Philosophy and the Technological Singularity
Carl H. Flygt
December 2007
Introduction – Cultural Relativism and Political Power
The perennial problem in philosophy is the triumvirate relation of mind, mental content and world. Perhaps because it is much closer to philosophy than we might otherwise think, social science has exactly this same problem. How, it asks, can we make exact determinations about social life, when it involves a three-place relationship, R(x,y,z)? In physics, after all, the three-body problem is essentially unsolved. Indeed, the apparent indeterminacy of social relations and social life generally gives rise to a mood in philosophy and social science, and certainly in the broader contemporary society, of individual and cultural relativism, the view that one individual constitution or one culture is just as good as any other one. Going back to Kant, who argued that human beings are not capable of direct, unmediated knowledge of the world, relativism is the great, paradoxical truth and discovery of modern thought, scientific and ethical. Man, that apotheosis of evolution and natural history, a forteriori creates his reality (his realities) arbitrarily.
The thesis of the technological singularity proposes that at some point in the foreseeable future, the products of collective intelligence, namely hyperpowerful and internetworked computers, robots and nanotechnology, will so supersede our capacity to understand them, to put their designs and their purposes into a language of our own, that they will replace us as the most intelligent form of decision-making on the planet. Market forces, it is thought, will combine with technological wherewithal and bureaucratic, sociological need to produce intelligent systems of sufficient complexity to take on a life of their own, whether that life is ultimately adjudged by us to be a mere simulation or an actual duplication of its original, and that new life will make things increasingly but unpredictably workable for us. It should go without saying that the ontological problems posed for philosophy by the realization, or merely by the contemplation of such a scenario are both unprecedented and rich. Particularly pressing, from this point of view, is to decide the nature of human consciousness in its living, breathing, spiritual aspect, and the social components of its constitution under that particular description.
The thesis of linguistic determinism contains the idea that nothing is available to conscious experience outside its capacity to apply words to it. A possible experience is what it is solely in virtue of its being constituted by language. Ontologically, on the same thesis, similar conscious experiences under different language patterns are incommensurable. The thesis is applicable in science as well. I’ve proposed a theory of conversation that I think can take care of the initial problem outlined above, the problem of cultural relativism, because it reduces the three-place relation R(x,y,z) of social life to the one-place relation, C(t), of pure or ideal conversation. It does so, on the one hand, by giving reasons for thinking we can naturalize the mind sociologically, for thinking we can expect to procure social systems that seamlessly integrate with the world of physics and natural history, and on the other by giving reasons for people to want to participate or cooperate in a special kind of conversation. It tries to say what ideal, or analytically defined conversation is, then it describes how a system utilizing that conversation would behave and then it shows why behavior of that sort is a good use of people’s freedom, a good use of time and resources, good enough in fact to make that use inevitable. It goes on to show how a certain application of neutral monism, which is really just a version of mental naturalism, to the circumstances of formal conversation can lead to testable conclusions about human consciousness in social situations, and about extensions of that consciousness into field phenomena that probably have physical reality.
There has thus far in the history of neither social science nor philosophy arisen any general theory of conversation, despite the fact on the one hand that conversation is, if anything is, the basic unit of social life, and on the other hand that conversation is what philosophers live to do. If anything can put social science and philosophy on the right track together, on the secure and simultaneous path of social and metaphysical progress, it seems to me, it will be a testable theory of conversation, lying at the spiritual center of each discipline and portending perhaps an entirely new form of life, superior in many respects to the forms we have today. Contemplating this possibility from the viewpoint of linguistic determinism, on the one hand, and cultural relativism on the other, MacIntyre (1984) argues that only the advent of a new and alien linguistic tradition, with new forms of naming and textual canon, will be adequate to enable us to identify and to understand the limitations of our own linguistic and rational-scientific institutional traditions, and thus to rise above them. He also argues that the evolution of such language and practice, if it were thoroughly impersonal, would be salutary, endowing us with a kind of universal realism, moral or otherwise, about ourselves. MacIntyre however is not entirely sanguine about the advent of the new and superior linguistic tradition.
According to MacIntyre, even though today we have achieved a relativistic standpoint vis a vis our own and other cultures, even though we do have the capacity to understand ourselves and other cultures relativistically, and even though our languages are able accurately to represent schemes of belief of earlier languages, which themselves have no capacity to represent our more sophisticated schemes of belief, even this new, impersonal and alien language, should it materialize somehow from somewhere, will lack a rationally founded agreement as to the nature of the justification required to place it in an intellectually or morally superior position with respect to our own or any other. Relativism will make itself felt, even at such a pass. Even a perfect language and a culture of perfect conversation, should these somehow emerge, perhaps from the cultural pressures exerted by the technological singularity, will resort ultimately to attitudes of co-optation, will and power, and will seek to establish its ascendance over the older, more primitive modes merely in virtue of its own idiosyncratic conception of its own reasonableness. Such is just the way of the world.
