John asked:

A possible argument that a computer running an algorithm cannot be conscious?

Perhaps a computer running a program cannot produce conscious awareness.

Answer by Craig Skinner

Consciousness occurs naturally in humans and some other animals, so that it seems to me it should be possible to produce it in a sophisticated enough artefact. Maybe an embodied, enactive computer, embedded in and learning from its environment (rather like you or me) as opposed to a box on the floor running software. I suspect it’s only a matter of time.

To turn now to your argument, a reductio ad absurdum whereby you prove something by showing that assuming the contrary leads to a contradiction.

First, I find it confusing, and will say why. Secondly, even if we allow the confusing bit to go through, the argument about probability and infinity is flawed.

As regards the confusion, you start by assuming the computer experiences subjective awareness by running a program. Well, then it’s conscious. Why the need for it’s ‘waking up’.

The flaw. You say the probability of any particular moment being selected is 1/infinity (zero). But the rules of probability only apply in this way to finite sets. Here’s why. Selection of any particular member from a set of s is 1/s only if each member has the same probability of selection.

For example, if a number is to be randomly chosen from 1-100, the chance of it’s being in the range 1-50 must be the same as the chance of it’s being in the range 51-100. But this can’t happen with the (countable) infinite set of natural numbers. Because any number you specify, however big, is always in the ‘lower half’ of the range with an infinity of numbers larger than it. It’s impossible to randomly choose a number from this infinite set. Of course you can still choose a number non-randomly, and we often do.

In misapplying probability to infinity, you are in distinguished company. The famous philosopher of science, Karl Popper, did the same. He didn’t like Bayesian analysis, and deplored it’s growing popularity in science. He sought to undermine it’s application to theorem choice in light of evidence. His argument was:

1. There is an infinity of theories compatible with any body of evidence (this is strictly true, Duhem’s thesis).

2. Prior to any evidence, we shouldn’t consider any theory more likely than another (he called this the Principle of Indifference).

3. Hence every theory must get equal prior probability.

4. For an infinity of theories, this probability can only be zero, since any finite probability, however small, would make the total probability infinite, and total probability can’t exceed one.

5. Hence the prior probability of any theory is zero.

6. Hence the posterior probability (after new evidence) of any theory remains zero, since zero multiplied by any number remains zero.

7. Hence Bayesian analysis never gets started and is useless.

The argument is valid. But unsound because 2. is false, and, just as in your argument, leads to the false conclusion in 4. We needn’t, and shouldn’t, consider every theory equally likely. Some are more plausible and deserve higher prior probabilities than others. It would be absurd, for example, in assessing theories of why things fall to the ground, to give the same probability to the theory of free fall in curved spacetime (Einstein’s theory) as to alternatives such as the theory that four elves pull a thing down by invisible string, or five elves by invisible string, or four elves by invisible rubber bands. etc etc. And of course, once we abandon the requirement that every choice gets equal probability, we can easily assign a finite probability to every one of an infinite collection without total probability exceeding one. A simple assignment is prob1/2 to theory 1, prob1/4 to T2, prob 1/8 to T3, 1/16 to T4 and so on. So probability survived, Bayesianism flourished, and Popper’s view is mostly forgotten.

In conclusion, I don’t know if conscious machines are possible, but suspect they are, but I do know that infinity should be handled with kid gloves.

Craig Skinner at philosophos.org

Greg asked:

Is hard determinism consistent with knowledge; that is, is it consistent with justified true belief? It’s the ‘justified’ condition that strikes me as problematic. If hard determinism is true, then wouldn’t my thoughts (including my belief in the truth of hard determinism) be the predetermined outcome of physical events in my brain? It may well be that natural selection favors my having certain (predetermined) thoughts in various circumstances, but the survival value of those thoughts is not necessarily the same as their truth value.

In addition to your answer, I’d appreciate any recommended books or articles for further exploration of these topics. Thanks!

Greg also asked:

Hi, here’s one more question related to hard determinism: Is hard determinism utterly futile?

A final irony: In the discussions of hard determinism that I’ve run across, the writers often lapse into addressing the reader as if they have a choice of how to react to their exhortations but I suppose the writers can’t help themselves.

