Skywritings

There seem to be three reasons why directors tamper with operas today: (1) To try to freshen them up and make them more “relevant”. (2) To try to put more (paying) bums on today’s (declining) seats. (3) To allow scope for the “creative” contribution of the director.

That’s all fine, for minor works. But when it comes to the masterworks, let them speak and sing for themselves.

Gounod’s Faust is not Goethe’s masterpiece, but it’s far from a minor work either. Gounod/Barbier/Carré reduce most of the depth and dimensionality of Goethe’s Faust to just the seduction and redemption of Marguerite. Faust himself is downsized to a somewhat ambivalent libertine. No sign of the doctor fallen from the heights of scholarly inquiry with which he had become disillusioned to try his hand at the ordinary layman’s love-making that he felt he may have missed. Not much trace of the bargain of pawning his soul for the second chance. And a lot more exalted Christian prudery sanctified as virtue in the devout Gounod’s version than in the more worldly and universalist Goethe’s.

Yet there is more than enough of the universal in Gounod’s Faust to make it unnecessary to strain to make it more “relevant.” Believers or non-believers, we can still understand that many once considered it a big deal to seduce, inseminate and abandon a naive girl. And even more immediate today is our horror at how cruelly she was treated for her “crime” by others, especially her beloved brother. We can even still understand — though we cannot endorse or condone — the brother’s anguish at his sister’s “fall.” (And, no, we need not view this portrayed en travesti as islamic honor killings in order to get the point.)

Fortunately, most of this manages to get through in the Met’s current Faust, directed by Des McAnuff. The way he chose to obtrude with a new “premise” (inspired by Dr. Jacob Bronowski’s renunciation of physics upon seeing Nagasaki) was in recasting Doctor Faust’s learned inquiries as 20th century atomic bomb-making rather than medieval alchemy and magic.

Well, yes, that certainly makes it more current and relevant, but does it make sense? The destruction wrought on Nagasaki was real enough, and horror at having contributed to it is certainly universally understandable. But what does it mean to renounce this destruction in favour of the goading of the gonads? Goethe’s Faust abandons airy scholarship because it has not brought him the satisfaction he had sought; Gounod’s Faust turns instead to seeking it in earthly seduction. But what, exactly, is the deal with McAnuff’s Dr. Strangelove? Is he trying to make amends for Nagasaki, or to make matters worse?

We don’t have to worry about these superadded fine points during most of the opera, however; they are obtruded only at the very beginning (where they puzzle, but otherwise do not matter, nor meddle) and at the very end — but there they do pose a bit of a problem. For when Marguerite eludes the long haul in Club Mephistopheles, because she is forgiven by the Almighty both for her original “sin” and for the madness and infanticide to which she was driven by all her pious unforgiving friends and family (with the exception of the youth who loved and lost but never condemned her) — the chorus of angels that cheer her up to the heavens is sung by legions of the lab-coated scientists that kept appearing here and there during the entire performance.

So it’s not forgiveness (whether Christian or generic) that triumphs and redeeems, but what? And why? And how does Nagasaki and disenchantment with research fit in all this?

Go figure. As long as it has that note of “relevance,” filled the seats, and brought due attention to the director, who cares?

Especially since (apart from the arbitrary atheistic irony of the ascent at the end) Gounod and the wonderful performers and conductor were nevertheless able to successfully reanimate this 19th century magic and alchemy yet again in the 21st.

The agony of mortality.
Not your own mortality.
That of those you love.

Not losing them.
That’s mere endless pain:
Yours.
Like their going off somewheres,
never to return again.

The agony (whose?)
is what they lose.
The loss, not them, but theirs.

Letter to TLS, Nov 4 2011:

“Stevan Harnad misstates the criteria for the Turing Test when he describes a sensing robot that could pass the test by recognizing and interacting with people and objects in the same way that a human can (October 21). Alan Turing’s formulation of the Turing Test specifies a computer with no sensors or robotic apparatus. Such a computer passes the test by successfully imitating a human in text-only conversation over a terminal.
    “Significantly, and contrary to Harnad’s formulation, no referential “grounding” of symbols is required to pass the Turing Test

                         David Auerbach 472 9th Street, New York 11215.

