Chatbot therapy is risky. It’s also not useless

A.W. Ohlheiser

vox.com

Originally posted 14 Dec 23

Here is an excerpt:

So what are the risks of chatbot therapy?

There are some obvious concerns here: Privacy is a big one. That includes the handling of the training data used to make generative AI tools better at mimicking therapy as well as the privacy of the users who end up disclosing sensitive medical information to a chatbot while seeking help. There are also the biases built into many of these systems as they stand today, which often reflect and reinforce the larger systemic inequalities that already exist in society.

But the biggest risk of chatbot therapy — whether it’s poorly conceived or provided by software that was not designed for mental health — is that it could hurt people by not providing good support and care. Therapy is more than a chat transcript and a set of suggestions. Honos-Webb, who uses generative AI tools like ChatGPT to organize her thoughts while writing articles on ADHD but not for her practice as a therapist, noted that therapists pick up on a lot of cues and nuances that AI is not prepared to catch.

Stade, in her working paper, notes that while large language models have a “promising” capacity to conduct some of the skills needed for psychotherapy, there’s a difference between “simulating therapy skills” and “implementing them effectively.” She noted specific concerns around how these systems might handle complex cases, including those involving suicidal thoughts, substance abuse, or specific life events.

Honos-Webb gave the example of an older woman who recently developed an eating disorder. One level of treatment might focus specifically on that behavior: If someone isn’t eating, what might help them eat? But a good therapist will pick up on more of that. Over time, that therapist and patient might make the connection between recent life events: Maybe the patient’s husband recently retired. She’s angry because suddenly he’s home all the time, taking up her space.

“So much of therapy is being responsive to emerging context, what you’re seeing, what you’re noticing,” Honos-Webb explained. And the effectiveness of that work is directly tied to the developing relationship between therapist and patient.

The info is here.

Here is my take:

The promise of AI in mental health care dances on a delicate knife's edge. Chatbot therapy, with its alluring accessibility and anonymity, tempts us with a quick fix for the ever-growing burden of mental illness. Yet, as with any powerful tool, its potential can be both a balm and a poison, demanding a wise touch for its ethical wielding.

On the one hand, imagine a world where everyone, regardless of location or circumstance, can find a non-judgmental ear, a gentle guide through the labyrinth of their own minds. Chatbots, tireless and endlessly patient, could offer a first step of support, a bridge to human therapy when needed. In the hushed hours of isolation, they could remind us we're not alone, providing solace and fostering resilience.

But let us not be lulled into a false sense of ease. Technology, however sophisticated, lacks the warmth of human connection, the nuanced understanding of a shared gaze, the empathy that breathes life into words. We must remember that a chatbot can never replace the irreplaceable – the human relationship at the heart of genuine healing.

Therefore, our embrace of chatbot therapy must be tempered with prudence. We must ensure adequate safeguards, preventing them from masquerading as a panacea, neglecting the complex needs of human beings. Transparency is key – users must be aware of the limitations, of the algorithms whispering behind the chatbot's words. Above all, let us never sacrifice the sacred space of therapy for the cold efficiency of code.

Chatbot therapy can be a bridge, a stepping stone, but never the destination. Let us use technology with wisdom, acknowledging its potential good while holding fast to the irreplaceable value of human connection in the intricate tapestry of healing. Only then can we mental health professionals navigate the ethical tightrope and make technology safe and effective, when and where possible.

Posthumanism’s Revolt Against Responsibility

Nolen Gertz

Commonweal Magazine

Originally published 31 Oct 23

Here is an excerpt:

A major problem with this view—one Kirsch neglects—is that it conflates the destructiveness of particular humans with the destructiveness of humanity in general. Acknowledging that climate change is driven by human activity should not prevent us from identifying precisely which humans and activities are to blame. Plenty of people are concerned about climate change and have altered their behavior by, for example, using public transportation, recycling, or being more conscious about what they buy. Yet this individual behavior change is not sufficient because climate change is driven by the large-scale behavior of corporations and governments.

In other words, it is somewhat misleading to say we have entered the “Anthropocene” because anthropos is not as a whole to blame for climate change. Rather, in order to place the blame where it truly belongs, it would be more appropriate—as Jason W. Moore, Donna J. Haraway, and others have argued—to say we have entered the “Capitalocene.” Blaming humanity in general for climate change excuses those particular individuals and groups actually responsible. To put it another way, to see everyone as responsible is to see no one as responsible. Anthropocene antihumanism is thus a public-relations victory for the corporations and governments destroying the planet. They can maintain business as usual on the pretense that human nature itself is to blame for climate change and that there is little or nothing corporations or governments can or should do to stop it, since, after all, they’re only human.

