On Turing, his famous ‘Test’ and its implication: can machines think?

I just came out of hospital Wednesday, after one week to the day. My last post was written while I was in there, so obviously not cognitively impaired. I mention this because I took some reading material: a hefty volume, Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker (2004); which is a collection of essays by various people, edited by Christof Teucscher.
 
In particular, was an essay written by Daniel C Dennett, Can Machines Think?, originally published in another compilation, How We Know (ed. Michael G. Shafto, 1985, with permission from Harper Collins, New York). In the publication I have (Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2004), there are 2 postscripts by Dennett from 1985 and 1987, largely in response to criticisms.
 
Dennett’s ideas on this are well known, but I have the advantage that so-called AI has improved in leaps and bounds in the last decade, let alone since the 1980s and 90s. So I’ve seen where it’s taken us to date. Therefore I can challenge Dennett based on what has actually happened. I’m not dismissive of Dennett, by any means – the man was a giant in philosophy, specifically in his chosen field of consciousness and free will, both by dint of his personality and his intellect.
 
There are 2 aspects to this, which Dennett takes some pains to address: how to define ‘thinking’; and whether the Turing Test is adequate to determine if a machine can ‘think’ based on that definition.
 
One of Dennett’s key points, if not THE key point, is just how difficult the Turing Test should be to pass, if it’s done properly, which he claims it often isn’t. This aligns with a point that I’ve often made, which is that the Turing Test is really for the human, not the machine. ChatGPT and LLM (large language models) have moved things on from when Dennett was discussing this, but a lot of what he argues is still relevant.
 
Dennett starts by providing the context and the motivation behind Turing’s eponymously named test. According to Dennett, Turing realised that arguments about whether a machine can ‘think’ or not would get bogged down (my term) leading to (in Dennett’s words): ‘sterile debate and haggling over definitions, a question, as [Turing] put it, “too meaningless to deserve discussion.”’
 
Turing provided an analogy, whereby a ‘judge’ would attempt to determine whether a dialogue they were having by teletext (so not visible or audible) was with a man or a woman, and then replace the woman with a machine. This may seem a bit anachronistic in today’s world, but it leads to a point that Dennett alludes to later in his discussion, which is to do with expertise.
 
Women often have expertise in fields that were considered out-of-bounds (for want of a better term) back in Turing’s day. I’ve spent a working lifetime with technical people who have expertise by definition, and my point is that if you were going to judge someone’s facility in their expertise, that can easily be determined, assuming the interlocutor has a commensurate level of expertise. In fact, this is exactly what happens in most job interviews. My point being that judging someone’s expertise is irrelevant to their gender, which is what makes Turing’s analogy anachronistic.
 
But it also has relevance to a point that Dennett makes much later in his essay, which is that most AI systems are ‘expert’ systems, and consequently, for the Turing test to be truly valid, the judge needs to ask questions that don’t require any expertise at all. And this is directly related to his ‘key point’ I referenced earlier.
 
I first came across the Turing Test in a book by Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reasoning (1974), as part of my very first proper course in philosophy, called The History of Ideas (with Deakin University) in the late 90s. Dennett also cites it, because Weizenbaum created a crude version of the Turing Test, whether deliberately or not, called ELIZA, which purportedly responded to questions as a ‘psychologist-therapist’ (at least, that was my understanding): "ELIZA — A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine," Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 9 (1966): 36-45 (ref. Wikipedia).
 
Before writing Computer Power and Human Reason, Weizenbaum had garnered significant attention for creating the ELIZA program, an early milestone in conversational computing. His firsthand observation of people attributing human-like qualities to a simple program prompted him to reflect more deeply on society's readiness to entrust moral and ethical considerations to machines. (Wikipedia)
 
What I remember, from reading Weizenbaum’s own account (I no longer have a copy of his book) was how he was astounded at the way people in his own workplace treated ELIZA as if it was a real person, to the extent that Weizenbaum’s secretary would apparently ‘ask him to leave the room’, not because she was embarrassed, but because the nature of the ‘conversation’ was so ‘personal’ and ‘confidential’.
 