Now let us imagine, pace MacIntyre, that an alien culture of conversation is introduced to our world not merely by human beings adept with the personal use of language according to ideal but ultimately idiosyncratic standards of judgment, but by a community with a system of artificial intelligence which, because it is artificial, uses impersonal standards of judgment in its social recommendations and directives. Suppose that instead of a George W. Bush in possession of the power to decide the course of events when confronted by the apparent menace of a Saddam Hussein, the power to decide events is given to calculations by an extra-human intelligence informed of the situational nuance of the world configuration as totally as the current generation of chess-playing computers is informed of the rules of that particular game, and with which it is able to outplay the highest rated grandmasters in the world. This is the thesis of the technological singularity, the theory that an alien intelligence and language is in fact poised to supplant our own, human intelligence, and that this replacement will occur sooner rather than later, perhaps within fifty years.
MacIntyre argues that the all-too-human anti-relativist proclivity to discover that unknown cultures are really “just like us,” and thus can be co-opted by us and our forms of institutional life and schemes of belief needs to be liberated from its hubris, and “made to accept and even to welcome” a future defeat at the hands of an alien and unintelligible tradition of thought and practice, so long as that tradition is impersonal. That alien form I think will be the market-driven, trans-biological intelligence of the technological singularity. That new, hyper-intelligent, Kripkean world will feature the replacement of place names by global positioning coordinates and untranslatable, socially divisive canonical texts by commercially viable virtual realities. To many these virtual realities will remain more appealing than the real world, and will capture them wholesale, mind and body. In addition, this alien intelligence will know the proclivities of the sociopath, of the under-performer and of the spendthrift, and will be able to recommend and even to implement their material remediation. Undoubtedly such things will be seen as great and desirable social benefits, and to the extent that they are, our world seems certain to be shaped by them.
Of course, a countercurrent of resistance is also certain to oppose this trend of explosive and effective social and technological intelligence, or at least to raise a certain nominal objection to its advent. The enclave of natural humanity within the monetized, corporatized, technologized and perforce mentally naturalized world of the future will be the collective intelligence of people motivated to understand the age-old life and death dimensions of human experience under newly framed social conditions. These social conditions will be created by opening, for the first time, the philosophical and scientific enquiry into natural conversation. Whether in practical terms that human enclave will be able to stand apart from MacIntyre-style power relations does not appear decidable from the present vantage point, because the capacity of human beings to enjoy and exploit power at the expense of wisdom is profound. But it seems to me such an enclave or set of enclaves is inevitable.
It is my purpose here to advance a two-fold thesis. In the first place, I want to stake out a position generally in favor of the Kurzweilian picture of the technological singularity, a picture of a desire-driven, neurologically implanted, hyper-networked, genetically augmented, nano-technologized and robotically assisted form of human life that will appear on the visible time horizon more or less because it can. I will not argue for this scenario, but will simply assume it, and appeal to it from time to time as background to my real argument that the philosophy of the near future will take a certain necessary form based on conversation theory. In the second place, I want to argue for a general transformation in culture and consciousness that will need to accompany the movement toward the technological singularity, for a moral and social evolution that will accompany the purely technical evolution, more or less because it must, and I want to show how this transformation is prefigured in one of the more salient pieces of modern philosophicall relativism: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. I want to show how our inner relations to language, to logic and to culture will adapt to these coming outer changes in ways that are outlined more or less instinctively in Wittgenstein’s classic treatment of philosophy.
Naturalizing the Mind
To interpret the Tractatus accurately, we need to recognize within it the impulse to naturalize the mind, to explain or to treat the mind in physical terms, or at least in ontologically unified terms, alone. Wittgenstein, of course, was not concerned explicitly to accomplish such an explanation, but because he was committed to a certain Zeitgeist he was concerned to exhaust what philosophy can contribute to a program that seeks to do so. Wittgenstein in the Tractatus sets about the business of thinking about the mind as an atomist who believes both the mind and the world are made up of basic units, and that, because mind and world both exhibit structure, the compounding of these units explains all there is. For the Tractatus, both the world and the mind are or seem to be composed of a uniform atomic structure, and because “the totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science” (TLP 4.11), a natural science extended to the mind would be a natural and fundamental move to make.