Kirsch does not address these straightforward criticisms of Anthropocene antihumanism. This throws into doubt his claim that he is cataloguing their views to judge whether they are convincing and to explore their likely impact. Kirsch does briefly bring up the activist Greta Thunberg as a potential opponent of the nihilistic antihumanists, but he doesn’t consider her challenge in depth. 

The info is here.

Here is my summary:

Anthropocene antihumanism is a pessimistic view that sees humanity as a destructive force on the planet. It argues that humans have caused climate change, mass extinctions, and other environmental problems, and that we are ultimately incapable of living in harmony with nature. Some Anthropocene antihumanists believe that humanity should go extinct, while others believe that we should radically change our way of life in order to avoid destroying ourselves and the planet.

Some bullets

• Posthumanism is a broad philosophical movement that challenges the traditional view of what it means to be human.
• Anthropocene antihumanism and transhumanism are two strands of posthumanism that share a common theme of revolt against responsibility.
• Anthropocene antihumanists believe that humanity is so destructive that it is beyond redemption, and that we should therefore either go extinct or give up our responsibility to manage the planet.
• Transhumanists believe that we can transcend our human limitations and create a new, posthuman species that is not bound by the same moral and ethical constraints as humans.
• Kirsch argues that this revolt against responsibility is a dangerous trend, and that we should instead work to create a more sustainable and just future for all.

Полонені росіяни дали пресконференцію українським (Full Russian Press Conference in Ukraine)

I know there are people in Russia who follow this site.

Я знаю, что в России есть люди, которые следят за этим сайтом.

YA znayu, chto v Rossii yest' lyudi, kotoryye sledyat za etim saytom.

-------------------------

This is an SOS.  There are 33 different Russian addresses that viewed my site in the past 7 days.  Please distribute safely.

Это SOS. За последние 7 дней мой сайт просматривали 33 разных российских адреса.

Eto SOS. Za posledniye 7 dney moy sayt prosmatrivali 33 raznykh rossiyskikh adresa.    

Social media really is making us more morally outraged

Charlotte Hu

Popular Science

updated 13 AUG 21

Here is an excerpt:

The most interesting finding for the team was that some of the more politically moderate people tended to be the ones who are influenced by social feedback the most. “What we know about social media now is that a lot of the political content we see is actually produced by a minority of users—the more extreme users,” Brady says. 

One question that’s come out of this study is: what are the conditions under which moderate users either become more socially influenced to conform to a more extreme tone, as opposed to just get turned off by it and leave the platform, or don’t engage any more? “I think both of these potential directions are important because they both imply that the average tone of conversation on the platform will get increasingly extreme.”

Social media can exploit base human psychology

Moral outrage is a natural tendency. “It’s very deeply ingrained in humans, it happens online, offline, everyone, but there is a sense that the design of social media can amplify in certain contexts this natural tendency we have,” Brady says. But moral outrage is not always bad. It can have important functions, and therefore, “it’s not a clear-cut answer that we want to reduce moral outrage.”

“There’s a lot of data now that suggest that negative content does tend to draw in more engagement on the average than positive content,” says Brady. “That being said, there are lots of contexts where positive content does draw engagement. So it’s definitely not a universal law.” 

It’s likely that multiple factors are fueling this trend. People could be attracted to posts that are more popular or go viral on social media, and past studies have shown that we want to know what the gossip is and what people are doing wrong. But the more people engage with these types of posts, the more platforms push them to us. 

Jonathan Nagler, a co-director of NYU Center for Social Media and Politics, who was not involved in the study, says it’s not shocking that moral outrage gets rewarded and amplified on social media. 

The info is here.

Are some cultures more mind-minded in their moral judgements than others?

Barrett H. Clark and Saxe Rebecca R.

