Philosopher S. Siddarth discusses. What do readers think?
My former colleagues at another university in Middle East have also been moved to online teaching indefinitely, with the students…
3 responses to “Leibniz, proto-panpsychist?”
-
For sure. Re-discovering Leibniz ; reinventing the wheel perhaps. This is why philosophy requires understanding the history of philosophy. I should throw in also that Whitehead would also be meditated on by the new pan psychists. He had already tried to bring Leibniz into the 20th centrury. The fundamentals elements are actual occasions that are drops of experience. Monads but with windows, and with levels of organization. But as with leibniz he is neglected
-
Leibniz, obviously and indisputably, believes that there is no true being that is not a perceiving subject, or that has nothing about it analogous to the “moi”. The physical world results in turn, in a way difficult to summarize, from the activity of these nodes of perception, atoms of substance, points of view, monads — call them what you will. If we want to project back the latest fashionable term to describe this position, I suppose nothing prevents us from doing so. But the framing is anachronistic and ultimately not terribly illuminating.
-
What does a windowed monad (hypothetically such as ourselves) want from LLM-type AIs if not, intuitively, to probe just how windowed or not it really is, albeit at the risk of blindly confronting its own reflection. For example, in Alan Turing’s classic paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” the latter apparently seriously considers the possibility that a human telepath and/or use of one might help ‘out’ the machine vs the true human (telepath). Here follows part of the relevant paragraph from the Turing paper:
“A more specific argument based on ESP might run as follows: “Let us play the imitation game, using as witnesses a man who is good as a telepathic receiver, and a digital computer. The interrogator can ask such questions as ‘What suit does the card in my right hand belong to?’ The man by telepathy or clairvoyance gives the right answer 130 times out of 400 cards. The machine can only guess at random, and perhaps gets 104 right, so the interrogator makes the right identification.” There is an interesting possibility which opens here. Suppose the digital computer contains a random number generator. Then it will be natural to use this to decide what answer to give. But then the random number generator will be subject to the psychokinetic powers of the interrogator. Perhaps this psychokinesis might cause the machine to guess right more often than would be expected on a probability calculation, so that the interrogator might still be unable to make the right identification. On the other hand, he might be able to guess right without any questioning, by clairvoyance. With ESP anything may happen.”
My focus in citing this is not the discussion of telepathy per se, but its exemplification of a brilliant mind’s pondering, via other words, just how porous or windowed, despite itself, is the conscious monad (i.e. human) or indeed a presumably non-conscious one, i.e. the Turing machine or (mutatis mutandis) LLM-AI* being tested. I would consider the example exemplary in that regard.
*(Because these, in Turing’s hypothetical, are being influenced by the true windowed and porous monad, the human telepath).
Leave a Reply to Ludovic Cancel reply