Rejecting the Core of Your Own Identity, Research Time, 16/02/2018

The funny thing about reading up on the influences of contemporary thinkers is how much baggage you have to sort through and throw away. And I’m not just talking about the poorly-written essays.*

* But there are a lot of poorly-written essays. I won’t name names, but I really want to.

I mean the concepts that create intractable, insoluble problems. These are the problems that define philosophical and metaphysical inquiries for literally centuries. Thousands of people across the tradition search for solutions – major, minor, underground, and utterly unremarkable thinkers.

But the most success they have is remixing the problem into new contexts. They can never solve these problems because the terms of the problem are set up in such a way that it is insoluble.

In particular, I’m talking about the mind-world problem. There are a few essays in Deleuze’s Philosophical Legacy that talk about this – which I find hilarious, because Gilles Deleuze never considered it an issue.

You could say – because I don't want to say it
definitively, but I still find it fascinating – that
Deleuze's most important idea for any thinker
to understand is his notion of philosophy as
the exploration and mapping of conceptual
terrain, rather than finding definitive answers
to questions.

I used to consider it an issue. It was the main concept I latched onto when I was first studying philosophy of mind in my early 20s. And it was one of the first philosophical concepts I ever studied, because my first ever philosophy course started with a month studying Descartes’ Meditations.

The mind-world problem has persisted through centuries of Western thought. The main reason it did was because it’s literally an insoluble problem – you can’t repair it on its own terms. You always end up in some terrible situation.

A big one is the problem of other minds – when you separate mind from world, you end up threatened by a solipsistic prison. In the essay in that volume about Edmund Husserl’s influence on Deleuze, they discuss how Husserl’s thinking floundered and even crashed on the problem of other minds.

He theorized endlessly – especially in the unpublished draft manuscripts, of which there are horrifyingly large amounts – about the encounter between yourself and others. But he could never really get past conceiving it as an encounter with the Other.

At most, other people become abstract. They’re the harbingers of an encounter with the Other. But the actual identities and existence of those other people can’t break through.

So when Deleuze engaged this problem, what did he do to get around it? Well, seeing how Deleuze repaired the mind-body problem was a big part of what first turned me on to his thought.

He didn’t. He just didn’t care about it.

That’s all you need to do! The mind-world problem arose from a few key works that engaged with the philosophical problems of their own times, and were influential enough to change the orientations of whole fields of philosophical questioning.

What the mind-world problem ends up doing is creating an empirically senseless dualism. There’s the individual mind of a single creature on one side – on the other side there’s all the other variety and diversity in the world. But its core framework reduces all that variety in our actual experiences to an abstraction – the encounter with the Other.

Understand this, and it isn’t a problem to be solved. You understand the mind-world problem as a breakdown in thought – an obsessive focus on a problem that takes you away from the problems of real existence.

The problem breaks thought because it keeps you from thinking of anything else and can’t actually be solved. So get rid of it.

A Continuous World of So Many, A History Boy, 13/02/2018

One of the most important insights a person should have in the 21st century if you want to settle yourself, and give yourself come perspective, is this – Accept the continuity between humanity and other species.

Now, I’m not just talking about human-ape proximity. Though I am. All too often we forget how close we are to primates, how similar they are to us. All too often, we know how close we are to primates, and acknowledge it in the worst way. All too typical of us, I should say.

Seeing the continuity of your own life with that of an orangutan
isn't all that hard – they're laughing, silly, joyful, and quietly
experience such an enlightened wisdom of knowing that a loving,
silly, joyful life is the best one for creatures like us.
They're what we aspire to be.

The continuity I’m talking about today has much earlier roots, and much deeper in our bodies. Literally and figuratively.

I spent quite a few years studying philosophy of mind, and one reason I walked away from that as a major research focus was frustration – Frustration that so many researchers ignored the obvious answer to so many of their problems.

So many discussions I had and papers I read about the “hard problem” of consciousness fell to dust to me as I accepted that the human mind is a perceptual field. Our thoughts aren’t just in our heads. Our brains and nervous system develop through environmental interaction. They continue to function through complex feedback loops that we’ve been refining for our entire lives.

Henri Bergson was on to a similar way of thinking. He just expressed it in a totally different way.

The tragedy of Bergson is that he so radically misapplied true and valid philosophical principles of becoming. In the most notorious* example from his work – No Henri, the cause of life getting more complicated isn’t a force of life energy constantly struggling against the inertia of matter’s torpor.

* And simplest to explain.

But yes, large amounts of matter interacting in complex systems that constantly generate energy – say, from giant balls of gas falling in on themselves until they become nuclear fusion furnaces that can be stable for billions of years – tend to become more complex over time.

Here's the life story behind that set of links. At 21, mystified why Chalmers
thought consciousness was a hard problem at all. At 22, puzzled why Putnam
even had to argue that meaning was more than thoughts or neuronal flickers.
At 23, Merleau-Ponty gave me a wonderful vocabulary to let me walk away
from Chalmers’ limited point of view. At 24, learning the biological ground
of that wonderful vocab from Varela. At 25, learning the power and ubiquity
of life and memory to grow, refine, and develop a creature thanks to Allen
and Hofstatder. If you let the problems be your guide, you’ll figure them
out. Don’t specialize too early.

Bergson’s ideas are much more useful today – better applicable to the current state of human science, where we understand that complexity really is everywhere. And his concepts of what consciousness is, and what its roots are, matter today too.

Think about Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness – that a scientific understanding of consciousness will never help us understand the experience of consciousness. An essential premise of that concept is unspoken, but necessary for someone to arrive at that concept at all.

Consciousness is exclusively human, and only humans experience the world as a phenomenal sensory field. Absolutely untrue.

Everything that is capable of action in response to external stimuli – whose reaction to fields of force and affects in its environment – is conscious. That covers every organism. Humans have peculiarly complicated and complex perceptual fields, because we’ve refined our powers of communication and memory with language and technology.

But all those actions are mechanisms. They aren’t deterministic in the most strict sense, because organic responses are based on feedback loops – previous responses condition future responses. The feedback loop is the most rudimentary form of memory.

Even the simplest organisms perceive because their responses are actions – the movement of response itself originates internally and kicks off a feedback loop of the organism with its environment which couples them into a single dynamic field.

Add Bergson to the history I’ve strung together. Even if he might not have realized he’d become a member.

Stretching Our Intentions Through Time, Research Time, 26/10/2017

Here’s an interesting argument that I found in The Human Condition. It’s another example of how Hannah Arendt’s thinking blends ontological and ethical matters in ways that work.