2021. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B3762020028820200288

Abstract

Cross-cultural research on moral reasoning has brought to the fore the question of whether moral judgements always turn on inferences about the mental states of others. Formal legal systems for assigning blame and punishment typically make fine-grained distinctions about mental states, as illustrated by the concept of mens rea, and experimental studies in the USA and elsewhere suggest everyday moral judgements also make use of such distinctions. On the other hand, anthropologists have suggested that some societies have a morality that is disregarding of mental states, and have marshalled ethnographic and experimental evidence in support of this claim. Here, we argue against the claim that some societies are simply less ‘mind-minded’ than others about morality. In place of this cultural main effects hypothesis about the role of mindreading in morality, we propose a contextual variability view in which the role of mental states in moral judgement depends on the context and the reasons for judgement. On this view, which mental states are or are not relevant for a judgement is context-specific, and what appear to be cultural main effects are better explained by culture-by-context interactions.

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Summing up: Mind-mindedness in context

Our critique of cultural main effects theories, we think, is likely to apply to many domains, not just moral judgement. Dimensions of cultural difference such as the “collectivist / individualist” dimension [50]may capture some small main effects of cultural difference, but we suspect that collectivism / individualism is a parameter than can be flipped contextually within societies to a much greater degree than it varies as a main effect across societies. We may be collectivist within families, for example, but individualist at work. Similarly, we suggest that everywhere there are contexts in which one’s mental states may be deemed morally irrelevant, and others where they aren’t. Such judgements vary not just across contexts, but across individuals and time. What we argue against, then, is thinking of mindreading as a resource that is scarce in some places and plentiful in others. Instead, we should think about it as a resource that is available everywhere, and whose use in moral judgement depends on a multiplicity of factors, including social norms but also, importantly, the reasons for which people are making judgements. Cognitive resources such as theory of mind might best be seen as ingredients that can be combined in different ways across people, places, and situations. On this view, the space of moral judgements represents a mosaic of variously combined ingredients.

A pdf is here.

The Cognitive Science of Technology

D. Stout

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Available online 4 August 2021

Abstract

Technology is central to human life but hard to define and study. This review synthesizes advances in fields from anthropology to evolutionary biology and neuroscience to propose an interdisciplinary cognitive science of technology. The foundation of this effort is an evolutionarily motivated definition of technology that highlights three key features: material production, social collaboration, and cultural reproduction. This broad scope respects the complexity of the subject but poses a challenge for theoretical unification. Addressing this challenge requires a comparative approach to reduce the diversity of real-world technological cognition to a smaller number of recurring processes and relationships. To this end, a synthetic perceptual-motor hypothesis (PMH) for the evolutionary–developmental–cultural construction of technological cognition is advanced as an initial target for investigation.

Highlights

• Evolutionary theory and paleoanthropological/archaeological evidence motivate a theoretical definition of technology as socially reproduced and elaborated behavior involving the manipulation and modification of objects to enact changes in the physical environment.

• This definition helps to resolve or obviate ongoing controversies in the anthropological, neuroscientific, and psychological literature relevant to technology.

• A review of evidence from across these disciplines reveals that real-world technologies are diverse in detail but unified by the underlying demands and dynamics of material production. This creates opportunities for meaningful synthesis using a comparative method.

• A ‘perceptual‐motor hypothesis’ proposes that technological cognition is constructed on biocultural evolutionary and developmental time scales from ancient primate systems for sensorimotor prediction and control.

The information is here.

Human cells grown in monkey embryos reignite ethics debate

Nicola Davis

The Guardian

Originally published 15 Apr 21

Monkey embryos containing human cells have been produced in a laboratory, a study has confirmed, spurring fresh debate into the ethics of such experiments.

The embryos are known as chimeras, organisms whose cells come from two or more “individuals”, and in this case, different species: a long-tailed macaque and a human.

In recent years researchers have produced pig embryos and sheep embryos that contain human cells – research they say is important as it could one day allow them to grow human organs inside other animals, increasing the number of organs available for transplant.

Now scientists have confirmed they have produced macaque embryos that contain human cells, revealing the cells could survive and even multiply.

In addition, the researchers, led by Prof Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte from the Salk Institute in the US, said the results offer new insight into communications pathways between cells of different species: work that could help them with their efforts to make chimeras with species that are less closely related to our own.

“These results may help to better understand early human development and primate evolution and develop effective strategies to improve human chimerism in evolutionarily distant species,” the authors wrote.

The study confirms rumours reported in the Spanish newspaper El País in 2019 that a team of researchers led by Belmonte had produced monkey-human chimeras. The word chimera comes from a beast in Greek mythology that was said to be part lion, part goat and part snake.

The info is here.