David Auerbach (TLS Letters, November 4) is quite right that in his original 1950 formulation, what Turing had called the “Imitation Game” (since dubbed the “Turing Test”) tested only verbal capacity, not robotic (sensory/motor) capacity: only symbols in and symbols out, as in today’s email exchanges. Turing’s idea was that if people were completely unable to tell a computer apart from a real, live pen-pal through verbal exchanges alone, the computer would really be thinking. Auerbach is also right that — in principle — if the verbal test could indeed be successfully passed through internal computation (symbol-manipulation) alone, then there may be no need to test with robotic interactions whether the computer’s symbols were “grounded” in the things in the world to which they referred. But 2012 is Alan Turing Year, the centenary of his birth. And 62 years since it was published, his original agenda for what is now called “cognitive science” has been evolving. Contrary to Turing’s predictions, we are still nowhere near passing his test and there are by now many reasons to believe that although being able to pass the verbal version might indeed be evidence enough that thinking is going on, robotic grounding will be needed in order to actually be able to pass the verbal test, even if the underlying robotic capacity is not tested directly. To believe otherwise is to imagine that it would be possible to talk coherently about the things in the world without ever being able to see, hear, touch, taste or smell any of them (or anything at all).

Harnad, S. (1989) Minds, Machines and Searle. Journal of Theoretical and Experimental Artificial Intelligence 1: 5-25.

Harnad, S. (1990) The Symbol Grounding Problem Physica D 42: 335-346. http://cogprints.org/0615/

Harnad, S. (1992) The Turing Test Is Not A Trick: Turing Indistinguishability Is A Scientific Criterion. SIGART Bulletin 3(4): 9-10.

Harnad, S. (1994) Levels of Functional Equivalence in Reverse Bioengineering: The Darwinian Turing Test for Artificial Life. Artificial Life 1(3): 293-301.

Harnad, S. (2000) Minds, Machines, and Turing: The Indistinguishability of Indistinguishables. Journal of Logic, Language, and Information 9(4): 425-445. (special issue on “Alan Turing and Artificial Intelligence”)

Harnad, S. (2001) Minds, Machines and Searle II: What’s Wrong and Right About Searle’s Chinese Room Argument? In: M. Bishop & J. Preston (eds.) Essays on Searle’s Chinese Room Argument. Oxford University Press.

Harnad, S. (2002) Darwin, Skinner, Turing and the Mind. (Inaugural Address. Hungarian Academy of Science.) Magyar Pszichologiai Szemle LVII (4) 521-528.

Harnad, S. (2002) Turing Indistinguishability and the Blind Watchmaker. In: J. Fetzer (ed.) Evolving Consciousness. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. 3-18.

Harnad, S. and Scherzer, P. (2008) First, Scale Up to the Robotic Turing Test, Then Worry About Feeling. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 44(2): 83-89

Harnad, S. (2008) The Annotation Game: On Turing (1950) on Computing, Machinery and Intelligence. In: Epstein, Robert & Peters, Grace (Eds.) Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer. Springer

Harnad, S. (2011) Minds, Brains and Turing. Consciousness Online 3.

The recent findings of Watanabe and Logothetis on dissociating attention and awareness are interesting

Watanabe, M, K Cheng, Y Murayama, K Ueno, T Asamizuya, K Tanaka, N Logothetis (2011) Attention but not Awareness Modulates the BOLD Signal in Human V1 During Binocular Suppression. Science 11 November 2011 DOI: 10.1126/science.1203161

but a more conservative interpretation might be that when there is divided stimulation and divided attention, stimulation and attention both contribute to awareness (of stimulation), with attention selectively enhancing the effects of the stimulation.

Harnad, S. (1969) The effects of fixation, attention, and report on the frequency and duration of visual disappearances. Masters thesis, McGill University.

I have only read the summaries of Steve Pinker’s new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” but I wonder about the demographics on which it is based:

As the centuries go by, is violence declining proportionally or absolutely? I suspect it’s the former. The population grows Malthusianly, but as civilization progresses, the proportion of violence “tolerated” goes down. Yet at our exponential population growth rate, that still leaves it open that the absolute amount of human/human violence is still growing, daily, relentlessly — just not as fast as the human population is growing.