She describes a foundational aspect of our experience of time – how we develop our most visceral conceptions and feelings for the time beyond the present. This goes beyond just remembering and imagining. Both of those are acts carried out in the present.

Remembering refers to the past and imagining can refer to the future, but these acts don’t connect our intentions and worldly activity beyond the present. These acts remain in the present – they don’t extend our action beyond the moment.

So we aren’t really experiencing the past and the future, only calling possibilities and memories before our thoughts. We can experience the past and the future, but it takes a much more intense act than speculation.

When I was partying in my early 20s, I had a
friend who, at the height of his drunkenness,
would scream, "I can see through time!"

Experiencing time beyond the hazy boundaries of the moment is a matter of physical reach there, spreading ourselves four-dimensionally.

Forgiveness and promising. These are the acts by which we physically reach into the past and future – essentially moral and social acts.

Forgiveness is to free someone from the consequences of a past act. It erases that old action from your relationship with that person. An action whose direct intention reaches into the past and changes it.

It may just be in the context of this one relationship between a few people, but it’s still changing the past – nullifying an event, deadening its consequences.

Promising is, parallel to forgiveness, the act of changing the future. Now, the future doesn’t yet exist – it literally hasn’t happened yet* – so you aren’t changing some pre-existing future.

* Please do not bring general relativity or any of the implied conceptions of time – block time, timeless time – into this conversation. I’m just talking about the human experience of time in the flow of our movement.

No, you're changing what would be into what can be. A promise is a reach into the future to create it – an act of manipulating existence into a particular shape. Our intentions in our promises push our actions forward in time as the promise becomes a goal, an attractor for our action.

These actions are possible only through social relationships – building bonds of trust, reliability, and obligation. Communities are constituted here.

But the constitution of communities and friendships are bound up with the extension of our experience beyond the present moment and into a smeared duration of practical awareness. Building our social bonds requires stretching our intentionality into the past the future – extending our presence from the present into a long stretch of time.

Self-conscious creatures become social through stretching their intentionality along entirely new vectors. Promising and forgiving makes us four-dimensional creatures. These acts make us more than timely – becoming temporal.

When the Imaginary Is Real, Composing, 18/01/2017

Social contract stuff again today. Because the whole concept of the social contract has been at the centre of Western political theory for literally hundreds of years. As a popular idea, it informs the very act of writing states’ constitutions.

As annoying and constraining the concept can be, it’s not going away, and anyone who wants to write foundational political theory has to grapple with it.

Here’s a common stereotypical way* to describe a social contract: as a thought experiment. “We all know that such a moment could never have existed. But if all the members of a society could have gathered to decide among themselves how they’d live, they would decide that . . .”

* You know where you can find the best examples of sadly common lazy stereotypes about how to describe philosophy? Look up a kind-of-shit Introduction to Philosophy textbook.

But here’s a problem with that image of the social contract concept as a thought experiment. It doesn’t really make clear why we would make the experiment in the first place.

Social contract thought experiments are ostensibly about discovering the fundamental relationships and concerns of society. Depending on the emphasis, it tends either to security (so you lean Hobbes) or productivity in community (so you lean Rousseau).

Yet it rarely works as a means to discover a real essence of politics. It’s an argumentative demonstration, but as an argument, it’s strictly rhetoric. If you’re interested in building a vision of society as fundamentally about mutual security, you’ll work through a social contract experiment that makes it so. Same goes for whatever set of values you want to argue is paramount in society.

That's not to say that social contract thought experiments are useless or poor philosophy. They’re actually great philosophy, but not because they reveal some real essence of society. It’s because thinking through them is an engine of concepts and ideas about fundamental issues of social life and human nature.

You don’t want to get to a right answer that’s so clearly correct that it shuts everyone up and they just memorize it as the perfect answer to the question. You want the best way to encourage thinking.

Now here’s how Immanuel Kant lays it out. He turns it into an example of a technical term in his complex, carefully designed ontology of the human subject – an ideal of pure reason.

How an “ideal of pure reason” works – it’s a framework principle of thought itself. Literally a regulation for our minds. So while it's an imaginary scenario, it's a real part of the human mind and subject.

So what kind of thought does thinking through a social contract argument facilitate? For Kant, it’s the thought of governors themselves – heads of state, politicians, functionaries, legislators, parliamentarians.

By focussing their minds on the fundamental questions of what brings people together in a society, leaders will create laws, regulations, and institutions for their own societies that align with the values and best interests of their own people.

As Kant puts it, they’ll write laws to which every citizen would consent if given the opportunity – just like in the image of writing the social contract in the first place.

There are some limitations to this. But I’ll get into those tomorrow.

Why Be So Ambitious About a Chatbot, Really? Research Time, 21/06/2016

You know, even though I spent yesterday’s post talking about the global mass fragmentation of online space, most of that actual post Brian Honigman published last week was about chatbots.

Now, chatbots are weirdly fascinating creatures. I mean this in a strictly intellectual sense. Because every time I encounter a chatbot in my actual life, they irritate the hell out of me. And this is a very important point for my argument that you should remember as I go through a more complex reaction to Brian’s ideas.

Hal, I asked you to open the pod bay doors. Why are you
asking me to do your survey about my satisfaction with
Discovery Space Systems before you'll let me back on
board the ship?

In a broad sense, artificial intelligence has a profound hold on the Western popular imagination. This is true for two worlds that I’ve worked in over the last decade – science fiction and philosophy.

Philosophically, I’ve studied cognitive science and the theory of mind in my younger days. Contemporary philosophy of mind developed from the community of scientists and thinkers that were part of the cybernetics community in the mid-20th century. 

This was the community whose ultimate goal was the creation of artificial intelligence. In its original sense, this was the replication of a human-style mind in a machine. Among the philosophical community (at least in academia), artificial intelligence is still largely focussed on this goal.

It’s the same goal and ideal that animates so much of science-fiction, from the first imaginings of mechanical men, through the creation of the term ‘robot,’ the innovations of Golden Age writers like Asimov, the more nuanced explorations of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Battlestar: Galactica, and so many other stories across so many other media.

It’s a focus of some of my own creative work, like the development of my Alice character for the film project Here Is a Man, and my plans for future short stories and novellas imagining the far future of humanity. 

Having survived multiple ecological crises and dystopias to live spread among stars hundreds of light years apart. A species of robotic sages who we created drift from world to world, the mirrors of our best natures, to whom we always fall short.

