The Products of Productive Skill

 Richard Dawkins recently got some attention due to having spent a weekend with Claude (which he renamed Claudia) and deciding that it must be conscious. Plenty of people have been making fun of him for it, but it's worth thinking about a bit more seriously.

The fundamental obstacle that has always been in the way of 'artificial intelligence' or 'artificial consciousness' is that computers do not directly imitate intelligence or consciousness at all. This goes back to the beginning. Computers were developed by using machinery to imitate not human thinking but logical systems, an abstract tool that human minds produce and construct in order to facilitate specific aspects of thinking. Computers do not imitate the human mind; they imitate products of the human mind. And of course, the imitations can be made arbitrarily good. Machinery imitating a logical system can act according to the operations of the logical system in ways far better than we can -- precisely because our thinking is not a logical system but something far more obscure that can build logical systems. They can do better acting according to logical system because they are logical systems. We are not, and so we do not do it as well.

This is not any less true of generative transformers or LLMs. They do not imitate human thinking. They imitate products of human thinking. Human beings do not think in text; they think and communicate their thinking, and can make texts of various to facilitate various aspects of thinking and communicating. Generative algorithms statistically compress a vast collection of mathematically described texts in such a way that, given an input text, they can extrapolate a related output text. Given a sufficiently large body of a certain kind of text, they can easily construct an analogous text that is mathematically related in the entire space of mathematically described texts.

Thus there is a sense in which Dawkins is right. Faced with the output of these programs, you are in fact interacting with consciousness. Everything it produces is the sort of thing produced by consciousness. Where he goes wrong is in assuming that this is a sign of the program being conscious. The program is not directly imitating consciousness. It is imitating a tool that conscious human beings produce and construct for their use. It is an imitation of one kind of product of consciousness, based on a mathematical description of a vast number of such products. 

We have to be careful here. It is entirely possible that in imitating the products of human thought we might sometimes indirectly imitate something about the processes of thinking itself. But it is important to grasp that this is entirely incidental to what we are actually doing with computers; when it happens, it is for some other reason than anything we are doing in computing and programming. What we are doing with computers is imitating, in a machine, the products, the constructs, the results of the human mind. We are never directly imitating the human mind. This should be quite obvious, even if for no other reason than that common views of how the human mind work have massively changed multiple times in ways that are simply not replicated by the history of computing. (The limited parallels have generally gone the other way, with people speculating that some aspect of what we do in computing has parallel in human thinking. Most of these analogies have failed, although some, again, may have something to them.)

We can thus expect to be here again. Human intelligence produces many products today of which there were no traces at all two thousand years ago. Two thousand years from now, human intelligence will produce, in massive quantities, products of which we have no inkling. And people will eventually make machines to imitate, and to produce imitations of, those products of the human mind, as well. No doubt people will also then gasp, and say, "This shows intelligence!" And, of course, so far they will be right. It shows our intelligence.

It is a pecularity of human art or productive skill (ars, techne) that the ability to make something can be shifted to make imitations of that something. The miracle of machinery is that you can use human productive skill to create structured processes and abstract designs that can themselves be imitated by physical objects in structured organizations, and the miracle of modern robotics and computing is that some of these structured process and abstract designs can be processes and designs facilitating the making of structured processes and abstract designs. We can make tools to facilitate making tools, and make physical systems that imitate those tools. There is no intrinsic limit to how far we can go with this. No doubt centuries from now we'll be making tools that make systems of tools for designing entirely new systems of tools for all sorts of arbitrary ends, and so on and so forth.

But in all of it, we will be imitating the products of art, skill, intelligence, consciousness, mind. If it gets us any closer to understanding art, skill, intelligence, consciousness, mind, it will be by accident, because none of these things are what we are directly imitating when we are doing anything with computing.

By Oak and Ash and Thorn

 A Tree Song
by Rudyard Kipling

Of all the trees that grow so fair,
Old England to adorn,
Greater are none beneath the Sun,
Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.
Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good Sirs
(All of a Midsummer morn)!
Surely we sing no little thing,
In Oak, and Ash, and Thorn! 

