Tag Archives: philosophy

What does it mean to think? 

It may surprise you to know, but I was once a philosopher.  To be more accurate, I was once a clueless college student who thought “philosophy” would be a good major.  I eventually switched to a science major, but not before I took more philosophy classes than most folks ever intend to. 

A concept that was boring back then, but relavent now, is that of the “Chinese Room.”  John Searle devised this thought experiment to prove that machines cannot actually think, even if they pass Turing Tests.  The idea goes something like this: 

Say we produce a computer program which takes in Chinese Language inputs and returns Chinese Language outputs, outputs which any speaker of Chinese can read and understand.  These outputs would be logical responses to whatever inputs are given, such that the answers would pass a Turing Test if given in Chinese.  Through these inputs and outputs, this computer can hold a conversation entirely in Chinese, and we might describe it as being “fluent” in Chinese, or even say it can “think” in Chinese. 

But a computer program is fundamentally a series of mathematical operations, “ones and zeros” as we say.  The Chinese characters which are taken in will be converted to binary numbers, and mathamatical operations will be performed on those numbers to create an output in binary numbers, which more operations will then turn from binary numbers back into Chinese characters.   

The math and conversions done by the computer must be finite in scope, because no program can be infinite.  So in theory all that math and conversions can themselves be written down as rules and functions in several (very long) books, such that any person can follow along and perform the operations themselves.  So a person could use the rules and function in these books to: 1.) take in a series of Chinese characters, 2.) convert the Chinese to binary, 3.) perform mathamatical operations to create a binary output, and 4.) convert that binary output back into Chinese. 

Now comes the “Chinese Room” experiment.  Take John Searle and place him in a room with all these books described above. John sits in this room and recieves prompts in Chinese.  He follows the rules of the books and produces an output in Chinese.  John doesn’t know Chinese himself, but he fools any speaker/reader into believing he does.  The question is: is this truly a demenstration of “intelligence” in Chinese?  John says no. 

It should be restated  that the original computer program could pass a Turing Test in Chinese, so it stands to reason that John can also pass such a test using the Chinese Room.  But John himself doesn’t know Chinese, so it’s ridiculous to say (says John) that passing this Turing Test demonstrates “intelligence.”   

One natural response is to say that “the room as a whole” knows Chinese, but John pushed back against this.  The Chinese Room only has instructions in it, it cannot take action on its own, therefore it cannot be said to “know” anything.  John doesn’t know Chinese, and only follows written instructions, the room doesn’t know Chinese, in fact it doesn’t “know” anything.  Two things which don’t know Chinese cannot add up to one thing that does, right? 

But here is where John and I differ, because while I’m certainly not the first one to argue so, I would say that the real answer to the Chinese Room problem is either that “yes, the room does know Chinese” or “it is impossible to define what “knowing” even is.” 

Let’s take John out of his Chinese Room and put him into a brain.  Let’s shrink him down to the size of a neuron, and place him in a new room hooked up to many other neurons.  John now receives chemical signals delivered from the neurons behind him.  His new room has a new set of books which tell him what mathematical operations to perform based on those signals.  And he uses that math to create new signals which he sends on to the neurons in front of him.  In this way he can act like a neuron in the dense neural network that is the brain. 

Now let’s say that our shrunken down John-neuron is actually in my brain, and he’s replaced one of my neurons.  I actually do speak Chinese.  And if John can process chemical signals as fast as a neuron can, I would be able to speak Chinese just as well as I can.  Certainly we’d still say that John doesn’t speak Chinese, and it’s hard to argue that the room as a whole speaks Chinese (it’s just  replacing a neuron after all).  But I definitely speak Chinese, and I like to think I’m intelligent.  So where then, does this intelligence come from? 

In fact every single neuron in my brain could be replaced with a John-neuron, each one of which is now a room full of mathematical rules and functions, each one of which takes in a signal, does math, and gives an input to the neurons further down the line.  And if al these John-neurons can act as fast as my neurons, they could all do the job of my brain, which contains all of my knowledge and intelligence, even though John himself (and his many rooms) know nothing about me.   

