I can’t give you the whole paper until the results are in but I thought I’d run through some of the interesting stuff I came across during the research here. Having read through some of the introductory and historical stuff, I found that at least a couple of paper referencing a guy named Searle who wrote about a thing called the Chinese Room.

To understand the Chinese Room, you have to go back a bit into sci-fi land and the excitement that was being generated as the first large scale integration of electronics and general purpose computers was getting momentum. At that stage, scientists who were brought up on fantastic novels about robots and machines building the future started to think that maybe we had arrived. Research into AI was getting some promising results where computers were able to make decisions and even diagnose blood diseases. It was thought at the time that if we could sort out all the rules of decision making and thought that our own brains work with and then program them into a computer, we might find ourselves talking to Baum’s Tin Woodsman (Wizard of Oz).

Hence the Chinese Room argument in which Searle sought to argue that the kind of AI envisioned at that time (1980) could never really think the way we do. The argument is based on the Turing test which goes back to early AI research in the 50s. In the Turing test, typed messages are exchanged between two rooms. The human in one room must guess is the typist in the other room is a computer or human by typing messages and examining the responses. If the person cannot tell the computer from a human, then we can say the computer is intelligent.

In the Chinese Room experiment, a giant phrase book is generated in chinese with millions of responses to various Chinese phrases. I guess Chinese is chosen because it is meaningless to most English speakers. On one side is a native Chinese speaker. On the other side, there is either the computer with all the rules programmed in or a human with the rule book. Searle’s argument is that just as the human doesn’t learn Chinese in this experiment, so the computer doesn’t think or know Chinese.

So that’s the Chinese Room in a nutshell and next time I’ll talk about how we might move beyond this kind of “propositional” thinking because let’s face it. A world without Skynet would be a bit boring.

Some links of interest:
The cybernetic imagination in science fiction / Patricia S. Warrick. looks at the history of AI and robots in science fiction.

...I discovered [the following] a few months ago from a philosopher who shall remain un-named, and I quote: ‘If X loves Y, then X wants to benefit and be with Y, and he has these wants, or at least some of them, because he believes that Y has some determinate characteristics, V, in virtue of which he thinks it worthwhile to benefit and be with Y. And he regards satisfaction of these wants as an end and not as a means to some other end.’

Well, be still my beating heart. One can only imagine Y’s deep delight at a lover’s declaration couched in such terms.

I liked how she progressed through various approaches to love starting with the rather shallow idea of it being attributes based (i.e. I love her blonde hair) and moving towards ideas of it being about a unique relationship (we have shared experiences and a unique understanding of one another), looking at the idea that relationships form our identity and finally discussing the pure irrationality of love and the idea of love as the simple recognition of another self unto themselves. I suppose my critique would be that Kennett moves from talking romantic love to something else at some stage and perhaps I missed that transition.

My reflections were that love takes many forms in many contexts and moves between all of the understandings presented by Kennett. For example, I think romances often start in the shallow excitement of sexuality and desire and only move to a deeper place as over time these two people might encounter each other in other aspects of their being.

In the context of my previous post on feminism I think feminists such as de Beauvoir and Firestone may have underestimated the role of love in sexuality for both men and women. For example, de Beauvoir felt that the outlook for independent women was bleak yet she didn’t see that men are capable of love and in that role might be able to respond to new ways of relating. Is there much feminist writing that looks at how men respond to feminism and their role in social change? (I’ve only had feminist readings from the early nineties so I’m a bit behind in this area)

Gender has been ignored in philosophy until very recently. Gatens discusses how some influential philosophy can be reapplied with gender in mind to show that women’s femininity is socially constructed.

In philosophy of politics:

Hobbes’ Leviathan presents the idea that the state is a giant monster made of of social institutions. The only place for women is under the umbrella of “those accepting by word and deed and conquered by war”. Women can’t participate in Hobbes’ polity, they are purely ruled by it.

Hume thinks women must “insinuate” their way into society by being associated with men. Hume shows how a voice is denied to anyone who is different from the dominant voice, i.e. women and people of other ethnicities. (Hume has also been used when talking about how any outsider must learn to speak in the dominant paradigm which may not be their own, for example Australian Aboriginals were required to speak in terms of “Land Rights” even though it’s an alien concept to their culture, likewise, women are required to speak with a man’s voice / language if they are able to take part in political discourse)

Labour, property and contracts

Engels states that when houses used to be communistic, womens work was public but since monogamous families have come about, it has become private. He glosses over the fact that labour conceived as property was the cause of men leaving the home. At the time of the industrial revolution, women’s bodies were considered incapable of producing goods.

Rousseau sees women as providing the backdrop / foundation to society. They are part of nature (Or part of the furniture) so don’t participate in the economy.

Marx is silent on gender but marxism has had a major impact on feminism since there are many parallels. Marxist feminists talk about the absence of wage relation in women’s work. i.e. that work undertaken by women in the home doesn’t have an economic value or isn’t part of the economy when it should be.

Sexuality, subjectivity and reproduction

In general, Men can be seen as split into natural man and social man. This is the idea that there is the physical man’s nature and body (including sexuality) as well as the intellectual and social man’s aspect. But women are typically not developed this way in traditional thinking, they are seen as neutral (i.e. their sexuality is not separated from any other aspects of their being). It seems that women just naturally attend to “natural needs” because they are the ones who give birth.