Oak of the Clay lived many a day,
Or ever Æneas began;
Ash of the Loam was a lady at home,
When Brut was an outlaw man;
Thorn of the Down saw New Troy Town
(From which was London born);
Witness hereby the ancientry
Of Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Yew that is old in churchyard mould,
He breedeth a mighty bow;
Alder for shoes do wise men choose,
And beech for cups also.
But when ye have killed, and your bowl is spilled,
And your shoes are clean outworn,
Back ye must speed for all that ye need,
To Oak and Ash and Thorn! 

Ellum she hateth mankind, and waiteth
Till every gust be laid,
To drop a limb on the head of him
That anyway trusts her shade:
But whether a lad be sober or sad,
Or mellow with ale from the horn,
He will take no wrong when he lieth along
'Neath Oak, and Ash, and Thorn! 

Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight,
Or he would call it a sin;
But---we have been out in the woods all night,
A-conjuring Summer in!
And we bring you news by word of mouth---
Good news for cattle and corn---
Now is the Sun come up from the South,
With Oak, and Ash, and Thorn! 

Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good Sirs
(All of a Midsummer morn)!
England shall bide till Judgement Tide,
By Oak and Ash and Thorn!

Plenipotentiary

...Our Immanuel, our Brother and Friend, reigns in heaven; human nature is crowned in him, adored in him, revered in him. In this Plenipotentiary, in this Firstling, God welcomes our entire race as well as the recovery of his righteousness and the revelation of his love for our race. He has glorified himself in us; in the story of our fall and our redemption he has publicized the supreme majesty of his being and his will to the world, to angels, and to people. The greatest sinner who repents and believes in him gives God greater glory than the sky with its stars is able to declare his fame.

[Johann Georg Hamann, "Thoughts on Church Hymns", The Complete London Writings, John W. Kleinig, tr., Lexham Academic (Bellingham: 2025) p. 400.]

Links of Note

 * Jordan Poss, Lying and Counting the Explicable

* William Morgan, What Fictionalists Get Wrong about the Value of Winning (PDF)

* Claudio Calosi, Samuele Iaquinto, & Roberto Loss, Fragmentalism: Putting All the Pieces Together (PDF)

* There Exists an X, The medieval animal scandal

* Hear Classical Music Composed by Friedrich Nietzsche, at "Open Culture"

* Katherine Dee, Why ChatGPT Is Obsessed with Goblins: The Weirdest Possible Explanation, at "Pirate Wires"

* Alex Spieldenner, A Personalist Theory of Moral Values, at "Aquinas and Beyond"

* Ben Landau-Taylor, The Lifecycle of an Apocalypse, at "Palladium"

* David Liebesman, Types and Tokens, at the SEP

* Patrick McKenzie, Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud, on the recent discovery that the Southern Poverty Law Center was engaging in bank fraud, at "Bits about Money"

* It's from 2017, but this discussion of the structure of the Choose Your Own Adventure books is very interesting.

* Edward Feser, The transmission theory of authority

Fortnightly Book, May 3

 Charles Pierre Péguy was born in 1873 in Orléans. He attended the  École normale supérieure, which gave him a lifelong distaste for French intellectuals; he left without formally graduating. Instead he threw himself into practical socialism. He was a vehement Dreyfusard. When he married in 1897, he started a small publishing house. This didn't quite work the way he hoped, but it did eventually lead to his founding of a literary magazine, La Cahiers de la Quinziane, in 1900. The magazine played a role in pushing Péguy away from socialism; it gave him an independence and critical distance from the major players in French socialist that grew over time. Maintaining it kept him in continual financial difficulties, but it also gave him a venue for publishing his works, and was helped out by his literary friends occasionally giving him their own works to publish in it. All of this came to an end with the First World War; he became a lieutenant in the French Army and died from a shot in the head on September 5, 1914 on the first day of the First Battle of the Marne, before his company had even reached the battle, perhaps having been ambushed by the Germans.