So what needs to be recognized at the beginning of our march toward the technological singularity is that, pace linguistic relativism, atomism is absolutely basic to the way the modern mind thinks about the world in controlling it effectively, and that the Tractatus is an exemplification of that sort of thinking. Naturalizing the mind is a natural extension of the impersonal scientific worldview, and it first came into currency under the influence of the American pragmatist school – Peirce, James and Dewey – and has been taken up by a stream of notable American thinkers from Quine to Putnam to Davidson to Searle to Dretske. The mental naturalizer thinks that someday when science has advanced far enough minds will be understood to be, and perhaps will experienced as, uncomplicated and seamless extensions of the physical world, the world over which through science and technology humanity already has a certain amount of global control. The world and the mind, both viewed as systems that are designed to perform certain functions, but without the postulate of a designer, and even without the logical construct of the self, will, on the program of the mental naturalizer, become a single system, with various cultural accommodations and sophistications made and developed from either direction to effect the union. I want to show how the Tractatus anticipates this union.
In Plato's Theatetus, Socrates relates a dream in which the objects he perceived had no properties. Each of them, in itself, “could only be named;” it was impossible to say anything else about it. It could not be said “either that it was or that is was not.” The objects of the dream would not admit of the application of such words as “itself,” or “that,” “each,” “alone,” or “this,” or “any other of the many words of this kind.” Socrates very clearly had had an alchemical dream, a state of consciousness and a kind of experience that outclasses and overawes through its sheer intelligence and anticipatory complexity the kinds of experience humans normally have in day to day waking and sleeping. When the alchemist Paracelsus says, “now we will speak only of those things which are difficult and not to be grasped by the senses, but, indeed, which are almost contrary to the evidences of the senses,” he means just these atomic, alchemical objects. The propertylessness of atomic objects (TLP 2.0232) and of the necessary and logical structure of the real world (TLP 2.021), and their power to stir the philosophical imagination, are basic themes developed in the Tractatus.
Socrates' companion Theatetus immediately recognizes Socrates' dream, and attests that he too has had such experience. The two then proceed to try to understand what it means to know something like the objects in such a dream, what these have to do with speech and with music, and whether a logos adequate to these objects can be constructed. Wittgenstein, I think, was motivated to accomplish just such contact with the super-real, and the Tractatus represents an attempt to outline the ontology of such contact. Whereas the motivation to make such contact is universally human and quite natural to us (we are all fundamentally dreamers, aren’t we?), the genealogy of Wittgenstein’s particular ontology extends from Democritus and Leucippus, the original atomists who argued against Parmenides, through Plato and Leibniz and into the material success of modern atomism, which was created by the corpuscularian essays of Boyle, Dalton and Lavoisier. The particular form of atomism that directly influenced Wittgenstein, however, was the logical atomism largely traceable to Leibniz, and adopted by Russell and G.E. Moore as a kind of super-realism, an atomism that viewed judgments and propositions as real facts in the world, and, like physical atoms, as ultimate constituents of the world.
For super-real logical atomism, reality and experience, which are both essentially propositional, are each composed of simple, indivisible units to which logic, and ultimately arithmetic, or the theory of numbers somehow corresponds. For the super-realist, everything that is the case is sentential, not objectual, and the world is everything that is the case. Logic contains or responds to these atoms, and if reality and experience can be shown generally to be underlain by logic, reality and experience can be shown to be atomic. Let us ask then if a self-conscious experience can be made out plausibly to be logically atomic, and thus objectively arithmetical. Let us, in other words, try to decide whether or not self-conscious experience, and the world which it computes, has an essentially propositional, number-theoretical structure. Let us try to decide whether or not it is a Turing machine.
By way of introduction here, it appears necessary to lay out the representationalist (functionalist, naturalist) conception of conscious experience in general, and sensory and qualitative experience in particular, the conception on which, Dretske says, the smart money of the scientific future should be placed. On this conception, primitive and extremely simple indicator devices, such as a thermometer or a speedometer, to the extent they perform the function they are designed to, can be said to experience this function. If we can know what it is like for them to perform this function, we can know what it is like for them to have this experience. To the extent that a system behaves as it is supposed to behave, that system is entitled to certain qualia, and we can know these qualia if and only if we can know what it is like for the system to perform in the way it does. One cannot overstate the philosophical and sociological significance of this monistic move.
