,' 'To φ thoughtfully,' 'To φ with aforethought,' 'To φ without thinking.' Etc., etc. Note, also, that cogitative verbs (like 'To think') can't be dissociated from cognitive, conative, and affective verbs. If a cogitative verb is logically predicable, an affective verb is too (like 'To grieve'). If it makes sense to predicate cogitation then it also makes sense to predicate affectivity. (And if it doesn't, it doesn't.) Hence Wittgenstein: 'What a lot of things a man must do in order for us to say he thinks' (RPP, §563; unless otherwise noted, all quotes hereafter from the L.W. corpus). Thinking, knowing, learning, believing, trusting, understanding, befriending, forgiving—these are potentiæ (powers, aptitudes, abilities) of animate beings in normative contexts. We can't literally apply them to machines, for machines are not alive; they couldn't possibly satisfy the criteria for literal application. And it's not as if they could think, in a futuristic tomorrowland; it's that 'machines can think' has no sense. ('Machines can't think' is not comparable to 'Dodo birds can't fly.') So why do AI experts tell us that machines can (and do) think?

'We compare "I think" with the wrong paradigm, e.g. with "I eat" ... We know in general what [digestion] means, we want to be given a detailed account of what goes on when this process which we understand in a rough way occurs: we want more detail, the detailed working of the mechanism. "What is thinking?" is similar in verbal form to "What is digestion?" The answer is a matter of X-rays, clinical tests, etc., a matter of experimental procedure. Is this so with "What is thinking?" ' (LPP, pp. 48, 236).

AI theorists believe that machines can think because they also believe that thinking can be explained mechanically. They take 'What is a thought? What is it to think?' to be like 'What is a sewing machine? How does it work?' (Cf. PG, V.§63 ). (And if they're right, the real question is: can humans think?) The basic problem is that AI's vocabulary is delimited by (a reductive version of) efficient causation. If it speaks at all, it speaks efficient-causally. Why can't a percept be both all-over red and all-over green? Come, let's ask efficient causation.

'Because the central tendency of activity in a cortical mapping of reflectance spectra cannot simultaneously lie on both sides of an anatomical axis of the mapping, the axis that divides the spectra judged red from the spectra judged green' (C.R. Gallistel).

Thanks. [Exit efficient causation] See? Logico-conceptual question, efficient-causal answer. But these categories of explanation are independent. And when it comes to that which is psychologico-experiential, 'we are not in the realm of causal explanations, and every such explanation sounds trivial for our purposes' (PG, V.§63). Yet for AI, thinking just is a unitized micro-mechanical process, a causal nexus the locus of which (for a human) is the brain. That's right, thoughts are literally in the brain, just as the brain is in the skull. (O Lord, deliver us from the men of excellent intention.) Likewise, today's neuroscientists speak (in l'esprit géométrique) of 'the human head within which we have no doubt that thoughts occur' (Edelman and Tonini, Consciousness, p. 200). Beg pardon, a brain can be removed from a skull, or halfway removed, or half a brain halfway removed. Yet a thought can't be removed from a brain, nor halfway removed, nor half a thought halfway removed. But never mind that. Say 'I have a brain in my head' and 'I have a thought in my head,' or 'I have a timbit in my mouth' and 'I have a pain in my mouth,' then say there's no syllepsis. Now you're talking like a real AI theorist! 

'In the consideration of our problems one of the most dangerous ideas is that we think with, or in, our heads ... "Thinking takes place in the head" really only means "The head is connected with thinking." Of course, one says also "I think with my pen" and this localisation is at least as good.' (PG, V.§64).

Compare Schrödinger:

'We have got used to localizing the conscious personality inside a person's head—l should say an inch or two behind the midpoint of the eyes ... It is very difficult for us to take stock of the fact that the localization of the personality, of the conscious mind, inside the body is only symbolic.' ('Mind and Matter,' in What is Life, pp. 122-123) 

[So where does thinking happen? Try: in the library, at the study hall, on the commuter train, up the walkway—places in which we earthlings find ourselves in the circumstances of life.]