Or instead each one of my neurons could be examined in detail and turned into a mathematical operation.  “If you recieve these specific impulses, give this output.”  A neuron can only take finitely many actions, and all the actions of a neuron can be defined purely mathematically (if we believe in realism).   

Thus every single neuron of my brain could be represented mathematically, their actions forming a complete mathematical function, and yet again all these mathematical operations and functions could be written down on books to be placed in a room for John to sit in.  Sitting in that room, John would be able to take in any input and respond to it just as I would, and that includes taking in Chinese inputs and responding in Chinese.  

You may notice that I’m not really disproving John’s original premise of the Chinese Room, instead I’m just trying to point out an absurdity of it.  It is difficult to even say where knowledge begins in the first place.   

John asserts that the Chinese room is just books with instructions, it cannot be said to “know” anything.  And so if John doesn’t know Chinese, and the Room doesn’t know Chinese, then you cannot say that John-plus-the-Room knows Chinese either, where does this knowledge come from? 

But in the same sense none of my neurons “knows” anything, they are simply chemical instructions that respond to chemical inputs and create chemical outputs.  Yet surely I can be said to “know” something?  At the very least (as Decarte once said) can’t I Know that I Am? 

And replacing any neuron with a little machine doing a neuron’s job doesn’t change anything, the neural net of my brain still works so long as the neuron (from the outside) is fundementally indistinguishable from a “real” neuron, just as John’s Chinese Room (from the outside) is fundementally indistinguishable from a “real” knower of Chinese. 

So how do many things that don’t know anything sum up to something that does?  John’s Chinese Room  is really just asking this very question.  John doesn’t have an answer to this question, and neither do I.  But because John can’t answer the question, he decides that the answer is “it doesn’t,” and I don’t agree with that.   

When I first heard about the Chinese room my answer was that “obviously John *can’t* fool people into thinking he knows Chinese, if he has to do all that math and calculations to produce an output, then any speaker will realize that he isn’t answering fast enough to actually be fluent.”  My teacher responded that we should assume John can do the math and stuff arbitrarily fast.  But that answer really just brings me back to my little idea about neurons from above, if John can do stuff arbitrarily fast, then he could also take on the job of any neuron using a set of rules just as he could take on the job of a Chinese-knower. 

And so really the question just comes back to “where does knowledge begin.”  It’s an interesting question to raise, but raising the question doesn’t provide an answer.  John tries at a proof-by-contradiction by saying that the Room and John don’t know Chinese individually, so you cannot say that together they know Chinese.  I respond by saying that none of my individual neurons know Chinese, yet taken together they (meaning “I”) do indeed know Chinese.  I don’t agree that he’s created an actual contradiction here, so I don’t agree with his conclusion. 

I don’t know where knowledge comes from, but I disagree with John that his Chinese Room thought experiment disproves the idea that “knowledge” underlies the Turing Test. Maybe John is right and the Turing Test isn’t useful, but he needs more than the Chinese Room to prove that.

Ultimately this post has been a huge waste of time, like any good philosophy.  But I think wasting time is sometimes important and I hope you’d had as much fun reading this as I had writing it.  Until next time. 

Assuming your political opponents are just “misinformed” only guarantees that you won’t win them over

A bit more streamsofconsciousness than other posts, because I’m writing late at night. But here goes:

I don’t know much about the right-of-center political shibboleths, but it’s been a shibboleth on the left that people only vote conservative because they “don’t know any better.” They’re “misinformed,” they’re “voting against their own interests,” they’re “low-information voters,” these are the only reason anyone votes for the GOP. Nevermind that the “low-information voters” tag was first (accurately) applied to the *Obama* coalition before Trump upset the political balance of power.

Remember that in the 2012 matchup, Obama voters consumed less news than Romney voters, and were less informed on the issues at large. But in those days calling someone a low-information voter was nothing less than a racist dog-whistle (at least among the left-of-center). By 2016, Trump had upended American politics by appealing to many voters of the Obama coalition, and now this racist dog-whistle was an accurate statement of fact on the left.