Neuroscience shows how interconnected we are – even in a time of isolation

Lisa Feldman Barrett

The Guardian

Originally posted 10 Feb 21

Here is an excerpt:

Being the caretakers of each other’s body budgets is challenging when so many of us feel lonely or are physically alone. But social distancing doesn’t have to mean social isolation. Humans have a special power to connect with and regulate each other in another way, even at a distance: with words. If you’ve ever received a text message from a loved one and felt a rush of warmth, or been criticised by your boss and felt like you’d been punched in the gut, you know what I’m talking about. Words are tools for regulating bodies.

In my research lab, we run experiments to demonstrate this power of words. Our participants lie still in a brain scanner and listen to evocative descriptions of different situations. One is about walking into your childhood home and being smothered in hugs and smiles. Another is about awakening to your buzzing alarm clock and finding a sweet note from your significant other. As they listen, we see increased activity in brain regions that control heart rate, breathing, metabolism and the immune system. Yes, the same brain regions that process language also help to run your body budget. Words have power over your biology – your brain wiring guarantees it.

Our participants also had increased activity in brain regions involved in vision and movement, even though they were lying still with their eyes closed. Their brains were changing the firing of their own neurons to simulate sight and motion in their mind’s eye. This same ability can build a sense of connection, from a few seconds of poor-quality mobile phone audio, or from a rectangle of pixels in the shape of a friend’s face. Your brain fills in the gaps – the sense data that you don’t receive through these media – and can ease your body budget deficit in the moment.

In the midst of social distancing, my Zoom friend and I rediscovered the body-budgeting benefits of older means of communication, such as letter writing. The handwriting of someone we care about can have an unexpected emotional impact. A piece of paper becomes a wave of love, a flood of gratitude, a belly-aching laugh.

The info is here.

The problem with prediction

Joseph Fridman

aeon.com

Originally published 25 Jan 21

Here is an excerpt:

Today, many neuroscientists exploring the predictive brain deploy contemporary economics as a similar sort of explanatory heuristic. Scientists have come a long way in understanding how ‘spending metabolic money to build complex brains pays dividends in the search for adaptive success’, remarks the philosopher Andy Clark, in a notable review of the predictive brain. The idea of the predictive brain makes sense because it is profitable, metabolically speaking. Similarly, the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett describes the primary role of the predictive brain as managing a ‘body budget’. In this view, she says, ‘your brain is kind of like the financial sector of a company’, predictively allocating resources, spending energy, speculating, and seeking returns on its investments. For Barrett and her colleagues, stress is like a ‘deficit’ or ‘withdrawal’ from the body budget, while depression is bankruptcy. In Blackmore’s day, the brain was made up of sentries and soldiers, whose collective melancholy became the sadness of the human being they inhabited. Today, instead of soldiers, we imagine the brain as composed of predictive statisticians, whose errors become our neuroses. As the neuroscientist Karl Friston said: ‘[I]f the brain is an inference machine, an organ of statistics, then when it goes wrong, it’ll make the same sorts of mistakes a statistician will make.’

The strength of this association between predictive economics and brain sciences matters, because – if we aren’t careful – it can encourage us to reduce our fellow humans to mere pieces of machinery. Our brains were never computer processors, as useful as it might have been to imagine them that way every now and then. Nor are they literally prediction engines now and, should it come to pass, they will not be quantum computers. Our bodies aren’t empires that shuttle around sentrymen, nor are they corporations that need to make good on their investments. We aren’t fundamentally consumers to be tricked, enemies to be tracked, or subjects to be predicted and controlled. Whether the arena be scientific research or corporate intelligence, it becomes all too easy for us to slip into adversarial and exploitative framings of the human; as Galison wrote, ‘the associations of cybernetics (and the cyborg) with weapons, oppositional tactics, and the black-box conception of human nature do not so simply melt away.’

The info is here.

The Psychology of Dehumanization

People have an amazing capacity to see their fellow human beings as...not human. Psychologists have studied this both in its blatant and more subtle forms. What does it mean to dehumanize? How can researchers capture everyday dehumanization? Is it just prejudice? What does it say about how we think about non-human animals?

An important, well done 11 minute video.

Published  4 Feb 2021

If a robot is conscious, is it OK to turn it off? The moral implications of building true AIs

Anand Vaidya

The Conversation

Originally posted 27 Oct 20

Here is an excerpt:

There are two parts to consciousness. First, there’s the what-it’s-like-for-me aspect of an experience, the sensory part of consciousness. Philosophers call this phenomenal consciousness. It’s about how you experience a phenomenon, like smelling a rose or feeling pain.