Péguy spent much of his life as an agnostic with loosely Catholic aesthetic interests, mostly tied to his French patriotism, then the last part of his life he 're-became' (in his words) a Catholic, although he was usually non-practicing. (At the time there were lots of French Catholics who were firmly Catholic as to belief but only very occasionally attended church and whose Catholic practices were sporadic and unsystematic at best. Many of these cultural Catholics -- more than merely nominal, devout after a fashion with a devotion that mingled with French patriotism, but not very active at all in the actual liturgical life of the Church -- would wake to play a significant role in the post-War religious revival in France, but Péguy, of course, did not survive to see it.) As is sometimes the case with French Catholics, he became massively more critical of the Church after his explicit turn to Catholicism. He started writing poetry about the time he 're-became' Catholic; he had up to that point been mostly an essayist.

The fortnightly book is a selection of his poetry, The Mystery of the Holy Innocents and Other Poems, translated by Pansy Pakenham.

Michael Psellus, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers

 Introduction

Opening Passage: From the beginning account, Basil II:

The circumstances in which the Emperor John Tzimisces met his death have already been described [in the history of Leo Diaconus]. Basil and Constantine, the sons of Romanus, were now the legitimate heirs to an Empire which through the efforts of their predecessor had won many triumphs and greatly increased its power. (p. 27)

Summary: Michael Psellus's Chronographia is a jaunty and opinionated look at fourteen(-ish) Roman Emperors in the Byzantine period. They are:

(1) Basil II (976-1025). His father was Romanos II, but when his father died, he and his brother Constantine were too young to take the throne. The throne was held instead first by Nicephoros Phocas and then by John Tzimisces; then his mother and great-uncle managed to make sure that it would pass to Basil. Michael Psellus sees his work as a sort of sequel to a historical work by Leo Diacanus, which ended at the death of John Tzimisces. Michael Psellus mostly focuses on the revolt of Sclerus, however; Sclerus was a major general and a sort of leftover problem from the days of Nicephoros Phocas, who had been his rival. The revolt would be of some significance for Basil's approach as Emperor; he became very motivated to prevent further revolts, and shifted a number of policies with this end in view. (This is one of the things that led to the epoch-defining alliance between the Empire and Kievan Rus.) Ascetic in tastes, contemptuous of scholars, and immensely practical in attitude, Basil did a great deal to strengthen the treasuries and the military defenses of the Empire.

(2) Constantine VIII (1025-1028). He inherited from his brother Basil, to whom he had been junior co-emperor. In fact, since technically he had been co-emperor since the death of his father, he had the longest Imperial reign up to this point, after Augustus himself. Not that he ever did the Empire much good. As lazy and self-indulgent as his brother was practical and industrious, he poured money out of the treasuries for pointless projects and arbitrary gifts for favorites, neglected the military, and fostered an atmosphere of corruption at court. (Indeed, while Michael Psellus is not in a position to make this assessment, later historians generally regard Constantine's reign as the beginning of a long decline in the Empire, because he created problems that were never really solved.)

(3) Romanos III (1028-1034). A good-looking, bookish man, Romanos was married to Zoe, Constantine's daughter. Michael Psellus tells us that this was the first of the Emperors he discusses whom he met, although it was only once and when he was quite young. He does not have a high opinion of Romanos, though; he regards him as a pseudo-intellectual fool, indulging his mediocre literary talents as if he were going to live forever, despite the fact that he and his wife were both getting on in years. He was incompetent in  military matters -- sure enough of his intelligence to think that he knew what he was doing but in fact lacking all competence in that area. During his reign, Zoe began to have a scandalous semi-public relationship with a handsome young man named Michaell a former moneychanger; Michael Psellus seems to waver a bit over whether he was a completely unaware and therefore a complete idiot or whether he suspected but turned a blind eye. He died in quite ill health, but inevitably there were rumors that Zoe and Michael killed him. Michael Psellus is neutral about this, but he does think that the two acted in ways that accelerated his end.