So, yes, it’s nice that the relative proportion of violence is not growing as fast as the population, but that’s just a statistic. The number of (human) sparrows felled (by humans) daily is still monstrous: bigger than it ever was, and growing. Taking solace from the fall in proportion is akin to tobacco-company thinking, it seems to me: Is Steven Pinker unwittingly falling into apologetics for the unpardonable, whether then, since, or now?

(And let’s not forget — although it’s well-hidden and sanitized — that the absolute amount of violence we are heartlessly inflicting daily on the helpless nonhuman creatures that we purpose-breed — not out of necessity: for savour, not survival — is growing just as exponentially as our own numbers…)

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This absolute/relative question has obviously been put to Pinker many times:

Q: Your claim that violence has declined depends on comparing rates of violence relative to population size. But is that really a fair measure? Doesn’t a victim of violence suffer just as much regardless of what happens to other people of the time? Was the value of a life less in the 13th century than in the 21st just because there are more people around today? Should we give ourselves credit for being less violent just because there has been population growth?

But Pinker’s reply to the question is not very convincing:

R: You can think about it in a number of ways, but they all lead to the conclusion that it is the proportion, rather than the absolute number, of deaths that is relevant. First, if the population grows, so does the potential number of murderers and despots and rapists and sadists. So if the absolute number of victims of violence stays the same or even increases, while the proportion decreases, something important must have changed to allow all those extra people to grow up free of violence.

This reply provides solace to statisticians, but not to victims.

R: Second, if one focuses on absolute numbers, one ends up with moral absurdities such as these: (a) it’s better to reduce the size of a population by half and keep the rates of rape and murder the same than to reduce the rates of rape and murder by a third; (b) even if a society’s practices were static, so that its rates of war and violence don’t change, its people would be worse and worse off as the population grows, because a greater absolute number of them would suffer; (c) every child brought into the world is a moral evil, because there is a nonzero probability that he or she will be a victim of violence.

Try replacing potential “victim” by potential “perpetrator,” and add that to the fact that the absolute number of victims is still growing.

R: As I note on p. 47: “Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease. So the number of people in a given time and place who enjoy full lives has to be counted as a moral good, against which we calibrate the moral bad of the number who are victims of violence. Another way of expressing this frame of mind is to ask, `If I were one of the people who were alive in a particular era, what would be the chances that I would be a victim of violence?’ [Either way, we are led to] the conclusion that in comparing the harmfulness of violence across societies, we should focus on the rate, rather than the number, of violent acts.”

If one takes the allocentric rather than the egocentric perspective on this, a declining proportion of suffering does not compensate for a growing amount of suffering unless we give my potential pleasure more weight than your actual pain.

Q: What about all the chickens in factory farms?

R: I discuss the chickens in a section on Animal Rights in chapter 7, pp. 469–473.

Well, I guess that settles that, insofar as concerns any potential complaints from the chickens (whose unlucky numbers are not only growing absolutely but whose proportions are not even declining relatively, like those of the lucky human survivors): So let them take solace in humanity’s increasingly angelic nature the same way the growing number of absolute human victims do. (A sentiment reminiscent of Marie-Antoinette — or perhaps a moral-credit Ponzo Plan, in which we amortize the increasing number of victims of human violence by increasing the total human population even faster…)

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Yet, all that said, I too think there’s hope: but it will only begin to be realized when it is the absolute number of victims (human and nonhuman) that begins to decline — and not just the proportion. And, yes, reducing rather than increasing our own absolute numbers might not be a bad step in that direction…

Re: “Physicists in tune with neurons”

My guess is that you could predict consonance/dissonance without recording neuronal activity. It’s already in the physics: consonant sounds share more harmonics, bottom up. You could measure that without neurons, just a device that can detect differences in the harmonic spectrum. (And it would be trivial to make neural devices mirror the same property.)