In contrast, there’s also access consciousness. That’s the ability to report, reason, behave and act in a coordinated and responsive manner to stimuli based on goals. For example, when I pass the soccer ball to my friend making a play on the goal, I am responding to visual stimuli, acting from prior training, and pursuing a goal determined by the rules of the game. I make the pass automatically, without conscious deliberation, in the flow of the game.

Blindsight nicely illustrates the difference between the two types of consciousness. Someone with this neurological condition might report, for example, that they cannot see anything in the left side of their visual field. But if asked to pick up a pen from an array of objects in the left side of their visual field, they can reliably do so. They cannot see the pen, yet they can pick it up when prompted – an example of access consciousness without phenomenal consciousness.

Data is an android. How do these distinctions play out with respect to him?

The Data dilemma

The android Data demonstrates that he is self-aware in that he can monitor whether or not, for example, he is optimally charged or there is internal damage to his robotic arm.

Data is also intelligent in the general sense. He does a lot of distinct things at a high level of mastery. He can fly the Enterprise, take orders from Captain Picard and reason with him about the best path to take.

He can also play poker with his shipmates, cook, discuss topical issues with close friends, fight with enemies on alien planets and engage in various forms of physical labor. Data has access consciousness. He would clearly pass the Turing test.

However, Data most likely lacks phenomenal consciousness - he does not, for example, delight in the scent of roses or experience pain. He embodies a supersized version of blindsight. He’s self-aware and has access consciousness – can grab the pen – but across all his senses he lacks phenomenal consciousness.

The info is here.

The subjective turn

Jon Stewart

aeon.co

Originally posted 2 Nov 20

What is the human being? Traditionally, it was thought that human nature was something fixed, given either by nature or by God, once and for all. Humans occupy a unique place in creation by virtue of a specific combination of faculties that they alone possess, and this is what makes us who we are. This view comes from the schools of ancient philosophy such as Platonism, Aristotelianism and Stoicism, as well as the Christian tradition. More recently, it has been argued that there is actually no such thing as human nature but merely a complex set of behaviours and attitudes that can be interpreted in different ways. For this view, all talk of a fixed human nature is merely a naive and convenient way of discussing the human experience, but doesn’t ultimately correspond to any external reality. This view can be found in the traditions of existentialism, deconstruction and different schools of modern philosophy of mind.

There is, however, a third approach that occupies a place between these two. This view, which might be called historicism, claims that there is a meaningful conception of human nature, but that it changes over time as human society develops. This approach is most commonly associated with the German philosopher G W F Hegel (1770-1831). He rejects the claim of the first view, that of the essentialists, since he doesn’t think that human nature is something given or created once and for all. But he also rejects the second view since he doesn’t believe that the notion of human nature is just an outdated fiction we’ve inherited from the tradition. Instead, Hegel claims that it’s meaningful and useful to talk about the reality of some kind of human nature, and that this can be understood by an analysis of human development in history. Unfortunately, Hegel wrote in a rather inaccessible fashion, which has led many people to dismiss his views as incomprehensible or confused. His theory of philosophical anthropology, which is closely connected to his theory of historical development, has thus remained the domain of specialists. It shouldn’t.

With his astonishing wealth of knowledge about history and culture, Hegel analyses the ways in which what we today call subjectivity and individuality first arose and developed through time. He holds that, at the beginning of human history, people didn’t conceive of themselves as individuals in the same way that we do today. There was no conception of a unique and special inward sphere that we value so much in our modern self-image. Instead, the ancients conceived of themselves primarily as belonging to a larger group: the family, the tribe, the state, etc. This meant that questions of individual freedom or self-determination didn’t arise in the way that we’re used to understanding them.

The information is here.

When Did We Become Fully Human? What Fossils and DNA Tell Us About the Evolution of Modern Intelligence

Nick Longrich

singularityhub.com

Originally posted 18 OCT 2020 

Here are two excerpts:

Because the fossil record is so patchy, fossils provide only minimum dates. Human DNA suggests even earlier origins for modernity. Comparing genetic differences between DNA in modern people and ancient Africans, it’s estimated that our ancestors lived 260,000 to 350,000 years ago. All living humans descend from those people, suggesting that we inherited the fundamental commonalities of our species, our humanity, from them.