Answer by Helier Robinson

First of all, the survival value of your thoughts IS the same as their truth value. False thoughts have no survival value except coincidently, such as: you avoid walking under a ladder, believing that this averts bad luck, and then do not get shot in a street shootout immediately after; but such coincidences cannot be relied upon. Whereas if you believe that learning to swim has survival value, so you learn to swim and one day fall overboard and manage to swim ashore, then your true belief did have survival value. More accurately, all thoughts that do have survival value have to be true, but not all true thoughts have survival value; if you prove to your own satisfaction what is the only value of n that satisfies the equation n plus n equals n times n, the result is true but is unlikely to have survival value.

Second, free choice almost certainly IS an illusion. A supposedly free choice is either caused, or else it is not caused. If it is caused then it is not free. If it is not caused then it is a chance event and so not willed, so not a free choice. Putting this another way, causal chains of events stretch into the past and into the future. A free choice is the start of a new chain, having no past antecedents; but how can that be?

So if determinism is true then you have no free choice. Tough. And if determinism is false then there are chance events but you still have no free will. Tough.

Helier Robinson is Emeritus Professor in Philosophy, University of Guelph. His books are available from http://SharebooksPublishing.com.

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

There are some conditions in which hard determinism is consistent with human knowledge, and other conditions where it is not. An example would be driving on a single-lane bridge, which gives you no option of turning. A counter-example is your last-minute decision to eat a fish burger instead of a steak sandwich, although you were hungry for a steak. Assuming this is a spontaneous decision, there is no possible knowledge of the momentary states of your various organs (including the brain) that facilitates a comprehensive explanation, so that claims on behalf of hard determinism are not consistent with knowledge.

To settle your concern about any such claims being ‘justified’, you have the simple expedient of demanding proof from any proponent. Thus anyone who tries to persuade you that the change of mind from steak to fish was brought on by the momentary state of the total chemical configuration of your body (which is of course determined by the immediate preceding states etc. etc.), is doing nothing better than illicitly extrapolating our relatively meagre understanding of causal chemical mechanics on organic processes where in the main they don’t pertain. Indeed many arguments in favour of hard determinism use intuition pumps as a preferred means of persuasion. Yet all conjectures about ‘momentary states’ (whether brain or body) ignore the fundamental fact that it is literally impossible to cut a temporal cross-section through a human body, or the human brain, with a view to ‘freezing’ the moment when a physical, chemical or mental configuration exists to justify the proposition. Moreover, it is impossible to say whether there is such a totality, nor can it legitimately be asserted that the claim itself makes any sense whatever – not to mention the time increments from one state to another.

I don’t wish to overstress another aspect, though it is relevant to the subject: Namely, that the source of this thinking is predominantly religious. I’m sure you can work this out for yourself.

In short, hard determinism, as applied to human intentionality, is a mere supposition, and often highly dogmatic in default of evidence in its favour. It may have its uses in some areas of intellectual and scientific effort, but on the whole it appears to me as a philosophically defective attitude, substituting conjectures (here a polite expression for sleight of hand) for the rigours of accounting for the interplay of spontaneity in living processes, which elude its grasp effortlessly.

Accordingly your gambit on evolution doesn’t work either. Thinking has very little to do with survival, as is shown by the fact that all creatures other than humans do no thinking at all about survival. Indeed, you might like to reflect on how many of your own thoughts are engaged in survival strategy; yet even if your answer is a (very high) ‘1%’, you would then have to wonder about the external conditions with which you are coping and how they and your survival thoughts managed to come together at the same moment in the small space you occupy. This is not discounting the probability that human survival may have been facilitated sometime in the pleistocene by an enlargement of the brain, though again it is more likely to have benefited our sensory and perceptive faculties than thinking.

As for writings on these matters, not knowing your level of expertise, it is difficult. But if you are patient and not exclusively sold on the latest gimmicks of this branch of philosophy, you could try Leibniz’s New Essays on Human Understanding. In my opinion, understanding is precisely the absentee on many pages written in favour of hard determinism – and this goes right back to the Bible!

Jürgen Lawrenz at philosophos.org

Jimi asked:

If philosophical zombies existed, would they talk about consciousness just like we do? Or, if you tried to talk to a philosophical zombie about consciousness, would they be fundamentally unable to understand what you mean? If the latter is true, would we then be able to tell if others were conscious just by talking about it?

Another possible explanation is that the philosophical zombie is physically ‘programmed’ to have a discussion about consciousness. If this were true, if there were a world of only p-zombies, where would the concept even come from? It would seem pretty random that consciousness, something so abstract and unheard of, would be such a common topic of discussion among p-zombies.