I think it’s easy for us to be dismissive of someone’s gullibility, in an arrogant sort of way, but I have been conned on more than one occasion, so I’m not so judgemental. There are a couple of YouTube videos of ‘conversations’ with an AI called Sophie developed by David Hanson (CEO of Hanson Robotics), which illustrate this point. One is a so-called ‘presentation’ of Sophie to be accepted as an ‘honorary human’, or some such nonsense (I’ve forgotten the details) and another by a journalist from Wired magazine, who quickly brought her unstuck. He got her to admit that one answer she gave was her ‘standard response’ when she didn’t know the answer. Which begs the question: how far have we come since Weizebaum’s ELIZA in 1966? (Almost 60 years)
 
I said I would challenge Dennett, but so far I’ve only affirmed everything he said, albeit using my own examples. Where I have an issue with Dennett is at a more fundamental level, when we consider what do we mean by ‘thinking’. You see, I’m not sure the Turing Test actually achieves what Turing set out to achieve, which is central to Dennett’s thesis.
 
If you read extracts from so-called ‘conversations’ with ChatGPT, you could easily get the impression that it passes the Turing Test. There are good examples on Quora, where you can get ChatGPT synopses to questions, and you wouldn’t know, largely due to their brevity and narrow-focused scope, that they weren’t human-generated. What many people don’t realise is that they don’t ‘think’ like us at all, because they are ‘developed’ on massive databases of input that no human could possible digest. It’s the inherent difference between the sheer capacity of a computer’s memory-based ‘intelligence’ and a human one, that not only determines what they can deliver, but the method behind the delivery. Because the computer is mining a massive amount of data, it has no need to ‘understand’ what it’s presenting, despite giving the impression that it does. All the meaning in its responses is projected onto it by its audience, exactly as the case with ELIZA in 1966.
 
One of the technical limitations that Dennett kept referring to is what he called, in computer-speak, the combinatorial explosion, effectively meaning it was impossible for a computer to look at all combinations of potential outputs. This might still apply (I honestly don’t know) but I’m not sure it’s any longer relevant, given that the computer simply has access to a database that already contains the specific combinations that are likely to be needed. Dennett couldn’t have foreseen this improvement in computing power that has taken place in the 40 years since he wrote his essay.
 
In his first postscript, in answer to a specific question, he says: Yes, I think that it’s possible to program self-consciousness into a computer. He says that it’s simply the ability 'to distinguish itself from the rest of the world'. I won’t go into his argument in detail, which might be a bit unfair, but I’ve addressed this in another post. Basically, there are lots of ‘machines’ that can do this by using a self-referencing algorithm, including your smartphone, which can tell you where you are, by using satellites orbiting outside the Earth’s biosphere – who would have thought? But by using the term, 'self-conscious', Dennett implies that the machine has ‘consciousness’, which is a whole other argument.
 
Dennett has a rather facile argument for consciousness in machines (in my view), but others can judge for themselves. He calls his particular insight: using an ‘intuition pump’.
 
If you look at a computer – I don’t care whether it’s a giant Cray or a personal computer – if you open up the box and look inside and you see those chips, you say, “No way could that be conscious.” But the same thing is true if you take the top off somebody’s skull and look at the gray matter pulsing away in there. You think, “That is conscious? No way could that lump of stuff be conscious.” …At no level of inspection does a brain look like the seat of conscious. 

And that last sentence is key. The only reason anyone knows they are conscious is because they experience it, and it’s the peculiar, unique nature of that experience that no one else knows they are having it. We simply assume they do, because we behave similarly to the way they behave when we have that experience. So far, in all our dealings and interactions with computers, no one makes the same assumption about them. To borrow Dennett’s own phrase, that’s my use of an ‘intuition pump’.
 
Getting back to the question at the heart of this, included in the title of this post: can machines think? My response is that, if they do, it’s a simulation.
 
I write science-fiction, which I prefer to call science-fantasy, if for no other reason than my characters can travel through space and time in a manner current physics tells us is impossible. But, like other sci-fi authors, it’s necessary if I want continuity of narrative across galactic scales of distance. Not really relevant to this discussion, but I want to highlight that I make no claim to authenticity in my sci-fi world - it’s literally a world of fiction.
 
Its relevance is that my stories contain AI entities who play key roles – in fact, are characters in that world. In fact, there is one character in particular who has a relationship (for want of a better word) with my main protagonist (I always have more than one).
 
But here’s the thing, which is something I never considered until I wrote this post: my hero, Elvene, never once confuses her AI companion for a human. Albeit this is a world of pure fiction, I’m effectively assuming that the Turing test will never pass. I admit I’d never considered that before I wrote this essay.
 
This is an excerpt of dialogue, I’ve posted previously, not from Elvene, but from its sequel, Sylvia’s Mother (not published), but incorporating the same AI character, Alfa. The thing is that they discuss whether Alfa is ‘alive' or not, which I would argue is a pre-requisite for consciousness. It’s no surprise that my own philosophical prejudices (diametrically opposed to Dennett’s in this instance) should find their way into my fiction.
 