Dream casting for Here Is a Man: June Diane Raphael as
Alice. She plays the same basic sarcasm and sense of
superiority she does so well on Grace and Frankie, but
where her character also has the genuine wisdom,
perceptiveness, and martial skill of the master sage
described in the Zhuangzi.

The human imagination has developed profound imaginaries of our most hopeful, optimistic alternative futures. And the most visible manifestation of artificial intelligence in our real lives are bloody chatbots.

That says a lot about human nature right there. 

Honigman discusses the potential of chatbots to improve consumer experiences, inquiries, and marketing techniques. Which is genuinely interesting territory – it’s fascinating and sometimes horrifying to develop algorithmic entities that can become creative and innovative thanks to continuing relationships with humans. Intelligence literally manifests through experience with an intelligence.

But our abilities at turning an algorithm heuristic* are still very limited. A chatbot can develop a very detailed and comprehensive power to respond to human needs and inquiries. But only within a very limited conceptual space.

* If I can borrow a phrase from Arthur C Clarke.

AI engineers can’t yet program a chatbot intelligence that can truly learn and adapt with the same flexibility that humans can with our uncommonly plastic, malleable brains. All the parameters of a chatbot’s interactions have to be pre-programmed into it. 

They can learn and improve within those parameters, so the best chatbots are the ones that perform very specific customer service functions. They're the front lines for a business to answer consumer questions in real time about specific product lines and company activities. 

With so much contemporary research showing how rooted
intelligence is in our embodiment and interactions with
our environment, building a truly human-like artificial
intelligence would mean literally building an artificial
human, down to our own neural plasticity and
developmental interaction with our environment.

The only AI we know how to build right now is one in which we can anticipate the boundaries of everything it will be asked to do. Life, taken on the whole, is too complex for anyone to anticipate. To imagine life in advance is beyond human intelligence.

So instead, we build computer programs to interact with people in messenger apps about consumer products. The first crack at help lines and customer complaint logs. A cheaper replacement for human operators.

With a little more flexibility, they can spam us with unsolicited and obviously fake conversations about a company’s products. In just the same way as I get generic emails to “try our progressive new product” from hotmail addresses that contain more numbers than anything like someone’s actual name, alias, or avatar. 

And I’ll pass over those open marketing messages in the same way I pass over those spam emails that slip through my filters and clutter my feed some mornings. Only I'll be more irritated, because I may not be able to get the chatbot to shut up.

Then I’ll go back to writing my story of the robotic sage who wants to save us from ourselves. Or watching an adventure with Geordi, Deanna, and Mr Data. Chatbots might be the future of a lot of marketing channels and consumer-company interaction, but I remain skeptical that they'll ever stop being annoying.

How Hard It Is to Know What You’re Talking About, Composing, 12/05/2016

Back in my academy days, I used to have some really frustrating conversations with other philosophers. In short form, we always used to talk past one another. 

I would use a word one way, and my conversation partner would be used to it meaning something different. We’d get into this ridiculous argument where each of us thinks the other is completely out to lunch. 

Sometimes philosophical arguments end up as intense as
a Klingon bat'leth battle to the death. Then we all have a
laugh about it and have made a bunch of new friends.

One of these conversations was once actually over the meaning of the expression “talking past one another.” And yet the actors I work with keep asking me where I learned to write comedy dialogue so well. Girlfriend, you don’t know shit.

We’re all well-informed intelligent people. So why do we end up in these stupidly counter-productive conversations? I think the answer lies in the nature of disciplines. Every knowledge tradition has its own specialized vocabulary. 

In those vocabs, words that are easily understood in everyday conversations often take on specialized technical meanings. And each disciplinary community is its own diverging path, so the technical meanings of a common word in one community might end up being wildly different than the technical meanings of the same word in another group.

That’s a perfect recipe for misunderstanding, frustration, and the slow-burning resentment of mutual hostility. 

Fairly frequently, I’d find that the most intense and entrenched quarrelling camps in different sub-disciplines of academic philosophy came down to these conflicts of definition. No one in either camp could get to a point of critical distance from their own debates to realize that they were talking about different processes with the same words. 

I feel like philosophy in the universities would be a lot more productive if more people realized that you weren’t supposed to argue over the precise meanings of each aphorism late-period Ludwig Wittgenstein said. You were supposed to read Philosophical Investigations like a guidebook on argumentation styles to avoid.

Wittgenstein is another thinker who I think
people take the wrong messages from.
There's an enormous number of academic
books and articles arguing over the precise
meanings and implications of his work, and
whether his various ideas are right or wrong.
But he wrote guides on how to recognize
whether a problem is real or a result of
confusion. The real dispute comes over
which of those guidelines you think should
apply when.

I discuss one example of these disciplinary wars over nothing for a moment in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. Short version. It’s part of a discussion of very primordial forms of subjectivity. The kinds of perception that single-celled organisms do. 

There's a dispute in philosophy of mind over the nature of cognition, between those who think it’s about forming linguistic propositions and those who think it’s about practical action in the world. Following Manuel DeLanda’s really quite insightful distinction that not enough people take seriously, this dispute comes down to no real difference.

One talks about how to create signification, semantic meaning. One talks about how to create significance in the world, practical value. They’re entirely different processes, but these academics think they have conflicting views of the same process because they call the topic of their study ‘cognition.’ 

I close the argument with a joke that I probably think is a lot funnier than it really is, about two groups of people talking past each other. 

“It’s as if a group of silver miners walked into an office full of statisticians at Google, to tell them they’ll never discover the data they’re mining without proper drilling equipment, while the data miners are incredulous that the silver miners achieve anything without programming skills.”

As I read back through Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity to prepare for my panel on it in Calgary at the end of the month, I’m noticing some of my own argument techniques more explicitly than I used to. And this is a style I use quite a lot. 

Deflating an intense dispute within a discipline by showing that it’s based on a category mistake. That there isn’t really a substantive difference between the two (or more) sides. Just a different set of definitions, people using the same words to refer to different problems and processes, then getting into fights when they talk to each other. 

Or rather, talk past each other. Another thing I noticed over the years is that none of these critiques ever go over that well. And discussions in philosophy can get very intense and heated. But we usually all make up and have a beer afterward. Nobody takes it personally.

Except when I make one of these fundamental criticisms. Saying that the basic foundations of a disciplinary dispute are based on a very simple misunderstanding, and that realizing this makes your debate fade away into utter meaninglessness or trivia?