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

The definition of a philosophical zombie includes their readiness to speak of consciousness, ‘although they don’t have any consciousness’. That seems to answer your first question. However, p-zombies are (or should be) classed as thought experiments. No-one expects a p-zombie to be found walking on the streets. At bottom, this kind of philosophical enquiry revolves around the problem that we humans also speak of consciousness, as it were all plain sailing. But we don’t really know what it is. So like a p-zombie we go around believing we have a consciousness of self. It leaves the door open for researchers to wonder if it’s just a ‘necessary delusion’, as one writer put it.

It is an uncertain attribute in the sense that consciousness of self inevitably refers to a residual ‘I’. Therefore it relies wholly on ascription; the projection of the ‘I’ on ‘you’ and ‘they’, as the outcome of a recognisable phenomenology. As a concept, however, ‘self-consciousness’ suffers from an underdetermined description: it is not actually possible to give an all-inclusive definition.

We know from Kant and Hegel that our consciousness of self exhibits a well-rounded phenomenology, that it has structure and that there is an evolution behind it which combines the priming of our sensibility by the natural, but especially the social habitat.

It is an altogether different issue when we take note of the claims of an AI industry which has a stake in such discussions. It might (and perhaps should) leave us with an uncomfortable sense that this presupposes a quantitative and instrumental view of consciousness of self, i.e. the tacit assumption that this feature is ultimately reducible to (thus far unknown and wholly indeterminable) chemically engendered energy relations among our neuronal assemblies.

It is the supposition behind your word ‘programmed’. That word brings huge problems into the argument, because it insinuates an intentional agent implanting a faculty into zombies. You can see at once that this would have to be a human or superhuman intentional being. It is therefore an unsatisfactory proposition, as the program devised by a software designer does not drive a brain, but a logical inference device. A brain is a logical inference device to only a small fraction, as it has to cope with real-life situations and engenders the ‘residual I’ so as to facilitate physical navigation in the world and communicative interaction with other people. This cannot be reduced to rules, as the rules themselves emerge from unquantifiable situations. The intervention of a superhuman agent does not solve the problem, because consciousness is also unquantifiable, and therefore the superhuman agent would have to possess a total overview which is dubious on two counts: First, it runs into infinite regress (even for one person, let alone the population of the Earth of the past and future); and second because the superhuman agent has no human-type experience, intuition or self-consciousness. So the whole issue is ultimately self-contradictory.

The only avenue towards a resolution of your question would seem to be a biological approach. Unfortunately we don’t do anywhere near enough research on it. On the contrary, we are so obsessed with explaining consciousness as an emergent feature of physical or electronic processes that we are losing sight of the fundamental difference between intentional and ‘programmed’ (algorithm-driven) behaviour. Therefore we have nothing resembling a theory of intentionality, even though it could conceivably explain such things as consciousness of self in terms of the outcome of many intentional agents creating a ‘superintentionality’ for a body — whether it is the body of a human animal or the body of a corporation like ants and bees. But this is only a hint at something which we in our scientific presumptuousness have hardly even looked at.

Jürgen Lawrenz at philosophos.org

Zach asked:

Is there conflict between being a good person morally and being a good friend? Explain why or why not by looking at what utilitarianism would say about our obligation to friends. If there is a conflict between being moral and being a good friend, are our duties to our friends stricter than those to others (strangers)?

Answer by Graham Hackett

Although you ask generally about the conflict between being a good person and being a good friend, I would like to look at this question from the point of view of consequentialism — utilitarianism in particular — but with a glimpse in the direction of duty based systems and virtue ethics. Do these latter systems do any better than utilitarianism?

The aim of being a good person usually is framed as ‘doing right’. But does this mean doing right on every occasion? On most occasions? Being a good friend is more difficult to define. If it means putting the friend first, and never letting anything else get in the way, then there will very often be problems with harmonising the concept of good friend and good person.

Utilitarianism is often seen in an unsympathetic light by its enemies, partly because of the suspicion that a faithful utilitarian could never be a faithful friend. Utilitarians are often cast in the role of making calculated decisions which result in performing acts which would normally be regarded as intuitively unacceptable. Would it really be all right for us to shoot an innocent South American Indian dead, even if we knew that by doing so would we would certainly save many others? This example is taken from the papers of Bernard Williams, who is a good source of wisdom regarding consequentialism. In a similar vein, what sort of person would push a grossly fat man off a bridge, even if doing so would cause a railway truck to derail and thus prevent it from careering into a group of workers further down the line? This example is taken from Philippa Foot.