Now consider one of the several salient functions of the body or the mind, the function of thermoregulation. Suppose that thermoregulation, in our particular case, is under conscious control, as it may be in a yogic culture, and that this control can be exercised by an arithmetical, Turing-computable function, such that the Turing machine halts if the core temperature is 98.6, and does not halt otherwise. The machine is obligated by its design or its function to output numbers which cause the core temperature to rise or to fall, and so to stabilize at 98.6. The machine whose function is to reach a halting state by way of certain discrete regulatory outputs, and which is representable in first order logic, thus possesses qualia of a certain sort. These qualia are a series of states of acquaintance with atomic propositions, states of affairs or objects (at this stage in the argument it doesn’t really matter which) with respect to which it is designed to function in a certain way. Intermediate states in the computation are states of acquaintance with states of affairs which the machine is designed to ignore, alter or otherwise minimize its acquaintance with. The end state, which is perhaps the only state that is real for it, is acquaintance with the comfortable and salubrious state of 98.6. The idea is that all well-defined representational functions, and even more complicated functions connected with effectors, because they are arithmetical Turing machines, have this logical, numerically driven feature of effective acquaintance with atomic facts (or even with substantive objects), such as mass or temperature, in virtue of their normative design or function.
Now consider a neurobiological Turing machine to which is introduced a function which would have been undecidable for it under normal circumstances, but which nonetheless we recognize as belonging (negatively) to its basic design. How can we characterize the atomic fact (or object) with which the machine thereby becomes acquainted? For the sake of argument, let’s say that this fact, object or state of affairs is just such a Platonic-Tractarian entity “about which nothing can be said,” and that the machine has somehow grown or been extended to reach out and touch it. Let’s say that mystical experiences are uncomputable Godel propositions. The hypothesis may not be far-fetched. We have all had remarkable dreams. Some of us meditate. Some of us have ingested psychoactive substances. It seems consistent at least to attribute our deep spiritual yearnings and philosophical motivations to the memory of Turing computations which, although undecidable in the domain of computable functions, natural numbers and ordinary experiences, nevertheless produced an experience outside that domain, an experience about which nothing can be said within it. So the theory of logical atomism, including Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, where simples necessarily exist but remain unsayable, is actually the theory of Turing computability; the practice of yoga and alchemy is actually the practice of undemonstrable Godel numbers, infinitely constructed axioms and transfinite sets.
Now, the program to naturalize the mind, it seems to me, to enforce a general and neutral monism on language, experience and culture, is just the program to reduce mental functions and mental practice to a Turing-computable state of affairs. It is a program to transform human culture and human life on earth into a gigantic and universal Turing machine, to produce a normative cyborg culture, in which machines and minds, mathematics and language, nurture and nature blend together seamlessly. The question of course is whether in this transformation anything important about human consciousness, its essential freedom for example, will be preserved, or whether it will be irretrievably overrun. A serviceable theory of conversation, in line with its natural functions, it seems to me, will leave the question of spiritual humanity alive, open and accessible. If mind and conversation each have an objective, naturalizable form, and if each is Turing-computable with Godel-style exceptions, and if these exceptions involve higher dimensions of consciousness and experience, then the program to naturalize the mind will actually contain that which is essentially free and human, and will be a good thing in all the important ways.
The Tractarian Parallelism
I have argued elsewhere that ideal, archetypal conversation has an effectively computable, numerical form, that there is a function or normative design to conversation of this sort and, despite the fact that this design is rarely executed in the real world in an exemplary way, it does nevertheless inform and guide all conversation, as a kind of memory or ideal to which people instinctively try to measure up. Taking this logical, arithmetical form as given, we can ask about the content of conversation. What should be talked about? What are suitable topics for good conversation and good company? If the function of conversation is good company, good health, a salubrious social atmosphere and a transcendental social culture, what topics should be avoided? Wittgenstein’s analysis of philosophy and his conclusions in the Tractatus about language and logic, and by extension about arithmetic and neurobiological Turing machines, are informative on this question.
In the first instance, Wittgenstein is firm that many of the things that philosophy tries to talk about are actually unsayable. Sensible talk comes out of atomic propositions and truth functional combinations of atomic propositions, and natural science is the domain of sensible talk, “the totality of true propositions” (TLP 4.11). Natural science is the domain of radically contingent, substantive assertion about the world, the human transaction with items that can be the case, or not the case, while everything else remains the same (TLP 1.21). We might think of natural science as the realm of linguistic reference that connects causally with the world, Kripke-style, which in some way reaches into the world itself (TLP 2.1511) and touches it (TLP 2.15121). But although the capacity for some of our language to touch the world, to bring us into contact with it, is limited to the contingent propositions and truths of science, the necessary manner in which these truths reach out to the world is attributable only to the picturing or simulating capacity of logic, which lies wholly within the domain of the non-contingent, the necessary and the unsayable.