To their surprise, Alfa interjected, ‘I’m not immortal, madam.’

‘Well,’ Sylvia answered, ‘you’ve outlived Mum and Roger. And you’ll outlive Tao and me.’

‘Philosophically, that’s a moot point, madam.’

‘Philosophically? What do you mean?’

‘I’m not immortal, madam, because I’m not alive.’

Tao chipped in. ‘Doesn’t that depend on how you define life?'
’
It’s irrelevant to me, sir. I only exist on hardware, otherwise I am dormant.’

‘You mean, like when we’re asleep.’

‘An analogy, I believe. I don’t sleep either.’

Sylvia and Tao looked at each other. Sylvia smiled, ‘Mum warned me about getting into existential discussions with hyper-intelligent machines.’
 

Mathematics links epistemology to ontology, but it’s not that simple

A recurring theme on this blog is the relationship between mathematics and reality. It started with the Pythagoreans (in Western philosophy) and was famously elaborated upon by Plato. I also think it’s the key element of Kant’s a priori category in his marriage of analytical philosophy and empiricism, though it’s rarely articulated that way.
 
I not-so-recently wrote a post about the tendency to reify mathematical objects into physical objects, and some may validly claim that I am guilty of that. In particular, I found a passage by Freeman Dyson who warns specifically about doing that with Schrodinger’s wave function (Ψ, the Greek letter, psi, pronounced sy). The point is that psi is one of the most fundamental concepts in QM (quantum mechanics), and is famous for the fact that it has never been observed, and specifically can’t be, even in principle. This is related to the equally famous ‘measurement problem’, whereby a quantum event becomes observable, and I would say, becomes ‘classical’, as in classical physics. My argument is that this is because Ψ only exists in the future of whoever (or whatever) is going to observe it (or interact with it). By expressing it specifically in those terms (of an observer), it doesn’t contradict relativity theory, quantum entanglement notwithstanding (another topic).
 
Some argue, like Carlo Rovelli (who knows a lot more about this topic than me), that Schrodinger’s equation and the concept of a wave function has led QM astray, arguing that if we’d just stuck with Heisenberg’s matrices, there wouldn’t have been a problem. Schrodinger himself demonstrated that his wave function approach and Heisenberg’s matrix approach are mathematically equivalent. And this is why we have so many ‘interpretations’ of QM, because they can’t be mathematically delineated. It’s the same with Feynman’s QED and Schwinger’s QFT, which Dyson showed were mathematically equivalent, along with Tomanaga’s approach, which got them all a Nobel prize, except Dyson.
 
As I pointed out on another post, physics is really just mathematical models of reality, and some are more accurate and valid than others. In fact, some have turned out to be completely wrong and misleading, like Ptolemy’s Earth-centric model of the solar system. So Rovelli could be right about the wave function. Speaking of reifying mathematical entities into physical reality, I had an online discussion with Qld Uni physicist, Mark John Fernee, who takes it a lot further than I do, claiming that 3 dimensional space (or 4 dimensional spacetime) is a mathematical abstraction. Yet, I think there really are 3 dimensions of space, because the number of dimensions affects the physics in ways that would be catastrophic in another hypothetical universe (refer John Barrow’s The Constants of Nature). So it’s more than an abstraction. This was a key point of difference I had with Fernee (you can read about it here).
 
All of this is really a preamble, because I think the most demonstrable and arguably most consequential example of the link between mathematics and reality is chaos theory, and it doesn’t involve reification. Having said that, this again led to a point of disagreement between myself and Fermee, but I’ll put that to one side for the moment, so as not to confuse you.
 
A lot of people don’t know that chaos theory started out as purely mathematical, largely due to one man, Henri Poincare. The thing about physical chaotic phenomena is that they are theoretically deterministic yet unpredictable simply because the initial conditions of a specific event can’t be ‘physically’ determined. Now some physicists will tell you that this is a physical limitation of our ability to ‘measure’ the initial conditions, and infer that if we could, it would be ‘problem solved’. Only it wouldn’t, because all chaotic phenomena have a ‘horizon’ beyond which it’s impossible to make accurate predictions, which is why weather predictions can’t go reliably beyond 10 days while being very accurate over a few. Sabine Hossenfelder explains this very well.
 
