This is good argument for why tech/science/stem need to read history, or 'older' science history. To at least be familiar with the science that has come before, either to know what was discarded, to be familiar with past dead ends, or forgotten knowledge that could still have value.
A lot of the AI spurred arguments in the last year seem like so much re-hashing since they were being discussed in 1879.
Absolutely agreed. I find it embarrassing how STEM devalued non-STEM studies for years, and now that LLMs are center stage, so is the near-universal unpreparedness of interested parties and stakeholders to wrestle with issues of cognition, consciousness, and ethics. This, despite literally thousands of years of prior studies on these matters.
Even now, I see basic refusal to engage with this extant literature, and a strong preference to just making shit up as if it's the first time anyone has anything interesting to say on these matters. Again, embarrassing. The industry is totally unprepared on an intellectual basis to wrestle with these issues.
This made me go look up whether STEM includes psychology and medicine. Wikipedia says "depends how you ask." In any case, William James trained to be a doctor and is considered the father of American psychology. If you've read any of his stuff, he was certainly not science illiterate.
Which is not to say I disagree with your point. However, it turns out a lot of people, especially the really smart ones we've all heard about, aren't easily characterized as STEM or non-STEM. That includes all the AI researchers I know.
This is because the humanities got taken over in some sense and filled with mumbo jumbo. Technical people don't want to touch that with a ten foot pole.
Besides, science used to be very much a "thinkers" only thing, because only those people went into studies instead of just being laborers. These were people that would question and ponder the things you mention. These days, STEM is filled with factory widget repeaters that are taught to regurgitate the syllabus and apply it in context so they can be good workers.
> humanities got taken over in some sense and filled with mumbo jumbo
This is exactly the kind of opinion that results from improper familiarization with the various sub-fields of the humanities. Is there bullshit? Yes. Is it typical? Absolutely not.
I think it in general refers to a (seeming) lack of awareness/acknowledgement of non-stem topics like philosophy, theology, ethics, history, etc.
I'm not sure I would phrase it as STEM itself devaluing non-stem (I mean it's an acronym for subjects) but, rather society in general devaluing these, example, how hard is it go out, get a philosophy degree, and practice/write that and live comfortably with that occupation (no external sources of income). History/Literature seems to be much the same
This is not correct. This attitude was nurtured by science's most successful public mouthpieces. Stephen Hawking and Neal Degrasse Tyson have been running around for decades telling everyone that the humanities are worthless. Young students, unfortunately, listened to them on this subject. A real tragedy, I think.
Carl Sagan would have been a much better steward for science today, as he had a very healthy respect for the relationship between science and humanities and the latter's value for understanding our world.
This dangerous rift goes back even further. See C.P. Snow's lecture "The Two Cultures".(1)
EDIT: Not sure how this slipped my mind, but Sean Carroll is exactly the kind of representative of the syncretic relationship between sciences and humanities that ought to be the default, rather than the exception.
>Stephen Hawking and Neal Degrasse Tyson have been running around for decades telling everyone that the humanities are worthless. Young students, unfortunately, listened to them on this subject. A real tragedy, I think.
Neither of them has said anything like this. Hawking's "philosophy (metaphysics) is dead" is a narrow point about the relevance of philosophy to basic theorizing about nature. NDT said something along the lines of he doesn't have time for questions like "what is the meaning of meaning". Neither can be reasonably construed as denigrating humanities. There have been a lot of folks on the other side who have put words into the mouths of these two for the sake of self-promotion. It's created a very warped perspective on what Hawkings and NDT actually believe.
I looked at it. Randomly opened a couple of links, none of which really support the idea of NDT thinking humanities are worthless. All I see are a lot of overinterpreting and misrepresentations for the sake of using popular guys as a jumping-off point for one's own defensive screed. If you have a specific citation that you feel best represents the case against NDT or Hawking, I'm happy to consider it.
That post is really a case-in-point of overinterpreting and using a popular commentator as a jumping-off point for one's own screed. Pigliucci's response doesn't really engage with a charitable interpretation of what NDT actually said about philosophy, but extrapolates the actual claims to a broad derision which motivates Pigliucci's much wider defense. The two substantive claims NDT makes is that it's hard to move forward when you're endlessly debating the meaning of terms and that philosophy that purports to describe the natural world is obsolete. He concedes other humanistic areas like religion, politics and so on are fruitful philosophical areas.