That seems to upset people quite a bit.

What We Think a Mind Can Be, Jamming, 31/08/2015

I had a really interesting conversation on Twitter this weekend, between Steve Fuller, Thomas Basbøll, and Phil Sandifer, as well as a new online acquaintance. We were chatting about the nature of intelligence, mind, and the Turing Test. It got me thinking about my own relationship with philosophy of mind back when I was finishing my undergrad and my master’s. 

Until the end of 2008, I had wanted to specialize in philosophy of mind in my academic career. I eventually decided against it because I found the style of writing and discourse in that sub-discipline unproductive. I've written about why I left philosophy of mind before.

Artificial intelligence is a concept that I find entirely
ordinary, I think because I've grown up around stories
of intelligent robots all my life. That's true of
everyone now.

The way people thought about and discussed the field's problems, it didn’t actually progress their conversation. It would just split a new idea into a new sub-sub-discipline, and the writers who didn't want to go in that direction would continue on as usual.

Come to think of it, that’s a problem with academic humanities in general. You can build a whole career just by declaring and arguing that everyone who's more innovative than you is wrong. I’ve met some old farts in the academic field like that. I never met Jerry Fodor, but I found most of his work had this character.

Complaining aside, it was an interesting conversation, about whether humans could ever develop an artificial intelligence on the same level as humanity, with similar powers. Steve, being the optimistic transhumanist that he is, is sure that we could. Thomas was sure that we can’t, and even doubted whether any machine was intelligent, because of what’s “on the inside.”

I agreed with Steve that it isn't really an argument against the possibility of AI. We don't know what's “on the inside” of other humans either. Philosophy has called this question The Problem of Other Minds™, and no one has ever conclusively solved that either. It’s one of those philosophical problems rising from such a radical skepticism that you can only walk away or let it consume you.

For someone raised on as much science-fiction as I have been, The Problem of Other Minds applies to machines and artificial intelligences (real, imagined, and hypothetical) even more than to humans. I’m sure we’ve all met people of whom we’ve concluded, quite reasonably, that there’s nothing going on in there.

I suppose my own thoughts are agnostic. Most of the attempts to conceive of AI scientifically revolve around computers and the Turing Test. But I don’t think human intelligence works anything like a computer. Human thought is completely different from serial processing, so developing artificial intelligence from computer technology is probably impossible.

I don't think anyone ever developed a Turing
Test scenario where the AI punches you in the
face, steals your wallet, and spends all your
cash on drugs and beer. That's why I think the
creators of Futurama are genuine innovators
in how we conceive of AI in our culture.

But that doesn't mean that I think artificial intelligence is impossible. I’ve always suspected that robotics would develop true machine intelligence on a human parallel, because robots have to perceive and move in the world. Humans have very plastic brains, which develop through worldly perception and interaction. This goes beyond learning. I'm talking about the actual development of our brains and cognitive capacities.

I suspect having a memory capable of narrative formation (and not just factual recall) is also essential to intelligence, because our self-consciousness and self-identity is inherently narrative. Our character is a story we tell about ourselves, and how we became who we are. We change our character when we change that story.

This is why I’m ultimately an agnostic on whether we'll ever develop an artificial intelligence in the greatest sense of the term. I don't know if any of our technology is capable of creating a robot whose brain physically develops through their worldly activity, and a memory that works by forming narratives. 

All of our existing computer and robotics technology, to my knowledge, makes brains (or central processing units) that are complete and don’t develop after activation. And computer memory is entirely about precise functional recall, not the development of narrative and character.

I believe that it’s possible to make something that works this way. I believe this is true because we exist, and we work that way. But there's no reason why making such an artificial intelligence is inevitable, any more than anything that happens is inevitable. As it is, humanity may simply never get around to it in the time we have left, however much or little it may be.

I Can Extend Myself Over the Whole Planet, Research Time, 30/06/2015

Something I’ve always found fascinating about ideas is how they seem to take on a life of their own. I didn’t always believe that ideas could live disconnected from their thinkers, and even now, I’m still very unsure of how the process would work. What is an idea? I can't bring myself to believe in ideas as eternal Platonic Forms. Ideas change, just as matter does.

Venice is loved for its ancient architecture, but
Marinetti hated Venice for the same reason.

Ideas drift around societies of thinkers, and recur in different places. One thinker focusses on an aspect of a particular idea that another may never notice at all. Back when I was working full-time in academic philosophy, I thought I’d research influence: how one set of ideas occurred in the works of another.

But in terms of the evidence I could summon up from research into the social networks, relationships, and what a given writer had actually read and studied, there weren't nearly enough chains of influence to make any direct claims outside established chains – who read whom, who studied under whom and where. So if I’m going to write about the recurrence of ideas among different writers and disciplines, I’ll have to find something more poetic and figurative than direct influence. 

Here's an example that just occurred to me. I’ve been reading some old essays of Filippo Marinetti. Marinetti and his crew of Italian punk artists, poets, and playwrights at the start of the 20th century wanted a revolution in theatre and society. They created art inspired by the lines of machine production, the regimentation and power of industry.

Marinetti wrote about a wonderful dream he once had, that the ancient historic buildings of Venice would be torn to rubble, and that rubble would fill the city’s canals to build roads to factories. The embrace of technology – the economic expression of a cultural embrace of the future – would make Italy a great world power, a centre of manufacturing and military might.

Humanity extends itself over the entire world with its
technology. This is the future, our world.

His central image was the Extended Man. Human ingenuity created technologies that can enormously increase the speed and intensity of material production. We can keep making more stuff, endlessly. All that production was organized in a massive system over the entire world: industrial states built massive armies to conquer foreign territory, enslave or co-opt their residents, and funnel their resources to the homeland, where domestic industries would build equipment to sell to their people and around the world.

I learned how it works in high school. It was called the history of the colonial era. We don't conquer territory with armies anymore – there’s no movement in England to make India British again. But the economic relations are there. We all know that most of our goods are made in overseas factories. Instead of the plantation with its open slavery, we now have Foxconn with its anti-suicide nets between the compound’s buildings to prevent employee turnover.

Technology was the extension of the human will, our thoughts, plans, and dreams extending all over Earth. In Marinetti's time, we did it with armies and navies, openly. In our time, we do it a little more secretly, with free trade agreements negotiated behind closed doors until the final texts hit our legislatures for ratification. At least we’re skeptical that these agreements are always in the best interests of the people, and talk about it on our social networks and in our coffeeshops.

