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"Are We Automata?" by William James (1879)

psychclassics.yorku.ca

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Re: "Are We Automata?" by William James (1879)

#91

Post by VirusNewbie »

pineaux wrote: post #86
VirusNewbie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it very suspicious that people who avoid learning rhetoric, or formal logic, or axiomatic thinking in general, are able to draw useful conclusions from studying humanities.

I find it fascinating that "STEM people" think all problems are best solved with logic and rhetoric instead of intuition and anecdotal evidence. While in real life many things simply cannot be measured and we must act on hunches or "feelings" and many, many people are very successful in navigating the world without any education in the (powerful, but very narrow) tools of formal logic, rhetoric and axiomatic thinking…

If intuition and hunches are important as you say, why study humanities?

We can just wing it, if we don’t care about things like absolute truth or sticking to something logical.

Re: "Are We Automata?" by William James (1879)

#92

Post by stevebmark »

suburbanwaste wrote: post #27
stevebmark wrote: post #13

I tried to read this but I can’t deal with the writing quality. I think it’s partly the historical nature of the piece, but James is a terrible writer. He is obtuse and pompous and clouds his meaning with confusing sentences. Even the first sentence is a nightmare to read. I’ll try again when I have more focus! And yes, we have no free will. Not sure if that’s related to this piece.

You just have bad taste.

It’s terrible writing AND I have bad taste*

Re: "Are We Automata?" by William James (1879)

#93

Post by ryanklee »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #90
ryanklee wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are his words. They are not out of context. I don't see how any of that negates the effect of one of science's pre-eminent public advocates bad mouthing philosophy and the humanities. People hear this and take it at face value. It informs their opinions. It shapes their lives. And it's his purpose to shape people lives. He is partially responsible for the proliferation of similar views throughout the intellectu…

Man, if philosophy can't take (an admittedly popular) guy saying rather milquetoast things about philosophy (whether right or wrong), the discipline is in worse shape than I thought. Philosophy should be capable of defending itself, it shouldn't need to rely on deferential treatment and a widespread presumption of value. Philosophy doesn't deserve deference or respect simply because it's an academic discipline. We've…

> if philosophy can't take

It's got nothing to do with what philosophy can't take.

The context of this conversation: science is not self-sufficient to be a force for good in this world without the aid of the humanities.

Scientism is naive and self-undermining.

Re: "Are We Automata?" by William James (1879)

#94

Post by ryanklee »

robotresearcher wrote: post #83
ryanklee wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is referencing the field of History, not history.

I do not understand the distinction. I’ll go further. If I said ‘he was referencing Science, not science’ would that make any sense? I was a CS professor for a long time. Like many of my STEM colleagues, I taught the history of the ideas in my discipline as an intrinsic and important part of the curriculum. It’s also good pedagogy, since the long process of getting closer to the truth or developing more powerful tech…

The commenter's point is that History as an academic discipline organized by institutions is part of the humanities departments.

It's not a deeper point.

Of course science has its own history and that history is examined (sometimes) in the course of scientific education. That's not what's at issue.

What's at issue is that History as a subject and other Humanities disciplines are systematically devalued in STEM disciplines and by scientific cultural mouthpieces and participants in STEM endeavors.

Re: "Are We Automata?" by William James (1879)

#95

Post by spookybones »

chr1 wrote: post #87
ryanklee wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not correct. This attitude was nurtured by science's most successful public mouthpieces. Stephen Hawking and Neal Degrasse Tyson have been running around for decades telling everyone that the humanities are worthless. Young students, unfortunately, listened to them on this subject. A real tragedy, I think. Carl Sagan would have been a much better steward for science today, as he had a very healthy respect for…

Richard Feynman also did not see value in philosophy, and he was right. The submitted article is a good illustration why. There are two hypotheses: one is that consciousness is essentially a computation, the other that it is an unknowable stuff. Philosophers spend time talking how one or the other hypothesis "feels right" to them. Scientists try to see what results can be obtained through computation. Now we got to t…

You’re talking about metaphysics. Epistemology will be one of the most important issues with AI. And let’s not ignore ethics. You seem to speak as someone who hasn’t read any philosophy. Einstein, Bohr, Oppenheimer, and plenty of other physicists would disagree with your sentiment.