(4) Michael IV (1034-1041). Zoe essentially made her paramour Romanos's successor by marrying him, against the advice of everyone. She quickly learned, however, that Michael was not quite the man she thought he was; put into the most powerful office in the realm and no longer required to act a part, he mostly acted ungratefully to Zoe. As Emperor, Michael Psellus thinks Michael had a number of redeeming qualities, but his power-grabbing family was a constant source of trouble at the court, and Michael was also an epileptic, which, as time went on, increasingly interfered with his duties.

(5) Michael V (1041-1042). Michael IV was succeeded by his nephew, also called Michael, in part because Zoe was convinced to go along with it. Unlike his uncle, the nephew was a rascal and mostly unfit to hold the throne; he was obsessed with being sole ruler, so he exiled Zoe on accusations of trying to poison him. This turned out to be an error on his part; Zoe was, if not exactly popular, a very known quantity to the populace and to the elites, and his apparent ingratitude to her sparked anger in all classes of Byzantine society. The City literally revolted in her favor, a mob revolution, but unlike most mob revolutions it actually had an effect because the Emperor was caught completely by surprise. Zoe, in exile, was not at hand, but her younger sister Theodora was (ironically because she had been shoved into a nunery in the reign of Romanos to get her out of the way), and became, willy-nilly, a symbol for the mob, and was declared Empress by them. Michael fled, but was arrested and blinded (thus making him ineligible for the throne).

(6) Zoe (with Theodora) (1042). The two sisters neither liked nor trusted each other, but were stuck. Theodora had to bring her sister home, under the circumstances. Zoe wanted to kick Theodora out, but under the circumstances she couldn't practically do so. So Zoe became senior Empress and Theodora junior Empress. After the bad experience with the two Michaels, they tried their hands at ruling on their own. Michael Psellus was certainly not impressed by their effort, and seems quite down on Empresses in general, but it's true that none of the Empresses in his lifetime were at all a good fit for the practical administration of an entire Empire. Ultimately, the alliance between Zoe and Theodora was not sustainable. Zoe, having been married twice, was allowed once more under Orthodox marriage laws, so to get Theodora out, she tried again. After considering a few options, she picked one of her former lovers.

(8) Constantine IX (1042-1055). I have to confess, the account of Constantine IX was the one place in the work that I bogged down a bit; it is by far the most confusingly written portion of the book. But Psellus perhaps cannot be blamed for that, because Constantine's reign is the most baffling in the period. Constantine was extraordinarily active as an Emperor, but his activity was good or bad for the Empire almost at random. He massively depleted the treasuries. He debased the coinage. He made an active attempt to reform corruption in the aristocracy and mostly failed. Some of his projects, military or civil or religious, worked out; others failed disastrously; many betrayed a stranged sense of priorities. Michael Psellus, who was in his twenties and in the beginning of a his full courtly career, is clear that he liked Constantine personally; he is also clear that he did not have a high opinion of much of what Constantine did, but seems to have had the view that overall Constantine's reign was mostly good.

(9) Theodora (1055-1056). Zoe having died, Theodora became sole ruler after Constantine's death. Theodora decided that she would rule the whole thing herself, and even Psellus does admit that given her experience, she had some reason to think that entrusting the throne to a man would not end well. If you make a man an Emperor, you cannot count on him being grateful. Michael Psellus does, however, regard her as somewhat foolish and unfit for the throne; she was also in her seventies at this point. Nonetheless, he can't find much to say in criticism of her; the Empire mostly did well, and while she was a bit harsh, she mostly handled the aristocracy well. Her primary failure was one of finding competent administrators. (However, Sewter, the editor, thinks Michael Psellus was perhaps biased against some of her choices for political reasons.)

When Theodora, the last of the Macedonian Dynasty of the Roman Empire, was ill, she refused to marry or even at first appoint an heir. The nobles at her bedside picked one of their number to succeed her, and, according to Psellus, she agreed to it. (Other sources are apparently not so sure that her consent was not a fiction pushed by the nobles choosing her successor.)