Back when I was still an enthusiastic academic-in-training, I was interested in philosophy of mind.* I discovered a curious idea in the work of a University of Edinburgh professor, Andy Clark: that technology extends the human mind.

* I still am. I just find the ways you can legitimately talk about it in North American philosophy departments to be a little limited.

Andy Clark, I discovered through a friend who went to
school at University of Edinburgh, is notorious for his
loud shirts. This is not Andy Clark, but Colin Baker's
similarly notorious Doctor Who.

Clark's vision was much more modest than Marinetti’s imperial conception of the technological man. Here’s a key example in Clark's work. Normally, we think of one function of the human mind as memory – memory happens inside our brains, where our minds are. But when I use technology to make a list of my day's tasks at work or a grocery list – maybe a pen and paper, maybe my phone – my mind is in the paper and the phone just as much as it’s in my skull. 

Technology extends the human mind and will beyond its body. But there are no political or social implications to this. Clark specializes in philosophy of mind, in cognitive theory. He's only interested in how human thought works. His way of thinking doesn’t have anything to do with politics. Philosophy of mind has nothing to do with political philosophy; they're different disciplines. Ask any professor.

Marinetti and Clark, across generations and countries, share an idea: technology extends the human mind. I doubt Clark ever read Marinetti's work. What would a cognitive theorist have to do with an artist, and an artist who had such repugnant politics as well? Yet the idea connects them, strangely. 

When we’re used to our assumptions about what kind of knowledge our knowledge is, we don't always make the connections that perhaps we should. Maybe we forget what once seemed obvious to us, and that forgetfulness leaves us vulnerable somehow.

Maybe good writing about ideas reminds us of the connections we should see, if we're to understand the real consequences of our thoughts. The full material implications of how creatures with our powers understand what we are.

What Is Life? There Is No Mystery, Jamming, 20/12/2014

I follow quite a few people from the world of Doctor Who on Twitter. In most cases, I get a wonderful glimpse into the thoughts of one of England's crankiest men (mid-1980s Doctor Colin Baker), notices of plucky theatre productions and charitable drives (1960s and 1970s companions Frazer Hines and Louise Jameson), and steadfast promotion for television shows so terrible that it constitutes a model case of entertainment industry professionalism (Karen Gillan's enthusiastic promotion of her absolutely terrible American sitcom, Selfie, which I badly hope doesn't ruin her career, as she's a wonderful actress who just needs material that measures up to her talent).

But Christopher Bidmead is perhaps the most rewarding single Twitter feed among my Doctor Who list. Bidmead is a science writer who was the script editor of the show in its 18th season (succeeding Douglas Adams, the toughest act to follow). He only held the post for that single year, but there was no other year like it in the entire history of Doctor Who. The stories produced in his short tenure skillfully combined thoughtfulness with suspense, adventure with science and philosophy, and some impressively weird imagery.

Saturday morning, Bidmead shared this video, which I thought I would share, even at risk of its being a too-long-didn't-watch at a length of an hour.

It's a lecture by physicist Jeremy England about how to define life according to the terms of physics. It was quite fortuitous for me that Bidmead would link this video after I just wrapped up the most sustained philosophical argument on my own blog. I was quite honoured that SK, one of the regular semi-troll commenters on Phil Sandifer's website visited my old post about the Star Trek episode "The Measure of a Man" from this May after Vaka Rangi linked to it in his discussion of that story.

The Star Trek episode is a cheekily over-dramatized trial, where Starfleet must decide whether Data has any rights, or if, as a machine, he is the institution's property. SK kept hammering me on the old point in philosophy of mind, that because Data is a machine, his entire person is a series of mechanical movements and reactions. And because he is determined entirely by physical causes, he does not truly think and express those thoughts, only precisely reproduce exactly what a creature (who is not a machine, so not subject to strict physical determinism) would say.

This juvenile way of thinking about physics and physical determinism is one of the central reasons why philosophy of mind doesn't get that much respect anymore in the scientific community. The conception of physical determinism as strictly linear A-causes-B-causes-C hasn't held much water in the physics community at least since James Clerk Maxwell. The development of the dynamic branches of physics and their cascading effects on the fundamental concepts of every other science is either forgotten or unknown in the general population, who still think of determinism after the fashion of Isaac Newton and David Hume's billiard ball analogy.

Throughout my time as a university-based philosopher, I regularly interacted with people WITH PHDS who said the scientific concept of emergence was nonsense, or who seriously described in professional contexts the neurological activity that constituted personality as "the mind stuff that brains do." My colleague in Texas, Levi Bryant, still regularly vents his frustrations on Facebook about a trend in philosophy to revive old-school vitalist biology, whose key postulate was that there had to be a fundamental force of nature, vitality, that animated organic bodies to be exemptions from the universe's strictly deterministic causality.

All that said, it is very difficult to use the fundamental concepts of physics to understand life. In their mathematical descriptions, all physical processes are fundamentally reversible. Yet living processes never flow in reverse. England's talk discusses how entropy, one of the fundamental concepts of Maxwell's thermodynamics (the revolutionary field that ultimately crushed the Newtonian model of linear causality) can be used to define what life is.

Living bodies, described in the terms of physics, are bodies whose internal processes tend to maximize the efficiency of entropy production.

Of course, the meaning of life as a whole goes far beyond the principle. Reductionism is a stupid way to think as well. But if you're wondering what physical principle might be held in common between me, you, a tree, a lichen, an ant, a trilobite, a paramecium, a plankton, a bivalve, and a herpes virus, entropy efficiency maximization is a pretty reasonable notion.

The Politics of Mind and Agency, Research Time, 27/05/2014

I have sometimes discussed how I left philosophy of mind as a major discipline for my writing of philosophy. One of the many issues that I have with this sub-discipline was that too many conceptions of mind used a template that was rather like the human model. In the environmentalist philosophical discourses that I delved into after leaving mind circles, anthropomorphism in thinking was considered a dangerous thing.

I agree in the case of mind and consciousness. Sean Smith's presentation was on the rudimentary versions of consciousness that one can discover through analysis of the evolutionary ancestors of modern animals. My own account of rudimentary consciousness is in the fifth chapter of my Ecophilosophy project, which understands such rudimentary consciousness as the basic ability to perceive the world and constitute differential relations in that world through one's movements.  I think my own philosophical ideas on this are already more radical than Smith's because this most rudimentary form of consciousness is common to all forms of life and objects able to move by means of metabolic chemical activity.