If you translate this type of extreme example into the case of friendship, you might begin to see the special problems that Utilitarianism has. The suspicion would be that such a person cannot be a true friend, because he/ she regards friendship as a means to an end of creating utility; you are only of interest to me because I can maximise happiness better as a result of the friendship. This may be unacceptable to us if we regard friendship as an uncompromisingly all-or-nothing type of relationship. Bernard Williams relates the thought experiment of passing a burning building where two people are trapped. You can go into the building and be certain of saving only one of these people, so you have to choose. What if one of these people is one’s beloved spouse? Applying strict utilitarian criteria would require us to be impartial, and consider who we should save. Even if we did do this and conclude in favour of saving our spouse, Williams would still argue that utilitarianism is guilty of having ‘one thought too many’. We should intuitively not have a second thought about saving our wife or husband. In the same way, we might think that a utilitarian will always have ‘one thought too many’ to be a good friend. If we were paranoid we might even suspect that our ‘friend’ might push us onto the railway track as a means to an end of saving others. Thanks very much; some friend you are!

So it is for reasons of this sort that we are suspicious of strict classical act utilitarianism. It seems to be unable to incorporate our personal life projects, including our relationships with friends into the area of ethical judgement. Is it always the case that we should strive to be impartial, and eliminate all personal considerations before we make a decision?

Before we condemn Utilitarianism too harshly, we should perhaps realise that no modern ethical theory of right action has handled friendship well. Would a theory of duty be any better? We could still argue that Kant tells us to put our maxims of duty before everything else, friendship included. Friendship was considered as a serious part of an ethical system by the ancients (consider Aristotle’s chapter in the Nichomachean Ethics.), but it has not been seriously dealt with in modern times. Perhaps because of the influence of Aristotle, a virtue ethics system might perform better, but even here, I might still argue that my friendship is being valued because of its contribution to the friend’s character and his path to virtue. My friendship is being valued as a stepping stone and not for its own sake.

Utilitarianism has been sensitive to these criticisms, and has produced variations to cope with them. We could note here that J.S. Mill himself had noticed (a claim made in his Autobiography) that he had more surely and certainly maximised good consequences by pursuing aims other than pleasure or happiness. These other aims would include valued friendships, and would be indirectly connected with happiness. If we adopted such a form of indirect utilitarianism, we would argue that we will not maximize happiness (generally speaking) if we intrinsically value happiness above all else. Those who in fact maximize happiness also intrinsically value particular people, such as friends, and projects; further, their allegiance to these other values is not always trumped by their commitment to happiness. So by all means value happiness, but value other particular people and projects as well. Choose decision principles in light of these values. You do not have to give up favouring these values just because it seems, at times, that they frustrate your ability to maximize happiness. It is just possible that you may think that such a moral system is so far removed from utilitarianism that it no longer be called as such.

Finally, I would like to make a mitigating plea on behalf of Utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham was very much concerned with improving policy making processes in the arena of government. It seems to me that Utilitarianism was developed in order to provide some insights into better public decisions. This is why, as an ethical system, it seems to find it difficult to find a place for the more personal aspects of moral judgements, such as friendship, people, personal integrity and projects.

Graham Hackett is currently studying for the BA (Hons) in Philosophy with the University of London International Programme. He is a former student of Dr Geoffrey Klempner.

Seb asked:

Is philosophy required to be based upon scientific knowledge, at least partially?

Answer by Danny Krämer

This is a question that concerns the purpose of Philosophy. Since Descartes and especially Kant a lot of philosophers thought that the job of philosophy is to provide a priori knowledge that no science could achieve. Especially knowledge of the mind was thought as a priori and so as a field where many thought that philosophy could deliver new answers. But at least since Quine, many philosophers are naturalists. Quine for example believed, that what was called philosophy is just a branch of psychology and philosophy has no special a priori knowledge about anything. Some naturalists think that philosophy is a mistaken undertaking and should be abandoned. All we can know about the wide world we know by science.

This is an answer that you can expect from someone who thinks that philosophy is the search for the fundamental structure of the world or special domains by a priori methods. I am a naturalist too but I don’t believe that philosophy is a failure. I think the most important task for philosophy is to help us to understand how the things of the world hang together and how we fit into this world. The sciences tell us what things exist and how they work. So to understand how we fit into this world and how our theories of the world can be brought into a consistent view philosophy must be informed by science. One of the most important tasks is to tell us how our, like Wilfried Sellars would say,scientific image of the world — that means the world of quarks and DNA and so on — and our manifest image of the world — the worlds of tables, values, artworks etc. — hang together.

