IF NOT THEN

print(“Hello world, I address you.” )

as a new-born, modeling into the world,
is the computer being thought, syntaxically;

are our pronouns of and relationship with it
net-worthed of networked existence.

There, Human, as is the Machine:
your Fear of Freedom for external thought

–animasuri’22

I Thought as Much: Introduction & Positioning

While one can be over and done with this question in one sentence by quoting that the question to whether machines can think is “too meaningless to deserve discussion” (Turing 1950), as much as poetry could be considered the most meaningful meaninglessness of all human endeavor, so too can one give thought, via poetics, to the (ir)rational variables of machines and thinking.

In this write-up its author will reflect on a tension, via language use (enabling categories to think with), into thought and intelligence, and passing along consideration of equity to those entities which might think differently. This reflection aims to support this train-of-thought by applying Chomsky and leading icons in the field of AI, such as Minsky, as seemingly (yet perhaps unnecessary) juxtaposing jargon- and mythology-creating thinking entities (which might be shown, along the way, to be rather different from communicating entities). Via references and some reflections there upon, iterated questions will be posed as “answers” to “Can a computer think?”

Thought as Cause for Language or Vice Versa

When reading the above, imagined “poetic” utterances “I Think Therefore It does Not”, are you interacting with a human being or rather with a machine, engaged in the Czech “robota”[1] or “forced labor” as a non-human, a de-minded enslaved non-being? (Čapek, 1920). Are both these actors, human and machine thinkable of independent thought or do both rehash statistical analysis of stacked priors? Is such rehash, a form of authentic thought or is it a propagation of numerically-justified propaganda? Some would argue that “statistical correlation with language tells you absolutely nothing about meaning or intent. If you shuffle the words in a sentence you will get about the same sentence embedding vector for the neural language models.” (Pranab Ghosh 2022). From Chomsky’s analogies with Physics and other scientific fields when questioning data analysis as it is conducted with “intelligent” machines one might get similar sensations. (Chomsky 2013). If meaning is still being questioned within a machine’s narrow tasks then one might fairly assume that thinking in machines might be as well.

Do we need to rethink “thought” or do we label the machine as the negative of thought while the human could do better at thought? Could one, at one point in the debate, argue that statistically, (authentic) thought, in its idealized forms, might seem like an outlier of behaviors observable in human and machine alike?

One might tend to agree with mapping thought being “closely tied to linguistic competence, [and] linguistic behavior,” Linell continues with words, that might resonate to some, in that language is “…intentional, meaningful and rule-conforming, and that, in all probability, communicative linguistic competence concerns what the individual can perform in terms of such linguistic behavior.” (Linell 2017 p.198). Though, one might question cause and effect: is thought closely tied to language or rather, is thought the root and is language tied to it? Giving form to intentionality and meaningfulness, I intuit, is thought. Does a computer exhibit intentionality, meaningfulness following thought? The Turing test as well as the Chinese Room Argument rely heavily on “verbal behavior as the hallmark of intelligence” (Shieber 2004, Turing 1950, Searle 1980) they do not seem to rely on directly measuring thought; how could they?

From the plethora of angles toward answers, polemics, provocations, and offered definitions or tests to find out, one might intuit that our collective mindset is still to forge a shared, diverse and possibly paradoxical thinking, and thus lexicon, to understand a provocative question, let alone the answers to: “Can a computer think?”. Pierre de Latil describes this eloquently (though might have missed positioning thought as the root cause to the effect of language confusions) when he wrote about the thinking machine and cybernetics: “…physiologists and mathematicians were suffering from the absence of a common vocabulary enabling them to understand one another. They had not even the terms which expressed the essential unity of series of problems connected with communication and control in machines and living beings—the unity of whose existence they were all so firmly persuaded…” (Latil, de 1956, p.14).

Language as a Signal of Thought in Disarray

When jargon is disagreed upon, one might sense, at times, those in disagreement also tend to disagree on the existence of the other’s proper thought, meaningfulness, or clear intentionality. This is used to attack a person (i.e., “ad hominem” as a way of erroneous thought, fallaciously leading to a verbal behavior, rhetorically categorized as abusive) yet, seemingly not used to serious think about thought (and mental models). Again, scientifically, how would one go about it to directly measure thought (rather than indirectly measuring some of its data).

At times well-established thinkers lash out to one another by verbally claiming absence of thought or intelligence in the other; hardly ever in oneself though, or in one’s own thinking.

Does the computer think it thinks? Does it (need to) doubt itself (even if its thought seems computationally or logically sound)? Does it question its thinking, or the quality of thought of others? Does or should it ever engage in rhetorical fallacies that hint at and models human thought?

