who only by moving can balance

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69401&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=artificial-intelligence-and-its-evil-twin-darwinism

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69401

In Daniel Dennett's 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, the chapter titled "Chomsky contra Darwin, Four Episodes" ends with this provocative sentence:

The hostility to Artificial Intelligence and its evil twin, Darwinism, lies just beneath the surface of much of the most influential work in recent twentieth-century philosophy.

What Dennett meant by "Artificial Intelligence" in 1995 was no doubt rather different from what people take the word to mean now. Still, the intended meaning of his aphorism remains intact and relevant.

You need to start with his distinction between "skyhooks" and "cranes", described here by Wikipedia. And then read about how he learned that Noam Chomsky rejected Darwinism as  form of epistemelogical empiricism, i.e. a "crane" that learns in the genome rather than the neurome:

In March 1978, I hosted a remarkable debate at Tufts, staged, appropriately, by the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. Nominally a panel discussion on the foundations and prospects of Artificial Intelligence, it turned into a tag-team rhetorical wrestling match between four heavyweight ideologues: Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor attacking AI, and Roger Schank and Terry Winograd defending it. Schank was working at the time on programs for natural language comprehension, and the critics focused on his scheme for representing (in a computer) the higgledy-piggledy collection of trivia we all know and somehow rely on when deciphering ordinary speech acts, allusive and truncated as they are. Chomsky and Fodor heaped scorn on this enterprise, but the grounds of their attack gradually shifted in the course of the match, for Schank is no slouch in the bully-baiting department, and he staunchly defended his research project. Their attack began as a straightforward, “first-principles” condemnation of conceptual error—Schank was on one fool’s errand or another—but it ended with a striking concession from Chomsky: it just might turn out, as Schank thought, that the human capacity to comprehend conversation (and, more generally, to think) was to be explained in terms of the interaction of hundreds or thousands of jerry-built gizmos, but that would be a shame, for then psychology would prove in the end not to be “interesting.” There were only two interesting possibilities, in Chomsky’s mind: psychology could turn out to be “like physics” — its regularities explainable as the consequences of a few deep, elegant, inexorable laws — or psychology could turn out to be utterly lacking in laws—in which case the only way to study or expound psychology would be the novelist’s way (and he much preferred Jane Austen to Roger Schank, if that were the enterprise).

A vigorous debate ensued among the panelists and audience, capped by an observation from Chomsky’s colleague at MIT Marvin Minsky: “I think only a humanities professor at MIT could be so oblivious to the third ‘interesting’ possibility: psychology could turn out to be like engineering.” Minsky had put his finger on it. There is something about the prospect of an engineering approach to the mind that is deeply repugnant to a certain sort of humanist, and it has little or nothing to do with a distaste for materialism or science. Chomsky was himself a scientist, and presumably a materialist (his “Cartesian” linguistics did not go that far!), but he would have no truck with engineering. It was somehow beneath the dignity of the mind to be a gadget or a collection of gadgets. Better the mind should turn out to be an impenetrable mystery, an inner sanctum for chaos, than that it should turn out to be the sort of entity that might yield its secrets to an engineering analysis!

Though I was struck at the time by Minsky’s observation about Chomsky, the message didn’t sink in. […]

That's the crux of the "evil twins" idea: maybe the mind is a collection of gadgets, evolved by learning in the genome, the neurome, and culturome, and suitable for analysis by engineering techniques.

After touching on John Searle, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, Herbert Spencer, McCullough and Pitts,  B.F. Skinner, Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, and others, Dennett zeroes in on Searle, ending the chapter with the "evil twins" sentence:

According to Searle, only artifacts made by genuine, conscious human artificers have real functions. Airplane wings are really for flying, but eagles’ wings are not. If one biologist says they are adaptations for flying and another says they are merely display racks for decorative feathers, there is no sense in which one biologist is closer to the truth. If, on the other hand, we ask the aeronautical engineers whether the airplane wings they designed are for keeping the plane aloft or for displaying the insignia of the airline, they can tell us a brute fact. So Searle ends up denying William Paley’s premise: according to Searle, nature does not consist of an unimaginable variety of functioning devices, exhibiting design. Only human artifacts have that honor, and only because (as Locke “showed” us) it takes a Mind to make something with a function!

Searle insists that human minds have “Original” Intentionality, a property unattainable in principle by any R-and-D process of building better and better algorithms. This is a pure expression of the belief in skyhooks: minds are original and inexplicable sources of design, not results of design. He defends this position more vividly than other philosophers, but he is not alone. The hostility to Artificial Intelligence and its evil twin, Darwinism, lies just beneath the surface of much of the most influential work in recent twentieth-century philosophy, as we shall see in the next chapter.

If you're interested, you should read the whole chapter, and indeed the whole book.

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