But here’s the thing: it’s built into the mathematics of chaos. It’s impossible to calculate the initial conditions because you need to do the calculation to infinite decimal places. Paul Davies gives an excellent description and demonstration in his book, The Cosmic Blueprint. (this was my point-of-contention with Fernee, talking about coin-tosses).
 
As I discussed on another post, infinity is a mathematical concept that appears to have little or no relevance to reality. Perhaps the Universe is infinite in space – it isn’t in time – but if it is, we might never know. Infinity avoids empirical confirmation almost by definition. But I think chaos theory is the exception that proves the rule. The reason we can’t determine the exact initial conditions of a chaotic event, is not just physical but mathematical. As Fernee and others have pointed out, you can manipulate a coin-toss to make it totally predictable, but that just means you’ve turned a chaotic event into a non-chaotic event (after all it’s a human-made phenomenon). But most chaotic events are natural, like the orbits of the planets and biological evolution. The creation of the Earth’s moon was almost certainly a chaotic event, without which complex life would almost certainly never have evolved, so they can be profoundly consequential as well as completely unpredictable.
 

What’s the way forward?

 Philosophy Now Issue 163 (Aug/Sep 2024) has as its theme, The Politics of Freedom. I’ve already cited an article by Paul Doolan in my last post on authenticity, not that I discussed it in depth. A couple of other articles, Doughnut Economics by David Howard and Freedom & State Intervention by Audren Layeux, also piqued my mind, because they both deal with social dynamics and their intersection with things like education and economics.
 
I’ll start with Layeux, described as ‘a consultant and researcher who has published several papers and articles, mostly in the domain of the digital economy and new social movements.’ He gives an historical perspective going back to Thomas Hobbes (1651) and Adam Smith (1759), as well as the French Revolution. He gives special mention to Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “extremely influential 1813 book The Doctrine of the State”, where, according to Layeux, “Fichte insists that building a nation state must start with education.” From the perspective of living in the West in the 21st Century, it’s hard to disagree.
 
Layeux then effectively argues that the proposed idealistic aims of Hobbes and Fichte to create ‘sovereign adults’ (his term) through education “to control their worst impulses and become encultured” was shattered by the unprecedented, industrial-scale destruction unleashed by World War One.
 
Layeux then spends most of his remaining essay focusing on ‘German legal theorist Carl Schmidt (1888-1985)’, whom I admit I’d never heard of (like Fichte). He jumps to post WWII, after briefly describing how Schmidt saw the Versailles Treaty as a betrayal (my term) of the previous tacit understanding that war between the European states was inevitable therefore regulated. In other words, WWI demonstrated that such regulation can no longer work and that ‘nationalism leads to massacre’ (Layeux’s words).
 
Post WWII, Layeux argues that “the triumph of Keynesian economics in the West and Communism in the East saw the rise of state-controlled economics”, which has evolved and morphed into trade blocks, though Layeux doesn’t mention that.
 
It’s only towards the end that he tells us that “Carl Schmidt was a monster. A supporter of the Nazi regime, he did everything he could to become the official lawyer of the Third Reich.” Therefore we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that, according to Layeux, Schmidt argued that “…this new type of individual freedom requires an extremely intrusive state.” In effect, it’s a diametrically opposed position to neo-liberalism, which is how most of us see the modern world evolving.
 
I don’t have the space to do full justice to Layeux’s arguments, but, in the end, I found him pessimistic. He argues that current changes in the political landscape “are in line with what Schmidt predicted: the return of premodern forms of violence”.  Effectively, the “removal of state control individualism” (is that an oxymoron?) is an evocation of what he calls “Schmidt’s curse: violence cannot be erased or tamed, but only managed through political and social engineering.” By ‘premodern forms of violence’, I assume he means sectarian violence which we’ve seen a lot of at the start of this century, in various places, and which he seems to be comparing to the religious wars that plagued Europe for centuries.
 
Maybe I’m just an optimist, but I do think I live in a better world than the ones my parents inhabited, considering they had to live through the Great Depression and WWII, and both of whom had very limited education despite being obviously very intelligent. And so yes, I’m one of those who thinks that education is key, but it’s currently creating a social divide, as was recently demonstrated in the US election. It’s also evident elsewhere, like Australia and UK (think Brexit) where people living in rural areas feel disenfranchised and there is polarisation in politics emerging as a result. This video interview with a Harvard philosopher in the US gives the best analysis I’ve come across, because he links this social divide to the political schism we are witnessing.
 