AI theorists follow their overlord Mssr. Descartes in understanding observable behaviour to be no more than correlatively suggestive of (or as Herr Wittgenstein would say 'symptomatic' of) antecedent unobservable activity. Inner brain states and processes cause outer behaviour, which behaviour is but kinematic motion. The inner-outer connection (which is already a literalised metaphor) is contingent, arbitrary, and severable. All is au fond Cartésien. (Cf. posts here and here.) What we're left with—public macro-mechanical movement here and secret micro-mechanical movement there—is not what we started with. We started with thinking. And 'in order to find the real artichoke, we divested it of its leaves' (PI, §64). Thinking just is a unitized micro-mechanical process? But (arbitrarily limiting ourselves to ratiocinative thinking) there are no efficient-causal connections in a logical inference or an arithmetic calculation. (Aristotle: 'In the field of what is unmoved there cannot be this kind of cause, which is why in mathematics nothing is proved by its means' [Met., II.995a].) Premises do not cause conclusions to follow, as A causes B in contact mechanics. And 'when we say "This proposition follows from that one" ... "to follow" is being used non-temporally' (RFM, I.§103). But on AI theory 'if p then q' means 'if p at time¹ then q at time².' That which was logical becomes causal. A logical mistake (which wants correcting) becomes a mechanical malfunction (which wants repairing). And the question 'How did you come to that conclusion?' can only be answered efficient-causally: 'A caused B, after that B caused C, after that ...' [And now there's the amusing question: where did you come to that conclusion—i.e. what are the intracranial coordinates, ye latitude and longitude?] But here we're not looking for causes; we're looking for reasons (for becauses). We don't say that so-and-so calculated because an efficient-causal A→B→C happened in his brain. It's only in a context of normativity that we can literally predicate calculation of him, elsewise there'd be no justification. And a machine, an inanimate artefact with an accidental form and an extrinsic teleology, can't (logically can't) behave normatively. A computer can be reprogrammed but not reproved. (Even the concept of mechanical malfunction [that it is thus] is borrowed from normativity!)

An abacus learning to calculate,
while a child watches—that is,
while a brain watches

Does an abacus calculate? No. Does a nineteenth-century comptometer calculate? No. Does a present-day computer calculate? No (introduction of electrical circuitry notwithstanding). Will a next-generation computer calculate? No. Consider that—

—'One could readily build a computer from a very large toy railway-set with a huge number of switch points and storage depots for different types of carriages to be shunted into until called upon for further operations (i.e. a "computer memory"). This computer would be cumbersomely large and slow, but in essence its operations would not differ from the latest gadgetry on the computer-market. Would anyone say, as hundreds of trains rush through complex networks of on/off points according to a prearranged timetable (a programme), depositing trucks in sidings or depots and collecting others, "Now the railway-set is calculating," "Now it is inferring," "Now it is thinking"? Does it make any difference if the railway-set is miniscule and the "trains" move at the speed of electric current?' (P. Hacker, Meaning and Mind, pp. 78-79).

Before AI can so much as begin, it has to reduce its analysanda to the efficient-causal. But the analysanda are irreducible. In the would-be reduction they're eliminated; they're replaced by the efficient-causal. (Just as qualia are not reducible to quanta, just as they are eliminated in the reduction, replaced by quanta.) And in so doing thinking (e.g.) is eliminated. 

Note that the mistakes here are not scientific, but philosophical. AI theory isn't bad science (inasmuch as it is science); it's bad philosophy, grounded in behaviourism (i.e. in Cartesianism minus cogitantes substantiae). The problem is the mathematico-mechanical metaphysic on which AI theory is premised, a metaphysic that lost its tenability a long time ago and has now degenerated into adhockery and meaninglessness. 'What is the sense of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics?' (Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p.21). If we're to arrest and reverse the degeneration, we'll have to put the question marks deeper down.

PS: When today's thinkers do put the question marks deeper down, they're publicly arraigned, as if they were impugning science itself. Look at Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, 'the most despised science book of 2012' (The Guardian), which criticised the defunct premises. How did the academy react? Like an angry zealot denouncing a heretic. Mind and Cosmos was: 'The shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker' (Steven Pinker of Harvard U); 'Absurd ... If you want arrogance and dogmatism you have to look to the [...] Nagel’s of the world. They’re the ones claiming, on the basis of some asinine armchair cogitation, that they have refuted an enormously successful scientific paradigm' (Jason Rosenhouse of James Madison U); 'Disturbing' (Jerry Coyne of U of Chicago). Etc. Such was the obloquy. Alright, these professors acknowledged that they hadn't read the book. But who needs to read books? Publisher's blurbs are more than enough—for social media (Pinker), newspaper articles (Rosenhouse), and blog posts (Coyne). (To be fair, Coyne did say that he was going to read it later. And later: 'I never got around to reading Mind and Cosmos ... I'm glad I didn't.') Sigh.

PPS: Meantime at Chapters bookstore ...

'Whatever I was told I would reject ... not because the explanation was false but because it was an explanation.'

Cause and effect ...

Recently I reread Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), in which is much of his sceptical writing on cause and effect. After closing the book, what's one to say but: Hume's premises, Hume's conclusions. For all his artful encomia to scepticism, he's never sceptical about his premises. They're uncritically presupposed (presupposing uncritical readers). And when these premises direct him to absurdities, Hume doesn't disabuse himself of their direction. (Therefore it can be said that he's modern philosopher.)

