Robot Philosophy

Psychologically reverse engineering blank slate-ism, and the inevitability of metaphysics

The Idea of Computation

The basic postulate, or assumption, of computation is: all complex statements can be reduced to a series of simple statements. All statements are reducible to a simple, Mono-causal universalism. If you can replicate intelligence in binary codebase, then you are also proving something about reality (insofar as reality is intelligent), which is: It is Mono-causal, universalist, and simple.

What do I mean by complex and simple statements?

(2 + 2 = 4) = ((1 + 1) + (1 + 1) = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1)

The former, (2 + 2 = 4), is a complex statement, the latter is a series of simple statements. 2 is a complex sign, the latter is a series of simple signs.

The idea I call mono-causal universalism, is, "every statement can be reduced to a series of “simple” statements, in a binary code of either 1 or not-1."

I accuse, that the very idea of computation is a kind of “testing” of reality, of whether the same rules apply universally, as in our constructed environment of electronic computation: is the "universe", reduce able to a series of binary signs of either 1 or not-1, is all of reality reducible to this?

Ultimately I believe it to be a restatement of the assumptions of, for lack of a better word, modern “scientism”. the degenerated cargo cult that permeates so much of the media and zeitgeist of our post-pandemic world.

I believe these projects, AI and VR, are the result of us philosophically being at the end of the rope of the modernistic worldview. Scientism trying to justify itself: "if we dig deep enough into any part of nature or the world-in-history, we will eventually hit the bedrock of “laboratory conditions”"

In a philosophical sense all computation is an attempt to prove that “laboratory conditions” are not an arbitrary, synthetic, created environment, but, a fully accurate, sufficient, replication of base reality. That laboratory conditions were discovered, not created, and that they 'come first', before history, and not as a product of the human mind-in-history.

This is an attack

I am not saying that any of this is conscious behavior, I am exactly accusing people of being motivated by unconscious processes, and not having a good, well thought out plan. In a deductive reasoning sense, recreating human intelligence in binary code would only prove it was possibly true, not necessarily. In a psychoanalytic sense I am accusing them of coping.

What are we trying to do with computing today? VR and AI. We are trying to recreate, synthesize, experience and intelligence. To recreate reality, not merely “visualise” or simulate it, not to make a lesser version of, but to make something fully equivalent to the real thing, synthetically. Virtual REALITY, not virtual space, not spatial hallucination. REALITY. Fully Equivalent, fully separate. Recreating reality and the-thing-that-experiences-reality, the object and the subject.

These projects carry metaphysical claims. A claim about base reality, a claim about intelligence, and a claim about time.

Intelligence: All complex statements can be reduces to a string of simple statements.

Reality: all complex functions can be reduced to a string of simple functions.

Or, simply: Everything is simple. All complexity is ultimately illusionary, a matter of perspective. A second order effect is just a sufficiently long string of simple mono-causality we haven't discovered yet.

What do I mean by mono-causality? The assumption that base reality can be expressed as a spreadsheet of monads. Any given phenomenon is a monad operating on another monad.

Kant

The critical perspective on these projects (AI, VR, computation) is that we are not “progressing” historically, despite our technological gadgets, and that these motivations are only possible for philosophically illiterate people. At the very least, it is a total divergence from the western tradition right around Kant, at the latest around Wittgenstein. There is absolutely no epistemic humility, or awareness of the basic difference between a statement in language and a mathematical function, or a recognition of the difference between ding-an-mir and ding-an-sich. The entire thing driving our technological development is a totally incoherent mishmash cargo cult mentality. There are basic, childish mistakes, and it is a vastly more primitive worldview and psychology, than the average superstitious peasant, today or in the middle ages.

Kant talks about space and time as being categories of the human mind, which, in simple terms, we project onto the world-an-sich, but are themselves not qualities we can ascribe to the world. He says they are conditions of the human mind, which is justified with the argument that we literally cannot imagine anything that doesn't have spacetime. Even in a priori mathematics, we operate with shapes in order.

If, 1+1, then, 2. Signs in order. Space and time.

When I accuse people of not reading their Kant, this is what I mean: the idea of binary logic, Monocausality, is obviously a byproduct of the human mind, and not an inherent quality of the universe. Literally all of neurology and brain studies support this, from day one of our torturing monkeys experiments. The Right brain - left brain divide. The Monocausal, the binary, the “deconstruction”, is just the way the left side of the brain operates. The idea that this is universal transcendentally true, is, literally, half-witted.