What NDT is guilty of in the minds of so many of the commentators is not having what they consider due reverence and deference to philosophy. What none of the responses do is justify the supposed reverence scientists and popular culture more broadly should have. The points about philosophy being dead in the context of describing the physical world appear to be true. The point about philosophy not making progress (understood in the way that science makes progress) appears to be true. If the only claim to value one can make is for activity that happened centuries ago (being the forebearer to science), then philosophy truly is dead. While Pigliucci's points in defense of philosophy are true, they still don't tell us why anyone outside of philosophy should care about philosophy.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a philosophy hater. I quite enjoy philosophy, I read an awful lot of it. But this is because I like puzzles and I like navigating conceptual spaces and gaining deep understanding. But this isn't all that relevant to most people's lives. You want people to care about philosophy, you need to be relevant to them. Philosophy is failing at being relevant.
I don't see how any of that negates the effect of one of science's pre-eminent public advocates bad mouthing philosophy and the humanities. People hear this and take it at face value. It informs their opinions. It shapes their lives. And it's his purpose to shape people lives. He is partially responsible for the proliferation of similar views throughout the intellectual ecosystem. On this point, he is being irresponsible and ignorant. He ought to have and communicate more nuanced views of the world.
I am having a lot of trouble understanding how their is anything but a tortured defense of his behavior on this front.
Man, if philosophy can't take (an admittedly popular) guy saying rather milquetoast things about philosophy (whether right or wrong), the discipline is in worse shape than I thought. Philosophy should be capable of defending itself, it shouldn't need to rely on deferential treatment and a widespread presumption of value.
Philosophy doesn't deserve deference or respect simply because it's an academic discipline. We've been far too deferential to questionable disciplines and their practitioners, and the academy is in bad shape because of it. Disciplines should be constantly challenged and expected to offer full throated defenses of their merits. If philosophy wants to be valued, it needs to actively demonstrate it's value. if the only thing it can do is get defensive when someone says something negative publicly about it, we might as well just shut it all down now because there's truly nothing left.
"Man, if philosophy can't take (an admittedly popular) guy saying rather milquetoast things about philosophy (whether right or wrong), the discipline is in worse shape than I thought."
Not what this discussions is about at all.
That is some straw man rhetoric.
That actual point was "Hey STEM people, you are talking in circles yourselves, and re-inventing the wheel, maybe checkout what some other fields have already studied"
The issue of NDT and Hawking dismissing philosophy is a mostly separate issue from the original topic and ryanklee turned this branch into that narrow issue. My reply is specifically addressing that subtopic.
Richard Feynman also did not see value in philosophy, and he was right. The submitted article is a good illustration why.
There are two hypotheses: one is that consciousness is essentially a computation, the other that it is an unknowable stuff. Philosophers spend time talking how one or the other hypothesis "feels right" to them. Scientists try to see what results can be obtained through computation.
Now we got to the point where we have automaton talking. Still very very far from understanding how brain works, but an interesting discovery on the way to it. Meanwhile, what philosophers have to say is still as uninteresting and irrelevant as it was in 1879...
You’re talking about metaphysics. Epistemology will be one of the most important issues with AI. And let’s not ignore ethics. You seem to speak as someone who hasn’t read any philosophy. Einstein, Bohr, Oppenheimer, and plenty of other physicists would disagree with your sentiment.
> Richard Feynman also did not see value in philosophy, and he was right.
Do you realize that physics requires the adoption of a philosophy? Physics addresses problems that are effectively easy. Physicists have tools, such as mathematics, at their disposal and can make wildly simplifying assumptions.
Philosophers are often trying to address what the questions even are and then try to develop new tools to both explore the questions and their answers. Physics is downstream of philosophy.
Unfortunately it is not possible to find out new questions or develop new tools by just thinking about stuff. You need to also do something concrete, at which point you cease to be just a philosopher and become also a mathematician, physicist, historian, economist etc.
In the example of question of consciousness, the point of view presented by William James here was obvious to people long before him. Scientific observation have shown the possibility of the alternative theory: that we are automata. We still do not have a definitive answer which one is correct, but philosophy have not contributed anything towards finding the correct answer. And the only progress we had in last 2500 years was due to science.