Let us pause for a moment here and consider the purport of Wittgenstein’s theory not so much for philosophy per se, which the essay in the Tractatus is primarily concerned to do, but for ideal conversation among people trying to reach out and touch one another in a reliable and reproducible way. What are these people going to talk about? They are going to talk about nothing but natural science! Quite seriously and quite systematically, they are going to limit their conversation to truths stemming from natural law, and the behavior of objects and states of affairs under the influence of natural law. All else, for them, will be nonsense. What will be of paramount importance for them will be the process of “laying against reality like a measure” (TLP 2.1512), and calibrating their propositions and their actions in a sort of concert whereby they take the measure of one another and of their world as natural extensions of themselves. Should we doubt that such a procedure will be adequate, if not to disclose the ultimate truth of his (her) birth and death to every individual, of his (her) karma and necessary work, of his (her) entitlement to hope and to faith, then at least to set the stage whereby such a mind and such a frame of mind can be expected, from time to time, to appear in the world and to give it direction and moral balance? I do not doubt it and I welcome it.
So natural science is the content of ideal conversation, and well-formed logic is the means by which the logical form of the world is not said, but shown (TLP 4.121, 4.1212). Logic is a mirror-image of the world, infinitely fine and very great (TLP 5.511). A convocation of naturalized minds, in this case governed, let us say, not by exogenous implants directing them in certain ways toward certain ends, but by logic itself, by an autonomous, ethical will, independently conceived and generated, free and infallible in deployment and perception, an energetic community of spirits in the presence of other spirits, for spiritual energy is the real essence of the mind. That is what conversation should be, and in reality that is what it is, once the overlays and obscurations of degenerate, nonsensical culture are stripped away. It is the logical form of conversation, its ultimate picture, as it were, that gives it its force. It is the contract, the manners, the formal and cultural solemnity of ontologically motivated conversation that makes it transcendental and that drives its contractees into the higher, more subtle dimensions of the mind and the body, of life and death, that heretofore have lain silent and obscured, extra-social, sullied, as it were, by cultural adaptations and cultural histories too coarse, too ignorant or too preoccupied with danger and foolishness to consign them to anything other than mysterious ritual and dumb wonder.
Now in the second instance, truth-functionality is central to the Tractatus and central to its characterization of sense. Every compound proposition is a truth function of elementary propositions, and elementary propositions, the bearers of truth and common sense, are the propositions of science. Truth (or falsehood) is an assignment to a proposition that signifies agreement (or disagreement) with the possibility of the state of affairs to which it corresponds (TLP 4.4-4.431). For conversation theory, truth (falsehood) is likewise universal acceptance (or non-acceptance) of an assertion of a proposition, or one of the other four other possible speech acts that can contain propositional content. For Wittgenstein, agreement or disagreement with possible states of affairs is depicted by logic through the array of the truth-table that represents the propositions in play. For conversation theory, universal acceptance or non-acceptance is depicted, or better is revealed, through a tacit and subtle timing function in conversational space. For conversation theory, the expression of a proposition is true if and only if everyone in the conversation is satisfied with what they just heard. Truth obtains in conversation if a microscopically focused collective intentionality obtains in the moment, if a certain quality of energy and attention suggests that it’s all right to proffer the next conversational content.
It is just these qualia of energy and attention that conversation theory is purposed to study as the physiological correlates of semantic moments and semantic fields in free conversation. The Tractarian point of view here is important. For the Tractatus, the logic of a conversation must mirror the logic of the world (TLP 5.511, 5.512). It must be possible to read or to recognize in the formal notation representing a conversation an identical and parallel formal notation in the world. If we admit qualia into the domain of functions that the world consists of, and we (partially) identify these qualia with certain natural “measuring instruments” or “systemic indicator functions” such as the galvanic skin response, and if a certain correspondence appears between GSR profiles and the logic of a conversational moment, then the Tractarian theory will achieve a certain empirical justification. In well-formed conversation, and only there, we will see a full Tractarian mirroring of language and world. I believe these results can be achieved, and I have identified a subject pool and a research department interested in pursuing them. My larger philosophical purpose, however, is to explore how things like the Tractarian theory of logical parallelism between world and language bears on the overall conditions under which conversation of a certain sort is performed.
