Metaphysics applied to psychology - Verbum chapter 3
David Bibby
"Excessive attention to the metaphysical framework with insufficient attention to the psychological content of the Thomist concept of verbum has led to a good deal of obscure profundity on the meaning of Aquinas's actus perfecti." (Verbum, chapter 3, section 2, page 110)
"The difficulty here, insofar as I have been able to grasp it, lies in distinguishing between the grammatical subject of a transitive verb in the active voice [e.g. 'I' in 'I see'] and, on the other hand, the ontological subject if the exercise of efficient causality [e.g. 'I' in 'I dig']." (Verbum, chapter 3, section 3, page 118)
"How can one speak of sensing in act, when one has maintained that sensing is a matter of undergoing change and being moved? ... The answer is that there is an acting which is simply being in act, and simply being in act is not opposed to being changed and being moved." (Verbum, chapter 3, section 3, page 119)
"For in the writings of Aquinas there are two distinct definitions of potentia activa. There is an Aristotelian definition, ... There is what may be called, though with diffidence, an Avicennist definition, ..." (Verbum, chapter 3, section 4, page 121)
"As when the waters of two rivers join to flow along side by side, so the two sets of definitions persist in the writings of Aquinas. He uses whichever suits his immediate purpose, and, as is the way with intelligent men, he does not allow a common name for different things to confuse his thinking." (Verbum, chapter 3, section 4, page 127)
"The importance of recognising the Aristotelian, as well as the Avicennist, scheme of analysis becomes fully apparent, however, only when one turns to the Thomist theory of the object, For this theory is Aristotelian." (Verbum, chapter 3, section 7, page 138)
"... the apparent incompatibility that arises from the blunder of confusing what Aquinas distinguished - active potency as the principle of an operation and active potency as the principle of an effect." (Verbum, chapter 3, section 7, page 143)
"In the long run, I believe, simplicity and clarity must win out. In the short run there can hardly fail to occur not only the normal human resistance to change, which is a healthy conservative force, but also the difficulty of assimilating what has been long overlooked, of grasping its significance, of assessing exactly its import and implications." (Verbum, chapter 3, page 107)
jaraymaker
"As siblings go, Dario and Daniela Amodei (founders of Anthropic) agree more than most. “Since we were kids, we’ve always felt very aligned,” Daniela says.
Alignment is top of mind for the brother-and-sister duo at the helm of Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI labs. In industry lingo, the term means ensuring AI systems are “aligned” with human values. Dario, 40, and Daniela, 36—CEO and president of Anthropic, respectively—believe they are taking a safer and more responsible approach to AI alignment than other companies building cutting-edge AI systems.
Anthropic, which was founded in 2021, has carried out pioneering “mechanistic interpretability” research that aims to allow developers to carry out something analogous to a brain scan—to see what’s really going on inside an AI system, rather than relying on its text outputs alone, which don’t give a true representation of its inner workings. Anthropic has also developed Constitutional AI, a radical new method for aligning AI systems. It has embedded those approaches into its latest chatbot, Claude 2, a close competitor to GPT-4, OpenAI’s most powerful model
"I think it’s useful to separate out the technical problem of: the model is trying to comply with the constitution and might or might not do a perfect job of it, [from] the more values debate of: Is the right thing in the constitution?” Dario says. That the two questions have often been conflated in the past, he says, has “led to unproductive discussions about how these systems work and what they should do.”
Anthropic has seven founders, all of whom previously worked at OpenAI before leaving to start their own company. Dario and Daniela are diplomatic about what, if anything, pushed them to leave, but suggest they had a different vision for building safety into their models from the beginning. “I think our existence in the ecosystem hopefully causes other organizations to become more like us,” Dario says. “That’s been our general aim in the world and part of our theory of change.”
Accordingly, Anthropic casts itself as an AI safety-research lab. To do that research, however, the Amodei siblings have calculated they need to build their own state-of-the-art AI models. For that, they need vast amounts of computing power, which in turn means they need a lot of money. That means that rather than acting as a nonprofit, they need to operate as a business that sells access to its AI models to other businesses and raises funds from investors. Anthropic has raised $1.6 billion, including $500 million from the now bankrupt FTX crypto exchange. (Investors in Anthropic also include Salesforce, where TIME co-chair and owner Marc Benioff is CEO.)
