Artificial Intelligence in Google and elsewhere

 In the 21 January 2021 edition of the London Review of Books is the review (entitled "Insanely Complicated, Hopelessly Inadequate") by Paul Taylor* of three books:

The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment by Brian Cantwell Smith

Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We can Trust by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis

The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea pearl and Dana Mackenzie

*Paul Taylor is "a professor of health informatics at University College London."

Taylor quotes Brian Cantwell Smith to say "huge efforts are made to constrain the vocabulary used in clinicians' computer systems, but the problem goes deeper hat that.  It isn't that we can't agree on the words: it's that there aren't always well-defined concepts to which the words can be attached." 

"Smith tried to explain this by comparing a map of the islands in Georgian Bay in Ontario with an aerial photograph showing the islands along with the underwater topography.  On the map, the islands are clearly delineated; in the photography it's much harder to say where each island ends and he sea begins, or even exactly how many islands there are.  There is a difference between the world as we perceive it, divided into separate objects, and the messier reality.  We can use logic to reason about the world as described on the map, but the challenge for AI is how to build the map from the information in the photograph."

"Cantwell Smith argues that if we seem to inhabit a world that is constructed of 'discrete, well-defined mesoscale objects exemplifying properties and standing in unambiguous relations', that is an achievement of our intelligence, not a truth that can be used when engineering an artificial intelligence.  This will resonate with anyone who has tried to express seemingly straightforward concepts in sets of rules, only to be defeated by the complexity of real life."

Comment:

I was once passed over for a promotion because, according to the manager, I was the only one who knew how to do the work.  So the promotion went to someone with a business degree who regularly attempted to get me to create procedures to describe how the work ought to be done.  Since I wouldn't comply, he brought in outside experts to create the procedures he wanted; so I marked them up to show how they wouldn't work.  So yes, Smith's arguments resonate with me. 

Perhaps the above is part of the reason I have never taken the Vienna Circle, especially Carnap, seriously.  Carnap for example defines everything that doesn't have its roots in empiricism as "nothing."  Godel would never say such a thing.

Godel, Manifest and Katla

 If Godel received his breakthrough insights through a sort-of poetic inspiration and felt about them in the same terms in which poets have described their best poetry, namely that the poems weren't created by the poets but by their poetic muses, then he wasn't going to be impressed with the Logical Positivists.  The Logical Positivists subscribed whole-heartedly to Wittgenstein's Tractatus and discount his ladder as combat fatigue or something like that.  But Wittgenstein himself never subscribed whole-heartedly to the beliefs of the Logical Positivists. 

As proper atheists, the Logical Positivists believed that man would eventually know everything -- that there were no limits to man's capabilities.  The poets and Godel benefited from inspirations they could neither explain, duplicate nor cause to work at their behests.  And while not necessarily crediting God, though some did, they knew better than to sign up to the Logical Positivist narrative.

I am only 35% through the biography of Godel and so don't know to what extent he credits God, nor any of the reasons he believed himself to be a failure, nor the reasons he felt incapacitating guilt.

Setting Godel aside off and on this past week I watched the first two seasons of Manifest.  An airplane takes off and then disappears for 5 1/2 years -- and then it lands.  The 159 passengers and crew aren't aware of a time lapse.  The world muddles about and draws all the wrong conclusions.  The passengers hear voices, but only a few realize these voices are "callings" -- sort of like the Biblical Holy Spirit urging a person to do the right thing.  "Right" in the Manifest sense isn't exactly Biblical.  It has a Karmic twist to it.  If you do it wrong you will suffer consequences.   The Biblical Holy Spirit if resisted has consequences by definition, i.e., if you resist doing the right thing then you will be doing the wrong one and doing things wrong usually have negative consequences.    

What Scientific theory is Manifest building upon?  Parallel Universes, some of which are mentioned in this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org but they don't fit Manifest very well.  What seems to be happening is the abandoning of an atheistic parallel universe for a supernatural karmic parallel universe.

In the Netflix Icelandic series Katla, one perhaps instead, thinks (instead of a scientific theory) of Jung's conclusion in his book on Flying Saucers, i.e., that they were mandalas created by man's oversoul (man confined in each sighting to the people who claimed to see the Flying Saucers).  That is, the clones being created covered in volcanic dust would be (in this theory) created by an Icelandic oversoul.  This theory while probably not fitting whatever the Netflix-Katla writers have written (I've only watched 2 seasons and 4 seasons exist), fits best (in my opinion) as far as I've watched.  A really poor story line would involve the ingredients in the Katla volcanic ash doing the cloning.