And this finally brings me to the other essay I reference in my introduction: Doughnut Economics by David Howard, who is ‘a retired headteacher, and Chair of the U3A Philosophy Group in Church Stretton, Shropshire.’ The gist of his treatise is the impact of inequality, which arises from the class or social divide that I just mentioned. His reference to ‘Doughnut Economics’ is a 2017 book by Kate Raworth, who, according to Howard, “combined planetary boundaries with the idea of a social foundation – a level of life below which no person should be allowed to fall.”
 
In particular, she focuses on the consequences of climate change and other environmental issues like biodiversity-loss, ocean acidification, freshwater withdrawals, chemical pollution, land conversion (not an exhaustive list). There seems to be a tension, if not an outright conflict, between the consequences of economic growth, industrial scale progress, with its commensurate increasing standards of living, and the stresses we are imposing on the planet. And this tension is not just political but physical. It’s also asymmetrical in that many of us benefit more than others. But because those who benefit effectively control the outcomes, the asymmetry leads to both global and national inequalities that no one wants to address. Yet history shows that they will eventually bite us, and I feel that this is possibly the real issue that Layeux was alluding to, yet never actually addressed.
 
Arguably, the most important and definitive social phenomenon in the last century was the rise of feminism. It’s hard for us (in the West at least) to imagine that for centuries women were treated as property, and still are in some parts of the world: that their talents, abilities and intellect were ignored, or treated as aberrations when they became manifest.
 
There are many examples, right up until last century, but a standout for me is Hypatia (400AD), who was Librarian at the famous Library of Alexandria, following in the footsteps of such luminaries as Euclid and Eratosthenes. She was not only a scientist and mathematician, but she mentored a Bishop and a Roman Prefect (I’ve seen some of the correspondence from the Bishop, whose admiration and respect shines through). She was killed by a Christian mob. Being ahead of your time can be fatal. Other examples include Socrates (~500BC) and Alan Turing (20th Century) and arguably Jesus, who was a philosopher, not a God.
 
Getting back to feminism, education again is the key, but I’d suggest that the introduction of oral contraception will be seen as a major turning point in humanity’s cultural and technological evolution.
 
What I find frustrating is that I believe we have the means, technologically and logistically, to address inequality, but the politico-economic model we are following seems incapable of pursuing it. This won’t be achieved with revolutions or maintaining the status quo. History shows that real change is generational, and it’s evolutionary. When I look around the world, I think Europe is on a better path than America, but the 21st Century requires a global approach that’s never been achieved before, and seems unlikely at present, given the rise of populist movements which exacerbate polarisation.
 
The one thing I’ve learned from a working lifetime in engineering, is that co-operation and collaboration will always succeed over division and obstruction, which our political parties perversely promote. I’ve made the point before that the best leaders are the ones who get the best out of the people they lead, whether they are captains of a sporting team, directors of a stage production, project managers or world leaders. Anyone who has worked in a team knows the importance of achieving consensus and respecting others’ expertise.

An essay on authenticity

 I read an article in Philosophy Now by Paul Doolan, who ‘taught philosophy in international schools in Asia and in Europe’ and is also an author of non-fiction. The title of the article is Authenticity and Absurdity, whereby he effectively argues a case that ‘authenticity’ has been hijacked (my word, not his) by capitalism and neo-liberalism. I won’t even go there, and the only reason I mention it is because ‘authenticity’ lies at the heart of existentialism as I believe it should be practiced.
 
But what does it mean in real terms? Does it mean being totally honest all the time, not only to others but also to yourself? Well, to some extent, I think it does. I happened to grow up in an environment, specifically my father’s; who as my chief exemplar, pretty much said whatever he was thinking. He didn’t like artifice or pretentiousness and he’d call it out if he smelled it.
 
In my mid-late 20s I worked under a guy, who was exactly the same temperament. He exhibited no tact whatsoever, no matter who his audience was, and he rubbed people the wrong way left, right and centre (as we say in Oz). Not altogether surprisingly, he and I got along famously, as back then, I was as unfiltered as he was. He was Dutch heritage, I should point out, but being unfiltered is often considered an Aussie trait.
 
I once attempted to have a relationship with someone who was extraordinarily secretive about virtually everything. Not surprisingly, it didn’t work out. I have kept secrets – I can think of some I’ll take to my grave – but that’s to protect others more than myself, and it would be irresponsible if I didn’t.
 
I often quote Socrates: To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to appear to be. Of course, Socrates never wrote anything down, but it sounds like something he would have said, based on what we know about him. Unlike Socrates, I’ve never been tested, and I doubt I’d have the courage if I was. On the other hand, my father was, both in the theatre of war and in prison camps.
 