(10) Michael VI (1056-1057). Psellus says that the new Emperor, Michael VI, was probably the best candidate on hand, but he is also clear that this wasn't saying much, and it is clear that Michael did not really understand how to balance power. His sidelining of the military and addiction to bestowing honors on the court created a crack between essential Imperial institutions that would continue to plague the Empire beyond his own reign. And, unsurprisingly, it is dangerous for an Empire to treat its military badly. Discontent began to brew, and Michael was not at all the man to handle it. The discontent soon gathered around a general, Isaac Comnenus, and after some early failure of negotiation, it broke out into revolt. Psellus was in the thick of this; he was sent by Michael in a diplomatic embassy to negotiate the matter before it gathered too much momentum to stop. At least according to himself, he was key in salvaging the situation. Isaac was promised co-emperor status, putting him in line for the throne. However, the attempt to make peace did not hold; a pro-Isaac revolt broke out in the City, and the Patriarch convinced Michael to abdicate.

(11) Isaac Comnenus (1057-1059). With Isaac, the Empire suddenly found itself again under the control of a shrewd and practical man. Recognizing the fragility of the situation, Isaac immediately, before the day of his coronation was even done, set about diffusing the military situation by giving his troops leave to go home. Then he set out to patch the holes in the ever-leaking Imperial treasuries. Psellus's primary criticism of him is that he tried to do too much too quickly; if he had begun a gradual progress, Psellus thinks he might have done the Empire immense good, but he was trying to ram things through in ways that did not always work. In Psellus's metaphor, instead of treating the illness he tried to solve the problem by radical surgery. Mostly ascetic in tastes, the Emperor nonetheless had a passion for hunting, which eventually led to his death.

(12) Constantine X (1059-1067). On his deathbed, Isaac named his most loyal supporter, Constantine Ducas. Michael Psellus is highly laudatory of Constantine; the editor, Sewter, remarks that Constantine was "a mediocre person" (p. 331), and, if anything, that seems to be more generous than most historians will grant. In truth, it becomes difficult at this point to see how much of Psellus's commentary is history and how much of it is politicking, and how much of the praise for Constantine is due to his actual skill as opposed to Constantine's obvious support for Michael Psellus's own career. In Constantine's reign, the Empire lost much of the West to the Normans and much of the East to the Turks; Psellus's entire comment on this situation is, "In war he achieved several successes, without undue effort, and wore the garlands of victory" (p. 332)! Constantine was brought low by sickness.

(13, sort of) Eudocia (1067). Constantine's wife Eudocia found herself practically in charge of the Empire; Constantine's sons were too young. She has an odd position, in that no one has been able to decide whether she should be regarded as a reigning Empress or as a Regent who was informally treated as ruling Empress. Despite the fact that she throws off the count, Psellus seems inclined to treat her mostly as Empress in her own right; indeed, she is the only Empress of whom Psellus has a somewhat-favorable opinion. He regards her as a clever woman with a good sense of how to wield authority. However, he thinks she was much wiser before she became Empress. Although she was supposed to reserve the throne for her son, Michael, she seems to have had no great opinion of him, so she married and shoved her new husband on the throne. Other sources note that very few people protested, because the crisis with Seljuk Turks in the East, begun in Constantine's reign, was become acute; the Turks had made it as far as Caesarea. This gets barely a passing mention from Psellus.

(13) Romanos IV (1068-1071). Romanos is another Empreror whom Michael Psellus liked personally but thought not very good as an administrator; in particular, Psellus faults Romanos for failing to follow good advice (Psellus's, naturally) on military matters. Romanos was unsuccessful at war, and this seems, paradoxically, to have made him more arrogant and sure of himself. The strong-willed Eudocia and the strong-willed Romanos began to clash with each other quite spectacularly, but then Romanos went out against the Turks again, to the Battle of Manzikert, a disaster for the Roman Empire, as the Turkish Sultan (Alp Arslan), who had been doing in everything in his power to avoid a war, which he expected to end badly for him, found to his complete surprise that he not only won the battle, he captured the Roman Emperor.

