Philosophy

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Monday, 02-20-12: Robot Intentionality II: The Chinese Room Replies, Boden's Response, and Searle's Argument

Assignments:

Problem Set 03 Due; Problem Set 04 Assigned

Readings:

Synopsis:

Before reflecting on our discussion today, I would like to draw your attention to two problems that struck me as rather more acute than usual: Excessive absences and not completing assignments.

Missing Class

I was disappointed to see so many missing class today. Only one student saw fit to email me that they were otherwise engaged and wouldn't be able to make class. Others, presumably, were either ill or busy studying for exams.

If you happen to be sick I much prefer you not come to class. You pose a bio-hazard to the rest of us when you insist on attending while ill. Stay home, get rest, be miserable, and get well soon knowing that we are wishing you a speedy recovery. Be sure to notify me by email that you've got the creeping funk and have chosen to miss class so as to rest-up and avoid passing the funk on to the rest of us.

Missing class to study for a test or work on a paper for another course (or this course) is another matter altogether.

Now, I understand the inclination to skip class to study for a test, because I've done it myself. Unfortunately the data do not bear this strategy out. That is, last minute cramming has been repeatedlyshown to be almost wholly ineffective in improving test performance. Worse, youmiss classdoing so. You take a double hit. You mostly fail to do any better on the test, and you get behind on the material in the class you're skipping.

To be sure, it is possible to miss some classes without getting much behind, whether because the content of the course is shallow or the pace of the course is glacial. Our pace is rarely slow even when we get behind, and no one would describe this material as shallow. You can't, in other words, miss this course without getting well behind in it. Think of it this way: We have scarcely 28 meetings all semester long. Each meeting is accordingly precious as their supply is so short.

So your reasoning is faulty. You get yourself behind in a course for want of a mere one and one-quarter hour additional studying for an examwhich will have almost no affect on your actual test performance.

Need I also mention how spectacularly galling it is to have students attempt to split the difference by studying for an exam in another class while in class? Your studying is ineffectual, your attention split, and your understanding of our discussion inevitably lackluster.

The upshot is that you need to come to class even if you are frantic about an upcoming exam, but you need to set the exam aside to focus on class. If it all gets to be too much for you to control, come see me. I can direct you to people who can help you learn time and stress management skills, which is all this comes to in the end.

Hard Problems

If you're new to Turing Machines, PS-03 is challenging. It is not the most challenging problem set we will have this semester, but it is the most technically demanding of all the problem sets.

I also note the following:

• Only one student sought me out to arrange for an office visit for help on the problem set;
• Several students who did attend class mentioned spending hours and hours on their own working on the problem set; and,
• Still other students said things like "I'm just not a math person!" or "Why is there math in a philosophy course".

I suppose the implication is supposed to be that it's just an impossible assignment, so why even try?

I confess I'm unsurprised, yet even as I expected these reactions, I cannot help but be frustrated by them--much as I am every semester. I've long suspected the problem lies at the nexus of factors generational and institutional.

The generational factor is this: We faculty are informed by those who study the dynamics of the various generations that the millennials (as--for most of you--your generation has been somewhat derisively dubbed) have been socialized by eager and well-meaning parents and educators to be enormously confident regardless of your actual abilities or accomplishments. Indeed, data shows that millennial college students in the US have confidence levels which far outstrip their actual performance, while their counterparts in other countries are just the opposite. For example, college students in South Korea have a surprisingly meager estimation of their own abilities even as they trounce American students by nearly every measure of accomplishment.

There is nothing particularly wrong with having high self-esteem and optimism about one's future accomplishments and skills. The problem is that the disconnect between the millennials' self-estimation and their actual ability leads them to be highly brittle in the face of serious challenges.

Let me be clear. I am not blaming you. I'm saying you've been set up to tend not to know how to handle challenges and fold up in the face of them as a result. Nor am I speaking of each and every person in the class--I can think of at least five serious counter-examples to the above just off the top of my head.