“Yes some voters just don’t know any better. They don’t know the facts, they don’t know right from wrong, they just don’t know. And if they don’t know, the quickest solution is to teach them, because once we give them the knowledge that “we” (the right thinking people) have, they’ll vote just like we do.”

But attacking liberals (in 2012) and conservatives (in 2016 and 2024) as “low-information” is old hat, what about attacking leftists?

That’s what the Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait has done in a recent article. Now, he doesn’t directly state “leftists are misinformed” like he would say about conservatives. It’s obvious Chait still wants leftists in his coalition and doesn’t want to insult them too badly. But he’s laying out the well-worn left-of-center narrative that his political opponents do not understand things, and that he needs to teach them how the government actually works so they can agree with his positions and support his favorite policies.

In Chait’s view, leftists just don’t get that the government is too restrictive, and that these restrictions are the cause of the housing crisis. They don’t realize it’s too regulatory, and those regulations harm growth. And they don’t get that government red tape is the reason all our infrastructure is dying and nothing new can be built. Chait attacks California High Speed Rail and Biden’s Infrastructure bill as hallmarks of this red tape. California HSR is 10 times over budget and still not a single foot of track laid down, while Biden signed the Infrastructure bill in 2021 and wrongly believed that he could have photo-ops in front of new bridges, factories, and ports in time for 2024.

The fruits of Biden’s infrastructure bills are still almost entirely unbuilt, their money still mostly unspent. And this lets Republicans make calls to overturn those bills and zero-out Biden’s spending. If his projects were actually finished on-time and during his presidency, Biden’s enemies could never attack his legacy like that. But government red tape stood in the way.

See, with claims like these, Chait is arguing in favor of the Abundance Agenda. I’m not entirely opposed to it. See my many posts on de-regulation.

But Chait is once again missing the mark here. He claims that Leftists don’t *understand* abundance, and that’s half of why they oppose it. He claims the other half is that they’ve built their power base as being the people who “hold government accountable” and oppose its over-reach. But Chait is mostly arguing that Leftists don’t realize that their crusade against Big Government is a “bad thing” that has made our economy worse. And I don’t think Leftists are misinformed at all, I think they just have different priorities than me and Jonathan Chait.

Let me explain though a specific example: Josh Shapiro is well-loved for repairing an I-95 overpass in rapid time. He did so by suspending all the red tape that usually slows down such infrastructure projects. Chait then argues, if we know we need to suspend the rules to get things done quickly, then why do we need to have these rules in the first place? They’re slowing us down and preventing us from building what’s needed, so shouldn’t we just remove some of them?

But here’s the red tape that Shapiro suspended:

  • There was no bidding process for procurement, contractors were selected quickly based on the Govenor’s office’s recommendations
  • There were no impact studies for the building process
  • On-site managers were empowered to make decisions without consulting their superiors or headquarters
  • Pennsylvania waived detailed financial reporting processes
  • Pennsylvania waived most environmental reviews
  • Pennsylvania waived the requirement to notify locals of the construction, and to gain local approval for that construction

I don’t exactly have a problem with these ideas, and if Chait wants to make these de-regulations a central part of the Democratic brand, more power to him. But Chait is wrong that leftists are simply misinformed, I think many leftists would say that while these waivers are fine in an emergency, we should not support this deregulation for all projects, even if it saves us time and money. The reasons (for a leftist) are obvious.

  • Deregulating procurement is central to the Trump/DOGE agenda, and opponents say this opens the door to government graft as those in power can dole out contracts to their favorites.
  • Impact studies were also deregulated under Trump in two different executive orders. Biden revoked both orders at the start of his term because of his focus on health and the environment. I think most leftists would assert that protecting the environment and health is more important than other government priorities.
  • On-site vs HQ is less of an emotive topic, but the need for “oversight” is still a driving idea any time the government Does Stuff
  • Waiving of financial reporting opens up accusations of fraud
  • Waiving environmental reviews, see point 2
  • Waiving local notification and buy-in. You can probably get away with this when “re-“building, but will ANY democrat stick their neck out and say locals shouldn’t have a say in new highway construction? I doubt it. Highways change communities, and any change needs community buy-in (so they say). This focus on localism is very popular on the right, left and center, no matter how much I and the Abudance-crats may oppose it.

