Interactive
Empiricism:
The Philosopher
in the Machine
Ron Chrisley
COGS/Informatics
University of Sussex
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Take-home message
Philosophy & Engineering: A two-way interaction
1. Some philosophical breakthroughs may only come
about through attempting to design and build
working systems (engineering helps philosophy)
2. Building complex systems (e.g. an artificial
consciousness) might require incorporating
scientists and philosophers into the design,
modelling:
–
–
How they affect the system dynamics
How they system dynamics affect them
Direction 1:
Engineering conceptual change
Conceptual problems
• Not all limitations on our
scientific understanding are a
matter of insufficient data
• E.g., consciousness:
– Naturalist intuition:
consciousness (like everything
else) is at root a physical
phenomenon
– "Zombie hunch": It is possible
for there to be a creature
physically identical to you, but
nobody's home
Conceptual change
• Best diagnosis: It is our
concept of
consciousness that is to
blame
• One solution: change
our concept of
consciousness, so that
we no longer suffer from
the zombie hunch
Conceptual conceptual
change?
• But it seems unlikely that
this conceptual change
could itself come about
purelyconceptually, merely
by, e.g.:
– Acquiring more beliefs
– Philosophical argumentation
– Reading journal articles
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Non-conceptual
conceptual change
• Rather, problems of
consciousness seem to
require a non-conceptual
development in our concepts
• (Bad) examples of nonconceptual change:
– Getting hit on the head
– Undergoing neurosurgery
– Taking drugs?!
Non-conceptual
conceptual change
• Better: change that is nonconceptual, but still:
– Rational
– Justified
– Based on experience of the subject matter
• What kind of change/learning could this
be?
Concepts as skills
• Wittgenstein: What underlies
being able to move between
ways of seeing something (e.g.
duck-rabbit) is the "mastery of a
technique"
• Then (some) concept acquisition
is like skill acquisition
– Just as one can't read/argue/theorize your
way to knowing how to ride a bike…
– …so also with some concepts; one must
experience the phenomenon to understand
it
Interactive empiricism
• But not just passive experience (normal
empiricism)
• Rather, interaction: mastery of how
one's experiences of the subject change
in the light of one's different
interventions (interactive empiricism)
Interaction is essential to…
• Perception (O'Regan and
Noë: Sensory-motor
contingency theory )
• Consciousness (Hurley:
Consciousness In Action)
• Cognition (Bickhard:
"Interactivism: A
Manifesto")
• Mammalian visual
development (Held and
Hein)
Meta cognitive science:
Theorist as subject
• A science of human cognition in general
should apply to the cognition of
cognitive scientists in particular
• If the cognitive science is right that
cognition is essentially interactive…
• …then doing cognitive science (or AI)
should be as well
Engineering as interaction
• But what kind of interaction?
• Perception of brain states (one's
own and others') during
manipulation (social, physical,
etc.)?
– Limited
– (compare doing something similar
with a computer)
• Better: attempt to design and
build cognitive systems, and
observe them working (or failing
to!): Engineering
An aside: The Mary problem
• Jackson's Knowledge Argument
against a physical science of
consciousness
– Mary knows everything the physical
sciences can tell us about colour, but
has never seen red
– Will she acquire some knowledge
when she sees red for the first time?
– Yes, she will learn what it is like to see
red
– So there is knowledge of
consciousness the physical sciences
cannot provide
Solving the Mary problem
• But science is essentially
interactive
• So although Mary may have read
every possible book about color
vision…
• …she doesn't have all the
knowledge involved in doing color
science
• Or rather, if we assume that she
has all such knowledge, then it is a
contradicition to also assume that
she has never interacted with
redness (i.e., seen red)
Direction 2:
The philosopher
in the machine
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We are a part of
the systems we build
• Just as interaction can have a
crucial, beneficial effect on the
theorist/philosopher…
• …so also can it have such an effect
on the system being designed/built
We are a part of
the systems we build
• Q: What has been
the biggest
engineering
advance in AI in the
last 20 years?
• A: Kismet's
eyebrows (Breazeal
et al)
Interacting with Kismet
• Kismet could only learn to visually track objects if
trained on suitable stimuli
• This required a trainer to wave objects in front of
Kismet at a certain speed, distance, etc.
• How to ensure this efficiently?
• Exploit affective responses in the trainer: if trainer gets
too close, Kismet jumps back, and raises eyebrows
• Trainer readjusts without having to be instructed,
understand physics of the system, etc.
Combining directions 1 and 2
• If we are part of the system, then not only can
we have a beneficial causal effect on the
robot's performance, but vice versa
• Thus, instead of trying to design an
AI/machine consciousness in one step…
• …why not instead design a system S1 so that
it will prompt conceptual changes in us…
• …that will enable us to design an S2 that will
prompt changes in us…
• …that will enable us to design an S3…
• …and so on?
Frank Herbert's prescience
• In the science fiction novel Destination:
Void, the author of Dune speculated that
the best way to create a machine
consciousness might be to design a
situation in which:
– Carefully engineered people (clones)
– In a carefully engineered technological environment
(computers, spaceship, neural wetware)
– Are manipulated and motivated to find a way to
create machine consciousness (e.g., they will die if
they don't!)
– A crucial part of the project is for the challenges they
face and the technology they build to play a role in
them figuring out what consciousness is (conceptual
change!)
From fiction
to fact?
• Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to suggest
that something like this could be developing
– Not just work like Kismet
– But also, e.g., the search for creative technologies:
environments, document systems, brain wave
induction devices etc. that facilitate insight
– Synthetic phenomenology: interactive familiarity
with a robotic system as a way of developing a
means of specifying linguistically inexpressible
experiential content (e.g., Chrisley and
Parthemore)
Thank you.
[email protected]
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/users/ronc
Talks available in various media at:
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