The institutional factor is this: We faculty have many choices about how we teach our courses and the level at which we teach them. Some of us insist--and I do indeed count myself among them--on teaching challenging material at what we have determined to be the appropriate collegiate level. In many respects we do so against the institutional grain. That is, our efforts are evaluated almost entirely on the basis of enrollments and student evaluations, which makes teaching elective courses at a challenging level a losing proposition. Students, naturally, prefer easy courses, and studies have repeatedly shown that the easiest way to improve student evaluation scores is to assign little to students and expect little from them. Nor should I neglect to make the obvious point that even as we are making our students lives tremendously easy, we make our lives easier still by virtue of having very little to do over the course of a semester. So all the institutional rewards and benefits tend towards doing the least for the most.

You can appreciate how these two factors--individually momentous as they are--come together to amplify their damaging effects on the depth and quality of your education in a kind of toxic feedback loop. I think this is a serious problem facing the institution, one I haven't the slightest clue how to solve (although I would very appreciate your thoughts on what to do about changing the direction of the institution at large.)

When it comes to this particular course, overcoming these factors suggests that we make an agreement:

• You will not work for hours and hours on a problem you're not getting (however admirable your tenacity!) without seeking help from your peers (your most valuable resource in the class) or me. Your peers are here to help you. I am here to help you. There is no shame in not getting it by yourself.
• You will seek me out for individual attention if you find that you just aren't getting something from class, handouts, readings, notes, the synopses, or what have you. I have a chalkboard in my office for a reason, after all. Nor, I submit, am I quite as frightening as I am made out to be... well, mostly, anyway.
• You will not assume that you should be able to do it all on your own, or that your writing is always instantly flawless, or that your first stab at an answer is the only possible answer that could be given.

Likewise,

• I will not assume that the way I've explained something is the best way it could have been explained.
• I will welcome with patience the floundering, the clueless, the angry, and the frustrated so as to help them as much as I can to see their way through to mastering the admittedly challenging material we are studying this semester.
• I will be relentless in challenging my students to achieve their greatest potential.

Above all, if you miss class for any reason whatsoever, you need to contact me to keep in touch about the course. Let us at least agree on this basic point of academic etiquette.

Today's Class

Today we continued our discussion of the Chinese Room Thought Experiment, starting with this puzzling philosophical notion of intentionality. Here is a passage from the first chapter (pp. 5-8) of John Haugeland's "Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence" (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997) which might help:

"Intentionality", said Franz Brentano (1874/1973), "is the mark of the mental". By this he meant that everything mental has intentionality, and nothing else does (except in a derivative or second-hand way), and, finally, that this fact is the definition of the mental. 'Intentional' is used here in a medieval sense that harks back to the original Latin meaning of "stretching toward" something; it is not limited to things like plans and purposes, but applies to all kinds of mental acts. More specifically, intentionality is the character of one thing being "of" or "about" something else, for instance by representing it, describing it, referring to it, aiming at it, and so on. Thus, intending in the narrower modern sense (planning) is also intentional in Brentano's broader and older sense but much else is as well, such as believing, wanting, remembering, imagining, fearing, and the like.

Intentionality is peculiar and perplexing. It looks on the face of it to be a relation between two things. My belief that Cairo is hot is intentional because it is about Cairo (and/or its being hot). That which an intentional act or state is about (Cairo or its being hot, say) is called its intentional object. (It is this intentional object that the intentional state stretches toward.) Likewise, my desire for a certain shirt, my imagining a party on a certain date, my fear of dogs in general, would be "about"--that is, have as their intentional objects--that shirt, a party on that date, and dogs in general. Indeed, having an object in this way is another way of explaining intentionality; and such having seems to be a relation, namely between the state and its object.

But, if it's a relation, it's a relation like no other. Being-inside-of is a typical relation. Now notice this: if it is a fact about one thing that it is inside of another, then not only that first thing, but also the second has to exist X cannot be inside of Y, or indeed be related to Y in any other way, if Y does not exist. This is true of relations quite generally; but it is not true of intentionality. I can perfectly well imagine a party on a certain date, and also have beliefs, desires and fears about it, even though there is (was, will be) no such party. Of course, those beliefs would be false, and those hopes and fears unfulfilled; but they would be intentional--be about, or "have", those objects--all the same.

It is this puzzling ability to have something as an object, whether or not that something actually exists, that caught Brentano's attention. Brentano was no materialist: he thought that mental phenomena were one kind of entity, and material or physical phenomena were a completely different kind. And he could not see how any merely material or physical thing could be in fact related to another, if the latter didn't exist; yet every mental state (belief, desire, and so on ) has this possibility. So intentionality is the definitive mark of the mental...