So Chait, do the leftists not understand Abundance? Or do they have strongly-held beliefs which are incompatible with Abundance?

This whole theory of “low-information voters” is always appealing to democracies biggest losers. It’s why the GOP liked it in 2012, and it’s why Democrats like it in 2024. The idea cocoons us in a comforting lie that we alone have Truth and Knowledge, and that if only everyone was As Smart As Me, everyone would Vote Like Me.

It also seems Obviously True on the face of it. “The best argument against Democracy is a conversation with the average voter,” so the saying goes. And when you see any of your opponent’s voters interviewed directly, you can’t help but notice how much information they are *lacking*. And it’s obviously true, most people don’t know how government works, they don’t understand permitting, they don’t get that environmental impact reviews cost so much money and time. So obviously if we gave them that knowledge, they’d start voting “correctly,” right?

This misses an important point about political coalitions and humans in general: the wisdom of the crowds. Most people don’t know most things, but we all (mostly) take our cues from those who do know.

Think about the leftist coalition in America, the Berniecrats, the AOC stans, the DSA and the WFP. Most of the voters in this coalition don’t have a clue how environmental review works. But there are some in the coalition (probably including Bernie and AOC) who do know how it works, and the rest of the coalition takes its cues from those people.

There are certainly some people who have looked long and hard at the Abundance Agenda, and they have concluded that (for instance) removing environmental reviews would lead to Americans being exposed to more pollution and harmful chemicals. It was only because of environmental reviews that the EPA took action against PFAS, for instance.

So Chait is arguing that we need to reduce regulatory burden and reduce the ability of locals and activists to halt projects with their red tape and environmental reviews. I agree with this.

But Chait then argues that the only reason leftists don’t agree with us is because they don’t understand how harmful red tape and reviews are, and thus leftists have lead a wrong-headed campaign of being the people who say “no” to new buildings. I disagree with this.

I think the evidence shows that leftists simply have different beliefs than me and Chait. Leftists believe that red tape and reviews are necessary to protect the environment. And a leftist might argue that Chait complaining about environmental reviews is like a conservative complaining that “cars would be cheaper if they weren’t forced to have seatbelts and useless safety stuff.” Chait says environmental review doesn’t help us. Well I’ve never needed my seltbelt either, because I’ve never crashed.

I’m sure you can see how stupid the seatbelt argument is, well that’s probably how stupid leftists would see Chait. Yes 99% of the time an environmental review finds nothing objectionable about a project, but what about those few times when they do? Do we scrap the whole system because it’s usually a waste of time? I say again: without environmental review, the EPA would not yet have taken action on PFAS. A leftist could seriously say to Chait: do you support allowing PFAS in the water? Because it might still be allowed without environmental review.

I don’t know what Chait’s response would be, I’m sure he’d try to say “well that’s different,” because any review that *found* something was clearly a good review. But you don’t know beforehand which reviews will find something dangerous and which won’t. To a leftist, that means you have to do them all.

Now, most leftists *do not understand environmental review* just like most liberals, moderates, conservatives, and reactionaries. Most people don’t understand most things. But the leftist coalition includes people who *do* understand it, and they’ve weighed the costs and benefits and come out with a different stance than Chait has. The rest of the coalition takes its cues from the understanders, just like the every other coalition does.

But Chait’s thesis is built on a lie that because most leftists don’t understand, they’ll side with him and Abundance once they *do* understand. I disagree strongly. Most leftists will continue taking their cues from the informed leftists, and Chait is not saying anything new to inform those informed leftists. The coalition will only modify its position on this issue once the majority loses faith in the understanders (and thus seeks new ones with new positions), or when enough of the current understanders retire and are replaced by new ones. Coalitions, like science, advance one funeral at a time.

But this idea that people are misinformed and just need a smart guy like *me* to set them straight, this is a central tenant of politics that I think needs to die. You shouldn’t assume your opponents are just misinformed, you need to understand that they *actually have different ideas than you do*, and try to win them over by finding common ground. Otherwise you’ll continue to be the Loser Coalition just like Rush Limbaugh and the Romney-ites of 2012.