> You need to also do something concrete, at which point you cease to be just a philosopher and become also a mathematician, physicist, historian, economist etc.
That's the point. And the converse is true as well.
Has NDT been saying that? I wouldn't know, since I mostly consume him as small segments of larger appearances, but it seems half the time he's conversing with someone he's spouting philosophy as he sees it, so it would be surprising to me that he denigrates it.
1. Tyson dismissed the intellectual value of philosophy in a podcast, which led to criticism from those within the discipline[1].
2. He has been quoted saying, "What they teach in the humanities is not 'skepticism' or 'critical thinking.' It's mental masturbation disguised as critical thinking"[5].
3. Tyson warned that philosophy "can really mess you up" and has implied that philosophy does not progress in the way science does[5].
4. His attitude towards philosophy has been characterized as science-defeating by some, as it dismisses the role of philosophy in addressing moral and aesthetic questions that science cannot answer[6].
5. Tyson's comments have sparked discussions and defenses of the humanities and philosophy, with critics arguing that his views are overly simplistic and do not represent the true value and diversity of philosophical inquiry[1][4][5][6].
Back to the concept rather than an individual, isn't part of the problem that STEM fields feed back into actionable ways, but perhaps philosophy doesn't?
For example, if a new exo-planet were found to have a certain chemical make up that our current understanding didn't agree with, that would go back to theoretical physics and mathematics, where they might discover a way to better describe the discovery. That then becomes a new model that allows us to recognize a new pattern of solar system formation, etc etc.
There's a practical application to STEM work. In what way is there a practical application in philosophy? Is it isolated to educating people on broader more complex thought?
I think this is the point. You are discrediting Philosophy, but that is where science and math came from. You don't go back and say "man Plato was such a waste, lets toss out western civilization".
The point is someone has to start somewhere, and frequently philosophy is the field that tackled open ended questions. Once the questions get 'solved', it gets spun off into another branch of science.
Philosophy is the startup of science, the leading edge. Once it become a 'common' ordinary science, it gets re-named, re-packaged as 'the accepted way'.
It is happening a lot right now, because so many STEM people building AI are suddenly arm-chair philosophers coming up with 'new' questions, that are really 'old'. So the whole field is re-discovering philosophy.
So, when your boss is asking you to design a better way of hiding the waste products from your industrial projects that you know could hurt folks-- that's a good place where having some ethical principles might help.
Without those principles, people are often left with "I am just doing my job" and "this is what any person would do, right"?
Whereas a lot of us won't do certain things because, say, if everybody did them they'd be self contradictory (Kant) or when we look at the overall utility of dumping toxic waste into a river we might it has some larger negative consequences for society (Mill).
Figuratively, how all my physicist and computer science friends rolled their eyes when I took degrees in the humanities. Literally, how true the joke is about the difference between an English major and a large pepperoni pizza is that the pizza can feed a family of three. On the other hand, the humanities did plenty to devalue itself, by adopting the view that 'value' itself is likely a social construct.
> the humanities did plenty to devalue itself, by adopting the view that 'value' itself is likely a social construct.
The humanities is not a monolith.
If you ask a philosopher in the analytic tradition, which is the tradition in which most of the philosophical world resides, they are likely to disagree with social constructivist views.
And if you ask a philosopher in the continental tradition, you're likely to get 1000 words of self-contradictory jargon that sounds deep, but means absolutely nothing. You don't get to point at Neil deGrasse Tyson, and sweep, for example, Zizek under the rug.
The Sokal affair was not some sort of isolated aberration, the truth is that enormous chunks of the humanities are worthless.
It refers to the word STEM, what the acronym stands for, and what it does not contain.
Many of the smartest people I have met, including some of the best programmers, have had non-STEM backgrounds. The push by the STEM industry has pushed universities to be STEM industry preparation and training centers. This, among other things, has greatly devalued non-STEM education. And even within STEM, there are subdisciplines that been devalued.
It's a shame, because many of the non-STEM disciplines that have been devalued are effectively systems disciplines that help train for understanding complex relationships and the effects of time and other effects on these relationships. So we are also devaluing those skills in favor of short-term STEM thinking.