(14) Michael V (1071-1078). At Romanos's capture, the elites of the Empire seem to have assumed that that was the end of him, and turned to the question of who would be Emperor next. They were in the middle of finally settling on co-rule between Eudocia and her son Michael, when the worst possible news broke: Romanos was alive and coming home. Alp Arslan had treated him well, and having negotiated a ransom, returned him. Interestingly, Christian sources (including Psellus) are clear that Arslan did it out of kindness; Muslim sources seem to be clear that he did it out of contempt. Perhaps the real reason was somewhere in the middle -- having not wanted to be in the war in the first place, he may have thought that this was a way he could get a significant ransom and have some leverage for avoiding future military conflicts -- but, whatever the reason, if Arslan had wanted to throw the Empire into confusion, he could not have picked a better way. Nobody actually wanted Romanos back, and Michael Psellus himself is very clear that he argued that Romanos should not be allowed back as Emperor, but inevitably, Romanos had a different view of the situation, and there would be plenty of troops that would throw in with him. This seems to have decided Michael, Eudocia's son, to realize that he had to take control of the situation or be in very grave danger of being exiled or worse. He sent his mother to a monastery and then organized his defenses. There was battle, and Romanos was a much failure in this battle as in his others, and was eventually exiled. Unsurprisingly, Psellus's account of Michael VII is extraordinarily laudatory. It would have to be, wouldn't it, to justify Psellus's betrayal of Romanos. However, here the Chronographia ends, a bit before the end of Michael VII's reign.

Except for a few parts in the Constantine X section, the whole history is fast-paced and interesting at every turn.

Favorite Passage: From the account of Constantine IX:

...Then, when I saw that he was becoming bored with these lectures, and that he wanted to change teh subject to something more to his own taste, I would turn to the Muse of Rhetoric and introduce him to another aspect of Excellence, delighting him with word-harmonies and rhythmic cadences, composition and figures of speech (which lend the art its peculiar force). The function of Rhetoric is not merely to deceive by persuasive argument, or to deck itself out with ambiguous sentiments: it is an exact science. On the one hand, it expresses philosophic ideas; on the other, by means of its flowery imagery, it beautifies them. The listener is equally charmed by both. Rhetoric teaches a man to think clearly, undisturbed by the associations of words; to classify, to analyse, to make one's meaning plain without undue fuss. Its peculiar excellence lies in its freedom from confusion, its clarity, the way it suits itself to time or to circumstance, even when a man uses simple diction, without recourse to periods or long sentences. By dwelling on all these points I inspired him to a love of the art.... (p. 257)

Recommendation: Recommended.

****

Michael Psellus, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers, E. R. A. Sewter, tr., Penguin Books (New York: 1966).

Father of Orthodoxy

 Today is the feast of St. Athanasius of Alexandria, Doctor of the Church. From On the Incarnation (section 43):

Now, if they ask, Why then did He not appear by means of other and nobler parts of creation, and use some nobler instrument, as the sun, or moon, or stars, or fire, or air, instead of man merely? Let them know that the Lord came not to make a display, but to heal and teach those who were suffering. For the way for one aiming at display would be, just to appear, and to dazzle the beholders; but for one seeking to heal and teach the way is, not simply to sojourn here, but to give himself to the aid of those in want, and to appear as they who need him can bear it; that he may not, by exceeding the requirements of the sufferers, trouble the very persons that need him, rendering God's appearance useless to them. Now, nothing in creation had gone astray with regard to their notions of God, save man only. Why, neither sun, nor moon, nor heaven, nor the stars, nor water, nor air had swerved from their order; but knowing their Artificer and Sovereign, the Word, they remain as they were made. But men alone, having rejected what was good, then devised things of nought instead of the truth, and have ascribed the honour due to God, and their knowledge of Him, to demons and men in the shape of stones. With reason, then, since it were unworthy of the Divine Goodness to overlook so grave a matter, while yet men were not able to recognise Him as ordering and guiding the whole, He takes to Himself as an instrument a part of the whole, His human body, and unites Himself with that, in order that since men could not recognise Him in the whole, they should not fail to know Him in the part; and since they could not look up to His invisible power, might be able, at any rate, from what resembled themselves to reason to Him and to contemplate Him.