Re: "Are We Automata?" by William James (1879)

#96

Post by rococode »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #5

1879 These arguments aren't new. This is good argument for why tech/science/stem need to read history, or 'older' science history. To at least be familiar with the science that has come before, either to know what was discarded, to be familiar with past dead ends, or forgotten knowledge that could still have value. A lot of the AI spurred arguments in the last year seem like so much re-hashing since they were being d…

> forgotten knowledge that could still have value

It's always fun to mention that many of the foundational ideas in the modern wave of machine learning & neural networks stem from work done in the 50s and 60s: perceptrons, backpropagation, stochastic approximation, etc. were all explored in depth back then.

It was only after compute power scaled up enough to apply these techniques practically that they became revolutionary. Really makes you wonder what things people are working on right now that will also need to wait 30 years.

Re: "Are We Automata?" by William James (1879)

#97

Post by Waterluvian »

kouru225 wrote: post #32

When people say we’re nothing but computers, neurons firing, chemical reactions, etc they think they’re saying that humans aren’t special. But I take it to mean that the rest of the world is way more special than we’ve been giving it credit for.

At that point it’s just semantics and relative comparison, I think.

Re: "Are We Automata?" by William James (1879)

#98

Post by r721 »

operatingthetan wrote: post #36
kouru225 wrote: post #32

When people say we’re nothing but computers, neurons firing, chemical reactions, etc they think they’re saying that humans aren’t special. But I take it to mean that the rest of the world is way more special than we’ve been giving it credit for.

Sometimes I entertain the idea that inanimate objects have consciousness too and it's pretty disturbing because it would mean we are doing pretty much everything wrong.

The keyword to look up is "panpsychism" - it was discussed a few times in the past year:

>Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-consciousness-...

>Scientific American on a philosophical grift: panpsychism

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/10/01/scientific-america...

>Is the Universe conscious? A panpsychism Q&A with philosopher Philip Goff

https://bigthink.com/13-8/panpsychism-universe-purpose-philo...

Re: "Are We Automata?" by William James (1879)

#99

Post by bmitc »

dnissley wrote: post #29
ryanklee wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely agreed. I find it embarrassing how STEM devalued non-STEM studies for years, and now that LLMs are center stage, so is the near-universal unpreparedness of interested parties and stakeholders to wrestle with issues of cognition, consciousness, and ethics. This, despite literally thousands of years of prior studies on these matters. Even now, I see basic refusal to engage with this extant literature, and a…

> STEM devalued non-STEM studies for years What does this refer to?

It refers to the word STEM, what the acronym stands for, and what it does not contain.

Many of the smartest people I have met, including some of the best programmers, have had non-STEM backgrounds. The push by the STEM industry has pushed universities to be STEM industry preparation and training centers. This, among other things, has greatly devalued non-STEM education. And even within STEM, there are subdisciplines that been devalued.

It's a shame, because many of the non-STEM disciplines that have been devalued are effectively systems disciplines that help train for understanding complex relationships and the effects of time and other effects on these relationships. So we are also devaluing those skills in favor of short-term STEM thinking.

Re: "Are We Automata?" by William James (1879)

#100

Post by bmitc »

chr1 wrote: post #87
ryanklee wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not correct. This attitude was nurtured by science's most successful public mouthpieces. Stephen Hawking and Neal Degrasse Tyson have been running around for decades telling everyone that the humanities are worthless. Young students, unfortunately, listened to them on this subject. A real tragedy, I think. Carl Sagan would have been a much better steward for science today, as he had a very healthy respect for…

Richard Feynman also did not see value in philosophy, and he was right. The submitted article is a good illustration why. There are two hypotheses: one is that consciousness is essentially a computation, the other that it is an unknowable stuff. Philosophers spend time talking how one or the other hypothesis "feels right" to them. Scientists try to see what results can be obtained through computation. Now we got to t…

> Richard Feynman also did not see value in philosophy, and he was right.

Do you realize that physics requires the adoption of a philosophy? Physics addresses problems that are effectively easy. Physicists have tools, such as mathematics, at their disposal and can make wildly simplifying assumptions.

Philosophers are often trying to address what the questions even are and then try to develop new tools to both explore the questions and their answers. Physics is downstream of philosophy.

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