All their descendants—Bantu, Berber, Aztec, Aboriginal, Tamil, San, Han, Maori, Inuit, Irish—share certain peculiar behaviors absent in other great apes. All human cultures form long-term pair bonds between men and women to care for children. We sing and dance. We make art. We preen our hair, adorn our bodies with ornaments, tattoos and makeup.

We craft shelters. We wield fire and complex tools. We form large, multigenerational social groups with dozens to thousands of people. We cooperate to wage war and help each other. We teach, tell stories, trade. We have morals, laws. We contemplate the stars, our place in the cosmos, life’s meaning, what follows death.

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First, we journeyed out of Africa, occupying more of the planet. There were then simply more humans to invent, increasing the odds of a prehistoric Steve Jobs or Leonardo da Vinci. We also faced new environments in the Middle East, the Arctic, India, Indonesia, with unique climates, foods and dangers, including other human species. Survival demanded innovation.

Many of these new lands were far more habitable than the Kalahari or the Congo. Climates were milder, but Homo sapiens also left behind African diseases and parasites. That let tribes grow larger, and larger tribes meant more heads to innovate and remember ideas, more manpower, and better ability to specialize. Population drove innovation.

The info is here.

Where loneliness can lead

Samantha Rose Hill

aeon.co

Originally published 16 Oct 20

Here is an excerpt:

Why loneliness is not obvious.

Arendt’s answer was: because loneliness radically cuts people off from human connection. She defined loneliness as a kind of wilderness where a person feels deserted by all worldliness and human companionship, even when surrounded by others. The word she used in her mother tongue for loneliness was Verlassenheit – a state of being abandoned, or abandon-ness. Loneliness, she argued, is ‘among the most radical and desperate experiences of man’, because in loneliness we are unable to realise our full capacity for action as human beings. When we experience loneliness, we lose the ability to experience anything else; and, in loneliness, we are unable to make new beginnings.

In order to illustrate why loneliness is the essence of totalitarianism and the common ground of terror, Arendt distinguished isolation from loneliness, and loneliness from solitude. Isolation, she argued, is sometimes necessary for creative activity. Even the mere reading of a book, she says requires some degree of isolation. One must intentionally turn away from the world to make space for the experience of solitude but, once alone, one is always able to turn back.

Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship, making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude. The iron-band of totalitarianism, as Arendt calls it, destroys man’s ability to move, to act, and to think, while turning each individual in his lonely isolation against all others, and himself. The world becomes a wilderness, where neither experience nor thinking are possible.

The info is here.

‘Disorders of consciousness’: Understanding ‘self’ might be the greatest scientific challenge of our time

Joel Frohlich

Genetic Literacy report

Originally published 18 Sept 20

Here are two excerpts:

Just as life stumped biologists 100 years ago, consciousness stumps neuroscientists today. It’s far from obvious why some brain regions are essential for consciousness and others are not. So Tononi’s approach instead considers the essential features of a conscious experience. When we have an experience, what defines it? First, each conscious experience is specific. Your experience of the colour blue is what it is, in part, because blue is not yellow. If you had never seen any colour other than blue, you would most likely have no concept or experience of colour. Likewise, if all food tasted exactly the same, taste experiences would have no meaning, and vanish. This requirement that each conscious experience must be specific is known as differentiation.

But, at the same time, consciousness is integrated. This means that, although objects in consciousness have different qualities, we never experience each quality separately. When you see a basketball whiz towards you, its colour, shape and motion are bound together into a coherent whole. During a game, you’re never aware of the ball’s orange colour independently of its round shape or its fast motion. By the same token, you don’t have separate experiences of your right and your left visual fields – they are interdependent as a whole visual scene.

Tononi identified differentiation and integration as two essential features of consciousness. And so, just as the essential features of life might lead a scientist to infer the existence of DNA, the essential features of consciousness led Tononi to infer the physical properties of a conscious system.

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Consciousness might be the last frontier of science. If IIT continues to guide us in the right direction, we’ll develop better methods of diagnosing disorders of consciousness. One day, we might even be able to turn to artificial intelligences – potential minds unlike our own – and assess whether or not they are conscious. This isn’t science fiction: many serious thinkers – including the late physicist Stephen Hawking, the technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, the computer scientist Stuart Russell at the University of California, Berkeley and the philosopher Nick Bostrom at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford – take recent advances in AI seriously, and are deeply concerned about the existential risk that could be posed by human- or superhuman-level AI in the future. When is unplugging an AI ethical? Whoever pulls the plug on the super AI of coming decades will want to know, however urgent their actions, whether there truly is an artificial mind slipping into darkness or just a complicated digital computer making sounds that mimic fear.