Have you heard of Newton, Pascal, Maxwell, Leibniz, Pythagoras, Einstein, Aristotle, Curie, and Turing? Do you know what they did and a little about their lives?
They were likely all dead before you were born.
Do you know some things about the Manhattan Project, Bell Labs, Bletchley Park, the Apollo Project, the Gutenberg press, the invention of carbon steel?
I’ll go further. If I said ‘he was referencing Science, not science’ would that make any sense?
I was a CS professor for a long time. Like many of my STEM colleagues, I taught the history of the ideas in my discipline as an intrinsic and important part of the curriculum. It’s also good pedagogy, since the long process of getting closer to the truth or developing more powerful technology is part of the toolbox we are trying to impart.
The commenter's point is that History as an academic discipline organized by institutions is part of the humanities departments.
It's not a deeper point.
Of course science has its own history and that history is examined (sometimes) in the course of scientific education. That's not what's at issue.
What's at issue is that History as a subject and other Humanities disciplines are systematically devalued in STEM disciplines and by scientific cultural mouthpieces and participants in STEM endeavors.
LLMs should requalify Liberal Arts education. The people who can ask questions and understand answers are quite relevant now, seeing how STEM worldview is in many ways no longer relevant.
SDEs should double down on soft skills now, since these are as useful with LLMs as with people.
I¹ get it. The STEM educated people are better at technical stuff like math and logic, thus they must be a lot more enlightened than these non-STEM journalists that walk around in the darkness of the intellectual void. We smart, They stupid. /s
You should ask yourself where this arrogance stems (so punny) from. Although you could argue that the liberal arts/humanities are stifled by leftist worldviews, which is true, I also believe that the study of the humanities is the one thing that created the societal structures -like democracy and education- that we cherish today and I believe they will be crucial for a nice non-authoritarian future. And the ideological pressure to discredit the humanities is something that I believe comes from a pro-authoritarian, conservative side of the political field.
¹STEM-educated (molecular biology, with a focus on computational analysis)
I find it very suspicious that people who avoid learning rhetoric, or formal logic, or axiomatic thinking in general, are able to draw useful conclusions from studying humanities.
I find it fascinating that "STEM people" think all problems are best solved with logic and rhetoric instead of intuition and anecdotal evidence. While in real life many things simply cannot be measured and we must act on hunches or "feelings" and many, many people are very successful in navigating the world without any education in the (powerful, but very narrow) tools of formal logic, rhetoric and axiomatic thinking. That is precisely the reason humanities have value: it is because they foster other ways of approaching the world. It is not about truth in the absolute ways that make STEM so appealing (and very narrow). It is more about fluid truth of finding patterns in the total of human experience. These truths can likewise be harnessed and formalised into institutions and systems that work on shared belief systems that are not necessarily logical, but do work nonetheless.
Its basic selection. You need a wide pool of ideas to get the best ideas.
You are making a charicature of what I am saying.
But to answer your question: Because quality thoughts are collected in the works that the humanities study. To say that you can and will have these quality thoughts by yourself - by winging it - is quite arrogant.
There are many works that find new ideas or are really thorough, combing through the breadth of human experience.
It is useful for people to spend their lives analysing these concepts and ideas. Their discourse can then be synthesized into new thoughts that will shape our societies. Do you think the laws you live by, the governmental structures, the way people treat each other, the structures of our societies would be like this without the studies of the humanities?
I think you are putting words in GP's mouth. They never said anything about avoiding learning formal logic or math. The context of that statement was a sarcastic position.
You misunderstood, I was criticizing the majority of people who study humanities in college, because they don’t have the requisite skills to make valid conclusions about what they are learning.
Doesn't have to be 'doomsday'.
Plenty of 'stem' thinkers expound on 'what is consciousness' by re-hashing old ideas as if they just occurred to them.
It goes back to the old quote ~ "Stephen Hawking famously wrote that “philosophy is dead” because the big questions that used to be discussed by philosophers are now in the hands of physicist" And then the follow up, "physicists then proceed to re-invent bad philosophy"(unknown).
The math behind the stealth bomber sat on a bookshelf for decades before someone realized what it could be used for. In STEM education, there should be some attempt at a 'rear view mirror', to know what has come before. AI is just the latest obvious area.