Before proceeding with that exploration, however, I think it will not be irrelevant to introduce a final element into the theoretical picture, namely the possibility of an artificial conversationalist. There seems to be no reason in principle not to suppose that an artificial intelligence can be designed capable of participating in sensible and contentful human conversations, and capable, by means of Google-style searches, of bringing immensely more well-informed and relevant material into that milieu than the limited memories and intelligences of the human beings can. An intelligence of this order, it seems reasonable to suppose, particularly if informed of the states of consciousness of the human participants, would need to be able to analyze the objective logic (the truth tables) of any conversational interaction in real time, and thus to interpret its level of realism, its internal coherence, its meaningfulness and its interest and relevance to other such conversations elsewhere. In other words, the parallelism thesis proffered in the Tractatus may see a real instantiation as the human-machine interface becomes increasingly seamless and as technology and society likewise grow together.
Now in a sense we have come full circle. The world contains objects and is constituted by states of affairs among objects, whereas language contains elementary propositions and makes sense by means of truth functions of those propositions. There is, moreover, a strict one-to-one mapping, and an identical multiplicity, between the states of affairs of the world and the propositions of sense (TLP 4.04). Natural science attempts to capture this mapping, but heretofore has been able to do so only indirectly (TLP 6.3431). Only the exercise of logic per se can explore that which is subject to law (TLP 6.3), and philosophy is all that is left to do that job. But philosophy and metaphysics, for reasons we have not discussed here, are committed to non-sense. To exercise logic per se, it would appear, we need to retreat from philosophy into a logical and scientifically researchable formulation of conversation, probably appealing instead to religious and mystical impulses in the human being. Under those conditions we will be in a position to do a direct and satisfactory sort of natural science, with full modeling of the world in language.
Under these conditions, both the thesis of linguistic determinism and the thesis of logical atoms we saw expressed in the Theatetus become salient. For under the conditions of pure conversation, it is not correct to say that “A believes that p,” or “A has the thought p,” or even “A says p.” What is correct is that “’p’ says p” (TLP 5.542). From this it is shown there is no such thing as the soul, insofar as this is conceived by superficial psychology (TLP 5.5421). What is important on the conversational model Wittgenstein has proffered is that the inward ego, the self, be eliminated in favor of a language situation that directly and completely maps onto the world, onto everything within that situation that is the case. The limit of that world is the new ego, the metaphysical subject (TLP 5.641), the spiritual form of life, I want to say, forced by our adaptation to the technological singularity. Tractarian conversation requires an altogether impersonal, objective and materially exact linguistic usage, a usage that extends the psychological subject to the limits of the world and for practical purpose eliminates it, that reaches out and touches it like a spirit in the cosmos, that lays one up against the other, language and world, like a ruler or index, each taking the measure of the other, wordlessly, joyfully, and each combining with the other in a creative play that yields meaning and significance for each into the perhaps infinite future.
Tractarian Ethics and the Tractarian Self
A theory of conversation can only be an ethical theory, a theory of what is good in the whole context of life and life situations. Within it there exists a theory of actions and choices, of norms, obligations and practical reasoning, of right expression and wrong, of moral dispositions in their specific applications, but the overarching, ethical view of conversation can only be global, reflective and contemplative, and outside the domain of morality and even of logic and metaphysics. A correct framework for conversation can only, in the overarching ethical sense, be a framework for the management of moods and qualia, of the human capacity for happiness and well-being, for example, or conversely of the capacity for free-floating guilt and anxiety. Conversation, correctly performed, is a spiritual practice. It is a sociological method aimed at the objective, ontological relations intrinsic in the world and in linguistic expression. It is a literal meditation, a disclosure of fundamental objects and fundamental meanings, with all of the potential for higher, transcendental consciousness and qualia that is portended by that practice.
Tractarian ethics arrives at much the same point of view, at least implicitly, but it extends the foregoing picture in some important, essential and instructive ways. Tractarian ethics finds it necessary to account for the subject of these moods and qualia, largely because of an asymmetry between the representing relations of world and language. Although a priori the representing relations among language items and objectual items can occur in 22 ways, and although there are real instances of the alternatives, the overwhelming propensity in the day-to-day is for only one of the four possibilities to occur. By and large in the day to day, language represents states of affairs. Even though it is possible for states of affairs to represent states of affairs (as when a toy model of a situation is built), for language items to represent language items (as when a text is translated), or for states of affairs to represent language items (as when an artistic genius, a W.A. Mozart or a Glenn Gould for example, is able to transpose his mental rehearsals into real things), the most impressive and efficient direction of fit between representatives and representables in the day-to-day is language to world. Generally, people walk around preoccupied with propositions they form about reality, not with propositions reality forms about them, at least not in the first instance.