What’s so special about prime numbers?

If you’ve ever watched Numberphile, you’ve probably heard a *lot* about prime numbers. In school prime numbers are mostly just curiosities. They’re numbers that can only be (cleanly) divided by 1 and themselves, so you hate getting them in a fraction. But the further you go in higher math, the more prime numbers seem to show up *everywhere* even in places you wouldn’t expect them.

My new favorite Numberphile video is on the reciprocals of prime numbers. A “reciprocal” of a number is just 1 divided by that number. So the reciprocal of “10” is “1/10” or in decimal form 0.1 . The video shows off the work of a 19th century mathematician named William Shanks who exhaustively catalogued the reciprocals of primes.

Because you see, prime numbers are special this way. Prime numbers don’t make “clean” reciprocals like 1/10 . The reciprocal of a prime tends to be made up of infinitely repeating digits instead. 1/7 is equal to 0.142857142857142857142857142857142857142857142857142857 with the “142857” part repeating infinitely. In math class we represented this with a line over the repeating digits. But I’m having trouble getting wordpress to properly display bars over numbers, so I’ll use “…” to represent repeating digits instead. So 1/7 would be 0.142857… in my decimal notation.

Now back to primes. What Shanks did was he took the reciprocal of larger and larger prime numbers and counted how many digits it took before the the numbers start repeating. So 1/7 repeats after 6 digits while 1/11 repeats after just 2 digits (0.09…). Shanks catalogued these repeating digits all the way up to prime numbers in the 80,000 range, whose reciprocals don’t start repeating until 60,000 digits or more.

The video is well worth a watch, and it’s fascinating to wonder if there’s any pattern to the data. But what struck me was a question from the host Brady near the beginning of the video: “do the reciprocals of all primes repeat?” The mathematician Matt Parker answered “yes” and continued the math lecture, but this got me thinking.

As soon as I told this question to a friend, they immediately said what many of you are probably thinking: “what about 1/5?” 5 is a prime number itself, but 1/5 is a nice, clean, non-repeating number of 0.2 . 2 is also a prime number and makes a clear 0.5 with its reciprocal. Maybe Matt Parker just wasn’t so attentive when he answered “yes” but it seems that not all reciprocals of primes repeat.

But then why are 2 and 5 so special? Why, out of every single prime number, are they the only ones with non-repeating reciprocals? Again I think everyone knows the answer: it has to do with Base 10, but I wanted to study this phenomenon a bit more so I did some math myself.

First, a quick note: we say our counting system is “base 10” because when writing a large number, each position in the number corresponds to units of 10 raised to some power. You may remember from school writing a number like 435 and being taught that is has “4 hundreds,” “3 tens,” and “5 ones.” AKA 435 is (4*100) + (3*10) + (5*1). It’s important that all the positions in a base 10 counting system correspond to 10x for some value X. The hundreds place represents 102, the tens place represents 101, and the ones place represents 100.

Now what about a base 12 counting system instead? What does the number 435 mean in base 12? Just like before, each position corresponds to some power of 12. So 122 is 144, meaning that 4 is in the “144s” place. The 3 is in the “12s” place and the 5 is still in the “1s” place because 120 and 100 both equal 1. So a 435 in base 12 is equal to (4*144) + (3*12) + (5*1), which would be 617 in base 10.

Now my question: do the reciprocals of primes still repeat the same way in a base 12 counting system as they do in base 10? We already know that 2 and 5 are special primes in base 10, their reciprocals don’t repeat. How about in base 12?

Well the reciprocal of 2 still works, it’s just equal to 0.6 instead of 0.5. But the reciprocal of 5 suddenly becomes madness

Here I did the long division for 1/5 in base 12. To keep myself on track I wrote a base-10 version of the subtractions I was doing at each step of the long division. And I don’t know how real mathematicians do it, but since I don’t have a number to represent “10” and “11” as single digits, I used “A” and “B”.