I suppose for meeting Gen. Ed. requirements more history and philosophy classes with a focus on where certain Math and Science comes from could be great.
Additionally math courses for the non-stem majors that focus more on the history and importance of something, say the quadratic formula, instead of applying it/remembering it without much context from where it came from could help out a lot of non-stem majors with their math requirement.
However I think it boils down to interest and a degree of time whether or not someone in a stem field feels compelled or not to pay attention and learn where their math tools come from or the experiments that built the respective sciences.
That is, I've found while stem classes may not focus on the above, they do cover it and for the more enthusiastic and self motivated student right there in their books to read about.
I've also found professor's that love this stuff too, which I've found pleasure in them sharing these stories when they can.
> These arguments aren't new. This is good argument for why tech/science/stem need to read history, or 'older' science history.
Sure, but it is also important not to lend too much credence to these arguments, because they were devised from a position of ignorance. In particular, in 1879 we didn't have neurobiology, nor the theory of computation and complexity, and we barely had evolution. OoS had been published just 20 years before, and molecular biology was many decades in the future. There is value in studying Ptolemy and Aristotle too, but mainly to understand how they got things wrong.
I agree.
You can't take something from 1800's as gospel, like that was the final word and we shall not progress.
Just saying, shouldn't ignore it either.
It is ok to study Plato or Leibniz, and realize it is historical background, and might spur new thoughts. We don't worship Plato as if that was the end of all thought. But lets not forget it, ignore it like it didn't happen, like all ideas today are new.
Agree with you except that the value in studying ancient thinkers and intellectuals is also in recognising patterns and seeing how they probably recognised patterns too.
Yes, I totally agree. I'm just saying that one should be skeptical about their conclusions because they didn't have access to much of the knowledge we have today. (William James in particular I have seen cited by religious people in support of religious arguments. He may have been a really smart guy, and there might be a lot to learn by studying him, but he just didn't know the things we know today -- no one did in his day -- and so it's not surprising that he got a lot of things wrong, including his answer to the titular question. We are in fact automata. Very, very sophisticated automata, but automata nonetheless.)
It's always fun to mention that many of the foundational ideas in the modern wave of machine learning & neural networks stem from work done in the 50s and 60s: perceptrons, backpropagation, stochastic approximation, etc. were all explored in depth back then.
It was only after compute power scaled up enough to apply these techniques practically that they became revolutionary. Really makes you wonder what things people are working on right now that will also need to wait 30 years.
I recently stumbled across a speech from 1855 by an American physician [1], and I suppose proto-electrical-engineer, talking about the telegraph. In it, he makes a direct analogy between the telegraph and the animal nervous system. (People were aware by then, that the nervous system was partly electrical in nature.)
The complexity of the nervous system and its ability to coordinate across distance, allows it to support more complex and bigger organisms, whether that organism is biological or political. Continuing with his analogy, the railroads and canals are the arteries and veins, supplying the raw materials and finished products, etc.
More tenuously, he also appears to make a kind of proto-evolutionary analogy (Darwin hadn't published but Lamarck had published decades before, by this point). And I even detect small hints of an antecedent to the concept of emergent complexity, and the notion of shared structures across biology, sociology, etc.
> The electric telegraph is thus the nervous system of this nation and of modern society by no figure of speech, by no distant analogy. Its wires spread like nerves over the surface of the land, interlinking distant parts, and making possible a perpetually higher co-operation among men, and higher social forms than have hitherto existed. [...]
> We are thus conducted to the result of the highest philosophy: that society in its form of organization, is human, and that it presents in its progressive development continually higher analogies with the laws of individual being. [...]
which means that there's probably a bunch of Gen Xers with this song still in their head somewhere (and since it's pretty catchy, some of HNs audience now).
Very true! I think it’s eye opening that almost every one of Chomsky’s lectures on such topics (I.e. “what kind of creatures are we?”) start with a discussion of what Newton, Galileo, or Descartes has to say about it.
The great thinkers of the past aren’t necessarily outdated, in some ways they might still have things to teach us from beyond the grave that we didn’t really appreciate when they were alive.
True; the 1768-1774 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaquet-Droz_automata were implemented specifically because writing, music, and art were at the time accomplishments that distinguished upper classes from lower.