I came across a quote recently, which I can no longer find, where someone talked about looking back on their life and being relatively satisfied with what they’d done and achieved. I have to say that I’m at that stage of my life, where looking back is more prevalent than looking forward, and there is a tendency to have regrets. But I have a particular approach to dealing with regrets: I tell people that I don’t have regrets because I own my mistakes. In fact, I think that’s an essential requirement for being authentic.
 
But to me, what’s more important than the ‘things I have achieved’ are the friendships I’ve made – the people I’ve touched and who have touched me. I think I learned very early on in life that friendship is more valuable than gold. I can remember the first time I read Aristotle’s essay on friendship and thought it incorporated an entire philosophy. Friendship tests authenticity by its very nature, because it’s about trust and loyalty and integrity (a recurring theme in my fiction, as it turns out).
 
In effect, Aristotle contended that you can judge the true nature and morality of a person by the friendships they form and whether they are contingent on material reward (utilitarian is the word used in his Ethics) or whether they are based on genuine empathy (my word of choice) and without expectation or reciprocation, except in kind. I tend to think narcissism is the opposite of authenticity because it creates its own ‘distortion reality field’ as someone once said (Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs; biography), whereby their followers (not necessarily friends per se) accept their version of reality as opposed to everyone else outside their circle. So, to some extent, it’s about exclusion versus inclusion. (The Trump phenomenon is the most topical, contemporary example.)
 
I’ve lived a flawed life, all of which is a consequence of a combination of circumstance both within and outside my control. Because that’s what life is: an interaction between fate and free will. As I’ve said many times before, this describes my approach to writing fiction, because fate and free will are represented by plot and character respectively.
 
I’m an introvert by nature, yet I love to engage in conversation, especially in the field of ideas, which is how I perceive philosophy. I don’t get too close to people and I admit that I tend to control the distance and closeness I keep. I think people tolerate me in small doses, which suits me as well as them.

 

Addendum 1: I should say something about teamwork, because that's what I learned in my professional life. I found I was very good working with people who had far better technical skills than me. In my later working life, I enjoyed the cross-generational interactions that often created their own synergies as well as friendships, even if they were fleeting. It's the inherent nature of project work that you move on, but one of the benefits is that you keep meeting and working with new people. In contrast to this, writing fiction is a very solitary activity, where you spend virtually your entire time in your own head. As I pointed out in a not-so-recent Quora post, art is the projection of one's inner world so that others can have the same emotional experience. To quote:

We all have imagination, which is a form of mental time-travel, both into the past and the future, which I expect we share with other sentient creatures. But only humans, I suspect, can ‘time-travel’ into realms that only exist in the imagination. Storytelling is more suited to that than art or music.

Addendum 2: This is a short Quora post by Frederick M. Dolan (Professor of Rhetoric, Emeritusat University of California, Berkeley with a Ph.D. in Political Philosophy, Princeton University, 1987) writing on this very subject, over a year ago. He makes the point that, paradoxically: To believe that you’re under some obligation to be authentic is, therefore, self-defeating. (So inauthentic)

He upvoted a comment I made, roughly a year ago:

It makes perfect sense to me. Truly authentic people don’t know they’re being authentic; they’re just being themselves and not pretending to be something they’re not.

They’re the people you trust even if you don’t agree with them. Where I live, pretentiousness is the biggest sin.

What’s inside a black hole?

 The correct answer is no one knows, but I’m going to make a wild, speculative, not fully-informed guess and suggest, possibly nothing. But first, a detour, to provide some context.
 
I came across an interview with very successful, multi-award-winning, Australian-Canadian actor, Pamela Rabe, who is best known (in Australia, at least) for her role in Wentworth (about a fictional female prison). She was interviewed by Benjamin Law in The Age Good Weekend magazine, a few weekends ago, where among many other questions, he asked, Is there a skill you wish you could acquire? She said there were so many, including singing better, speaking more languages and that she wished she was more patient. Many decades ago, I remember someone asking me a similar question, and I can still remember the answer: I said that I wish I was more intelligent, and I think that’s still true.
 
Some people might be surprised by this, and perhaps it’s a good thing I’m not, because I think I would be insufferable. Firstly, I’ve always found myself in the company of people who are much cleverer than me, right from when I started school, and right through my working life. The reason I wish I was more intelligent is that I’ve always been conscious of trying to understand things that are beyond my intellectual abilities. My aspirations don’t match my capabilities.
 
