Statue of clay golem depicting Prague Golem.
Author: Michal Ma
Source: Wikipedia
Science does not dehumanize man, it de-homunculizes him — B F Skinner, 1971
This chapter:
From Wikipedia: Golem
In Jewish folklore, a golem is an animated anthropomorphic being, created entirely from inanimate matter. The word was used to mean an amorphous, unformed material in Psalms and medieval writing.
From the Incomplete Nature glossary:
Golem: In Jewish folklore a golem is an animated, anthropomorphic being, created entirely from inanimate matter but lacking a soul
This section:
Key words: Eliminative materialism, homuncularize, [page:Ententional Ententional]
Topics covered: philosophy, biology
In our daily life we homuncularize on a regular, natural basis - without thinking.
We imagine multiple outcomes. We anthropomorphize the inanimate. p80
We homuncularize without thinking. Even careful theorists do it... p80
Eliminative materialism: the position that any ententional phenomenon are merely heuristic place holders and can/must be eliminated from science and replaced by mechanistic methods.
Eliminative materialism tends to sacrifice completeness for consistency - misses out on all the ententional aspects. p81
This section:
Key words: Daniel Dennett, Homunculi, Élan vital, Hydra, Hercules, Marvin Minskey/Society of Mind, Eliminative materialism, Fractionation, reducible/decomposable[Reduction], DNA
Topics covered: philosophy, humanities
Daniel Dennet: An effort to deny ententional processes and reference to teleological phenomena in one location only serves to displace these functional roles to other places. p81
Homunculi are stand-ins for incomplete explanations. p81
Example: homunculi become little men becomes élan vital. p82
A similarity is drawn to Hercules cutting off the head of the Hydra only to have two new heads appear. p82
Eliminative materialism posits that homunculi will go away with further research and/or being proved to be fictional to begin with. p83
Fractionation is a common strategy to reduce complex phenomena into simpler component features
Reducible systems - only depend on ability to identify graininess in complex phenomena / capacity to study properties of subdivisions / as distinct from collective phenomenon that they compose. p85
Decomposable systems - additionally requires subdivisions to exhibit properties they exhibit in the whole / even if entirely isolated and independent of it. p85
A clock is both reducible and decomposable to its parts, whereas a living organism may be analytically reducible, but it is not decomposable. p85
While ententional phenomena are dependent on physical substrate relationships, they are not decomposable to them, only to lower-order ententional phenomena. p85
This is because although ententional phenomena are necessarily physical, their proper parts are not physical parts. p85
In dividing our problems into smaller bits, we multiply the mysteries. p86
This section:
Key words: Golem, Robot, Homunculus, Zombie, Frankenstein, Logic, Containment, Alan Turing, Turing machine, Gregory Bateson, Kurt Gödel, Incompleteness theorems
Topics covered: humanities, philosophy, cognitive science
Homunculus: an avatar of cryptic ententional properties smuggled into our theories, p86
Golem as the avatar of its opposite: apparently mind-like processes that are nonetheless devoid of their own ententional properties. p86
If a homunculus is a little man in my head, then the golem is a hollow-headed man, a zombie. p86
A golem is often proposed as a reductio ad absurdum of a thoroughly eliminative materialism view. p87
Vast majority of our moment-to-moment behaviors - including belies, desires and purposes - are not associated with consciousness - and is thus zombie/golem-like<. p87/p>
Besides being a soulless being, following commands with mechanical dispassion, the golem lacks discernment. p88
The golems of today are not artificial living beings, but rather bureaucracies, legal systems, and computers. In their design as well as their role as unerringly literal slaves, digital computers are the epitome of a creation that embodies truth maintenance made animate. p89
Computers are logic embodied in mechanism. Logic is only the skeleton of thought: syntax without semantics. p89
The golem nature of logic comes from its fixity and closure. Logic is ultimately a structure out of time. It works to assure valid inference because there are no choices or alternatives. So the very fabric of valid deductive inference is by necessity preformed. p89
This logico-mathematical-machine equivalence was formalized in reverse when Alan Turing showed how, in principle, every valid mathematical operation that could be precisely defined and carried out in a finite number of steps could also be modeled by the actions of a machine. p90
To simplify a bit, the problem lies in the very assumption that syntax and semantics, logic and representation, are independent of one another. A golem is syntax without semantics and logic without representation. There is no one at home in the golem because there is no representation possible no meaning, no significance, no value, just physical mechanism, one thing after another with terrible inflexible consistency. p92
We might suspect, then, that whenever we encounter a golem, there is a hidden homunculus, a man behind the curtain, or a rabbi and his magical incantations pulling the nearly invisible strings. p93
This section:
Key words: Behaviorism, B F Skinner, Cognitive science, Cognition, Computation, Software, Jerry Fodor
Topics covered: psychology, cognitive science, philosophy
60's Behaviorism movement almost killed psychology. Thoughts and experiences: taboo. But this was first systematic approach to slaying the homunculus fallacy by replacing notions with observations. p93
70's Cognitive science - mixes psychology, philosophy, computation et al - treats mental processes as vast array of computer algorithms. But finds no place for consciousness - heck, consciousness might not even exist. p94
Thus, if scientists could map every possible human thought or action to an equivalent computer circuit or algorithm, wouldn't this be good enough? p94
The implication: For any mental operation it should be possible to derive a corresponding mechanical operation. Therefore ideas can have a physical consequence. And teleology can be embodied. Thus we can dispense with teleology and focus on the physics. p96
This section:
Key words: Computer theory of mind, Algorithm, Gary Kasparov, Deep Blue, Software, Irving Good, Jerry Fodor
Topics covered: cognitive science, philosophy
Computational theory of mind: the manipulation of tokens completely describes thinking. p97
Algorithm: a set of instructions to generate a process that achieves a particular consequence. p97
But don't specify all the details. Just like words on this page - there needs to be an interpreter. p99
Consider Gary Kasparov playing chess against the computer Big Blue. Big Blue is but a collection of homunculi - human thoughts stored in a box. p99
Software is human intentions set to to accomplish a specific task. p100
It resembles the unconscious more than the conscious. p100
No one home - all the way down, p101
Supposition: the human mind ultimately is just a computer, p102
Jerry Fodor: But, if so, how did it learn? How can 'simple' become more 'complex'? How did it evolve? p103
And when and how does cognition come into the process? p103
Computation is an idealization about cognition based on an idealization about physical processes. p104
Note that cognition has to be intrinsic/come from within - not extrinsic/come from the outside. p104?
Computer bugs provide a clue. The process of maintaining/surviving as yet unknown errors may provide some clues. p104
Computers made of meat (us) are messy and imprecise. Just what the doctor ordered. p105