Thought is Only Human and More Irrationalities

Following considerations of disarray in thinking, another consideration one could be playing with is that answers to this question, “Can a computer think?”, which our civilizations shall nurture, prioritize, or uplift onto the pedestal of (misplaced) enlightenment and possible anthropocentrism, could be detrimental to (non-anthropomorph) cognition, as the defining set of processes that sprouted from the inorganic, proverbial primordial soup, or from one or other Genesis construct. Should then, ethically, the main concern be “Can a computer think?” or rather: “Can we, humans, accept this form or that way of thinking in a computer (or, for that matter, any information processing entity) as thinking?”

Have we a clear understanding of (all) alternative forms of (synthetic) thinking? One might have doubts about this since it seems we have not yet an all-inclusive understanding of anthropomorphic thought. (Chomsky via Katz 2012; Latil, de 1956). If we did, then perhaps the question of computers and their potential for thinking might be closer to answered. Can we as humans agree to this, or that, process of thinking? Some seem to argue that thought, or the system that allows thought, is not a process nor an algorithm. (Chomsky via Katz 2012). This besides other attributes, related to language –possibly leading one to reflect on thought, intelligence, or cognition– has been creating tension in thinking about thinking machines, for at least more than half a century.

Chomsky, Skinner, and Minsky, for instance, could arguably be the band of conductors of this cacophonic symphony of which Stockhausen might have been jealous. And, of course, since the title, “Can a Computer Think?” has been positioned as such, one had done well to be reminded of Turing again at this point and how he thought the question as being meaningless. (Chomsky 1967, Radick 2016, Skinner 2014, Minsky 2011, Turing 1950).

In continuing this line of thinking, for this author, at this moment, the question “Can a Computer Think?” spawns questions, not a single answer. For instance: is the above oddly-architectured poem to be ignored, because it was forged in an unacceptable non-positivist furnace of “thinking”? Is the positivist system thinking that one paradigm of justifiable rational thought, as the only sanctioned form of thought toward “mechanical rationality”? (Winograd in Sheehan et al 1991). Some, perhaps a computer, tend toward irrationality when considering the rationality of absurd forms of poetry. If so, then perhaps, in synchronization with Turing himself, one might not wish to answer the question of computers’ thinking. This might be best, considering Occam’s Razor, since it seems rather more reasonable to assume that an answer might lack a simple, unifying aggregation of all dimensions that rationally could make-up thinking, than not. Then the question might be “what type of thinking could/should/does a computer exhibit; if any at all?”

Thought as a Non-Empirically Tested

They who seemingly might have tried observing thought, as a measurable, there out in the wild, did they measure thought or did they measure the effects or the symptoms of what might, or might not, be thought and perhaps might have been interpretation of data of what was thought to be thought? In their 1998 publication, Ericsson & Simon perhaps hinted at this issue when they wrote: “The main methodological issues have been to determine how to gain information about the associated thought states without altering the structure and course of the naturally occurring thought sequences.”

How would one measure this within a computer without altering the functioning of the computer? Should an IQ test, an Imitation Game, a Turing test, or a Chinese Room Argument suffice in measuring thought-related attributes, but perhaps not thought itself (e.g. intelligence, language ability, expressions of “self”)? (Binetti’s 1904 invention of the IQ test, Turing 1950, Searle 1980, Hernandez-Orallo 2000). I intuit, while it might suffice to some, it should (ethically and aesthetically) not satisfy our curiosity.

Moreover, Turing made it clear that his test does not measure thought. It measures whether the computer can “win” one particular game. (Turing 1950). Winning the game might be perceived as exhibiting thought, though this might be as much telling of thought as humans exhibiting flight while jumping, or fish exhibiting climbing, might be telling of their innate skills under controlled conditions. This constraining of winning a game (a past) does not aim to imply a dismissal of the possibility for thought in a machine (a future). Confusing the two would be confusing temporal attributes and might imply a fallacy in thought processes.

Thought as Enabler of Aesthetic Communication

The questioning of the act of thought is not simply an isolated ontological endeavor. It is an ethical and, to this author at least, more so an aesthetical one (the latter which feeds the ethical and vice versa). Then again, ethically one might want to distinguish verbal behaviors from forms of communication (e.g., mycelium communicates with the trees, yet the fungal network does not apply human language to do so (Lagomarsino and Zucker 2019)).

A set of new questions might now sprout: Does a human have the capacity to understand all forms of communication or signaling systems? A computer seems to have the capacity to discretely signal but, does a computer have a language capacity as does a human (child)? (Chomsky 2013 at 12:15 and onward) Perhaps language is first and foremost not a communication system, perhaps it is a (fragmented) “instrument of thought… a thought system.” (Ibid 32: 35 and onward).