Besides, consonant/dissonant does not correspond to aesthetically “pleasant/unpleasant” (and the right aesthetic adjective is not quite the word “pleasant” anyway): Some of the most excruciatingly beautiful harmonic moments are dissonant ones. (It has more to do with the drawing out or manipulation of expectation in the passage from dissonant to consonant — but that too is a trivialization…)

(As happens so often: take an absolutely trivial empirical correlation, and make one of its correlates our own precious brain activity, and people are almost superstitiously ready to marvel, the same way they do at their own horoscopes, when they seem to fit…)

And, of course, having detected the physical difference, you’re left with the usual (hard) problem, which is not why one feels pleasant and the other not, but why any of it feels like anything at all…

 Yes, the commentator in the Khodorkhvsky movie who said “Kh was the best of the worst” (the worst being all the oligarchs, including Kh) seems to have captured the essence of the puzzle. 

There is no question that Kh’s enormous business success was due in part to the government selling him public assets at a low price (partly to keep them in Russian hands, partly because of insider wheeling and dealing and self-interest). There were no doubt dirty tricks and gangsterism on both sides (oligarchs and government) along with collusion. There is also little doubt who the worst of the worst was and is (VVP). 

How did Kh become the best of the worst? It looks as if his motives for acquiring wealth never came from those lowest depths of sociopathic cupidity that drove so many others; his motives seem to have been more technical than materialistic: it was a skill he was obsessed with developing. There may even have been some self-serving belief in its “trickle-down” benefits for the rest of the world too. But he clearly had a first round of remorse and rethinking that led to his support of the political opposition to Putin (possibly because of conflicts and conflicts of interest with Putin), and this is what led to his arrest (by which time he had already developed a sense of fatalism, if not martyrdom; probably his wealth and influence also gave him some illusion of immunity, so far only partly confirmed).

But what about now? In prison, having lost (almost) all, he had a second round of second-thoughts about wealth acquisition, and he seems to think he is now fighting for a principle (though it is not at all evident what that principle is).

Probably Kh would have made (and might still make) a better president than Putin. But that just means the best of the worst would be better than the worst of the worst.

Human character is capable of remorse and reform, but I think Russia’s chances would be better in the hands of Politkovskaya (compassionate, intelligent, funny, and equally obsessive and fatalistic —  surely closer to the best of the best) if the worst of the worst (or some of his competitors) had not already done their worst with her.

Cryptography’s
poetastery.

Art should make
you feel
not reel.

“Wouldn’t it short-circuit all these discussions if you just came out and said that this is how you use the word “Feeling”, that is, to mean any conscious notion or awareness whatever, even if it is not a sensation like taste or pain or fear?  You say “feeling” is a nice honest word, while words like “awareness” and “conscious” are weasel words.  But since a lot of us cannot agree that wondering idly whether it will rain next Tuesday is a feeling, then when you say it is because it just has to be, good old honest-yeoman uncorrupt “feeling” slips into weaseldom, or at least mush, just as all the other words do.  

“Perhaps Hofstadter is right: because these words refer to states we cannot point to or compare, words grounded (in your term) only in private experience, then we are simply clashing by night. We don’t really know what each other means by any of them.  I will swear that I can know I am thinking about next Tuesday, or the square root of twelve, and can tell the difference between these notions, but it is all done separate from sensation of any kind.

“I repeat, why CAN’T the brain deliver information to one’s awareness by at least one other avenue than feelings?  To insist that it cannot makes your denial cease to be an empirical statement and become a definition of “feeling”.”

Very good challenge, and I’m happy to try to rise to the occasion!

The brain not only can but does “deliver information” without its being felt. Not only delivers information, but gets things done. 

It does nocturnal deliveries while we’re asleep, of course, but it also does a lot while we’re awake (keeps my heart beating, keeps me upright, and, most important, delivers answers to my (felt) questions served on a platter (“what was that person’s name?”, “where am I going?”, “what word should I say next?) without me feeling any of the work that went into it. 

These are things we do, and feel we do (“find” the name, “recall” where I’m going, “decide” what to say next), but we are clueless about their provenance: We have no idea how we do them. Our brain does them, and then “delivers” the result.

Some of this delivery is delivery of know-how (riding a bike, speaking) and some of it is of know-that (facts, or putative facts). 

We are the “recipients” of the delivery, and the question is, how does our brain do it?

But these are the “easy” questions: Cognitive neuroscience will eventually tell us how our brain does and “delivers” all these things for us.