As you can see, *now* this prime’s reciprocal *does* repeat, even though it didn’t in base 10!

I think the mathematician was getting at something deeper when he said all reciprocals of primes repeat, but I’ll have to save it for another post as I had wanted to publish this one on Sunday and I’m already 3 days late.

Some philosophers are just preachers

The word for “preach” in English comes from the word “proclaim” in Latin. It did not necessarily have religious connotations in that language, you could proclaim just about anything. And yet today the word “preach” in invariably tied to a specific type of proclamation who’s connotation cannot be separated from the word. “Don’t preach at me,” “he’s preaching to the choir,” preaching connotes a way of speaking that accepts no argument and engenders no debate. What is preached is correct (as believed by the preacher), regardless of whether you like it.

That’s why it’s amusing how many philosophers I’ve seen who are just preachers and not, you know, philosophers. Not all of them mind you, some philosophers are ready willing and able to dive into the weeds of actually proving their conclusions (or at least trying to). But I’ve been to church enough times to know when I’m being preached at, so the proliferation of dime-store philosophers online are to me no more worthwhile than the doomsday preachers on the street corners.

Today’s preacher de jure is whoever the hell wrote this which was linked to me as a “compelling argument” in favor of utilitarianism and effective altruism. It includes this lovely passage:

You know what? This isn’t about your feelings. A human life, with all its joys and all its pains, adding up over the course of decades, is worth far more than your brain’s feelings of comfort or discomfort with a plan. Does computing the expected utility feel too cold-blooded for your taste? Well, that feeling isn’t even a feather in the scales, when a life is at stake. Just shut up and multiply.

I’m sure this sounded good as an imaginary debate in the author’s head, “FACTS DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS” and all, but it gets to the type of anti-utility preaching that I’m surprised a supposedly utilitarian author is falling into. Anti-utility preaching is what I would define as the type of preaching done not for others but for oneself. Even if you are religious, even if you do think preaching can change people’s minds for the better, there are some preachers who have no desire to do that and just want to feel righteous by screaming at all the “sinners.” These preachers aren’t changing minds, they aren’t being productive in any way, and in fact are clearly driven by vanity, which most Christians and other religions think is a sin. In the same respect, if the utilitarian who wrote the above passage were really serious about changing minds, they should probably have had the self-awareness to realize that this method isn’t effective and is probably just turning more people off of their philosophy because they’re being a dick.

Just for fun, this leads me to a thought experiment: effective altruism of the kind this person is advocating for tries to use a kind of “ethical calculus” to calculate the exact goodness or badness of any action, and thus the correct action is the one that maximizes goodness and minimizes badness. Is it worth mutilating a child in order to perform an experiment which will cure cancer? Add up the goodness and badness of each scenario and find out that yes, that is perfectly valid. Even stranger, is it worth killing one person to cure everyone’s hiccups forever? Strangely enough yes, yes it is, this utilitarian preacher reasons that the tiny amount of badness caused by a hiccup, multiplied by *everyone* is greater than the amount of badness from killing of a single person.

So let’s go a tiny bit further, if we accept that effective altruism is truly the best morality, then it must also be true that goodness is maximized by more and more people becoming effective altruists. This follows logically from the fact that effective altruists are going to be better than other folks at making “the right” choices and therefore increasing goodness and decreasing badness with their actions. So in keeping with the hiccup example above, decreasing the number of effective altruists in the world will decrease the amount of goodness and so there must be some reduction in effective altruists that adds up to being worse than murder on the balance of goodness and badness in the world.

Therefore I can confidently state that by its own logic this article is worse than murder. It tangibly reduced my desire (if there ever was any) to be an effective altruist just so I don’t become associated with people like the writer, and it probably did the same to most people that read it. The author can take a nice warm bask in their own vanity, while feeling happy that they got to preach to the sinners on the internet. No minds were changed, no one was “saved,” but the preacher felt damn good doing it and isn’t that really what’s important?

Final addendum, I just looked it up and it seems Eliezer Yudkowsky was the author of this trash. But I don’t feel like rewriting the above post to include that fact so I’ve tossed it here at the end.