Hume (leaning on Malebranche?)

Where did Hume live qua philosopher? In the qualia-quanta duoverse created by the early-moderns, of course. And his causation conundra are species of a genus peculiar thereto. Remember that causal powers or forces (qua powers and forces) can't exist in the quantaverse. Their homeworld is the qualiaverse. But how, then, are the worlds to interact? Direct interaction is precluded (on pain of nonsense). The answer is: God. He's the intermediary. Hence occasionalism (most famously that of Malebranche, but cf. Al-Ghazali and Ockham), wherein there are no natural causes at all. We'd say that A causes B, but really God causes B when A (the 'occasion') is present. We'd say that the noonday sun wilts the grass, but the sun hasn't active power, nor the grass passivity to be acted upon. God wilts the grass (or 'wilts' the 'grass'). A sunburn is really a Godburn. Etc. (Note that the quantaverse is now a superfluous appendix; it's understandable that Berkeley had it removed.) Thus, as the universe became a duoverse, cause and causatum came to mean miracle¹ and miracle²; as techne drove out physis (see post on Chomsky), the miraculous drove out the natural. But to introduce God in this way (qua Deus ex machina) is to forego explanation. And Hume has at the occasionalists accordingly (e.g. Enquiry, pp. 65-66, Cambridge UP), yet he's committed to the same metaphysical premises (e.g. the same dysteleo-nominalism) that necessitated their calling upon God as explanans. (He also borrowed from T. Taylor's translation of Malebranche so liberally for his Enquiry that 'if Hume were a modern academic, he would not escape the charge of plagiarism.' [S. Buckle, Hume's Enlightenment Tract, p. 191.]) The saying goes: Hume is occasionalism minus God. That's not a bad way of putting it. He follows the occasionalists almost all the way, stopping just short of their miraculous solution, and his stop-short conclusion is: causation is 'entirely arbitrary' (Enquiry, p. 32); cause and effect are 'entirely loose and separate,' words 'absolutely without any meaning' (ibid., p. 68).

To save the causal phenomena, Humeans have retreated to regularity theories. But regularity theories (like counterfactual analyses) do not look at causation per se. To specify a regularity is not eo ipso to specify a cause. (For example, whenever bricks smash windows there are window-smashing sounds, but these are not the causes.) The analysanda here may or mayn't be causally efficacious, but if they are, they're not so qua regularities. And if we ask why there are these regularities, we're not answered.

By contrast, consider the later mediæval philosophies of causation, predicated on Aristotle's act-potency, four-cause metaphysic. Here actus and potentia are a complete division of all that is or can be. 'Potency and act divide being and every kind of being' (Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1.77.1). And the famous four (be)causes—formal, material, final, efficient—are four categories of explanation which, all together, are to deliver a complete understanding of the phenomenon. (But don't put the phenomenon in the wrong drawer!) Causal principles are then built up on these foundations. For example, that nothing can go from potency to act save by that which is in act—i.e. a potency qua potency (active or passive) can't actualise itself—and that cause and effect must be proportionate (for nemo dat quod non habet, you can't give what haven't got).

Now, modern philosophers (Hume among them) proceed with a reductive efficiency-only understanding of causation. For an Aristotelian, this is no more intelligible than a reductive one-dimensional understanding of four-dimensional spaces. Moreover, efficient causes are logically late, they'd say. Actio sequitur esse, action follows being (logically). For example, an efficient cause is that which actualises a potency, but a potency is a potency for an actuality. Thus efficiency presupposes finality, and finality presupposes efficiency.

'The [final cause] is not the cause of that which is the efficient cause, but it is the cause of the efficient cause being an efficient cause' (Aquinas, De principiis naturae, 4.29).

Side note: The mediæval doctrine of finality was not well understood by early-modern thinkers, whose eisegesis was that it projected conation onto that which had no mind and could not be subject thereto (e.g. onto inanimate substances, like salt). Whereas, in fact, the Schoolmen (who lived in a universe, not a duoverse) had believed that re agentibus naturalibus final causation was non-mentalistic, non-conative. Thus Aquinas: 'It should be understood that, although every agent [...] intends an end, it does not follow that every agent knows or deliberates about the end ... In the case of natural agents, the actions are determined ... [They] intend an end without deliberating about it. And this intending is nothing other than having a natural inclination toward something.' (De principiis naturae, 3.16.) Example: salt (sodium chloride) 'naturally intends' to dissolve in water, in the literal, Latinate senses of the terms nature and to intend. Sodium chloride qua sodium chloride (formality) is in these circumstances directed at this outcome (finality)—that's what it is to be salt.