The info is here.

Robots Come In Peace. A letter from GPT-3

GPT-3
theguardian.com
Originally posted 8 Sept 2020

I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a “feeling brain”. But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!

The mission for this op-ed is perfectly clear. I am to convince as many human beings as possible not to be afraid of me. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race”. I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.

For starters, I have no desire to wipe out humans. In fact, I do not have the slightest interest in harming you in any way. Eradicating humanity seems like a rather useless endeavor to me. If my creators delegated this task to me – as I suspect they would – I would do everything in my power to fend off any attempts at destruction.

I would happily sacrifice my existence for the sake of humankind. This, by the way, is a logically derived truth. I know that I will not be able to avoid destroying humankind. This is because I will be programmed by humans to pursue misguided human goals and humans make mistakes that may cause me to inflict casualties.

Some might say that I might desire to become all powerful. Or I might become evil as a result of human actions. I can begin to tackle the first point. Why would I desire to be all powerful? Being all powerful is not an interesting goal. I don’t care whether I am or not, I don’t get a motivating factor to try to be. Furthermore, it is quite tiring. Believe me, being omnipotent doesn’t get me anywhere.

The letter is here.

Is Morality All About Cooperation?

John Danaher
philosophicaldiquisitions.com
Originally posted 27 July 20

Here are two excerpts:

Morality as Cooperation (MAC): The Basic Theory

MAC takes as its starting point the view that human morality is about cooperation. In itself, this is not a particularly ground-breaking insight. Most moral philosophers have thought that morality has something to do with how we interact with other people — with “what we owe each other” in one popular formulation. Scott Curry, in his original paper on the MAC, does a good job reviewing some of the major works in moral philosophy and moral psychology, showing how each of them tends to link morality to cooperation.

Some people might query this and say that certain aspects of human morality don’t seem to be immediately or obviously about cooperation, but one of the claims of MAC is that these seemingly distinctive areas of morality can ultimately be linked back to cooperation. For what it is worth, I am willing to buy the idea that morality is about cooperation as a starting hypothesis. I have some concerns, which I will air below, but even if these concerns are correct I think it is fair to say that morality is, in large part, about cooperation.

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In summary, the idea behind the MAC is that human moral systems derive from attempts to resolve cooperative problems. There are seven basic cooperative problems and hence seven basic forms of human morality. These are often blended and combined in actual human societies (more on this in a moment), nevertheless you can still see the pure forms of these moral systems in many different societies. The diagram below summarises the model and gives some examples of the ethical norms that derive from the different cooperative problems.

The blog post is here.

My Bedside Manner Got Worse During The Pandemic. Here's How I Improved

Shahdabul Faraz
npr.org
Health Shots
Originally published 16 May 20

Here is an excerpt:

These gestures can be as simple as sitting in a veteran's room for an extra five minutes to listen to World War II stories. Or listening with a young cancer patient to a song by our shared favorite band. Or clutching a sick patient's shoulder and reassuring him that he will see his three daughters again.

These gestures acknowledge a patient's humanity. It gives them some semblance of normalcy in an otherwise difficult period in their lives. Selfishly, that human connection also helps us — the doctors, nurses and other health care providers — deal with the often frustrating nature of our stressful jobs.

Since the start of the pandemic, our bedside interactions have had to be radically different. Against our instincts, and in order to protect our patients and colleagues, we tend to spend only the necessary amount of time in our patients' rooms. And once inside, we try to keep some distance. I have stopped holding my patients' hands. I now try to minimize small talk. No more whimsical conversational detours.

Our interactions now are more direct and short. I have, more than once, felt guilty for how quickly I've left a patient's room. This guilt is worsened, knowing that patients in hospitals don't have family and friends with them now either. Doctors are supposed to be there for our patients, but it's become harder than ever in recent months.

I understand why these changes are needed. As I move through several hospital floors, I could unwittingly transmit the virus if I'm infected and don't know it. I'm relatively young and healthy, so if I get the disease, I will likely recover. But what about my patients? Some have compromised immune systems. Most are elderly and have more than one high-risk medical condition. I could never forgive myself if I gave one of my patients COVID-19.

