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Hi Nautilus members,
In a stand-up act earlier this year, the comedian Chad Kroeger came to my defense. Well, not me personally, but the tiny group of us—around 1 percent in the United States—who study philosophy in college. “A lot of people bag on philosophy majors,” he says. “Like, ‘You can’t do anything. What do you guys do?’” “Oh you mean besides enlighten people? Inspire wisdom, courage, virtue?” OK, they say, but you can’t do anything in the “real world.” Kroeger, with scorn and pity in his reply: “You think the world’s real?”
Among other things I experimented with in college, radical skepticism was one of them. I found it thrilling to rigorously and quite seriously doubt what everyone around me took for granted—such as that the world outside themselves even existed.
This wide-openness to counterintuitive ideas was a result of losing my faith. It liberated me to begin thinking I knew next to nothing. The intellectual exhilaration was palpable.
Sometimes I wonder what the point of it all was, though. Did I get anything out of puzzling over the problem of induction, for instance, which suggests we have no solid basis to believe that the future will resemble the past—we just expect it to? “Such a stance, which recognizes the limitations of what can be proved from human experience, can lead to profound skepticism,” wrote philosopher Robert Trigg in Nautilus. “It can give no rational grounding to science at all. Science becomes more the expression of human nature and our preference for the familiar than a quest for knowledge.” I also fried my brain working through things like “Gettier cases” that poked holes in the very definition of knowledge.
According to some recent findings, perhaps I didn’t philosophize in vain. Psychologist Michael Prinzing and philosopher Michael Vazquez analyzed a dataset collected by the Higher Education Research Institute that contains survey results from more than 120,000 undergraduate students from more than 360 U.S. colleges and universities on questions about changes in mental habits and cognitive ability. They found that a philosophy major in fact seems to make students more reflective, logical, and open-minded over their years in college compared to other majors (a causal effect). “Although this difference in growth is not drastic,” Prinzing and Vazquez conclude, “it remains noteworthy and suggests that philosophical education may uniquely enhance certain intellectual virtues.”
Arguably this is due to the fact that philosophy relies almost entirely on learning by thinking as opposed to learning from observation. In a recent paper, psychologist Tania Lombrozo highlights four major ways we learn by thinking: self-explanation, simulation, analogy, and reasoning. These help to illustrate what she calls the “paradox of knowledge from nowhere.” In other words, how do we come to know new things when we’re not taking in novel information from outside ourselves? In the case of simulation, Lombrozo mentions the dramatic example of Einstein picturing himself traveling on photons and trains to gain insights about relativity.
Einstein was of course a philosophical thinker in his own right, and wasn’t shy about touting the advantages of being one. “So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like someone who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest,” he wrote in a 1944 letter. He believed engaging with the philosophical ideas underlying accepted scientific notions gave him a leg up, freed him from biases and assumptions he wouldn’t otherwise notice.
In the coming years we may not have to go it alone. Computational cognitive scientist Katie Collins and her colleagues propose, in a new paper in Nature Human Behavior titled “Building machines that learn and think with people,” that we’ll have increasingly capable AI “thought partners” to pitch in. Gone are the days when we understood computers as Steve Jobs did—as “bicycles for the mind.” Nowadays, they say, computers are less like vehicles and more like “copilots.”
Today’s chatbots—the likes of ChatGPT—are not quite ready for this challenge yet because “these machines do not robustly simulate human cognition (for example, explicitly reasoning about the world or other minds) in ways expected by a true thought partner,” Collins and her coauthors write. “We argue that good thought partners are systems (1) that can understand us, (2) that we can understand and (3) that have sufficient understanding of the world that we can engage on common ground.” These criteria would, funnily enough, exclude C3PO, who once lamented, “Sometimes I just don’t understand human behavior!” Good thought partners are presumably systems that can grok us unfailingly.
I’m partial to the idea of partnering in thought—I wouldn’t want anyone (or anything) doing my thinking for me. The complexity scientist David Krakauer has come up with a helpful distinction in this regard, between technology that either complements or competes with our own cognition. The former would look like calendar and journaling apps, the latter global positioning systems and recommendation engines. He’s not entirely a doomer about superintelligent AI enslaving humanity and instead imagines that a bad scenario for AI would involve us allowing it to think and create for us.
One place to start on that more hopeful path would be to have systems that invite us into an enriching dialogue, not unlike those still held around seminar tables in universities. These would be like Socratic AI assistants—they wouldn’t necessarily be trained on Socrates’ words from Plato’s dialogues but would emulate his method of probing and provoking thought. “This Socrates is not going to tell you, ‘You should do that,’ in a concrete moment,” philosopher Jon Rueda told me, “but will help you improve your reasoning—to consider empirical facts, to think more logically and coherently.”
A copilot such as this would seem to me to be a fine complement to our own cognitive adventures. Assuming an AI thought partner could hold its own in a critical and playful discussion about ideas, I imagine the experience would be like intellectual jousting with a friend late into the night. When heads collide with equal candor and respect, no one’s ideas displace the other’s. It’s a synthesis of minds. A win-win.
— Brian Gallagher, Nautilus associate editor |
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