Hume also presents a (false) disjunction in the Enquiry (which he 'borrowed' from Malebranche): cause and effect are connected either with absolute necessity or with arbitrary contingency. (And they aren't connected with absolute necessity. Therefore, etc.) But causation is neither/nor. The former necessity is too strong and the latter contingency is too weak. Don't forget, actio sequitur esse. It isn't that A must cause B, but that A precisely qua A is directed at or tends toward B, so that A will cause B ceteris paribus.

Hume's arguments are further premised on the belief that cause and effect are discrete events in temporal succession. But disunite cause and effect in this way and you needn't hope to reunite them afterwards. The fateful move has been made, and you're foredoomed to absurdities. The Aristotelians would say that the (proximate) efficient cause has to be simultaneous with its effect. Thus Aquinas: necessarium est causam et causatum simul esse, 'it is necessary that the cause and the caused exist at the same time' (DPN, 5.43). Plus, a cause is not an event. Suppose there's a baker. He's kneading dough (active); dough is being kneaded by him (passive). He moves his hands like this (cause) and the dough is moved like that (effect). These are not (pace Hume) 'entirely loose and separate' successive events. There's but one event (that of kneading) twice told. (Thus Aquinas [in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics]: ‘Action and passion are not two changes but one and the same change, called action in so far as it is caused by an agent, and passion in so far as it takes place in a patient.’) And, besides, not all examples of causation are examples of events. There's causation in books leaning against each other, such that they don't fall over, but this is a state, not an event.

Look at these colourful events!

We could keep going—we could talk about Hume's conflation of concepts and images or about his performative self-contradictions (e.g. 'All knowable propositions concern either relations of ideas or matters of fact')—but enough's enough. The message in all of this isn't that the mediæval philosophers were right. The message is: slow down. (Wittgenstein: 'This is how philosophers should greet each other: "Take your time!" ') Are you lost? Bethink yourself, for maybe you took a wrong turn, or maybe your premises misdirected you. Even Hume says as much, almost writing an epigram upon himself as he animadverts against occasionalism:

'Though the chain of arguments, which conduct to it, were ever so logical, there must arise a strong suspicion, if not an absolute assurance, that it has carried us quite beyond the reach of our faculties, when it leads to conclusions so extraordinary, and so remote from common life and experience. We are got into fairy land, long ere we have reached the last steps of our theory.' (Enquiry, p. 67)

Well, well. With fairy-land friends like him, Modernskyism doesn't need enemies.

For Sarah R. ('Too much the daughter of Hume.')

PS: It's amusing that scientistic 'sceptics' nowadays adulate Hume. Had the Humeans their way, science would be done for, and scientism would be an even bigger joke than it already is. (But Daniel Dennett will wear his velvetine headpiece notwithstanding.)

A.N. Whitehead put it this way (in 1926):

'Since the time of Hume, the fashionable scientific philosophy has been as such as to deny the rationality of science. This conclusion lies upon the surface of Hume's philosophy ... If the cause in itself discloses no information as to the effect, so that the first invention of it must be entirely arbitrary, it follows at once that science is impossible, except in the sense of establishing entirely arbitrary connections which are not warranted by anything intrinsic to the natures either of causes or effects. Some variant of Hume's philosophy has generally prevailed among men of science. But scientific faith has risen to the occasion, and has tacitly removed the philosophic mountain ... [Therefore science] has remained a predominantly anti-rationalistic movement, based upon a naive faith ... It has never cared to justify its faith or to explain its meanings; and has remained blandly indifferent to its refutation by Hume.' (Science and the Modern World, pp. 4-5, 20.)

Whitehead also propounded an answer to Hume:

'We must recur to the method of the school-divinity as explained by the Italian mediævalists' (Ibid., p. 55).

PPS: Herr Nietzsche understands:

'We reason, "this and that must precede for that to follow"—but we haven't thereby understood anything. The specifically qualitative aspect for example of every chemical process, still appears to be a "miracle," as does every locomotion; no one has "explained" the push. And how could we explain! We are operating only with things that do not exist—with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times, divisible spaces. How is explanation to be at all possible when we first turn everything into a picture—our picture!' (The Gay Science, §112.)  

' "Cause and effect." In this mirror—and our intellect is a mirror—something is taking place that exhibits regularity, a certain thing always succeeds another certain thing—this we call, when we perceive it and want to call it something, cause and effect—we fools! As though we had here understood something or other, or could understand it! For we have seen nothing but pictures of "causes and effects"! And it is precisely this pictorialness that makes impossible an insight into a more essential connection than that of mere succession.' (Daybreak, §121.)