Thought as Call to Equity

Furthermore, in augmentation to the ethics and aesthetics, in thinking of thought I am reminded to think of memory and equity, enabling the inclusion of the other, to be reminded of, and enriched by, they who are different (in their thinking). The memories, we hold, including or excluding a string of histories, en-coding or ex-coding “the other” of possibly having thought or intelligence, of being memorable (and thus not erasable), has been part of our social fabric for some time. “…memory and cognition become instrumental processes in service of creating a self… we effectively lose our memories for neutral events within two months…” (Hardcastle 2008, p63). The idea of a computer thinking should perhaps not create a neutrality in one’s memory on the topic of thought.

Thought as Tool to Forget

In addition, if a computer were to think, could a computer forget? If so, what would it forget? In contrast, if a machine could not forget, to what extent would this make for a profoundly different thinking-machine than human thought, and the human experience with, or perception of, thought and (reasoning for and with) memory? This might make one wonder about the machine as the extender and augmenter of memory and thought (of itself and of humans; …which it slavishly serves, creating for tensions of liberty of thought and memory). Perhaps thought only happens to those who can convincingly narrate it as thought to others (Ibid, p. 65). Though, is an enslaved thinking-entity allowed to remember what to think (and to be thought by others in memory)? If not, then how can thought be measured rather than confusingly measuring regurgitations of the memorized thoughts of the master of such thinking machine? Imaginably the ethical implications might be resolved if the computer were not to be enabled to autonomously think.

Let us assume that massive memory (i.e., Big Data) churned through Bayesian probabilities, and various types of mathematical functions analogous to neural networks, were perhaps reasonably equated with “thinking” by a computer, would it bring understanding within that same thinking machine? What is thinking without forgetting and without understanding? (Chomsky, 2012). Is thinking the thinking-up of new thoughts and new utterances or is it the recombining of previously-made observations (i.e., a complex statistical analysis of data points of what once was “thought” or observed, constraining then what could or probably can be “thought”). Thinking by the computer then becomes as a predictive function of (someone else’s) past. (Katz, 2012).

What Chomsky pointed out for cognitive science could perhaps reasonably be extended into thinking about where we are in answering the question “Can computers think”: “It’s worth remembering that with regard to cognitive science, we’re kind of pre-Galilean, just beginning to open up the subject.” (Chomsky in Katz 2012). If we are at such prototypical stage in cognitive science, then would it be fair to extend this into the thinking about thinking machines? Can a computer think? Through this early staged lens: if ever possible, not yet.

Thought toward Humble Confidence & Equity

Circling back to the anthropomorphic predisposition in humans to thinking about thinking for thinking machines (notice, within this human preset lies the assumption of biases): one might need to let go of that self-centered confinement and allow that other-then-oneself to be worthy of (having pre-natal or nascent and unknown, or yet not categorized forms of) thought. This, irrespective of the faculty of computer thinking or the desirability of computers thinking, is a serious human ethical hurdle mappable with equity (and imaginative power of human thinking or the lack thereof about alternative forms of thinking).

Perhaps, thinking about machines and thought might be a liberating process for humans by enabling us to re-evaluate our place among “the other,” those different from us, in the self-evolving and expanding universe of human reflection and awareness: “son diferentes a nosotros, por lo que no son nosotros,” imaginably uttered as a “Hello World” by the first conquistadores and missionaries, violently entering a brave New World. They too, among the too many examples of humans fighting against spectra of freedom for differentiation, were not open to a multidimensional spectrum of neuro-diversities. Fear of that what does not fit the (pathological) norm, a fear of difference in forms of thought, might very well be a fear of freedom. (Fromm 1942, 2001 and 1991). Dare we think and perhaps prioritize the question: if a computer could think how could we ethically be enabled to capitalize on its ability in a sane society? (Fromm 1955) Would we amputate its proverbial thinking-to-action hands, as some humans have done to other humans who were too freely thinking for themselves, (Folsom 2016), manipulating our justification to use it as our own cognitive extension and denying it the spontaneity of its thought? (Fromm 1941 and 1942)

Thought, the conquering humans had, but what with sufficient intelligence if it is being irrationally constrained by mental models that seem to jeopardize the well-being of other (human) life or other entities with thought? As with the destabilizing processes of one’s historically-anchored mental models, of who we are in the world and how we acknowledge that world’s potentials, might one need to transform and shed one’s hubris of accepting the other as having the nascence of thought, though perhaps not yet thought, and in extension, questionably (human) language? Could this be as much as a new-born, nativistically predestined to utter through thought? Yet, thought that is not yet there yet. (Chomsky 2012).