It is because of this asymmetry in the representing relation between things in language and things in the world that the subject appears, and a need to account for it arises. Were it not for this asymmetry, the fourfold form entailed by representation would be overwhelmingly neutral, and the logical necessity for a self would vanish to zero. If representation were as facile or as transparent in the world as it is in language, it is conceivable we would be without selves! We would inhabit a world indifferent to who or what was causing our experiences, a form of consciousness indifferent to agency and responsibility, a world more like a dream than the world of everyday materiality. Because the conditions of this world force a persistent asymmetry in representing relations, with a subjective application or use of representation projecting from the domain of language into the world of objects, a certain form of subjectivity is required to account for representation generally. These contingent conditions affecting the way representation (and subjectivity) normally happens may simply be a consequence of the terrestrial conditions under which it occurs - gravity, atmospheric pressure, locomotion, predator/prey relations and heterophagy, for example. Under other, freer, more spiritual conditions, the facts about natural representation and its subjects might be quite different.
Although it tries to do justice to the facts of this world, the Tractatus feels the logical force of the general neutrality of representablity and representativeness, and settles into a non-individuated, attenuated form of subjectivity, the metaphysical self (TLP 5.633, 5.641). The subjective self is a limit of the world, not a part of it (TLP 5.632, 5.641). It is a transcendental construction of logic, common to all men and women that gives form to the world and pattern to the ontological and social conditions that preoccupy day-to-day existence, but contrary to the Kantian construal, it is neither a priori (TLP 5.634) nor inevitable. It is what goes on all the time in this world, but it could be otherwise. This world could be limited in other, more perspicuous ways. Selves could be something else altogether. Conversation theory purports to show what these limits of the world, these subjective points of view, otherwise could be, and provides the rationale to bolster these alternative forms of subjectivity systematically.
In the second instance, of course, it must be acknowledged that men and women do walk around in the world bound to a great subconscious sensitivity to the representations and propositions the world holds about them. This world to mind (or world to language) direction of representation is in part what is generally thought of as the social contract, the expectations other minds have about what goes on in one's own mind, and the causal effect these expectations have on ordinary subjectivity. The individual and social ontologies thus generated are of paramount explanatory importance in social science, and they need both to be understood as clearly as possible. I believe conversation theory will make that understanding much more perspicuous than it currently is because it will give an explanatory role to collective intelligence in day to day events.
Certainly collective intelligence is currently recognizable in large scale and long term patterns of social activity, such as the evolution of science and technology, the working of economic systems and other patterns of mutual dependence and interaction, but on microscopic scales, such as ordinary conversation, collective intelligence is scarcely discernable as a social or ontological force. Under conditions where the world to mind direction of representation plays a defined and recognizable role in self-conscious experience and overall social organization, where worldly objects appear to manifest a certain all-pervading liveliness, representativeness and intelligence, collective intelligence is sure to be recognized as an ontological and sociological factor. The advent of collective intelligence in future social evolution, and its role in responding to the technological singularity, I think, is prefigured in the Tractarian treatment of the self and of ethics, and stems both from its parallelism and from its thesis of representational neutrality.
For Wittgenstein, logic manifests itself in the functioning of language. What is of utmost importance is that language be used properly, that the world be seen aright, generally by means of scientific truths and scientific propositions. Under those conditions, logic and ethics take care of themselves. Ethics is the model for logic, logic the model for ethics, and both are transcendental (TLP 6.13, 6.421). Ethics, moreover, is identical with aesthetics (TLP 6.421). For Wittgenstein then, and for conversation theory, seeing the world aright and using language aright are an aesthetic necessity. Ultimately we can be depended on to respond to one another and to the world in ways that are logical, ethical and aesthetic. Conversation theory seeks merely to compress our responses and our expectations into a circumscribed format that conforms, on the one hand, to facts about bodies, minds and language in real-time relationships, and on the other to self-disclosures that are simultaneously logical, aesthetic and ethical. Under those conditions, which are, it is thought, more free and more desirable than lesser, uncontrolled conditions, the need for philosophy will simply disappear. The enjoyment of self-conscious human existence – language, mind and world - will overwhelm it.
Conclusion
What is life? In all likelihood, I think, it is a play between logic and world. It is a set of effective procedures on numbers or objects that represent ontologically necessary states of affairs, including the calculus of eating and being eaten and the need to reproduce, and that produces self-consciousness in the process of designing these functions. What is intelligence? Much the same thing, I think, but not bound up with biological and evolutionary history. Will the two merge into a sort of unity? Undoubtedly. How will self-consciousness be transformed as a result? That will depend on the choices we make with our cultural practices, perhaps only because of the technological singularity, and on our collective instinct for what is good.
