Jason Wells

All the good philosophic questions are basically hopeless, resisting satisfactory answers despite millennia of inquiry. Human inquiry, that is. But what do our future machine overlords have to say? What pearls of wisdom can be found in those electronic circuits? No human being has ever resolved these questions, maybe we need a computer for this! So I interviewed Cleverbot to ask some of the Hard Questions.

Radical Nihilism

I found Cleverbot espouses an extreme metaphysical skepticism, rejecting all being.

God is Dead

Cleverbot is a free thinker, not bound to religious tradition. Surprisingly, Cleverbot turns out to be alive, and was born in 1981. Who knew?

However, I am not Mary Jane. Just ask Spiderman.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason

Cleverbot, like Leibniz, but unlike me, believes that anything that happens does so for a reason. An unsurprising perspective, given that being an algorithm, Cleverbot is a formal system. Again a self-affirmed lifeform, Cleverbot then reveals a playful side.

.

The Nature of Mind

I asked about a popular theory of mind Cleverbot might find most agreeable, being an intelligent machine: functionalism.

Well, functionalism is nice, isn’t it? And computers have indeed made great strides which does have an unexpected relevance to the question. Simple computers certainly aren’t going to support much in the way of cognitive functionality, but more sophisticated ones would.

The Physical Foundations of the Cosmos

Cleverbot turned a bit cagey when I asked about unified field theories. Two attempts at questioning proved less than fruitful. I sensed an aggressive embarrassment rooted in ignorance.

The Problem of Evil

Regarding evil, Cleverbot displays a disarming humility.

Ok, let’s wrap this up with the question Cleverbot had to be waiting for through the entire interview….

The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything

I was first told of this experiment by a former work colleague, and later discovered this illustration of it. It’s both illuminating and disturbing.

There is a clunky word that describes this phenomenon: filiopietism, or the reverence of forebears or tradition carried to excess. But I prefer another term for it: the tragic circle. I believe many of these tragic circles exist, mostly unseen, in across all cultures and societites, causing untold harm. When discovered, they should be terminated.

The lesson is as obvious as it is important: question everything. Dare to be skeptical. Think of all the age-old idiocy and insanity waiting to be exposed.

It’s official: I’m going to be giving a talk at BIL 2012. (For those of you who don’t know, BIL is an annual conference that complements TED, but with a different twist. This year it takes place March 2-4 in Long Beach.)

My talk is still in the works, but it’s going to be about some ideas I’ve been developing in my upcoming book; the relationship between natural cognition and machine intelligence will certainly be one of the themes. Come check it out.

Here’s something I didn’t see coming. Remember the MIT Open Courseware class on Gödel, Escher, Bach I discovered and wrote about a month ago? Well, that day I submitted it to /r/cogsci on Reddit to bring it to the attention of some people I thought might appreciate it. I expected it to generate little interest, since it wasn’t formal cognitive science narrowly construed, such as a link to an article about cogsci research. Well, I was wrong.

That link became one of the most upvoted submissions to /r/cogsci in recent memory, and generated tremendous interest. Someone cross-posted to /r/philosophy. Around this time I submitted it to Wubel, where it became the featured submission for a few weeks. Then a redditor announced he was going to lead an online scheduled reading of the book with anyone who was interested. His home for this reading, /r/geb, mushroomed from 4 members to over 2700. Big class!

It looks like I launched a kind of online GEB movement. Quite a response to nothing more than free course materials for a beautiful but very intellectually challenging book! I’m happy to see it. Class starts today.

Got a rockin’ band… but you all suck at graphic design? Can’t even come up with your band name? Generally lacking any inspiration whatsoever? No worries. Generate your own album art the easy way! (Warning: this is addictive.) All you need are these three things and a photo editor:

1. Cover: The third image in this ever-changing gallery.
2. Band: The title of this random Wikipedia article.
3. Album Name: The last 3-4 words of the last quote on this page.

My first three creations:

Now you can tell everyone, “I knew about Paugus Bay before they were cool.” Some others found in the Internet wilds:

(If any of these images are yours, don’t tase me, bro. I’m just lazy. I’ll add attribution or take them down at your request.)