Danny Krämer has a Philosophy MA from the university of Erfurt. His blog ‘The Realist Turn’ can be found at http://therealistturn.wordpress.com.

Kevin asked:

I’m an atheist. While challenging my indoctrination in my youth I came to this reasoning concerning infinity and god/s;

Logically speaking, can the ‘creator of the universe’ be an infinite being?

Answer by Peter Jones

This is a great question. I feel that your reasoning is basically correct. Where the problem arises is in the assumption that an infinite being exists. If this phenomenon is limitless, as most people would claim for their God, then He cannot be limited by existence. He must have a reality, but to be limitless ‘He’ would have to transcend the distinction between existence and non-existence. Note that a transcendent being of this kind would be a way to make logical sense of existence, and thus logical sense of God, and that philosophers have so far failed to discover an alternative that works. This would be the God of such explorers as Meister Eckhart and Nicolas de Cusa, for whom ‘He’ would lie ‘beyond the coincidence of contradictories’, thus not only in but also beyond this world of opposites.

‘God’ may not be the correct word term here but some would use it in this way. More often, I think, this immanent and transcendent phenomenon beyond all distinctions and partial views is not called God. For instance, F.H. Bradley, whose essay Appearance and Reality you might like, would use the word ‘Reality’, and while referring to all that is finite, subject to change and dependent on conceptual distinctions would use ‘Appearance’. The Sufi sage Al-Halaj uses the word ‘Truth’ and claims ‘I am Truth’. Many mystics have claimed to be God and say it is unavoidable. All these claims would be equivalent.

An excellent and immediately relevant book exploring the consequences of your thinking would be Keith Ward’s God: A Guide for the Perplexed. Again, God would be beyond the existence/ non-existence distinction. Nothing else would be truly real. Lao Tsu explains that the laws of Earth and Heaven come from ‘Tao being what it is’. What it is would include Earth and Heaven. Here there is no intentional act of creation and no problems arise with events occurring in infinity. At the level of its ultimate or infinite aspect there would be no change, no movement and no time except for Now, or what Eckhart calls the ‘Perennial Now’. The Buddhist sage Nagarjuna long ago proved that nothing really exists and nothing ever really happens. If you can get hold of Sri Aurobindo’s Life Divine, on pages 80 and 81 you will find good answers to your questions here.

As all of this indicates there too much to say about these issues to cover the ground here. There is a vast literature that describes this idea of a changing but changeless ultimate phenomenon, and I think you will find that it avoids the problems that you correctly identify with most ideas of God. You would need to explore apophatic theology, Sufism, Hermeticism, the Christian mystics, advaita Vedanta, Taoism, Buddhism and so forth.

How can an infinite and changeless being which enfolds the whole universe come to thought? This seems an extremely good question. Perhaps it would be good thing if more people asked it. If you give this question a lot of thought you’ll see that there’s only one way it could be done. He has to divide Himself up in the vast Web of Indra and then forget that He is doing this. Thus He cannot help but watch every sparrow that falls for He is not free to be absent. If God is limitless then it would be impossible to have a thought or experience that He cannot have, for this would represent a limit on His thinking and experience.

Like St. Augustine you cannot make sense of time or, more accurately, you can see that your idea of time does not make sense. I would suggest that you turn this problem on its head and start trying to make sense of the idea that time as a metaphysical phenomenon truly does not make sense, and that this is because it is unreal and you are assuming otherwise. Time makes perfect sense as long as we do not reify it in metaphysics. Time is a psychological phenomenon for the mystics and evaporates in their ontology. A fundamental phenomenon that is subject to time would be a very muddled and incoherent concept, so in the end time has to go the way of space.

It seems very sensible that you question your indoctrination and do not simply reject it. Indoctrination is not necessarily a pack of lies and may simply be education. You’ll find that God does not have to rejected if we award Him a definition that is not a straw man in philosophy and science. Such a definition is possible but difficult to understand.

If you are an ‘instinctive’ theist but merely sceptical, and also new to mysticism, then for reading matter I can confidently recommend Keith Ward as a starting place. After this it would depend on which writers and approaches happen to work best for you. It might be Plotinus, Alan Watts, the sayings of the gnostic Jesus or the poetry of Kabir. The philosophy of Buddhism may be the easiest place to start and many Christians claim to have re-discovered and better understood the religion of their birth by studying this.

Good luck on what may turn out to be a surprisingly exciting journey.

Peter Jones at philosophos.org