[lit-ideas] Re: Madness, Foucault, Nietzsche & Emerson

  • From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 22:21:49 +0900

Honestly speaking, I do not know whether or not McCulloch believed that men
are mere machines. What I recall and advocate by recalling is an attitude:
He goes off to build a better machine, a better approximation to the kind
of human behavior he is trying to simulate. It too will be imperfect, and
then he will go off to build an even better machine. The machines will get
better and better. The stimulations will improve. No final solution is
required.


John


On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 9:58 PM, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

>
>
>   ------------------------------
> *From:* John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxx
>
> >Donal,
>
> >I don't read McCulloch as making a claim different from the one you
> ascribe to Popper. >
>
> John, is this your way of saying that do you read him as making the same
> claim as Popper, or a way of saying he simply does not make a claim
> different or the same i.e. takes no view on the question 'Are men mere
> machines?' In the light of the rest of your post, it would seem the latter.
>
> > He didn't have much time for folk who argued that he couldn't build a
> better machine because it would never be a perfect imitation of humanity.
>
> Who argued this? It is clearly a fallacy to say that if humans are not
> machines it must then be impossible to build better machines that better
> simulate human behaviour; just as it would be a fallacy to conclude from
> the same premise that therefore it is impossible to build any machine that
> simulates human behaviour.
>
> >The difference invoked here is reminiscent of the one I recall (again,
> perhaps unreliably) Nietzsche making in *The Birth of the Drama and the
> Genealogy of Morals, *in a passage in which he compares the scientist and
> the metaphysician to two men watching Salome perform the dance of the seven
> veils. The scientist is content to be tantalized as one veil after another
> is slowly lifted. The metaphysician is the boor shouting, "Take it all off.
> Now.">
>
> This is a very poor analogy to what is at stake in the argument between
> Turing and Popper: a better form of this analogy would be that Turing is
> saying there is nothing under the veils that could not be exactly replaced
> by a machine doing the same thing and therefore Salome is a machine; Popper
> is not saying anything like "Take it all off. Now", but that this
> 'argument' is a fallacy.
>
> Donal
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 8:17 PM, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
>
>
>
>   ------------------------------
> *From:* John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
> **
>
> >I lied. I'll add one more favorite reference, to Warren McCulloch's 
> >*Embodiments
> of Mind. *McCulloch was the father of automata theory, a man who devoted
> his life to trying to design machines to simulate human neurons. In his
> introduction to the book, he writes that he is a man who builds machines
> that try to simulate human behavior. Whenever they fail, there are always
> those who say, "See, it can't be done." There, however, people like him,
> who go off to build a better machine. >
>
> It is not entirely clear as to whether this "favourite reference" is cited
> approvingly, but it appears it is. It bears striking resemblance to a
> fallacy that we can attribute to Alan Turing, who may be taken to have
> argued that humans are automata and this can be shown because, for any
> specified human behaviour, a machine could be built to a specification that
> simulated that human behaviour. But this is a fallacy: for even assuming it
> is true that a machine could be built to simulate any human behaviour so
> specified, that would not show that humans are machines - it would show
> only that there are human behaviours of sorts that may be 'specified' in
> ways that machines could [in principle] simulate to that degree of
> specification. As Popper says, Turing's argument is a "trap". Only if
> 'what humans are' is exhausted by the sorts of behaviours that may be so
> specified might be use the fact those behaviours can be 'machine-simulated'
> to argue that humans are machines: but this is to ignore a wealth of
> material that indicates that humans have many characteristics - notably,
> rational consciousness - that are not reducible to mere specifable
> behaviours of the kind that machines might simulate.
>
> In short, build a better machine if you like, but don't be fooled that
> even a machine that perfectly simulates human behavior thereby demonstrates
> the theory that humans are  automata. It doesn't. If "automata theory"
> implies it does, then McCulloch is also father of a fallacy [though the
> parental lineage of this fallacy goes back further to Turing, and even to
> an argument we find in Homer: see Popper's TSAIB].
>
> (Other aspects of the posts I hope to get round to addressing later).
>
>
>


-- 
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/

Other related posts:

  1. Home
  2. lit-ideas
  3. Archive
  4. 12-2011