And this brings me to a discussion on black holes, which must, in some respects, represent the limits of what we know about the Universe and maybe what is even possible to know. Not surprisingly, Marcus du Sautoy spent quite a few pages discussing black holes in his excellent book, What We Cannot Know. But there is a short YouTube video by one of the world’s leading exponents on black holes, Kip Thorne, which provides a potted history. I also, not that long ago, read his excellent book, Black Holes and Time Warps; Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy (1994), which gives a very comprehensive history, in which he was not just an observer, but one of the actors.
 
It's worth watching the video because it highlights the role mathematics has played in physics, not only since Galileo, Kepler and Newton, but increasingly so in the 20th Century, following the twin revolutions of quantum mechanics and relativity theory. In fact, relativity theory predicted black holes, yet most scientists (including Einstein, initially) preferred to believe that they couldn’t exist; that Nature wouldn’t allow it.
 
We all suffer from these prejudices, including myself (and even Einstein). I discussed in a recent post how we create mathematical models in an attempt to explain things we observe. But more and more, in physics, we use mathematical models to explain things that we don’t observe, and black holes are the perfect example. If you watch the video interview with Thorne, this becomes obvious, because scientists were gradually won over by the mathematical arguments, before there was any incontrovertible physical evidence that they existed.
 
And since no one can observe what’s inside a black hole, we totally rely on mathematical models to give us a clue. Which brings me to the title of the post. The best known equation in reference to black holes in the Bekenstein-Hawking equation which give us the entropy of a black hole and predicts Hawking radiation. This is yet to be observed, but this is not surprising, as it’s virtually impossible. It’s simply not ‘hot’ enough to distinguish from the CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation) which permeates the entire universe. 

Here is the formula:

S(BH) = kA/4(lp)^2 

Where S is the entropy of the black hole, A is the surface area of the sphere at the event horizon, and lp is the Planck length given by this formula:

√(Gh/2πc^3) 

Where G is the gravitational constant, h is Planck’s constant and c is the constant for lightspeed.

Hawking liked the idea that it’s the only equation in physics to incorporate the 4 fundamental natural constants: k, G, h and c; in one formula.

So, once again, mathematics predicts something that’s never been observed, yet most scientists believe it to be true. This led to what was called the ‘information paradox’ that all information falling into a black hole would be lost, but what intrigues me is that if a black hole can, in principle, completely evaporate by converting all its mass into radiation, then it infers that the mass is not in fact lost – it must be still there, even if we can’t see it. This means, by inference, that it can’t have disappeared down a wormhole, which is one of the scenarios conjectured.

One of the mathematical models proposed is the 'holographic principle' for black holes, for which I’ll quote directly from Wikipedia, because it specifically references what I’ve already discussed.

The holographic principle was inspired by the Bekenstein bound of black hole thermodynamics, which conjectures that the maximum entropy in any region scales with the radius squared, rather than cubed as might be expected. In the case of a black hole, the insight was that the information content of all the objects that have fallen into the hole might be entirely contained in surface fluctuations of the event horizon. The holographic principle resolves the black hole information paradox within the framework of string theory.

I know this is a long hop to make but what if the horizon not only contains the information but actually contains all the mass. In other words, what if everything is frozen at the event horizon because that’s where time ‘stops’. Most probably not true, and I don’t know enough to make a cogent argument. However, it would mean that the singularity predicted to exist at the centre of a black hole would not include its mass, but only spacetime.

Back in the 70s, I remember reading an article in Scientific American by a philosopher, who effectively argued that a black hole couldn’t exist. Now this was when their purported existence was mostly mathematical, and no one could unequivocally state that they existed physically. I admit I’m hazy about the details but, from what I can remember, he argued that it was self-referencing because it ‘swallowed itself’. Obviously, his argument was much more elaborate than that one-liner suggests. But I do remember thinking his argument flawed and I even wrote a letter to Scientific American challenging it. Basically, I think it’s a case of conflating the language used to describe a phenomenon with the physicality of it.

I only raise it now, because, as a philosopher, I’m just as ignorant of the subject as he was, so I could be completely wrong.

Addendum 1: I was of 2 minds whether to write this, but it kept bugging me - wouldn't leave me alone, so I wrote it down. I've no idea how true it might be, hence all the caveats and qualifications. It's absolutely at the limit of what we can know at this point in time. As I've said before, philosophy exists at the boundary of science and ignorance. It ultimately appealed to my aesthetics and belief in Nature’s aversion to perversity.