(their biggest weakness is that being analogue instead of digital, their programming is very sensitive to environmental changes)
Yes, we are and some observable Automatisms are hyper creepy. And if you become aware of them it turns society into a collection of walking grandfather clocks in some aspects. Not a recommendable direction to move, madness is preferable.
An old Fritz Leiber novel, You're All Alone, aka The Sinful Ones, is about a man who discovers that most of the people in the world are automata, and he has been functioning as one for some time.
By this point I think the "nothing but" part is the bit that's actually wrong.
It's about putting yourself up on a pedestal while downplaying others.
Of course, at some point those "others" (be it peoples, genders, creatures, or machines) turn out to be as good or better at certain things than you are. And what do you do then? You won't have anywhere to go psychologically without devaluing yourself.
So then you end up shutting down avenues of thought that might otherwise have been productive.
Yes exactly. It’s hierarchical thinking from an anthropocentric pov. IMO the longer I live and the more I learn, the more I see hierarchical thinking as the biggest obstacle towards learning and understanding.
Sometimes I entertain the idea that inanimate objects have consciousness too and it's pretty disturbing because it would mean we are doing pretty much everything wrong.
I feel like it would mean we’re doing less damage than before: if everything is conscious then death isn’t what we think it is. Decomposing suddenly means something completely different.
Call it qualia, or "having experience", or "what our mind does" -- that is subjectively real. Perhaps especially so because of our ability to notice and reflect on the fact.
But that doesn't mean we actually have free will, or aren't automata. Most of the time we are lulled into the "illusion" that we do, to some extent.
It was kind of funny to me that Dostoevsky coincided with biology development which made him ponder painfully if we are just reactions of our neuron's "tails" and that there is nothing underlying (such as Soul and God).
IMHO they were a reasonable response to the irreducible complexity that accreted as a result of applying increasingly specific and complex empiricism to questions far broader than it might be suited to. (E.g. How do we know anything?)
Slightly tangential, but is anyone aware of an app/site that can take a URL like this one and convert the text to a format and layout that's easier on the eyes and easier to read in general? Like Kindle-fy a web page full of text?
Wow, this works great! On Android I recall getting the "simplified page" prompt but never found that to be all that great of a solution but using reader mode with Chrome is pretty neat. You can format it to basically be the same as reading a book from the Play store.
One nit is that if I tab away from the page and tab back the highlighted area is wiped from the reader pane -- assuming I had unhighlighted it in order to start reading.
In Chrome it seems like clicking the pop up is the only way to access simplified view. If you exit, follow a link, tab away, whatever... I can't figure out how to get it back! Any tips? Really confusing that I'm either missing something obvious or the explicit option is missing.
Safari, Firefox, and Edge all have a built-in Reader mode that doesn't exactly the thing you want for the device that you are on. Lots of extensions do this as well. There's used to be a handful of websites but it seems they no longer exist (they were also commonly used to bypass paywalls).
I tried to read this but I can’t deal with the writing quality. I think it’s partly the historical nature of the piece, but James is a terrible writer. He is obtuse and pompous and clouds his meaning with confusing sentences. Even the first sentence is a nightmare to read. I’ll try again when I have more focus!
And yes, we have no free will. Not sure if that’s related to this piece.
Fwiw nothing with outside influence is automata as the true randomness from quantum phenomena propagates.
Eg. If you take in real world visual input to a system that from that point on is deterministic the output of that system is now non-deterministic. Similar to how Shrodinger talked about the macro scale cat being alive and dead at the same time.
So the arguments that the neurons in the brain are deterministic or that the transistors in a computer are deterministic breaks down at the first introduction of real world input. The outputs of those systems actually aren't deterministic at all.
As far as we've been able to determine, almost all macroscopic objects can be behaviorally described in terms of classical physics, and this includes neurons.
Even in rare cases where quantum effects are seen, such as photosynthesis, or radioactive decay, it's extremely localized. The fact that a plant's efficiency of conversion of light to chemical energy appears to use quantum effects doesn't affect the rest of the plant or turn it into some "Schrodringer's cabbage" thought experiment. We can still understand the rest of the plant in classical terms.
Even if it were to be discovered that neurons are sometimes (or even always for that matter) behaving randomly due to quantum effects, that would not mean that we have free will and are not automata. It would just mean we are non-deterministic automata.
