Dick Pountain /Idealog 342/ 05 Jan 2023 10:55
My column last month was a semi-temperate rant, triggered by the sensationalist reporting of advances in cosmology and particle physics by the mainstream press (the ‘wormhole in a quantum computer’ effect). I attributed this to the coming of age of successive generations reared on Star Wars and the Marvel Universe, which induces deep longings to flout the laws of physics.
Readers of a philosophical bent (assuming I have any) might have concluded from this column that I’m a red-faced, harrumphing old British Empiricist who lumbers around the world kicking things and shouting “I refute it thus!” but nothing could be further from the truth. By ‘further’ I mean that my philosophical views are 180° opposed to such an empiricism, if you believed that truth is organised as a 2-dimensional graph which I don’t. Instead I believe that all sentient living creatures, human beings included, are ruled by emotions and live in a world that’s constructed almost entirely by imagination.
There is of course a catch, and that is that those of us who think this way define the words ‘emotion’ and ‘imagination’ in a way rather different from, and more rigorous than, their use in everyday speech. I’ve suggested in this column several times before that emotions properly understood are evolutionarily ancient neural subsystems that alert us to dangers, attract us to food and to potential mates, persuade us to play or to freak out. They operate below consciousness but the chemical changes they produce in our bodies get detected by our senses as what we should more properly call ‘feelings’.
And speaking of our senses, another confusion arises there. All living creatures must separate what is themself from what is the outside world by a barrier, in our case the skin. Of our five sensory subsystems, only taste and smell permit molecules from the outside world to cross this barrier: touch measures pressure and temperature on the skin while sight and hearing detect waves of visible radiation and air pressure. Having our skin penetrated by anything more solid usually constitutes an undesirable emergency, so our experience of the outside world is mostly via second-hand, internal, signals.
Our brain processes such signals to detect patterns in them, analysing those into smaller sub-patterns and storing them for future reference: whenever a new stimulus arrives the brain tries to recognise it by rebuilding an image from such stored components. We maintain an internal mental map of the outside world which is neither complete nor entirely accurate, constantly updated via Bayesian composition of new inputs, and which most importantly is coloured by emotional tags: we like or dislike the things and places it contains. The world we actually live in is an imaginary one, precarious and error prone but which evolution has honed to be good enough to keep us alive. People born with a desire to pet Bengal Tigers tended to have fewer offspring than those who preferred to run away (or invent the rifle).
Part of this process should remind you a little bit of the multi-layer ‘neural’ nets used in the most successful AI deep-learning systems, namely the part about analysing and storing sub-patterns, but that’s as far as the resemblance goes. Computers don’t have bodies, nor emotions to protect those bodies, and most (not all) AI researchers remain staunch Cartesian rationalists who believe “I think, therefore I am”, when “I am, therefore I think occasionally” is closer to how humans really are.
All those stored sub-patterns occupy a universe of the imaginary, not material things but possible ways material things could be arranged, unchangeable and infinite in number. A triangle is a triangle is a triangle and you can imagine or discover any shape, size and number of them. Seeing a real brown cow uses most of the same patterns as imagining a blue cow. We think by manipulating and recombining patterns, we speak and write by recognising and producing them, mathematicians study the rules they obey. Claude Shannon’s Information Theory, the foundation of our industry, is about transmitting them from one place to another.
The point is such patterns have no power of their own to affect material things in the real world: that they can only do via our body and its muscles, by making them want to do something. Ever since Homo sapiens developed language it’s been inevitable that we would start confusing such patterns with things and wishing that they could do stuff directly. We developed science in order to understand why that doesn’t work, but not everyone wants to be so disabused, and some people make a living by exploiting and furthering such confusion. I’m perfectly happy to imagine blue cows, perhaps to write stories or make paintings of them, but I won’t try milking them…
[Dick Pountain likes Dr Johnson really]
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