Many material things that arent intentional systems are nevertheless about other things - including, sometimes, things that don't exist. Written sentences and stories, for instance, are in some sense material; yet they are often about fictional characters and events. Even pictures and maps can represent nonexistent scenes and places Of course, Brentano knew this... But [he] can say that this sort of intentionality is only derivative. Here's the idea: sentence inscriptions--ink marks on a page, say--are only about anything because we (or other intelligent users) mean them that way. Their intentionality is second-hand, borrowed or derived from the intentionality that those users already have.

So, a sentence like "Santa lives at the North Pole", or a picture of him or a map of his travels, can be about Santa (who, alas, doesn't exist), but only because we can think that he lives there, and imagine what he looks like and where he goes. It's really our intentionality that these artifacts have, second-hand, because we use them to express it. Our intentionality itself, on the other hand, cannot likewise be derivative: it must be original. (Original, here, just means not derivative, not borrowed from somewhere else. If there is any intentionality at all, at least some of it must be original; it can't all be derivative.)

The problem for mind design is that artificial intelligence systems, like sentences and pictures, are also artifacts. So it can seem that their intentionality too must always be derivative--borrowed from their designers or users, presumably--and never original. Yet, if the project of designing and building a system with a mind of its own is ever really to succeed then it must be possible for an artificial system to have genuine original intentionality, just as we do. Is that possible?

Think again about people and sentences with their original and derivative intentionality, respectively. What's the reason for that difference? Is it really that sentences are artifacts, whereas people are not, or might it be something else? Here's another candidate. Sentences don't do anything with what they mean: they never pursue goals, draw conclusions, make plans, answer questions, let alone care whether they are right or wrong about the world they just sit there, utterly inert and heedless. A person, by contrast, relies on what he or she believes and wants in order to make sensible choices and act efficiently; and this entails, in turn, an ongoing concern about whether those beliefs are really true, those goals really beneficial, and so on. In other words, real beliefs and desires are integrally involved in a rational, active existence intelligently engaged with its environment. Maybe this active, rational engagement is more pertinent to whether the intentionality is original or not than is any question of natural or artificial origin.

Indeed, Haugeland's last point is one we took up today when we considered (among many others) the Robot Reply to the Chinese Room Thought Experiment. Most of today's discussion was focused on the replies Searle discusses. To be sure, many other replies have been raised.

A curious feature of Searle's challenge to traditional artificial intelligence is that intentionality is fundamentally a biological phenomenon. That is, our brains have the capacity to underwrite intentional states because they have have specific causal features which depend, ultimately, on the particular stuff out of which the brain is made.

One might imagine resurrecting Putnam's Multiple Realizability Argument against Type-Physicalism. That is, one might argue that Searle's emphasis on the particular causal features of our neurobiology makes him into something of a Type-Physicalist, so that nothing which fails to have our special neurobiology can have mental states since mental states are intentional yet intentionality is biological in a uniquely human sense.

This criticism would not be quite right, however, nor is it part of Boden's Reply. In particular, Searle can and does admit that mental states are multiply realizable. Crucially for Searle, though, the other stuff that realizes mental states must have mostly the same causal features of the biological stuff which underwrites our mental states. So intelligence can be realized in other substances, but those substances must be similar in specific causal respects to our substance. It's not the case that intelligence can be constructed out of any old thing, but it's also not the case that we are the only thing that can be intelligent. A puzzle for Searle is just how similar the other stuff must be to our stuff to have enough of the same causal features to secure intentionality.

A better question, and the one Boden asks, is why the causal capacities Searle thinks underwrite intentionality are features of mere substance as opposed to features of a substance having a specific structure. After all, it seems that the causal capacities a thing has are more a matter of its structure than the material out of which it is made. Try playing billiards with cubes instead of spheres. Even if the cubes are made of the same stuff as the spheres, you won't have much of a game.

In short, it's fine for Searle to say

The brain, as far as its intrinsic operations are concerned, does no information processing. It is a specific biological organ and its specific neurobiological processes cause specific forms of intentionality. (John Searle, ”Is the Brain a Digital Computer”)

Yet even if we agree that the rule-governed manipulation of strings of symbols will never yield intentionality, we still need an explanation for why processes other than neurobiological ones can't.

Next time we will start with Searle and move on to Dretske.