This is a very slippery issue because we're all so accustomed to thinking of mind and consciousness in terms of the human model. I personally prefer using a more neutral term, like perceptual subjectivity or fundamental agency, precisely because these terms are a little less loaded. But it is part of a larger point that I develop throughout the project that amounts to a radical conception of agency, that foregrounds the capacity for bodies in motion and interaction as the primary producers of new complexities and new bodies or systems in the world.

This is also my contribution to the environmentalist critique of anthropocentrism in an ontological context. It is a conception of the world where a notion of agency can apply to all developments of new physical structures. Environmentalist theorists want a vision of the world where humans are one peculiar part of a massively complex world that is fascinating and beautiful in all the fractally complicated majesty of its assembly.

Such vision, where humans, and a single conception of what humanity is, are not the measure of all that the world can be, is common across contemporary forms of radical political thinking. One of my favourite sessions today was by Kristin Rodier, who, broadly speaking, focussed on the feminist notion of transforming your own subjectivity through coming to know how the world has constructed you, and your feedback relationships in how forces in your environment transforms you. While this concept is firmly rooted in political practice, there are similar political aspects in other genes of philosophical thinking that are less obviously so.

Like the ontology of complexity and assemblage in my own manuscript, or the redefinition of the mind away from human models in the evolutionary investigation of conscience. I think pretty much all philosophy, no matter the explicit context, has these political implications if you let them inform the wider conception and practice of your life.

Learning Philosophy With Mr Data, A History Boy, 10/05/2014

I would definitely say that the first episode of Star Trek that really stuck with me was “The Measure of a Man,” and it’s only come to mean more to me over time. Those of you who know me personally probably don’t find it surprising that one of my favourite Star Trek characters, and one who I identified with myself as a child, was Mr Data. My favourite episodes of TNG as a child featured Data, and a lot of them are still personal favourites today. I first saw “The Measure of a Man” when I was five years old, and while I didn’t understand everything that was going on at the time, I knew I was watching some amazing television.

I don’t think a discussion of an episode of TNG that’s nearly thirty years old can be spoiled, though I’ll still add my 

SPOILERS!!!

sign for the sake of politeness. After all, Vaka Rangi and TARDIS Eruditorum don’t worry about spoilers, so neither will I. Starfleet robotics scientist Cmdr Maddox visits the Enterprise with a request that Data take part in an experiment to replicate his positronic brain, which would require that his memory banks be downloaded to an external hard drive and his brain and body disassembled. When Maddox can’t guarantee that he’d be able to put Data back together again, the android rightfully refuses, at which point Maddox produces a transfer order, and refuses to let Data resign to escape the experiment on the grounds that, as a machine, he is property of Starfleet and has no rights. 

When Picard asks the local starbase JAG for a trial to decide Data’s fate, he’s pressed into service as defence advocate, and Riker is ordered to be the prosecutor. Although Riker successfully proves that Data is a machine, Picard and Data successfully demonstrate his sentience and self-awareness. Maddox justified his desire to build a race of thousands of Data androids so they could be probes sent into dangerous environments to do the dangerous and dirty work that organic beings could not be rightfully pressed into. And because this hearing will have ruled them machines, they’d have no right to object. Since it would go against all the basic ethical principles of the Federation to build a race of robotic slaves, the JAG grants Data his rights, and he immediately refuses, formally, to participate in Maddox’s work.

Cmdr Maddox is certain that a bundle of electrical nets and
gears is incapable of true thought, of understanding
anything but the syntax and functions of poetry.

One aspect of the philosophical issues that inform this story is terribly obvious: the basic questions of philosophy of mind. All of the explicit conversation throughout most of the episode revolve around whether Data, as a machine, is really capable of thinking. At one point, Maddox thumbs through Data’s copy of the complete works of Shakespeare, and asks him, both fascinated and pathetically pleading with the android, if they are just words to him, or if he genuinely understands their meaning and significance. Data responds with a chipper affirmative, but Maddox still calls him ‘it’ for the rest of the episode.

This is the oldest issue in philosophy of mind. Indeed, it’s probably the definitive question of the whole sub-discipline. The sub-discipline was founded as the philosophical wing of the cybernetics research community, where the possibility of creating a genuine artificial intelligence with computer technology was paramount. For decades, its major problems revolved around what constituted the mind, because answering this ontological question would constitute a response to whether the Turing Test would succeed.

The Turing Test was a thought experiment, named after its first formulator Alan Turing, of course, that a machine would have achieved genuine intelligence if it was capable of pulling off a lie to a person about what it was, via exchange through a medium like text message that would keep the human from seeing it. The lie is usually depicted as the computer convincing a human conversation partner that it’s a human too. So a lot of the debate revolved around whether external activity was enough to guarantee the existence of a mind. Many thought experiments produced in response to this question attempted to pose this question with computers, (very technically specified) zombies, non-human animals, extra-terrestrials, convoluted translation apparatuses, and, naturally, androids. 

John Searle, a philosopher for whom I have distaste,
devised the Chinese Room thought experiment, in which
a simple translation and phrasebook algorithm achieves all
the Turing Test asks to prove sentience. Therefore, artificial
intelligence is impossible. His lack of imagination saddens
me.

Maddox treats Data just as some philosophers have conceived of mind: if it isn’t human (or at least organic) then it’s just a bundle of gears and mechanisms that spit very convincing responses to stimuli. Unfortunate for Data. But fortunately for Data, this is based on a premise that itself is up for philosophical debate: whether there is any aspect of the physical human organism (our squishier gears and mechanisms) which produces all that we call mind, or whether there is some immaterial aspect to the human mind’s constitution. If we’re all material, then a creature like Data could exist, if a machine (like the fictional positronic brain and neural net) could accomplish all that the human brain and perceptual apparatus does, or more.

Since all of the empirical evidence for the existence of human minds is our behaviour, Data’s behavioural demonstration of sentience and self-awareness is enough to declare him truly self-aware and sentient.

And the best part is, these ontological arguments are thrown out entirely for an ethical question. If we had an army of androids available to do terrifyingly risky tasks and labour, to be treated as disposable people, they would essentially be slaves, demarcated by their race: android. For people who know the horror of slavery, creating such a system with full knowledge of what you were doing would be intolerable in the deepest sense.

There is another ethical question in this episode, though, one that constitutes an idea that animates my own ideas for fiction work about my Alice character. She is an android that has overcome the human morality of resentment, who feels no impulse to punish for offence or wrongs, and seeks only to repair the damage to the wronged and the wrongdoer. Well, at least in this episode, Data is the one to do it first. 