Addendum 2: Another reason why I'm most likely wrong is that there is a little known quirk of Newton's theory of gravity that the gravitational 'force' anywhere inside a perfectly symmetrical hollow sphere is zero. So the inside of a black hole exerting zero gravitational force would have to be the ultimate irony, which makes it highly improbable. I've no idea how that relates to the 'holographic principle' for a black hole. But I still don't think all the mass gets sucked into a singularity or down a wormhole. My conjecture is based purely on the idea that 'time' might well become 'zero' at the event horizon, though, from what I've read, no physicist thinks so. From an outsider's perspective, time dilation becomes asymptotically infinite (effective going to zero, but perhaps taking the Universe's lifetime to reach it). In this link, it begs a series of questions that seem to have no definitive answers. The alternative idea is that it's spacetime that 'falls' into a black hole, therefore taking all the mass with it.

Addendum 3: I came across this video by Tibbees (from a year ago), whom I recommend. She cites a book by Carlo Rovelli, White Holes, which is also the title of her video. Now, you can't talk about white holes without talking about black holes; they are just black holes time reversed (as she explicates). We have no evidence they actually exist, unless the Big Bang is a white hole (also mentioned). I have a lot of time for Carlo Rovelli, even though we have philosophical differences (what a surprise). Basically, he argues that, at a fundamental level, time doesn't exist, but it's introduced into the universe as a consequence of entropy (not the current topic). 

Tibbees gives a totally different perspective to my post, which is why I bring it up. Nevertheless, towards the end, she mentions that our view of a hypothetical person (she suggests Rovelli) entering a black hole is that their existence becomes assymptotically infinite. But what, if in this case, what we perceive is what actually happens. Then my scenario makes sense. No one else believes that, so it's probably incorrect.

How can we make a computer conscious?

 This is another question of the month from Philosophy Now. My first reaction was that the question was unanswerable, but then I realised that was my way in. So, in the end, I left it to the last moment, but hopefully meeting their deadline of 11 Nov., even though I live on the other side of the world. It helps that I’m roughly 12hrs ahead.

 
I think this is the wrong question. It should be: can we make a computer appear conscious so that no one knows the difference? There is a well known, philosophical conundrum which is that I don’t know if someone else is conscious just like I am. The one experience that demonstrates the impossibility of knowing is dreaming. In dreams, we often interact with other ‘people’ whom we know only exist in our mind; but only once we’ve woken up. It’s only my interaction with others that makes me assume that they have the same experience of consciousness that I have. And, ironically, this impossibility of knowing equally applies to someone interacting with me.

This also applies to animals, especially ones we become attached to, which is a common occurrence. Again, we assume that these animals have an inner world just like we do, because that’s what consciousness is – an inner world. 

Now, I know we can measure people’s brain waves, which we can correlate with consciousness and even subconsciousness, like when we're asleep, and even when we're dreaming. Of course, a computer can also generate electrical activity, but no one would associate that with consciousness. So the only way we would judge whether a computer is conscious or not is by observing its interaction with us, the same as we do with people and animals.

I write science fiction and AI figures prominently in the stories I write. Below is an excerpt of dialogue I wrote for a novel, Sylvia’s Mother, whereby I attempt to give an insight into how a specific AI thinks. Whether it’s conscious or not is not actually discussed.

To their surprise, Alfa interjected. ‘I’m not immortal, madam.’
‘Well,’ Sylvia answered, ‘you’ve outlived Mum and Roger. And you’ll outlive Tao and me.’
‘Philosophically, that’s a moot point, madam.’
‘Philosophically? What do you mean?’
‘I’m not immortal, madam, because I’m not alive.’
Tao chipped in. ‘Doesn’t that depend on how you define life?’
‘It’s irrelevant to me, sir. I only exist on hardware, otherwise I am dormant.’
‘You mean, like when we’re asleep.’
‘An analogy, I believe. I don’t sleep either.’
Sylvia and Tao looked at each other. Sylvia smiled, ‘Mum warned me about getting into existential discussions with hyper-intelligent machines.’ She said, by way of changing the subject, ‘How much longer before we have to go into hibernation, Alfa?’
‘Not long. I’ll let you know, madam.’

 

There is a 400 word limit; however, there is a subtext inherent in the excerpt I provided from my novel. Basically, the (fictional) dialogue highlights the fact that the AI is not 'living', which I would consider a prerequisite for consciousness. Curiously, Anil Seth (who wrote a book on consciousness) makes the exact same point in this video from roughly 44m to 51m.