Godel as a sick soul

alsoI ordered Journey to the Edge of Reason, the Life of Kurt Godel both in Kindle and in the hard copy. 

Godel was mentally unstable late in life.  Several poets that I have liked have been mentally unstable, but their brand of instability, for most of them, was manic-depression, bipolar disorder; which fits well with the writing of poetry.  One cannot write in an inspired mode continuously; so when that mode is gone, one is bound to feel a bit depressed.  Anyone, perhaps, would feel a bit of mild depression, but the ones I have in mind entered into extremes.  

Some however descended into extreme depression which seems from the little I've thus far read to have been Godel's situation.  He didn't seem to have a manic mode.  The fact that he was being deserted: Einstein's death, Roth's suicide among others who died, but especially his wife's hospitalization affected him strongly.  He believed someone was trying to poison him and so would only eat food that she prepared.  After she was hospitalized he wouldn't eat anything and so starved himself to death.

Leo Depuydt's opinions are interesting.  He thinks that if someone has deep feelings of failure, you should take him at his word.  I thought, when I read Depuydt, of William James' Varieties of Religious experience.  James classed people into two categories: Healthy and Sick souls.  Godel would be a sick soul.  Depuydt sounds as though he is a Healthy soul.  Perhaps people with healthy souls aren't very good judges of people with Sick souls.  

Vienna as an ideal "place"

 Stephen Budiansky early in Journey to the Edge of Reason reports that Godel was affected by the suicide of Joseph Roth, "one of the countless victims of what the historian George Berkley called 'the most unrequited love affair in urban history" -- the tragic devotion of Vienna's 300,000 Jews to the country that had given them and 2 million of their kinsmen an unparalleled haven and hope only to see it ground to ashes." 

Budiansky adds, "'Austria is neither a state, a home, nor a nation,' says the mad brother of one of Roth's characters, a Polish count from the Austrian territory of Galicia.  'It is a religion.'  'It is thus not a multinational state, but a supra-national one,' he explains: 'the only supra-nation which has existed in the world.' (As a private person my brother is as mad as a hatter,' says the count, 'but where politics is concerned he is second to none' -- one of Roth's many wry allusions to the schizophrenic realities of Austrian life.)"

Further down, Budiansky writes, 'Those years, recalled the writer Stefan Zweig, another contemporary of Godel's, and like Roth another Austrian Jew who managed to escape Hitler only to die by his own hand in heartbroken exile, were the 'Golden Age of Security.'"

Comment:  I've been walking about with the idea of "place."  But none of California's places are as well established as those in Europe where 300,000 people can have a love affair with Vienna.    I didn't care about that sort of thing.  I'm used to getting everything else from magazines, books, and the internet.  And yet, I've been wondering lately what it means to miss out on the sort of thing 300,000 Viennese Jews felt for their place.

When our ancestors began farming about 15,000 years ago they had "places" that their hunter-gatherer ancestors didn't. Did early farmers love those places?  Or did the love have to wait until more beautiful places were built?

To what extent Godel was affected by the loss of Vienna, I have thus far only Budiansky's hint, but Budiansky quotes Godel's psychiatrist to say that Godel mourned the loss of the intellectual vigor he had in his twenties when his mathematical achievements were established and praised.    

More on Godel

 I just read the Wikipedia article which is more respectful of Godel than Depuydt is.  I was interested in this description of Godel's belief in religion: 

Gödel was a theist in the Christian tradition.^[38] He believed that God was personal, and called his philosophy "rationalistic, idealistic, optimistic, and theological".^[39]

Gödel believed firmly in an afterlife, saying, "Of course this supposes that there are many relationships which today's science and received wisdom haven't any inkling of. But I am convinced of this [the afterlife], independently of any theology." It is "possible today to perceive, by pure reasoning" that it "is entirely consistent with known facts." "If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife]."^[40]

In an unmailed answer to a questionnaire, Gödel described his religion as "baptized Lutheran (but not member of any religious congregation). My belief is theistic, not pantheistic, following Leibniz rather than Spinoza."^[41] Of religion(s) in general, he said: "Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not".^[42] According to his wife Adele, "Gödel, although he did not go to church, was religious and read the Bible in bed every Sunday morning",^[43] while of Islam, he said, "I like Islam: it is a consistent [or consequential] idea of religion and open-minded."^[44]

Kurt Godel and Leo Depuydt

 There is a biography just out:  Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Godel by Stephen Budiansky.  I was tempted, a little bit.  Then I read Leo Depuydt's review (on Amazon) which I consider very much worth reading:   [Depuydt abbreviates the names of the people he discusses.  Thus Albert Einstein is AE and Kurt Godel is KG.]  Here is the last bit of his Amazon review:

At that time, the Einstein fuse had burned out and he was just a shadow of his former self, turning himself into some kind of a freak show that still dominates the airwaves.