But that’s not the hard part. The hard part is explaining why and how it feels like something to be the “recipient” of these “deliveries.” If the result of the deliveries were merely doings and sayings, there would be no issue, because there would be nothing mental; it would all just be mechanical, neurosomatic dynamics. 

Now, you are sort of forcing me to do some phenomenology here — something I’m neither particularly good at, nor set great store by, but here goes:

Am I just linguistically legislating that having received a “delivery,” [say, the “information,” X, that it’s Tuesday today] from their brain, what people mean by “I am aware of X” has to be “It feels as if X is the case”?

Or, worse, am I presumptuously denying what is not only other people’s private privilege but (by my own lights) certain and incorrigible, when I say that people are wrong when they insist it doesn’t feel like anything to know it’s Tuesday? Wrong to just settle for saying they just know it, it’s one of those pieces of “information delivered” by their brain, and that’s all there is to it?

That would be fine, it seems to me, if the “delivery” were taking place while you were asleep or anesthetized or comatose. 

But it seems to me (and here I am doing some amateur phenomenology) that the difference between being (dreamlessly) asleep and being awake is that it feels like something to be awake and it does not feel like anything to be dreamlessly asleep.

“Information” “delivered” and even “executed” by my brain while I am asleep is also being served on a platter, just as it’s served on a platter when I’m awake: I’m just not feeling anything the while.

So far you will say you could have substituted “not aware of (a ‘delivery’)” for “not feeling (a ‘delivery’)” and covered the same territory without being committed to its having to feel like something to be aware of something.

But I can only ask, what does it mean to be awake and aware of something if it does not feel like something to be awake and aware of something?

If you reply “It feels like something to be aware of something, but only in the sense that it feels like something while I’m being aware of something, because I happen to be awake, and being awake feels like something” — then I will have to reply that you are losing me, when you say that it feels like something while you receive the “delivery” but that that something it feels like is not what it feels like to receive the delivery!

Yes, our language about this is getting somewhat complicated, so let me remind you that, yes, our difference could be merely terminological here, for much the same reason that (if I remember correctly) you had objected, years ago, to my insistence that seeing, too, is feeling. 

I think you said that feeling tired is feeling, or feeling anger is feeling, and even feeling a rough surface is feeling, but seeing red is not feeling, it’s seeing. And the way I tried to convey what I meant by “feel” was to point out that you too would agree (and you did) that it feels like something (rather than nothing) to see red. And it feels like something different to see green, or to hear middle C or to smell a rose.

I think I even said that it was just our language — which says I am feeling a headache or I am feeling cold or I am feeling a rough surface, yet not “I am feeling red” but rather “I am seeing red,” and not “I am feeling the perfume” (if we don’t mean palpating it but sniffing it) but “I am smelling the perfume” — is fooling us a bit, when we conclude from our wording that seeing is not feeling. 

I think I even mentioned French, in which both feeling and smelling are (literally): “je sens la douleur”, “je sens le parfum,” as is palpating (“je sens la surface”), whereas, as in English, seeing and hearing have verbs of their own.

There is in the French the residue of the Latin “sentio” — to feel — that still exists in English, but as a sort of ambiguous false-friend, “I sense,” which means more “I intuit” or “I pick up on” than “I feel.” But I would say the same thing about sensing: If I sense something, be it sensory, affective, tactual, thermal, cognitive, or intuitive, then it feels like something to be sensing it, and would feel like something else to be sensing something else, as surely as it feels like something to be seeing red and would feel like something else to see something else.

And not just because I happen to be awake while my brain “delivers” the “information”!

So if I am sensing that it’s Wednesday today, then that feels like something, and feels like something different from sensing that it’s Tuesday today as surely (but perhaps not as intensely) as seeing red feels different from seeing blue.  

To put it another way, the result of the “delivery” is not just my “speaking in tongues.” It feels like something not only to say (or think) the words “It’s Wednesday today” but to mean them. And it feels like something else not only to say (or think) but to mean (or understand) something else.

Sociopaths, sadists, zealots and lunatics there have always been. But technology has now empowered them to do harm far beyond their numbers: The “normal” distribution is becoming a hostage, perhaps irretrievably, to a reign of terror from its tail-end.