Massimo Pigliucci of Psychology Today Insults David Chalmers’ Haircut for Giving Talk on the Singularity Sunday, Nov 8 2009
AI and singularity 9:10 pm
David Chalmers, one of the world’s most famous philosophers, is now giving talks on the Singularity in venues other than Singularity Summit, so surely this means that it must be time to hurl ad hominem insults at him. At least, that’s what Massimo Pigliucci of Psychology Today seems to think:
David Chalmers is a philosopher of mind, best known for his argument about the difficulty of what he termed the “hard problem” of consciousness, which he typically discusses by way of a thought experiment featuring zombies who act and talk exactly like humans, and yet have no conscious thought (I explained clearly what I think of that sort of thing in my essay on “The Zombification of Philosophy”).
Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing Chalmers in action live at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He didn’t talk about zombies, telling us instead his thoughts about the so-called Singularity, the alleged moment when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, resulting in either all hell breaking loose or the next glorious stage in human evolution — depending on whether you typically see the glass as half empty or half full. The talk made clear to me what Chalmers’ problem is (other than his really bad hair cut): he reads too much science fiction, and is apparently unable to snap out of the necessary suspension of disbelief when he comes back to the real world. Let me explain.
Like Robin Hanson points out, some things in academia are just considered silly, and it is verboten to discuss them. Human-equivalent Artificial Intelligence is of these, because it insults those who are offended by the prospect that their intelligence, creativity, insight, and imagination could all be duplicated by a machine. A journalist recently pointed out (I forget who) that there are now three things that shouldn’t be discussed at dinner parties — politics, religion, and the Singularity. It is really sad that talking about human-level Artificial Intelligence causes Massimo Pigliucci to insult Chalmers’ hair cut, behaving like an angry child. Again with the hair. Chalmers has interesting hair, Pigliucci has the standard old-white-dude-semi-fro-with-receding-hairline hair, therefore anything outside the norm is socially unacceptable and must be insulted.
Hey Michael, just wanted to let you know that I’m consistently entertained by your blog…it has a great mix of humorous observations, insights, serious thought and rigorous analysis. Keep up the great work!
I just watched Chalmer’s talk from the summit and was underwhelmed. That doesn’t justify Pigliucci’s snarkiness, or some of his shaky counterarguments, but it probably justifies him not having spent adequate time researching the topic to make a reasonable contribution to the discussion.
Hey Michael,
first off, do you really want to dismiss my entire argument against Chalmers on the basis that I made a joke about his hair cut? I mean, there were another 1300+ words of actual argument following the joke…
Second, speaking of logical fallacies, it is of course entirely irrelevant that Chalmers is “one of the world’s most famous philosophers,” he can still be dead wrong on something. You are using an argument from authority…
Chalmers might be famous – but for the “hard problem” of consciousness, and for “zombies”.
This puts him in the garbage bucket in my book – along with Penrose and Searle.
His talk at the SS was pretty boring – and rather dubious. Simulated evolution might take a while – and we probably won’t keep superintelligences inprisoned for very long – since we will want them to help us.
Hi Massimo,
No, I actually don’t dismiss all your arguments. I think some of your arguments make sense. But the way in which you present them is so uncivil that I had to call that out. In a future post I will remark that you have good points.
Basically, it seems like you have acquired a threshold degree of social status where you feel comfortable insulting people instead of at least showing them a superficial degree of respect and focusing on the arguments. I consider that sort of poo-throwing intellectually disrespectable because it arouses emotions that lead to biased evaluations and discussions without a basic foundation of good will.
It reminds me of the “arguments are wars” mentality — any weapon that you can field against the person you disagree with is considered fair game, and it shouldn’t be. If Chalmers is lazy about definitions, say so, don’t insult his haircut.
Yes, you’re right that he could easily be wrong, but I think it particularly irks you that such a well-regarded philosopher is discussing what you consider to be science fiction. That’s the harsh double edge of granting people status based on their intellectual merits — they might eventually turn around and have an idea we don’t like!
Massimo Pigliucci: your critique has some problems – you seem to think defining intelligence is an issue (it really isn’t) – and you also seem to have doubts about the Church–Turing–Deutsch principle – which most people at machine intelligence conferences are likely to accept. You can heckle us about our beliefs there if you like – but we do have our reasons – and so will probably just ignore you.