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There is no determinable outcome, given three masses, three initial positions and three vector quantities, for the interaction of the three bodies.
Rorty (1985) advances this self-refuting view of the epithet, only to dismiss it handily in favor of an ethnocentric pragmatism.
Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (5.6); “The subject does not belong to the world, but is a limit of the world” (5.632); “About what one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent” (7).
James is the original source for neutral monism. See Russell, 1914, for a succinct critique.
See Sheldrake, 2005 and my How to do Conversation Research, 2006.
The best statement of the program to naturalize the mind is Dretske, 1995.
Godel aptly describes the “leftward” Zeitgeist of empiricism, reductionism, skepticism and mental naturalism in his 1951 Gibbs lecture, the Zeitgeist to which Wittgenstein made material contributions through is influence in the Vienna circle of logical positivism.
“There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical” (TLP 6.522).
Here Moore’s The Nature of Judgment (1899) will serve as the paradigm.
The reader will recognize two streams here. On the one hand is the stream of logicism, which asserts that number theory or arithmetic is reducible to first-order logic, plus the notions of zero, successor, less than, addition and multiplication and which was given a certain twist by the proofs of Godel, which showed that this theory is incomplete and unable to prove its own consistency. On the other is the stream that views number theory, and not geometry, which in the 19th century was shown to be consistent under a number of different and contradictory axioms, as the sole repository of this objective mathematics. See Godel 1951.
The substance of the world, composed of objects, is something else. I am claiming that Wittgenstein’s logical atoms are propositional, not substantial. The “simple objects” of TLP 2.02 for example seem to be something else.
We know from Godel that a formal system of propositions can be represented as an arithmetical system of numbers. Godel 1931 is the classic paper.
Prologue, Naturalizing the Mind
“(Qualia) are physically definable as long as there is a description, in physical terms, of the conditions in which systems have information-carrying functions. As long as we have a naturalistic theory of indicator functions, we have a naturalistic theory of representations, and hence, of qualia” (Dretske, p 78). “Knowing what bats, fish and neighbors experience is, in principle, no different from know how things ‘seem’ to a measuring instrument” (Dretske, p. 82).
The Vedas represent a yogic culture. See Staal 2007.
This is the primary feature of the celebrated Godel sentence, the true sentence of a formal system which the system cannot generate. This sentence is a feature of the numerically distinct sentences it can generate, the number that by diagonalization it cannot generate.
This picture is generally compatible with the relativist picture of linguistic determinism, in which independent subjective experiences remain forever out of touch with one another, unintertranslatable, be these those of the Hopi and the standard average European, of the cultures of theoretical physics and literary criticism, or the modern American husband and wife heading inexorably for yet another divorce.
One symptom of this new and inexorable cultural trend is what Luban, Strudler and Wasserman (1992) call the “Other-Directed Society.” Other-directedness entails the evaporation of the individual’s sense of moral responsibility in the face of organizational situations in which he (she) lacks knowledge that a decision must be made and what choices are available. The extreme example of that situation was Nazi Germany, but kinder, gentler versions of the same thing are being assembled by technology and corporatism generally.
J.R. Lucas (1959) argues that any human mind will always transcend any given Turing machine, because the mind always has access to the machine’s Godel sentence, which the machine by definition does not. More perspicuously, he might have argued that a human mind is always a Turing machine, and from time to time transcends itself by stumbling on its own Godel sentence.
Flygt, 2006. The argument is made on the basis of Searle’s frameworks for illocutionary acts and for self-conscious intentionality, and the Kantian conception of the free will.
Kripke’s 1980 theory of causal reference is the paradigm here.
The appeal here is to the function of the Bodhisattva, the enlightened spiritual being who revisits the earthly domain when conditions are right for the sake example and guidance. The tradition is well-known. See, for example, Santideva, 2006.
Following Searle, the five possible speech acts are assertion, directive, commissive, expressive and declaration. Their functions in conversation are each somewhat different, but not altogether different. Here we will treat them all as essentially truth-functional.
The language here is Dretske, e.g. p. 19.
Flygt, “How to Do Conversation Research.”
For Kant, the “I think” must accompany all judgment. For Wittgenstein, judgment could just as readily be a feature of a world of objects sensitively tuned to the nuances of language.
The other part of the world-to-mind direction of fit, of course, is given in perception, in the passive attitudes propositional consciousness assumes toward the world.
Microscopic (conversational) collective intelligence is being noticed today as a social phenomenon of potentially great importance. I believe it is scientifically researchable. See Hamilton, 2004.