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.

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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

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.

How cool is this. MIT Open Courseware offers a class called Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey. It is an entire course geared around Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach.

This is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read; it’s a true masterpiece. I first encountered it in high school. Ostensibly it’s a gorgeous web interconnecting art, mathematics and music, but that’s actually instrumental to the book’s true purpose. Quoth Wikipedia:

Hofstadter has emphasized that GEB is not about mathematics, art, and music but rather about how cognition and thinking emerge from well-hidden neurological mechanisms.

And now MIT offers a free class geared around this book, using it as a kind of textbook, bracketed with a syllabus and class notes in PDF. All this for free. Wow. Props to the instructors, Justin Curry and Curran Kelleher, and to MIT for providing this to the world gratis.

As I embark on intellectual adventures in cognitive science, as I intend to, I begin with the basics. The first question I tackled, and one I’m often asked, is: “What is cognitive science?” It doesn’t get much more basic than that. Even so, there is enough confusion about this to make it a very good question for anyone to ask.

I'm so confused.

Cognitive science is, of course, the science of cognition. Cognition is just another word for thinking–one that carries specific implications about how thinking happens. At this point it’s evident that we think with our brains, and presumably cognitive science is the study of this. So it purports to be, too, although there’s a whole lot more to it. You could see it as the study of mind and mental processes, in other words, of the mind and its operations; and since the mind is what the brain does, it’s not unreasonable to think that cognitive science would primarily study neural function.

Here’s where things get a little whack. There’s already another field for studying brains: neuroscience. Neuroscience is not cognitive science–although it is sometimes considered one of the “cognitive sciences.” In fact, not all neuroscientists seem to be even interested in cognitive science. So I wondered: how do they relate? For example, what is a question one discipline would address that the other wouldn’t?

I’ve asked several neuroscientists and a neurophilosopher this question directly; none could say! I even raised the question on Quora. No satisfactory answers there either. I began to wonder: given the billions spent on research into the brain, the mind and psychology every year, how could this be?

Then it gets more fun. Turns out there’s something else called cognitive neuroscience. When I discovered this, my initial reaction was, are you kidding me? But cognitive science is not cognitive neuroscience, despite the two having almost identical names. The latter is a subfield of neuroscience; the former isn’t. Yet the two definitely relate. For example, the Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology Lab at UCSD is part of the UCSD Cognitive Science department (which is considering my Ph.D. application right now).

And then it gets even better. There’s something else called computational neuroscience. Since cognitive science draws deeply from computer science (it had a major artificial intelligence research program for decades), you might at first think this is simply a synonym for cognitive science. But it’s not. It is the study of the brain as an information processor. It has multiple touchpoints to cognitive science, but again, one goes to places the other doesn’t, and vice versa.

So, what the fuck is going on? I’ve spent the past few months trying to clear this up for myself. Here’s what I’ve got so far.

Neuroscience is a life science. It’s about the nervous system, which includes the brain. It’s not really about thinking at all, although obviously it has huge relevance. A neuroscientist works with neurons, perhaps seeing how they can be affected by chemicals or sensing their electrical activity to get a grasp of neural functions. A neuroscientist might study what the brain does when a person thinks about adding two numbers, but not how a computer does the same thing, even though (I would argue) both are comparable forms of cognition, despite having very different realizations. And I doubt a neuroscientist would investigate anything cognitive that can’t be reduced to a neurological explanation. For example, the thing we call friendship is something mental that is maintained by neural functionality, but you can’t explain friendship in those terms for an individual brain. Friendship is social; it emerges from the interaction of at least two brains, and each may have very different things going on. Friendship can’t appear on an fMRI scan.

Here’s another clue. A cognitive scientist might very well study psychological and social relationships between different people without looking into neurology at all. I don’t believe a neuroscientist would do something like this unless it were to inform a specific inquiry into brain function. A cognitive scientist may even study how people and computers orchestrate themselves cognitively; this is in fact a topic of cognitive science known as distributed cognition.

So as best I can make out, cognitive science isn’t strictly reducible to neuroscience for two big reasons: one, it takes on phenomena that emerges beyond the bounds of the neurology of an individual brain; and two, it can encompass cognitive phenomena exhibited in intelligent machines, i.e. computers, which don’t have neurons.

At this point it seems like the best way to make sense of all this is as follows:

• Cognitive science is the study of the phenomena of cognition in the world, natural or artificial, leveraging insights from the following three fields and others, such as computer science, psychology, linguistics and even philosophy;
• Neuroscience is the study of the brain and nervous system, not artificial systems and not necessarily even cognition;
• Cognitive neuroscience is the study of the phenomena of cognition in the brain, that is, the biological underpinnings of thinking; and
• Computational neuroscience is the study of the brain and nervous system’s information processing abilities, cognitive or otherwise.

So there it you have it. The fields all interact in different ways and overlap considerably, and I didn’t even address other closely related fields like cognitive psychology or philosophy of mind. I take this complicated muddle to be the product of the deep confusion that exists about the mind today. All the same, the progress in this space is beyond warp speed, which creates new chaos and confusion at least as fast as discoveries and advances clear things up. In short, the “cognitive sciences” are in a state of total revolution… and revolutions get messy. There’s so much creativity in this space that these disciplines, with their distinct intellectual interests and traditions, either blend, separate or directly contradict one another in countless ways that constantly change.

I really like revolution. I think it’s a very exciting time to study cognition. There is clearly much to be done.

This morning I read an interesting article written by David Frum. I almost feel sorry for the guy. He’s one of a dying breed of Republicans–the kind that can think and are sane. That is, the kind that are getting purged from his party more and more as RINOs. I didn’t know much about him, so I poked around a little. I discovered this idea of his:

When I was in law school, I devised my own idiosyncratic solution to the problem of studying a topic I knew nothing about. I’d wander into the library stacks, head to the relevant section, and pluck a book at random. I’d flip to the footnotes, and write down the books that seemed to occur most often. Then I’d pull them off the shelves, read their footnotes, and look at those books. It usually took only 2 or 3 rounds of this exercise before I had a pretty fair idea of who were the leading authorities in the field. After reading 3 or 4 of those books, I usually had at least enough orientation in the subject to understand what the main questions at issue were — and to seek my own answers, always provisional, always subject to new understanding, always requiring new reading and new thinking.

Essentially, this is the Google PageRank algorithm as it might exist inside one’s head. That is, an informal method for identifying people and works of high centrality. Not only is this a brilliant idea (predating Google by decades, if he did it when he was in law school!), but it illustrates that it’s possible for someone to be conservative and have a functional mind. Something liberal people might want to keep in mind before getting too smug. Whether or not it will be possible for a Republican to have a functional mind much longer… that’s a different story.