There can be macro objects with non-determinism. The cat in the box in the Shrodinger experiment has deterministic neurons but you don't actually know the state of the cat as a whole due to the initial quantum event that set the entirity of the cat on one path or another.
This is where the entire problem with the thought that systems are deterministic or not comes into play. If there's a single photon that can hit a pixel on a sensor (or retina) or not and that ultimately has a cascading effect to make that larger object do something completely different or not then that larger object is non-deterministic as a whole. Yes as others have stated there's ways in which non-deterministic inputs can end up not mattering - the system has the same output. But there's also systems, eg. the cat in the box experiment, where the macro object ends up taking on the non-determinism of a single quantum event.
An AI that can behaive one way or the other based on what it read into the sensor input is absolutely as non-deterministic as that input. Likewise humans are as non-deterministic as their inputs. If a photon can hit your eye today and cause a flash of light that sets you on the path of doing something you otherwise wouldn't have done it doesn't matter if your neurons are essentially a machine or not. You are still non-deterministic. The focus on neurons being deterministic or not kind of misses the bigger picture. We absolutely live in a non-deterministic world and those inputs from this world cause ourselves to ultimately be non-deterministic.
This really gets down to the regularly discussed thought experiment of simulating a human. If you fully simulated a human with non-deterministic inputs everywhere you probably would indeed have a fully deterministic system. But that's just not how the real world environment a human is in behaves.
It's not at all clear how quantum mechanics in general, or a thought experiment like Shrodinger's cat, should be interpreted.
In the lab one can perhaps coax a few atoms near absolute zero into a superimposed state, but not a large room temperature object like a cat, so that particular thought experiment is just that - not an observed experimental outcome.
Is quantum randomness actually real, or just a reflection of an imperfect model of reality ?
In any case, isn't William James really just considering the issue of free will ? If the world, including ourselves, is just an automata evolving according to (say) Schrodinger's equation, then does it really make any difference if it's deterministic or not ? Even at a classical level the future is unpredictable due to chaotic dynamics, and from a subjective (presumably misleading) POV we have free will, regardless of what the reality is.
I don't understand why you're making this argument. It seems to basically be about the semantics of "deterministic" (or not) when composing different systems, which isn't really relevant to the original point.
Just because some macro systems can be non-deterministic doesn't mean they all are. If you have non-deterministic binary inputs to an AND gate, do you really mean to say the AND gate is not deterministic?
The statistical effects that reliably turn individual gas molecule motion into PV=nRT, are just as reliable in biochemistry.
There's an entire field of deterministic mathematics called Chaos Theory, that pretty much encompasses what it says on the tin.
It turns out that -innocent, simple looking- finite state deterministic automata can actually be less predictable than the non-deterministic kind. (and it can get pretty wild! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2vgICfQawE )
Sure - not everything that looks random is random. How about Stephan Wolfram's finite automata "Rule 30" for another example.
But anyways, neurons don't even APPEAR to be acting randomly - they appear to obeying the laws of chemistry, and behaving in meticulously studied and well understood ways.
As said before in this thread, that won't give you free will, and elsewhere on HN, that you won't even get an uncaused cause. Think of your brain as a cryptographic hash function running on a non-reversible computer mixing the quantum noise into its state if you want, so you get your avalanche effect and chaos theory stuff (though I think that's majorly overstating it, people don't behave that erratically). See Good and Real by Gary L. Drescher (2006), but also see my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38789146
I see no reason why that can't be modeled as an automata? Nondeterministic automata are still automata. I think your meanings of 'deterministic' are confused- it's about impulse response. A little bit of stochasticity in the thermal voltage doesn't ruin the determinacy of a computers ALU operational modes.
Deterministic systems, or at least highly predictable ones, can arise for non-deterministic components, as for example the Boltzmann equation demonstrates. Other examples include the models that we build of automata on machines made of matter made of non-deterministic particles.
These arguments aren't new.
This is good argument for why tech/science/stem need to read history, or 'older' science history. To at least be familiar with the science that has come before, either to know what was discarded, to be familiar with past dead ends, or forgotten knowledge that could still have value.
A lot of the AI spurred arguments in the last year seem like so much re-hashing since they were being discussed in 1879.