Philosophy in the flesh
What are human beings like? How is knowledge possible? What is truth? Where do moral values come from? Questions like these have stood at the center of Western philosophy for centuries. In addressing them, philosophers have made certain fundamental assumptions-that we can know our own minds by introspection, that most of our thinking about the world is literal, and that reason is disembodied and universal-that are now called into question by well-established results of cognitive science. It has been shown empirically that: Most thought is unconscious. We have no direct conscious access to the mechanisms of thought and language. Our ideas go by too quickly and at too deep a level for us to observe them in any simple way. Abstract concepts are mostly metaphorical. Much of the subject matter of philosophy, such as the nature of time, morality, causation, the mind, and the self, relies heavily on basic metaphors derived from bodily experience. What is literal in our reasoning about such concepts is minimal and conceptually impoverished. All the richness comes from metaphor. For instance, we have two mutually incompatible metaphors for time, both of which represent it as movement through space: in one it is a flow past us and in the other a spatial dimension we move along. Mind is embodied.
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- Gigantic asterisk since this is just a general impression but I think that cognitive science and as a result ML have a huge problem coming to terms. Precise terminology seems like it’s plagued these fields since the beginning. Strong AI, weak AI, AGI, cognition, consciousness vs wakefulness, what are the essential features of consciousness?
As a result of this, you can read about AGI and think authors are debating whether a system is an AGI or a proto-AGI but they’re actually debating where the line is drawn.
Taking a page from Philosophy in the Flesh, I think that human reasoning and cognition are intrinsically related to the body—like even metaphor is inherently body and environment related. Have we really considered what the human mind would act like completely disembodied? Is language on its own really the right context for AGI to be born in?
- Lakoff and Johnson followed up with Philosophy in the Flesh, applying their conceptual metaphor analysis to philosophies and philosophers. One of the most enlightening philosophy books I've read - and I read mostly philosophy for many years - it felt like having my eyes opened. And the book that helped me in understanding art and music far more than any other, Dewey's Art as Experience, I picked up because of good things they say about Dewey in the first pages of Philosophy in the Flesh! I'm a musician and artist, so I'm extremely grateful for that lead.
- If you are interested in this direction of research: There is a big body of work regarding human cognitive processes and the role of metaphor. I would suggest "Philosophy in the flesh" by Lakoff and Johnson. A hefty work, but that was one of the publications that fundamentally changed my perspective on the human mind. The concept of embodied reasoning was eye-opening for me.
As I have an academic background in learning theory and developmental psychology, I'm pretty pessimistic about the current AI trend, autonomous driving etc. Most smart people in the field are chasing what are effectively more efficient regression functions for over 60 years now, and I almost never stumble upon approaches that have looked at what we know about actual human learning processes, development of the self etc.
Moravec's paradox[1] IMO should have been an inflection point for AI research. This is the level of problems AI research has to tackle if it ever wants to create AGI.
- The books that have shed the most light on this for me are I'd say
Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis
the chapter on Self in Lakoff/Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh
and The Gospel of Ramana Maharshi.
for 3 totally different angles on what is 'self', true self, real self, etc. They're all amazing books too.
- All these had a huge impact on me. The descriptions are inadequate, I've just tried to mention the subject matter.
Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand - how males and females talk different languages.
Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By - how our language and thoughts are built from a fabric of conceptual metaphors. Philosophy In The Flesh is about the conceptual metaphors that philosophy is built from.
Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century - WWI, WWII and other wars, nazism, communism etc
Plutarch's Lives - biographies and stories from famous ancient Greeks and Romans. Amazing how little's changed.
Lin Yutang, The Importance of Understanding - introduced me to ancient Chinese philosophers. The Importance of Living - introduced me to ancient Chinese writers, poets and the Chinese way of life.
Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach - read it when I was 14, and I was into music, art and programming, so it blew my mind.
Susan Faludi, STIFFED - men, work, jobs, masculinity, 20th C
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion - media, war, propaganda, democracy
Noam Chomsky's political books
E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful - the world, development, government, planning, organization, humanity, sustainability
J.R. Saul, Voltaire's Bastards - power, history, democracy, technocracy, reason, rationality, history from late 18th C until today.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 - the anti-industrialist tradition, politics, culture, society and the new language describing these things
Clifford Pickover, Computers, Patterns, Chaos, and Beauty - programming, mathematics, art, fractals, dynamical systems etc
Ben Zander, The Art of Possibility - hard to explain, kind of advanced self-help, the magic of changing attitudes, expectations, habits.
My favourite non-fiction books of all time, though, are the essays of Emerson, Hazlitt, RL Stevenson, GK Chesterton, Santayana, Bertrand Russell. And the books of Nietzsche, SARK and Robert Fulghum.
- Don't you think the concept of "motion" presupposes time? For that matter, every verb in existence presupposes time.
A fascinating book on this topic is "Philosophy in the Flesh" by George Lakoff:
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