Mono-causality and time

All claims about causality, are metaphysical claims about time, because in a simple sense, causality takes place in time. More specifically, Mono-causal universalism makes a specific claim about time, which is that it is infinitely divide-able. No two actions ever occur at the same time, only seemingly so. Any two actions happening at the same time would necessarily have to be the same action. Einsteinian physics says that if two points are differentiated in space, they are differentiated in time, and vice versa. This means that logically, if two actions take place at the same time, they are identical to each other, which, in logic, makes them the same object, equivalent to itself.

In 2+2=4, "2" doesn’t “happen at the same time”, but is a matter of relative distance of the viewer: 2 is really 1+1, if we step "closer" and inspect it.

The idea of AI, both in literature and how it is attempted recreated from literature today, is: If you make a sufficiently complex spreadsheet, then it will eventually just sort of flash into Sentience, or, create the illusion of Sentience (and in this case Sentience was ever only an illusion universally, and we are robots).

In both cases, the idea is: if you create a complex enough spreadsheet, eventually, you will make 1+1=3, and break the laws of thermodynamics, create energy, and create something out of nothing.

I am not here trying to prove any one thing about these theories, although I will strongly imply my opinion, but my main goal is to clarify what exactly the questions being asked are.

The idea of VR is much the same thing, but approached from the opposite side. In VR, we attempt to prove that reality, the universe, or experience, as it applies to your philosophical assumptions - is fully reducable to simple binary statements, because it is fully replicable in simple binary statements. This is even more childish and cargo cultish on the face of it, since it is generally based on some totally unreflected assumptions about the human senses, that sight is the prime sense, to which all other senses can only hope to be handmaiden to. I present the homunculus.

Necessary and sufficient conditions

In formal logic, we learn about the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions.

A condition for P can be necessary, but not by itself sufficient, for P.

Example. P has two conditionals, A and B, which both need to be true, for P.

If A and B, then P.

If A is necessary, but not sufficient for P, then we cannot say, “if A then P”, but we can say, “if P then A”. We cannot say, “if P, then not-B”.

If, however, both A and B are sufficient, but not necessary, then, we can say: if a, then P. If b then p. We cannot say, if a, then b. We cannot say, if P then A, or, if P, then B.

You can scream all day that A is sufficient for P, but you will never be able to prove, that “A and therefore not-B”. You can only prove “possibly A”. Or in formal speech: “P, therefore A or B”.

This is what it's all about. What the “scientivist” philosophy can only ever achieve, without contradicting itself, is a sufficient, possible, A. Never a necessary A. Even if human minds, and Existence, experience, and the universe turn out to all be completely replicable in binary computation, it ultimately wouldn't prove anything. And it wouldn’t even scratch the itch they are trying to scratch.

There's no reason to do it, and nothing to be gained - and we CAN prove this, a priori, with simple logic. If you wannabe spooky and nick landish about it, you could interpret it as a mutant subschool of positivism, operating on a darwinian self preservation level, and behaving like a lifeform, which is then controlling human beings like that zombie ant fungus thing, to try to justify itself, using humans as pawns who have been taken over and hypnotized by this ghost demon thing. But that's just for fun, and not really important.

Writing code does not turn robots into people, it turns people into robots

Every time you use a computer, regardless of what you believe about the nature of reality being reduce able to 'reason' (Mono-causality et al.), you are, as Jordan Peterson would say "acting as if you believe it". To interface with a computer at all, in any way, you temporarily internalise those metaphysic assumptions, and train yourself in believing them.

Anything we do as humans, trains us to think a certain way. All actions are building a habit, good or bad. When you write code, or formal logic, you are training yourself to think like a robot. You are not making a rational decision about your beliefs, and you are not making a Nietzschian Act of transcendent Will, Choosing your own Morality. You are just doing what you have been trained to do, and have absentmindedly trained yourself to do. A habit you have reinforced every day since the first time you used a computer.

Every time you write code you train yourself to think a certain way.

Every time you paint, you train yourself to think a certain way.

Every time you play a musical instrument, or sing, or dance, or pray, or fight, or ride a unicycle, or do brain surgery, or carpentry, or go up and talk to a girl, or lift a weight over your head, you are training yourself to think a certain way. If you put a computer interface on top of all those things, so you are always interacting with a computer first, then you are training yourself to think in a different way.

“If metaphysics weren't false, it would be necessary to destroy them” - Steve Jobs