Mill advocates a strong public / private divide based on a “social contract” suggesting that women benefit by having a protected space. He forgets that relegating women to private space makes them invisible which means they are vulnerable to private dangers (i.e. rape, incest and domestic violence). Mill fails to acknowledge that women’s positions are not brought about by contract but by social construction in which women don’t have a choice.

de Beauvoir and Firestone say that contraception allows women to enter the workforce: Who will do the housework now? Maybe home labour will be contracted which would bring it into a relationship with the public sphere. (This was written in 1991, since then we’ve found that women just continue to do both)

What is women’s sexuality without reproduction? Women’s sexuality is defined in society by their reproductive role, so it seems like so much feminism is obsessed with women’s liberated sexuality once reproduction is taken out of the equation. This ignores other dimensions of women’s beings. What of male – female relations and marriage for the non-reproductive female? de Beauvoir makes the assertion that the relationship must be based on a shared project.

Gatens thesis is that feminism is often reduced to a choice between artificial equality (ie. contraception) or acceptance of the natural differences between genders. She argues that this choice is artificial and that we need to challenge the social constructions of femininity.

References

Gatens, Moira. “Sexual Difference or Sexual Equality” in Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality, Cambridge: Polity Press & Indiana University Press, 1991. [Google Scholar Search]

Moira Gatens bio at U Syd website.

For example, in our lecture on logic last night we discussed all the different types of fallacies that crop up in persuasive discourse. (A fallacy is another word for a flawed or invalid argument.) One example our lecturer used for the fallacy of confusing cause with correlation was with aboriginal communities and alcoholism. An example proposition (philosophy lingo for a statement of argument) might be: “Alcoholism is rife in Aboriginal communities, therefore Aboriginals are just naturally alcohol abusers”. The fallacy in that argument is that a correlation doesn’t mean that there is a cause and of course we know that there are many factors that cause alcoholism in some Aboriginal communities and we have no evidence of a cultural or genetic predisposition (at least not in traditional aboriginal culture). But the point I’m making is that a seemingly abstract and boring topic can be applied positively to a contemporary and relevant problem.

The Philosopher’s Zone seems to also reflect this. When I tuned in, they were interviewing Jonathan Glover, a Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London about his recent talk on the Israel Palestine conflict and how narratives are constructed and used by both sides. His topic not only spoke to the conflict of study but had implications for all of us and how we form our identity and live our lives:

When we think about ourselves and our lives, we think we’d try and make some sense of our lives, people don’t just want their life to be a heap of events one after another in a kind of chaos. People like to think that their lives add up to some kind of coherent story which makes some kind of sense, until they have an answer to the question What have you done with your life? (Jonathan Glover, “Uprootedness and national conflicts”, The Philosopher’s Zone)

He talks about “rootedness” and the need for people to have a place where they belong and the humiliation that we feel when that is denied.

Any other fans of the Philosopher’s Zone out there? Recommended philosophy / theology podcasts?

References:

Jonathan Glover, “Uprootedness and national conflicts”, The Philosopher’s Zone.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2008/2332471.htm#transcript.

Our first weeks readings in my course have offered some reasons for studying philosophy. Both of the authors felt the need to defend philosophy from the old it’s a useless waste of time argument. Interestingly, they didn’t exactly disagree with this assertion. Philosophy, unlike the other sciences has no direct tangible outputs. On the other hand, you could argue that all of science is an output of philosophy because one of the first thing that happens when philosophy discovers that something might be useful is that it is spun off to form a new branch of science.

For example, imagine the first philosophers asking what makes a tree different from a rock or a person. If you cut them into ever smaller pieces do we eventually end up with common building blocks or are they a homogenous substance that cannot be separated into component parts? Philosophers probably argued over this for hundreds of years and the science of chemistry was born and later on particle physics.

But both authors also agree that philosophy is more importantly highly beneficial to the practitioner for the sake of opening one’s mind, learning the skill of being able to assimilate things that are of the “other” and becoming aware of what makes up your self and all of the assumptions that are inherited into our selves from our culture. In other words the practice of philosophy equips one with valuable thinking skills but also the ability to see beyond our immediate circumstances into a wider context.

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions … but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good. (Bertrand Russell, “The Value of Philosophy”, 12)

References:
John Perry, “On the Study of Philosophy” in Introduction to Philosophy, 1-6.
Bertrand Russell “The Value of Philosophy” in Introduction to Philosophy, 9-12.
Perry, J. and M. Bratman (eds). Introduction to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

In our introductory lesson last night we zoomed through some broad descriptions of Philosophy noting that it is ancient and classical, sometimes thought of as the Great Conversation, a thread of discourse going for centuries where the founders speak timelessly so that their arguments still resound today and where each one of us takes part bringing our own experience to the party. We skated over the diversity of the types of questions that Philosophy tries to deal with and noted how Philosophy is related to the “meta” of almost every other “logos” or discipline that ends in “logy”. We saw that the nature of Philosophy is to deal with questions that underlie everything yet are perhaps impossible to answer and we finished off touching on the concept of logic as a tool for reasoning and allowing Philosophers to think and argue around the great mysteries of existence.

I particularly enjoyed a discussion of the absurdity of asking “Why” i.e. the more we try to question our assumptions, the more we end up in a kind abstract soup which can also be humorous. We looked at an article illustrating this called The Toddler Philosopher: I’m only five ‘Why’s’ away from an ontological crisis where the author discusses how her toddler keeps asking “Why?” until she ends up having to explain the meaning of life to him after a simple question about what an ice scraper does.

When I used to blog on Bogosity I would fairly regularly ask myself big philosophical questions and then write about them as if I expected to be able to produce a neat answer in less than 500 words and two hours of thought. It took me three years to conclude what we learned in our lecture last night, that many of these questions can’t be easily and definitively answered, that we don’t have to have a crisis every time we’re confronted with something that challenges our world view but that we can learn an awful lot of useful stuff along the way if we’re brave enough to set out on the journey.

See also: The School of Athens a cool painting.