Anthropic’s founders recognize the tensions inherent in this commercial approach—that they might be contributing to the very problem they founded Anthropic to prevent—but believe it’s the only way to do meaningful AI safety research. “There’s this intertwinement—it’s one of the things that makes the problem hard—between the safety problems and the kind of inherent capabilities of the model,” Dario says.
To try and insulate themselves from some of the perverse incentives that the market can create, Anthropic’s leaders structured it as a public benefit corporation, meaning it was created to generate social and public good. In practice, this makes it harder for investors to sue if they feel that Anthropic is prioritizing goals other than financial return. But whether Anthropic has resolved the tension between AI safety and operating as a corporation is a question that persists. In April, TechCrunch reported Anthropic had attempted to raise funds by promising potential investors it would use their cash to build Claude-Next, a model that it said would be 10 times more capable than today’s most powerful AI.
Dario disputes the report without providing specifics, declining to comment on Claude-Next. He also rejects the idea that the decision to operate Anthropic as a company has locked it into a counterproductive race to build larger models, but “one way or another, the scaling up of the models is part of our plan,” he says. “Simply not doing it, I think, isn’t a solution.”
Anthropic’s leaders are notably less outspoken than other AI luminaries about the potential benefits that AI could bring to humanity’s future. That’s “not because we don’t care or because we don’t think it’s there,” Daniela says, “but because we think there’s so much important work to do right now.” Her brother agrees, but strikes an even more skeptical tone about the value of discussing utopian scenarios for AI. “I just don’t want it to turn into corporate propaganda.”
Constitutional AI allows developers to explicitly specify the values their systems should adhere to, via the creation of a “constitution,” separating the question of whether an AI can do something from the more politically fraught question of whether it should. The other leading method for AI alignment—called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)—can often result in those two questions being “mixed together,” Dario says. Recent research from Carnegie Mellon shows that chatbots with more RLHF training tend to give more socially and economically liberal answers than those that don’t. That could be because the training process often rewards the models for being inclusive and inoffensive. Constitutional AI allows developers to instill a codified set of values into an AI rather than letting them be implicitly and imperfectly set via RLHF." End quote
I would note that Lonergan, beginning with Verbum, and continuing with Insight and MiT, very insightfully anticipated and gave "feedback" suggestions and even solutions in his eight functional specialties to address the quandaries facing our complex global problems--a step-by-step approach as it were. Needless to say "metaphysics" is not a concern of AI aficionados, but it can provide a pertinent background as e. g. Dario and Daniela Amodei have been implicitly addressing in their "brain-scanning" of AI issues. I will end by saying that Pierre and I do address some of the issues in our book published last year.
John
Hugh Williams
John and David,
John provides us, again, with a very subtle account of the goings on in AI and the complex and consequential issue between ethics and technology that now is at play.
David further below presents some of the deeper philosophical issues needing careful clarification to prevent what he calls 'profound obscurity' that he worries can lead us no where ...
I can only recall and recycle from very recent
history some good work by Patrick Daly in health care policy and
practice that seems to have such concerns in mind in an attempt to
apply Lonergan's GEM in a particular area of theory and practice
...
In the context of health care theory and practice, Patrick Daly argued, not long ago, in several papers and presentations that Lonergan’s GEM does provide a method for integrating natural and human sciences more effectively in part by giving them deeper and broader definitions so as to include the contributions of the humanities. It also does so by providing a more effective method for integrating common sense and science in health care practice and theory. This he showed was fully in accord with the best practices in person-centered health care models, and it avoids or resists any tendencies in the field to dichotomize theory and practice.
Daly further acknowledged that the entire field of health care practice inescapably confronts the challenges to not only human well being but to the very survival of the human species. This in large part has propelled the evolution of medical ethics into what is now called bio-ethics, and now further towards what is called global bio-ethics. There is a concerted effort to expand and deepen the multi-faceted perspectives involved in these inquiries so as to move from a perspective preoccupied with individualistic self-preservation interests to more inclusive or wholistic or comprehensive perspectives capable of recognizing more effectively and honestly the interrelationship of the more global social issues such as peace, pollution, and poverty with human health and wellness. Daly recognizes in the area of health care what Lonergan (L) saw in his own way in his serious effort to study political-economy, i.e., how forms of what he called liberalism, at the time, which tended to abstract individual well-being from the larger eco-social context is simply an ineffective, and perhaps even deadly approach to dealing with challenging crisis we now face and of which we are now in the midst. He too concludes that what is needed is a concerted effort at 'collaboration and cooperation' in the areas of both theory and practice.