I am not even trying to be critical of KG the Man. He was talented in many ways. So, he was weird. But then, he was harmless. And you can’t say that about all weird people, though he did freak out people a little on occasion and also got into all kinds of disputes a good deal more than most people. The author and myself are evidently diametrically opposed in regard to KG The Myth. But then, the author does transmit the prevailing narrative, a narrative with which I could not disagree more. And the book did nothing to change my mind regarding this disagreement. Quite to the contrary, it helped me strengthen my personal opinion about something that I had long suspected; that is why I personally welcome the book. Reporting the prevailing narrative may just be the task of the biographer. And the author does report the narrative objectively. The author reports the Myth. I see his book as a tool to finally help end the Myth. There are many indications throughout the book of cracks in the Myth. For example, KG later in life felt that he had not done much over several decades at the Institute of Advanced Studies. And that was true. Should such a statement not just raise some suspicion? KG even once, still in his prime, as I learned from the book, submitted an article for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was rejected because the reviewer could not make any sense of it. Should that not raise some suspicion?

I add in the margin that books about KG and accomplices are often packaged by the media and the book industry as books about a supreme genius. So for a $20 bill or so you can “read the mind of God” or the like. That is a really good deal. Beats going to Disneyland. This reminds me of AE’s famous statements quoting the thoughts of God. Either this was totally ironical or just plain stupid. But people actually buy it most of the time. Go figure. (By the way, I talked to God the other day and he told me He would not tell AE anything because He was afraid as to what he was going to do with it).
In sum. This book needed writing. Finally. It took real work. Impressively. And it is well written. Thankfully. We need many, many more books like this.* To cut more of the crap. There is too much of it. Quousque tandem?

*In fact, a book about another Holy Cow just came out, about St. Stephen (that is, Hawking) by Charles Seife. Also recommended reading.

Leo Depuydt currently works in the Department of Egyptology and Assyriology, Brown University. "Leo does research in Rational Human Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, and the History of Science. His current projects include 1) "Complete definition of the operating system (OS) of the human brain" (yes: all of it! see the book[*]), trying to show at the same time how all current efforts at AI are completely misguided and money down the drain (such a terrible waste) and 2) "Mapping the Geography of Infinity" (or "The Role of Infinity in the Physical Universe"). In regard to the latter, it can be shown mathematically that the universe is infinite and timeless and that time is only a limitation imposed on the human condition; it is a straightjacket in which all of humanity is held captive. LD"

[*] I went to Amazon to "see the book" Depuydt refers to, but it isn't there.

Marjorie Perloff on Menand's The Free World

 I just read the review in the TLS by Marjorie Perloff of Louis Manand's The Free World, Art and Thought in the Cold War. 

Perloff begins her review with a quote from the beginning of Manand's book:  "This book is about a time when the United States was actively engaged with the rest of the world.  In the twenty years after the end of the Second World War, the United States invested in the economy of Japan and Western Europe and extended loans to other countries around the world.  With the United Kingdom, it created the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to support global political stability and International trade.  It hosted the new United Nations.  Through its government, its philanthropic foundations, its universities, and its cultural institutions, it established exchange programs for writers and scholars, distributed literature around the globe, and sent art from American collections and music by American composers and performers abroad. . . . Works of literature and philosophy from all over the world were published in affordable translations.  Foreign movies were imported and distributed across the country. . . ."

I thought of Clive Bell's Civilization.  Surely the United States doing the things Manand describes is deserving of some slight bit of the classification "Civilized."  But that thought begins to crumble as one gets past this first section, as I have, having bought the book.  The U.S. becomes embroiled in the world's shadier activities and doesn't manage nearly as well as it did during the first period.  But this is not, apparently, a point Menand wants to emphasize.  He wants to show how the U.S. has been changed, how its art has grown and improved, how in fact the U.S. has become more cultured and perhaps (I am hopeful) civilized.  The news is full of our shortcomings, but something dramatic and even revolutionary has happened in art, in culture, in understanding if not in politics during the period Menand discusses . . . at least it would seem so from Perloff's review and in the few pages I've thus far read.