Critique #6 Re: A Critique of Prof. Hubert Dreyfus' "Why Heideggerian AI failed"- a call for comments
Isaac
Again, not all issues will resonate with everyone so pick and choose what
you find interesting to debate pro/con and I will defend any of my comments,
and even
Dreyfus if your critique is weak.
my critiques open for comment is below the section of Dreyfus' paper that I
am quoting. I highlight the particular words at issue in his paragraph(s)
by enclosing them between "***" characters. I also include any citations in
the quoted section of the paper at the end of this post.
I seek (intelligent and informed) technical/theoretical/philosophical
critique or feedback of my comments from anyone on the issue(s)
presented/raised.
See bottom of page 16:
But Wheeler misses my point when he adds:
However, this takes us back to the points I make above about the prevalence
of unreadiness-to-hand. Action-oriented representations will underlie our
engagements with the unready-to-hand. In this domain, I suggest, the
effects of CRC will be restricted. And, I think, unreadiness-to-hand is the
(factual) norm. (Personal correspondence continued.)
We just agreed, that this is not an empirical question concerning the
frequency of coping with the unready-to-hand but an ontological point about
the background of all modes of coping. If Wheeler wants to count himself a
Heideggerian, he does, indeed, "have to concede that action-oriented
representation will in fact do less explanatory work than [he] previously
implied."
Wheeler seems to be looking for a neurodynamic model of brain activity such
as we will consider in a moment when he writes:
[A]lthough there is abundant evidence that (what we are calling) continuous
reciprocal causation can mediate the transition between different phases of
behavior within the same task, that is not the same thing as switching
between contexts, which typically involves a reevaluation of what the
current task might be. Nevertheless, I am optimistic that essentially the
same processes of fluid functional and structural reconfiguration, driven in
a bottom-up way by low-level neurochemical dynamics, may be at the heart of
the more complex capacity.[i]]]
Meanwhile, Wheeler's ambivalence concerning which model is more basic,
***the representational or the dynamic,*** [asb1] undermines his
Heideggerian approach. For, as Wheeler himself sees, the Heideggerian claim
is that action-oriented coping, as long as it is involved (online, Wheeler
would say) is not representational at all and does not involve any problem
solving, and that all representational problem solving takes place offline
and presupposes involved background coping.[ii] ***Showing in detail how the
representational un-ready-to-hand in all its forms depends upon a background
of holistic, nonrepresentational coping is exactly the Heideggerian project
and would, indeed, be the most important contribution that Heideggerian AI
could make to Cognitive Science***[asb2] . Indeed, a *** Heideggerian
Cognitive Science would require working out an ontology, phenomenology, and
brain model, that denies a basic role to any sort of representation - even
action oriented ones***[asb3] -and defends a dynamical model like
Merleau-Ponty's and van Gelder's that gives a primordial place to
equilibrium and in general to rich coupling.
Ultimately, we will have to choose which sort of AI and which sort of
neuroscience to back, and so we are led to the questions: could the brain in
its causal support of our active coping instantiate a richly coupled
dynamical system, and is there any evidence it actually does so? If so,
could this coupling be modeled on a digital computer to give us Heideggerian
AI or at least Merleau-Pontian AI? And would that solve the frame problem?
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MY CRITIQUES indexed by my initials "ASB" followed by the number of my
comment above:
[asb1]did you know that new born sea turtles recognize the outline of
sharks and go away from them... mammals are afraid of reptiles.. etc...etc.
all these causal cognitive capabilities must be part of an a priori
representation in the new born's brain, and not some kind of learned
absorbed coping event expos facto. How do you explain this clear evidence
of default (unlearned) cognitive representations of real-world, meaningful
causality? It seems artificial to me that you must deny internal
representations to further a dynamically coupled approach. You frame them
as mutually exclusive, but it seems so clear to me that they are not. How
do you reconcile this class of counter examples?
[asb2]I don't see how that is some kind of fundamental contribution to
modern AI. It is really a standard research problem that manifests itself
in many ways a couple of which are hierarchical Neural Networks (NN) and
trying to merge Neural Networks with fuzzy logic, both of which seek to
bring the (seemingly) non-representational NN as pattern categorization
layer under the control of a semi-classic logical/representational control
layer. So, it seems to me that the fundamental aspects of what you say is a
Heideggerian AI philosophy is already long present in standard AI, they just
do not know how to make it work- an engineering research problem, not a
philosophical one. I am sure that is why Brooks gave up on emergent
behavior (bottom up, Insect level) research and switched to what you call
modular, representational AI (top down). They do not know how to handle the
context problem from the bottom up, so they are betting they can get further
from the top-down. This is true, though, in some controlled domains of
commercial interest, but does not further the cause, just kicks the can down
a dead-end road.
[asb3]It would be actually helpful if "Heideggerian AI" could make a real
contribution to Cognitive Science by providing a technical roadmap to how to
do what has long been tried and failed in bottom-up AI. Again, the
Heideggerian AI philosophy as you describe it has not been lacking for the
last 15 years, however just how to do it effectively (i.e., converge in a
reasonable time based on a reasonable training set) has been technically out
of reach.
CITATIONS MADE IN THE ABOVE QUOTED SECTION OF THE PAPER:
[i] Wheeler, Reconstructing the Cognitive World, 279.