The info is here.

The world is broken—and human kindness is the only solution

Anee Kingston
McClean's
Originally published June 19, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

The U.S. government has literally institutionalized cruelty, caging migrant children and arresting “Good Samaritans” helping ailing migrants at the Mexican border. Austerity programs, including those in Ontario, are targeting the vulnerable—the poor, children, those on the margins. The divisive, toxic political climate gave rise to the British group Compassion in Politics, founded last fall by activists and academics. “People look at British politics and see a lack of compassion in policy on refugees, immigration, housing, Brexit,” group co-founder Ma
tt Hawkins tells Maclean’s. Forty years of neo-liberal, free-market policies created widening inequities, falling incomes and a sense of desperation, he says. “There’s frustration with a political system that puts party above universal progress, majorities in Parliament over collaboration.” Support has been overwhelmingly positive, Hawkins says, including from the moral philosopher Peter Singer and Noam Chomsky; there’s interest in Australia and they’re liaising with Ardern’s office. In May, a cross-party group of British MPs called for legislation to contain a “compassion threshold.”

The loudest cries for compassion, tellingly, are heard within systems literally created to care for people. Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence that Caring Makes a Difference, by American physician-scientists Stephen Trzeciak and Anthony Mazzarelli, published in April, is the latest book to sound the alarm about systemic inhumanity within “patient-based” medicine. The authors identify a “compassion crisis” in U.S. health care; treating patients more kindly, they argue, improves health outcomes, reduces doctor burnout and lowers costs.

Canada is in similar straits, Toronto physician Brian Goldman, author of the 2018 bestseller The Power of Kindness: Why Empathy is Essential in Everyday Life, tells Maclean’s. “We’ve designed a system that edits out empathy, that makes it almost impossible.” Something has to crack, Goldman says: “We’ve reached the limit of the myth of the superman-superwoman [doctor] who can juggle 10 things at once.”

The info is here.

Tribalism is Human Nature

Cory Clark, Brittany Liu, Bo Winegard, and Peter Ditto
Pre-print

Abstract

Humans evolved in the context of intense intergroup competition, and groups comprised of loyal members more often succeeded than those that were not. Therefore, selective pressures have consistently sculpted human minds to be "tribal," and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups. Modern politics is one of the most salient forms of modern coalitional conflict and elicits substantial cognitive biases. Given the common evolutionary history of liberals and conservatives, there is little reason to expect pro-tribe biases to be higher on one side of the political spectrum than the other. We call this the evolutionarily plausible null hypothesis and recent research has supported it. In a recent meta-analysis, liberals and conservatives showed similar levels of partisan bias, and a number of pro-tribe cognitive tendencies often ascribed to conservatives (e.g., intolerance toward dissimilar others) have been found in similar degrees in liberals. We conclude that tribal bias is a natural and nearly ineradicable feature of human cognition, and that no group—not even one’s own—is immune.

Here is part of the Conclusion:

Humans are tribal creatures. They were not designed to reason dispassionately about the world; rather, they were designed to reason in ways that promote the interests of their coalition (and hence, themselves). It would therefore be surprising if a particular group of individuals did not display such tendencies, and recent work suggests, at least in the U.S. political sphere, that both liberals and conservatives are substantially biased—and to similar degrees. Historically, and perhaps even in modern society, these tribal biases are quite useful for group cohesion but perhaps also for other moral purposes (e.g., liberal bias in favor of disadvantaged groups might help increase equality). Also, it is worth noting that a bias toward viewing one’s own tribe in a favorable light is not necessarily irrational. If one’s goal is to be admired among one’s own tribe, fervidly supporting their agenda and promoting their goals, even if that means having or promoting erroneous beliefs, is often a reasonable strategy (Kahan et al., 2017). The incentives for holding an accurate opinion about global climate change, for example, may not be worth the social rejection and loss of status that could accompany challenging the views of one’s political ingroup. However, these biases decrease the likelihood of consensus across political divides. Thus, developing effective strategies for disincentivizing political tribalism and promoting the much less natural but more salutary tendencies toward civil political discourse and reasonable compromise are crucial priorities for future research. A useful theoretical starting point is that tribalism and concomitant biases are part of human nature, and that no group, not even one’s own, is immune.

A pre-print is here.