Nevertheless, Daly asks in his summation - is this really possible? And he admits that GEM offers no ready-made answer, but he is convinced that it does provide a solid normative methodology that has profound trans-cultural applications for our efforts, and that also tries to be profoundly realistic about human progress and decline. This he argues is significantly unique to the GEM model and very much needed for our times.
In the course of his good work, Daly acknowledged that it is L’s intentionality analysis and its dependence upon phenomenology that is the basis of his important approach to human self-understanding. However, there are, as David suggests below, epistemological insights into cognition, verification, and scientific understanding that take his reflections beyond most phenomenological accounts moving them towards the profoundly challenging areas of epistemology and metaphysics and their complex and layered interpenetration. This is a dimension of the inquiry that Daly’s own work prefers to avoid engaging directly, instead he deals only indirectly with these complex issues by developing, what I would call an intermediate concern for a comparative analysis of GEM with the dominant health/medical phenomenological models in their concrete application to actual health care challenges with clients and patients.
And yet even this is much easier said than done of course, but Daly in my estimation gives it (or gave it …) a good try … (it would be, if it were possible, both interesting and important to hear how this effort at implementation has fared ....)
Hugh
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lonergan_L" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lonergan_l+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lonergan_l/966740010.9611389.1712998589312%40mail.yahoo.com.
Hugh Williams
David, John, et al,
If we can imagine this email exchange as being at times somewhat similar to an old fashion philosophy seminar – ongoing with an actual history, we do at times reach moments of ‘crises’.
And by ‘crisis’ I mean moments of both challenge and opportunity, or even more to the point, as that decisive point in a process of dis-ease (restless even feverish inquiry) where we face recovery or ‘death’ …
I say this because David Bibby’s intervention below challenges us to recount what we’ve been doing and why, and should we consider doing things differently.
I believe David’s intervention needs to be carefully summarized so as to be understood, and then perhaps critiqued a bit on some of its Lonerganian assumptions.
It can take us back to Verbum, at least for a time, … to Ch.3.
This somewhat aligns with ‘our’ recent consideration of Rahner (Spirit in the World) especially with my contention that it can be read as a sophisticated (Heidegger informed …) response to Lonergan’s 1958 question to the ACPA, i.e., to Catholic thinkers more generally and even beyond …
‘Is there or is there not an intellectual intuition of concrete actual of existence?’
So, I’ll make two main points for the moment – 1) and again, that there are several points in David’s recent intervention that require some further discussion, but these should not distract us from his constructive main point – that Lonergan’s Verbum Ch 3 will or can aide us somehow … 2) this next point goes to John as a question – is it within the realm of technological possibility that there be at least consideration of a very time limited virtual seminar of Lonergan’s Verbum Ch 3 with the problematic in mind that Gerard O Reilly painstakingly laid out for us back in Feb/March 2021? Now three years ago … (I can supply/recycle the background notes if others should need these …)
-----
Some further notes of possible interest and relevance … I’d make the generalization, based upon John’s shared article below, that the ‘constitution’ of our human intelligence is Trinitarian. And that with further definition and clarification can provide some guidance (especially as regard AI pursuits or restraints). In fact the notion that the ‘digital world’ and AI especially now need a constitution much as States do is for me a rather striking insight and ideal …
K. Schmitz who is a metaphysician I’ve referenced before has a nice phrase on our need for – ‘the recovery of wonder and the asceticism of power’. I sense a great need for something like this at this present moment in our history.
Now, it seems to me, in all honesty that - the problematic for both Rahner and Lonergan is – ‘where is Christianity in all of this?’ ‘Does it have any effective relevance?’
And again, and with great emphasis, there is Gerard O Reilly’s extraordinary contribution from Feb 16/21, to be exact, where drawing upon Lonergan’s own words from Verbum p.105, where we found him saying, or admitting/conceding – that if ‘our interpretation of applied metaphysics depends upon the psychology, so too the interpretation of the psychology depends upon the applied metaphysics’, and so on the basis of several intervening moves we were led to this very moment on this Lonergan List Serve, or at least some of us were ….
… and where perhaps now a 2hr - 3hr virtual seminar might be warranted might it not … or is it out of the question both practically and technically?
Hugh
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lonergan_l/c3569f98-d8ae-4eeb-b815-3614d32ba3f2%40nbnet.nb.ca.