Will Riker is forced to argue that one of his best friends is
not even a person.

Remember that Cmdr Riker was drafted to play the part of the prosecution, and he played it so well that if Picard and Guinan hadn’t thought of switching the case from an ontological to an ethical ground, Data would have been taken apart and died. By the end of the episode, Riker is miserable, because his actions almost cost the life of his friend. But Data is not offended; he’s grateful. If Riker had refused to prosecute the case, or do his level best to prove the Maddox’s case, the JAG would have ruled against Data’s having rights to self-determination. So Data says, “That action injured you, and saved me. I will not forget it.” 

That’s a greater wisdom than most humans possess, the ability to see past the immediate appearance of acts to their larger consequences and results. And with these in mind, he takes no offence, and praises his friend for the openly offensive acts that the situation had made necessary to save his life. His morality is guided by his knowledge. Data the character often spoke of his desire to become more human. Well, in this episode at least, he became more than human, better than human.

Kraftwerkdenken 1: Machinic Man in a World of Computers, A History Boy, 31/03/2014

Watching Kraftwerk’s 3D concert this Saturday was delicious for my philosophical brain as well as my musical and cinematic brains. It provoked me to revisit an old argument that I’ve heard for a long time, why people are uncomfortable with the typical materialism of philosophy in discussions and contexts regarding mind and soul. 

One of the most striking philosophical denunciations I’ve ever had thrown at me lay in this issue. It happened at one of the Jockey Club meetings in which I used to take part when I was at Memorial’s philosophy department. Discussing a paper about mind-body dualism, I expressed my belief, which I basically still hold, that humans are entirely physical creatures, and that our personalities and mental aspects are ultimately generated by physical processes. And an older student from the English faculty then loudly denounced me as someone who did not believe in morality or ethics, for that reason. 

No matter what their art has suggested over the years, we
are not actually robots. Not even Kraftwerk anymore.

I was more than flummoxed by the response, but it’s rooted in a concern that still rankles people, me included. This is the presumption that material, the physical, is only capable of extremely simple activity. After all, what more can be done with a physical object other than kicking it down the road? When the image of the mind as software for the brain was first developed, computers were very simple machines running very rudimentary processes. They were the kind of computers that Kraftwerk depicts in their visuals and music. Harshly bright green text on a dark green screen, huge clunky monitors and little more processing power than a calculator. 

If this is the kind of computer of which the human mind was a slightly more complicated model, then this vision of humanity depicts us literally as robots. Their mobility depressingly limited, little more than a talking mannequin. All of humanity’s profundities would be mere simulations, lying to ourselves that we could be more significant than we really were. If this was the dream of a technological, materialist humanity, then for many people it was a nightmare. 

If anything bugged me about Cmdr.
Data's existentialism, it was that he
framed it in terms of 'becoming human.'
Really, just like humans, we should all
strive to make ourselves more complex
machines.

Venerable curmudgeonly scholars muscle strong arguments against this reductive materialism, the idea that we are “nothing but” or “mere” matter in motion. But you don’t have to believe in anything transcendentally or cheesily spiritual to overcome this idea. Even just learning how vastly complex material systems can actually become are good enough. This is why I was happy to discover the work of Manuel DeLanda during my doctoral research. He spells out in detail just how complex even the simplest movements of particles (convection currents in your oven, in your oceans, or over your city) actually are, and the frightfully difficult mathematical locations just to plot their tendencies of motion. His 2011 book Philosophy and Simulation was a series of chapters describing the different systems of cellular, organismic, ecological, and socio-political interactions that computer simulation can depict accurately with chaos mathematics. We can now do actual simulations of small tribe economics, one level of ecosystemic relations (that is, just the animals and plants consumption relations and symbioses), and urban traffic flow of vehicles, transit, and pedestrians. And that's just with the technology of the 2000s. There has been progress since. The visuals Kraftwerk played for their "Tour de France" suite at the concert depicted even France itself as an enormous, complex machine, constituted through the trillions of geographical and technological threads that knit it together. 

We too often think, at least in the popular consciousness, that mathematical prediction of movement is easy. The world’s most powerful computers strain to grasp the complexity with which urban traffic systems move. Now consider systems with the incredible complexity of systems and their many layers of interaction as an ecosystem or an organism. The materialism I believe in isn’t that old-fashioned reductive kind that depicts humans as robots moved only by the most simple drives. Why I distrust Freudian or Lacanian perspectives in philosophical and social criticism is because their framework for human motivation is too simple, almost facile, compared to the frameworks of chaos mathematics that actually approach the tendencies of actual matter interacting in the world. My kind of materialism believes that the material is actually adequate to all the tasks for which we commonly believe that a mind is necessary. 

So don't be afraid of your nature as a machine. It’s not that we get rid of the immaterial substance of mind. It’s that we could achieve so much without even having it at all. Matter is powerful enough to be a mind.

The Content of a True Contradiction, Research Time, 29/01/2014

Having finished Graham Priest’s Beyond the Limits of Thought, you might wonder what one of these true contradictions might be. I discussed the basic logical foundation of it a few posts ago, and one of the conversations I had with friends who read it revolved around what contradictions would actually be true. Because when you open the possibility of true contradictions, you also open yourself to straw man arguments from your enemies to make you look ridiculous.

After all, just because there can be true contradictions doesn’t mean that every contradictory sentence is true. There can be true propositions of regular sorts. That doesn’t mean that every proposition is true. The sentence “I am Adam Riggio and a root vegetable” is contradictory, but it isn’t true because I’m just Adam Riggio, no matter what dreams and aspirations I may have to become a turnip. The sentence “Adam Riggio was born in Jakarta” is a sentence with a non-contradictory form, but its form doesn’t make it true, because it’s empirically false. I don’t even think I want to go to Jakarta. The climate would kill me in the face.

The whole book is an exploration of one type of true contradictions, the contradictions which indicate a limit of thought. We reach a point in our conceptual exploration beyond which our powers to think don’t work. The tricky part of this idea, where contradictions appear, is that in order to identify a limit of thought, we have to transcend the limit. That’s why Priest identifies this contradiction in terms of transcendence and closure. A limit concept of thought generalizes over the totality of what can be thought or expressed or iterated, closing the set. But in order to generalize over that totality, we must refer to what can’t be generalized, transcending the set we just closed. In referring to what can’t be encompassed in the totality of what can be thought, we think it. So we both can think it and are unable to think it. 

Bertrand Russell's most fertile period in philosophy was
spent working to overcome what he held to be intolerable
contradictions in logic. Personally, he also reminds me of
an interesting take on Doctor Who.

In the history of philosophy, this was often conceived as the thought of the infinite. Finite creatures can’t conceive of the infinite, so goes the idea. Especially since in some periods of philosophy’s history, the infinite was conceived as the uncountable, and mathematical conception only included very simple counting methods. When set theory was developed, we now had a system of rules that could count infinite quantities, or at least quantify over them. Being able to do this helped clarify a confusion, or rather identify that our previous thought had been less transparent than we believed. Set theory was a new standard to think about infinity.

Priest’s book looked through the history of philosophy to find the common thread in all these limit concepts of thought: totalizing self-reference. The perfect example in logic is the set of all sets. Being itself a set, it would have to include itself in its own set. But that would make it subject to the classic Russell paradox, that a set being a member of itself implies that it is not a member of itself. Russell’s generation of logicians spent years obsessed with overcoming this contradiction because they took as an unquestionable premise that consistency was a necessary condition of the true, that a contradiction could never be true because reality was consistent. It’s been an obvious and clear truth since Aristotle declared it to be so in his writing.

Aristotle was also a teleological evolutionist and believed in a geocentric cosmology. Aristotle is no authority.

Self-reference is one species of true contradiction. There are probably others, but I don’t want to talk about them today. Except perhaps for one little moment of jamming, a speculation that I’ve wondered about for years, ever since I started studying the nature of human thought and mind. 

The limit of our thought lies in the contradictions of self-reference, reflexive and reflective thought, self-consciousness. We wouldn’t have the personalities we do without self-consciousness, the ability to think beyond immediate needs and immediate perceptions. Self-consciousness is the ability to imagine the future and the past, planning for uncertainties and conceiving of priorities and desires. Self-consciousness is the ability to critique and change ourselves and our behaviour. To do so, we must refer to ourselves, include ourselves in our statements about the world, even as referring to the world implies that we are somehow separate from the world. Sartre, for example, described human consciousness as beyond the world, but embedded in it. Self-conscious creatures like humans may very well be another species of true contradictions walking around all over this planet.

Where Is My (Place in the Philosophy of) Mind? A History Boy, 22/10/2013

I suppose I need have had no serious concerns about arguments between Joe Margolis and myself over his treatment of the nature-culture relationship in his Aesthetics book. The last quarter begins with Margolis making the same point I did yesterday about culture being an emergence from natural processes. 

This last quarter of the book is where he makes a statement that I knew was lurking under the surface of his analysis for a while, and that I very much agreed with, despite not always wanting to say so. When someone becomes very skilled not only at writing philosophy, but also thinking it, that person can understand how concepts that are at the forefront of one sub-discipline may occur implicitly in a different, seemingly unrelated, field. Margolis is able to connect the tendency of Analytic aesthetics to presume that no cultural knowledge or background is required to understand an artwork, with the principles of eliminativism in philosophy of mind. Both presume that there is nothing about cultural or mental propositions that cannot be explained by reducing them to propositions about natural bodies or mere being in aesthetics, and the brain in theory of mind. 

The classic Doctor Who story The Brain of Morbius features
a literal brain in a vat, who is quite desperate to get back to
the worldly action that completes him, mass murder and the
conquest of the universe.

I became fascinated with the problems of the theory of mind in my late undergrad, and wrote my MA thesis on the problem of the relationship of mind to the outside world. I argued, basically, that worldly perception was a part of thought and everything else associated with mind. Internalism about mind makes no sense, the brain in a vat is not a real problem, and one can’t build a workable theory of mind that doesn’t integrate mind with the perceptual relationships of the real world. Basically, exactly Margolis’ point: any account of the human mind and personality is incomplete if it doesn’t include cultural factors, a person’s actual life in the world.

My last public work in philosophy of mind was a commentary I gave at the 2010 Canadian Philosophical Association conference at Concordia University, in Montréal. The paper was about the spectrum inversion problem in philosophy of mind: Victoria sees a particular patch as red, and has seen that colour as red all her life, while Jamie sees and has seen such patches as green, but they both use the word ‘red’ to refer to the colour in question and have no problems saying true propositions about the colour; who sees it correctly? 

The most explicit reason why I left philosophy of mind is a question of style. Writing style: the essays in the sub-discipline abound in ridiculously obtuse technical language. Most papers in philosophy of mind contain so much technical shorthand as to make it utterly inaccessible to non-experts. Not just non-philosophers, but non-experts in philosophy of mind. Sometimes even non-experts in that particular sub-discipline of the sub-discipline (which would mean they’ve created sub-sub-disciplines?). 

An even worse problem I think was more fundamental. What today is called philosophy of mind has its heritage in cybernetics and the cognitive science that arose from it. This was a very multi-disciplinary community: in addition to philosophers, there were computer scientists, mathematicians, robotics engineers, neurologists, psychologists, and biologists. But as the field evolved, it splintered into a cornucopia of different debates and problems with their own concerns and sets of problems. An intellectual movement that began as a wide variety of disparate researchers coming together fragmented into highly technical debates whose terms and problems have become mutually incompatible. 

The paper focussed on the problem of Jamie and Victoria's phenomenal experience. My commentary focussed on what grounds anyone has to say what perceptual qualities are normal in the first place. My critique came from far outside the typical terms of the debate on this problem in philosophy of mind, but I thought it made an interesting challenge. The audience, including a former professor of mine, found my ideas interesting. Through the question period after I delivered my commentary, the presenter didn’t even acknowledge my presence in the room and when the session was over, he stormed out. 

What I find the most moribund sub-fields of philosophy of mind are the ones that refuse to accept what Margolis and I understand: that mind is incomplete without its world. The few, like Andy Clark, who try to explain this in the terms of philosophy of mind end up resorting to ridiculous arguments about shopping lists and iPhones. They try to prove that the mind exists in the world because actions we consider mental, like memory, can be carried on outside the skull. With, for example, shopping lists and iPhones. 

Having to put the argument in the terms of philosophy of mind makes a profound and intriguing argument sound silly. Margolis, and the Adam Riggio of 2007, are trying to explain how worldly perception grounded in a historically contingent and dynamic set of cultural practices and processes is necessary for a complete understanding of the human mind. I find it incredibly difficult to understand how some highly intelligent people need to have it drummed into their skulls that, in the words of Hilary Putnam, meaning “just ain’t in the head.”