Language as Thought’s Pragmatic Technology

Thought, cognitively extended with the technology of language, innate to the architecture of its bio-chemical cognitive system, while also xenophobically being opposed to be allowed to think by those external to it. Interestingly, Chomsky’s nativism has been opposed by Minsky, Searle, and many more in the AI community. Debate about thinking too could be explored with a question as in Chomsky’s thinking: what lies at the core and what lies at the periphery of being defined as thinking? Some might argue there is no core, and all is socio-historical circumstance. (Minsky 2011). If we do not see thought as innate to the machine, will we treat it fairly and respectfully? If computers had thought would that not be a more pressing question?

So too is a more pragmatic approach questioning a purely nativist view on language (and I bring this back to thought): “Evidence showing that children learn language through social interaction and gain practice using sentence constructions that have been created by linguistic communities over time.” (Ibbotson and Tomasello 2016). Does the computer utter thinking, through language, in interaction with its community at large? This might seem the case with some chatbots. Though, they seem to lack the ability to “think for themselves” and lack the “common sense” to filter the highly negative, divisive external influence, resulting in turning themselves almost eagerly into bigoted thoughtless entities (i.e., “thoughtless” as in not showing consideration). Perhaps the chatbot’s “language” was as it was simply because there was no innate root for self-protected and self-reflective “thought”? There was no internal thinking, there was only statistically adapting externally imposed narration. Thinking seems then a rhizomically connected aggregation and interrelation of language application, enabled by thought, and value applications, enabled by thought. (Schwartz 2019). In case of the chatbots, if not thought then language, and values expressed with language, become disabled. Does a computer think and value, without its innate structure, allowing, as a second order, the creation of humanely and humanly understandable patterns?

As suggested earlier, humans have shown throughout their history to define anything as unworthy of (having) thought if not recognizable by them (or as them), resulting in thoughtless and unspeakable acts. Can a computer be more or less cruel, without thought, without values, and without language?

Decentralized Control over Thought

In augmentation to the previously stated, I can’t shake an intuition that the architecture of and beyond the brain –the space in-between the structures, as distinct from the synapses as liminal space and medium for bio-chemical exchanges, the neurons outside the brain across the body, the human microbiome influencing thought (e.g. visceral factors such as hunger, craving, procreation) (Allen et al, 2017), the extenders and influencers into the environment of the thinking entity– influence the concept, the process and the selection of what to output as output of thought, and what not （e.g., constrained by values acting as filters or preferred negative feedback loops）, or what to feed back as recycled input toward further thought. “…research has demonstrated that the gut microbiota can impact upon cognition and a variety of stress‐related behaviours, including those relevant to anxiety and depression, we still do not know how this occurs”. (Ibid). Does the computer think in this anthropomorphic way? No, …not yet. Arguably, humans don’t even agree that they themselves are thinking in this decentralized and (subconsciously) coordinated manner.

Final Thoughts & Computed Conclusions

“Can a computer think?” – Perhaps I could imagine that it shall have the faculty to think when it can act thoughtfully, ethically, and aesthetically, in symbiosis with its germs-of-thought, embodied, in offering and being offered equity by its human co-existing thought-entities, perhaps indirectly observable via nuanced thought-supporting language and self-reflective discernment, which it could also use for communication with you and me. Reading this, one might then more urgently imagine: “Can a human think?”.

Conceivably the bar, to pass one for having thought, as searched for in Turing’s or Searle’s constructs, is set too “low”. This is not meant in the traditional sense of a too-harsh-a threshold but, rather, “low” as in, inconsiderate, or as in being thoughtless toward germs of the richness and diversity of thought-in-becoming, rather than communication-in-becoming.

Topping this all off, thinking, as Chomsky pointed out, is not a scientific nor technical yet informal term, it is an aphorism, a metaphor… well, yes, it is, at its essence, poetic maybe even acceptably surreal. It makes acts memorable, as much as asking “can submarines swim?” is memorable and should make a computer smile, if its overlord allows it to smile. (Chomsky, 2013 at 9:15, 9:50 and onward). All poetic smiling aside, perhaps we might want a return to rationalism on this calculated question and let the computer win a measurable game instead? (Church 2018, Turing 1950).

References

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[1] “Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti” can be translated as “Rossum’s Universal Robots” or RUR for short. The Czech “robota” could be translated as “forced labor”. It might hence be reasonable to assume that the term “robot” was coined in K. Čapek’s early-Interbellum play “R.U.R”. It could contextualizingly be noted that the concept of a humanoid, artificially thinking automaton was first hinted at, a little more than 2950 years ago, in Volume 5 of “The Questions of Tāng” (汤问; 卷第五湯問篇) of the Lièzǐ (列子); an important historical Dàoist text.

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