Doug Mounce
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lonergan_l/9515ee87-567f-4fb9-91cf-093f966a0159%40nbnet.nb.ca.
Hugh Williams
Doug et al,
This perhaps also belongs under the Rahner subject line 'conversion to the phantasm' but since it was this note of Doug's below that inspired this -
here goes ...
We’ve been mentioning Heidegger on and off as we try to get some grip on Rahner’s “Spirit in the World”. Here Doug mentions Heidegger's ‘polemic against Kant’. Dare I say in Heidegger we get a sort of ‘polemic’ against much in Western philosophy. And because Rahner is under Heidegger’s influence to some significant extent, perhaps a telling (at least an attempted telling …) of this story may give some context as we consider Rahner, especially in relation to Lonergan’s pointed question (of fact) from 1958 –
‘is there or is there not an intellectual intuition of concrete actual existence?’
So, a little on Husserl, and then on Heidegger’s critical relationship to Husserl’s project.
Husserl is widely seen as introducing into philosophy a consideration of consciousness. And in considering the data of consciousness, he posited two kinds of data – physical and mental phenomena. Physical phenomena are sensible things, colours, smells, touch … Mental phenomena are thoughts and their immanent object or content. This is Husserl, by way of Brentano, reintroducing the scholastic theory of intentionality as somehow key for understanding our mental acts and human life more generally. Husserl’s work was considered by many of the best and brightest young philosophical minds of Europe to be both complex and rich, especially this reintroduction of the notion of intentionality. He speculated that what is most characteristic of the mental, in contrast to physical phenomena, is this directedness to objects. In addition, two things seemed essential for thought – content and the subject of this content, i.e., a possessor. Nevertheless, Husserl’s philosophy became widely regarded as a type of methodological solipsism being unable to adequately come to grips with the challenge (and reality) of intersubjectivity and other minds. This was the assessment of many …
… and so Heidegger, as the story goes, mounted his own critique of Husserl in terms of Husserl’s phenomenology being too half-hearted. In its claim to examine the data of consciousness it was employing notions such as ‘subject’, ‘object’, ‘act’, ‘content’ all of which were not items or elements discovered in consciousness but items inherited from earlier philosophical discourse. Husserl in Heidegger’s assessment was basically accepting the framework of Descartes ... of there being two correlative areas of consciousness and reality with only the former being the concern of phenomenology. In Heidegger’s view the first task of this phenomenology should be to study the notion or concept of Being which, in his view, was prior to this cleavage or chasm between consciousness and reality … and so it is this experience that leads us to contrast these two realms as polar opposites that is the primary phenomenon to be examined.
Our starting point then is not consciousness but Being.
This means ‘philosophizing
in the nude’ and this was to be done or exercised by way
of the (human) being
that raises this question which is Dasein. Dasein is (human)
being in the world in a
much more primordial way than as a thinking thing – Dasein for
Heidegger was
more of a caring thing. (see Antony Kenny, A New History of
Western
Philosophy (2010) pp.814-821)
Hugh
----------------------------
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lonergan_l/CALaFOMtYqDTsGdakX%3DYdR__XKzV0p9vkWD0C9STe-EsJZa0qJA%40mail.gmail.com.
jaraymaker
Deconstructing Dasein: Heidegger's Earliest Interpretations of Aristotle's "De Anima"
Josh Michael Hayes
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lonergan_l/f8337496-ffaa-4645-92fd-69a67203b499%40nbnet.nb.ca.
jaraymaker
Mediation of Deconstruction: Bernard Lonergan's Method in Philosophy : The Argument from Human Operational Development
David Bibby
jaraymaker
David,as to your conclusion: " We must begin by understanding the terms that we use," YES, that is what Lonergan does in the first chapters of Insight. Perhaps, Lonergan had taken it upon himself to clarify the passage from Verbum,
"Excessive attention to the metaphysical framework with insufficient attention to the psychological content of the Thomist concept of verbum has led to a good deal of obscure profundity on the meaning of Aquinas's actus perfecti." (Verbum, chapter 3, section 2, page 110)
JohnDear all,
David Bibby
"so far was Aquinas from the stereotyped terminology that sometimes is attributed to him that he could write 'sapientis enim est non curare de nominibus [it is the part of a wise man not to worry about words]'." (Verbum, chapter 3, section 2, page 115)
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lonergan_L" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lonergan_l+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit