THIS NEW LOOK AT the introduction of the late Joseph Weizenbaum's 1975 book Computer Power and Human Reason goes over material I went over in May 2013. Some of the resources I would have liked to have then weren't available to me and, in terms of studying and thinking about the problems I dealt with then a lot or water has gone under the bridge. I will comment on the same things Weizenbaum wrote but the comments will not be the same, in some ways they will be far more vehement in their rejection of the materialism that I was merely skeptical of as a social and intellectual influence then. I have come to believe that it is one of if not the central component of the degeneracy of human culture and behavior. I will be breaking into the text to point out and comment on points I see as even more important now than I did then.
Introduction
In 1935 Michael Polanyi, then holder of the Chair of Physical Chemistry at Victoria University of Manchester, England, was suddenly shocked into a confrontation with philosophical questions that have ever since dominated his life. The shock was administered by Nicolai Bukharin, one of the leading theoreticians of the Russian Communist party, who told Polanyi that "under socialism the conception of science pursued for its own sake would disappear, for the interests of scientists would spontaneously turn to the problems of the current Five Year Plan." Polanyi sensed then that "the scientific outlook appeared to have produced a mechanical conception of man and history in which there was no place for science itself." And further that "this conception denied altogether any intrinsic power of thought and thus denied any grounds for claiming freedom of thought."
It was gratifying to see that not only such brilliant thinkers as Michael Polanyi and Joseph Weizenbaum had seen something I've pointed out repeatedly, that a materialististic-scientistic ideological orientation is certainly inconsistent with taking any mental activity on the part of human beings as being of transcendent significance - certainly not in that extra-scientific activity of discerning truth - but in the actually more banal activity of doing science and having the results have any claim to being more than the product of the particular brain chemistry of the scientists doing it, which could only find truth on no more than on the odds of such chemistry being gathered by chance in any one locus, such as a scientist's brain affords. I would guess that the chances against such a peculiar congregation of chemicals acting under the operation of human memory and judgement would tend to obscure the chances of finding truth at least by as much as they might help toward that goal but, certainly, the presence of such happy coincidences would add newer vectors into the equations and may tend to diminish the probability of truth than to enhance it. It is ironic that such a materialist who would like to grant some power to human judgement would only be providing someone with the ability to point out they were resorting to arguments of intelligent design in the process of creation and diminishing the role of those gods of atheist contingency "probability" and "random chance" to a considerable degree.
I would go a lot farther than I did then in attributing to that kind of thinking the general degeneration in a sense of the morality of telling the truth as opposed to telling lies. I would, of course, have been radicalized by witnessing the subsequent experience of the United States and other countries falling into a "post-truth" mode of thought, noting that the example used by Weizenbaum, Nicolai Bukharin, one of the leading theoreticians of the Russian Communist party, only indicates how much earlier the reign of a regime of lies followed from a self-intended scientific regime gaining power and reducing the product of science to a tool of the intentions of the Communist Party, something also done by other materialists in the same decade in Germany, though in that case the 19th century science followed was the Darwinist ideology of natural selection. I would probably not have dared to make the connection between that view of science and the vulgar materialist's, Donald Trump's and his Republican goons' treatment of science.
I don't know how much time Polanyi thought he would devote to developing an argument for a contrary concept of man and history. His very shock testifies to the fact that he was in profound disagreement with Bukharin, therefore that he already conceived of man differently, even if he could not then give explicit form to his concept. It may be that he determined to write a counterargument in Bukharin's position, drawing only on his own experience as a scientist, and to have done with it in short order. As it turned out, however, the confrontation with philosophy triggered by Bukharin's revelation was to demand Polanyi's entire attention from then to the present day [c1975]
I recite this bit of history for two reasons. The first is to illustrate that ideas which seem at first glance to be obvious and simple, and which ought therefore to be universally credible once they have been articulated, are sometimes buoys marking out stormy channels in deep intellectual seas. That science is creative, that the creative act in science is equivalent to the creative act in art, that creation springs only from autonomous individuals, as such a simple and, one might think, obvious idea. Yet Polyani has, as have many others, spent nearly a lifetime exploring, the ground in which it is anchored and the turbulent sea of implications which surrounds it.
What both Polyani and Weizenbaum were confronting was far larger and deeper than that, it was one important but relatively small area in which the implications of materialism and scientism and the habits of thought that those ideologies have generated and which has become a tidal wave in human culture came back to bite science. Weizenbaum correctly notes that science is a creative act, AN ACT OF CREATION, it is the creation of a human explanation - unfortunately, especially in the life sciences the creation of humanly convincing narratives - which are only as legitimate as, have only the right to be held as important as the minds that are creating them. And both materialism and scientism as ideologies are corrosive of the belief that our minds are capable of producing that legitimacy and significance and importance. The implications of that which are the most dangerous are those within large scale, organized human activities, government, business, industry, etc. in which governments and corporations, legal fictions invented by people to multiply human power and potency and in the ultimate in such loose organization, human societies and the human population as a whole. Without the sense of morality - which materialism destroys and scientism inevitably corrodes - that allows us to hold that the truth is superior to lies, that rights are real and inherent to all people and animals, that the continuation of life on Earth is entirely more important than the profits of industry and the wealth of billionaires, the thing which Polanyi was so disturbed by comes to complete expression in all too real reality.
The second reason I recite this history is that I feel myself to be reliving part of it. My own shock was administered not by any important political figures espousing his philosophy of science, but by some people who insisted on misinterpreting a piece of work I had done. I write this without bitterness and certainly not in a defensive mood Indeed, the interpretations I have in mind tended, if anything, to overrate what little I had accomplished and certainly its importance. No, I recall that piece of work now only because it seems to me to provide the most parsimonious way of identifying the issues I mean to discuss.
The work was done in the period 1964-1966, and was reported in the computer-science literature in January 1966 and August 1967. To summarize it briefly, I composed a computer program with which one could "converse" in English. The human conversationalist partner would type his portion of the conversation on a typewriter connected to a computer, and the computer, under control of my program, would analyze the message that had so been transmitted to it, compose a response to it in English, and cause the response to be typed on the computer's typewriter.
I chose the name ELIZA for the language analysis program because, like the Eliza of Pygmalion fame, it could be taught to "speak" increasingly well. Because the conversations must about something, that is, because they must take place within some context, the program was constructed in a two-tiered arrangement, the first tier consisting of the language analyzer and the second of a script. The script is a set of rules rather like those that might be given to an actor who is to use them to improvise around a certain theme. Thus ELIZA could be given a script to enable it to maintain a conversation about cooking eggs or about managing a bank checking account, and so on. Each specific script thus enabled ELIZA to play a specific conversational role.
For my first experiment, I gave ELIZA a script designed to permit it to play ( and I should realy say parody) the role of a Rogerian psychotherapist engaged in an initial interview with a patient. The Rogerian psychotherapist is relatively easy to imitate because much of his technique consists of drawing his patient out by reflecting the patients statements back to him. The following conversation between a young lady ELIZA playing doctor illustrates both the Rogerian technique of encouraging a patient to keep talking and the operation of a computer program ELIZA . The first to "speak" is the young lady. The computer's responses are printed entirely in capitals
Men are all like that
IN WHAT WAY
They're always bugging us about something or other.
CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
He says I'm depressed much of the time.
I'M SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED....
In 2013 I didn't appreciate the importance of it being Weizenbaum's decision to use the academic superstition of psychology for his experiment in computer programming and why the reaction to his lab trick (I don't think he'd see it as much more significant than programming a computer to play tic-tac-toe) by not only psychologists but a materialistic-scientistic ideologue who would become famous for his TV appearances in the next two decades. That he chose Rogerian therapy, a product of the "Humanistic Psychology" that was a professional reaction against the absurdity of Freudianism and the hard-line materialist-scientism of the then reigning and about to be overthrown Behaviorist school is ironic. Having played with some of the online ELIZA implementations, given how easy it is to get them to spit out really hilarious and silly stuff, it feels like it should be astounding that people with PhDs were so easily gulled into taking its content seriously. But I think their responses were both professionally interested, in the case of the psychology guys and purely ideological in Carl Sagan who was, even the following year, becoming one of the founders of the atheist ideological promotion and cover op, CSICOP. He, due to his specialty in planetary science, was also one of the more culpable bystanders in the one and only scientific investigation incompetently done by them, the central dishonesty of which he certainly understood but did nothing much to either correct or expose in the interest of honesty and scientific integrity. In the demotion of truth which was already well underway, his role in that scandal never did much to diminish his star power.
... DOCTOR, as ELIZA playing psychiatrist came to be known, soon becoming famous around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where it first came into existence, mainly because it was an easy program to demonstrate. Most other programs could not vividly demonstrate the information-processing power of a computer to visitors who did not already have some specialized knowledge, say of some branch of mathematics. DOCTOR, on the other hand, could be appreciated on some level by anyone. Its power as a demonstration vehicle was further enhanced by the fact that the visitor could actually participate in its operation. Soon copies of DOCTOR, constructed on the basis of my published description of it, began appearing at other institutions in the United States. The program became nationally known and even, in certain circles, a national plaything.
The shocks I experience as DOCTOR became widely known and "played" were due principally to three distinct events.
1. A number of practicing psychiatrists seriously believed the DOCTOR computer program could grow into a nearly completely automatic form of psychotherapy. Colby et al.* write, for example,
"Further work must be done before the program will be ready for clinical use. If the method proves beneficial, then it would provide a therapeutic took which can be made widely available to mental hospitals and psychiatric centers suffering a shortage of therapists. Because of the time-sharing capabilities of modern and future computers, several hundred patients an hour could be handled by a computer system designed for this purpose. The human therapist, involved in the design and operation of this system, would not be replaced, but would become a much more efficient man since his efforts would no longer be limited to the one-to-one patient-therapist ration as now exists."
I had thought it essential, as a prerequisite to the very possibility that one person might help another learn to cope with his emotional problems, that the helper himself participate in the other's experience of those problems and, in large part by way of his own sympathetic recognition of them, himself come to understand them. There are undoubtedly many techniques to facilitate the therapist's imaginative projection into the patient's inner life. But that it was possible for even one practicing psychiatrist to advocate that this crucial component of therapeutic process could be entirely supplanted by pure technique - that I had not imagined! What must a psychiatrist who makes such a suggestion think he is doing while treating a patient, that he can view the simplest mechanical parody of a single interviewing technique as having captured anything of the essence of a human encounter? Perhaps Colby et al. give us the required clue when they write;
"A human therapist can be viewed as an information processor and decision maker with a set of decision rules which are closely linked to short-range and long-range goals, ... He is guided in these decisions by rough empiric rules telling him what is appropriate to say and not to say in certain contexts. To incorporate these processes, to the degree possessed by a human therapist, in the program would be a considerable undertaking but we are attempting to move in this direction."
What can a psychiatrist's image of his patient be when he sees himself, as therapist, not as an engaged human being acting as a healer, but as an information processor following rules, etc."
Such questions were my awakening to what Polany had earlier called a "scientific outlook that appeared to have produced a mechanical conception of man."
* Nor is Dr. Colby alone in his enthusiasm for computer administered psychotherapy. Dr. Carl Sagan, the astrophysicist, recently commented on ELIZA in Natural History, vol. LXXXIV, "No such computer program is adequate for psychiatric use today, but the same can be remarked about some human psychotherapists. In a period when more and more people in our society seem to be in need of psychiatric counseling, and when time sharing of computers is widespread, I can imagine the development of a network of computer psychotherapeutic terminals, something like arrays of large telephone booths, in which, for a few dollars a session, we would be able to talk with an attentive, tested and largely non-directive psychotherapist."
It is striking how the branch of science that purports to deal most directly with human minds had such a simplistic, mechanistic and weak conception of what they do as to be tricked into thinking the ELIZA bot was something like what they did. I suspect they were not among the more effective therapists of their generation.
Among the things I didn't have access to in 2013 is the copy of Natural History so I could read Sagan's entire article, that is now available in PDF and other formats at Archive dot org. The article is remarkable in the banality of its claims, using the typically naive and simplistic common received understanding of "The Turing Test" as if it were a real indication that human made machines could achieve intelligent thought, any thought, really. It has long been one of the annoyances of materialists that they could not deal with the human experience of consciousness, thought, freedom, etc. so they have always sought to demote the experience to the action of molecules - I believe the concept of an atom as the ultimate reality was created for that purpose, taken as a replacement for explanation of the experience of consciousness, it has certainly had that use. Not to make the mistake of conceiving of the original definition of atoms for what modern atomic theory talks about. Those original atoms were taken as being the smallest things and indivisible. Now ever smaller theorized bits of matter smaller than nothing exists take that place in ideological use of science.
The Archive reproduction of the journal he made his claims for machine intelligence for includes a far better test than the one Turing in his epic naivety and epic genius is popularly believed to have set in stone for all time. The machine read "Full Text" of the printed page - certainly at that vintage originally entered by human hands into a type setting machine, going through human editing and human review, not to mention however Sagan got his words down on paper. The "Full Text" really means full text of the page, in which all of the advertisement texts are interspersed in the machine generated stream of letters and spaces and breaks, the machine not being capable of distinguishing between Sagan and the ad agency generated stuff - sales pitches sufficiently different in semiotic significance for a human mind to discern but not for even today's generation of computers. And you will find many places in even Sagan's text in which the machine was unable to discern letters and combinations of letters for what they were, which humans attempting to navigate it can, rather easily figure out due to them doing what the machine certainly does not, understanding the meaning of what is there to be observed.
Even a better programmed computer that might, someday, (not something that is at all likely) have a program that can distinguish between the text of Sagan and a copy scribbler will be doing what the machine does now. Just as any more convincing program that can gull people into thinking its talking to them and understanding them will be doing the same thing that Weizenbaum's ELIZA spewing computer did. They no more can understand what the significance of the words on the page is anymore than someone who didn't know an alphabet could understand the difference, though I would bet that the person could be taught to read it and they would immediately be able to tell the difference. Just as they would be able to do something that a computer can't do, want to play a game and decide whether or not they were going to.
One of the selling points of materialistic-scientistic-atheism is the claim derived from a superficial and pop account of Laplace's alleged answer to Napoleon, that he had "no need of God" to explain his physics and the claim that there is "no need" to resort to God in science today. That, of course, leaves out the fact that science being a human invention and the product of humanly agreed to rules of the game made the decision to leave out any questions concerning God and religion and other things that were not directly relevant to finding the limited things about the physical world that science was invented to find. I rather like Eddington's point when he observed that essentially the same act is done in business accounting for purposes of tidiness. Though it is a complete misunderstanding of science to try to use it for any ideological purpose that has been one of the more popular activities of scientists, especially from the 19th century till today. The untidiness of thought which that leads to is, actually, one of the more fascinating and rather completely uninvestigated areas of scientific culture.
I have pointed out that what people like these psychologists and Carl Sagan did and their ideological and scientific descendants still do is to recreate the habits of very young children who believe that their model human beings and animals, dolls and teddy bears, have interior lives. Computers were machines made to mimic some limited aspects of human minds, they were created most successfully in doing some of the most defined activities of minds, making calculations, "playing" highly structured games, etc. Yet it has been a fact that from even before there were actual computers people were already attributing actual thinking to machines made to mimic thinking, as can be seen by Sagan's use of that other trope of pop culture, the origin of the word "Robot." It is a defect in the habits of materialism, the insistence of demoting human thought, the thinking of animals, to the level of material interactions that leads them to think that machines can think. It is their arrogant conceit that they are doing something just brilliant and brave when what they are doing is reverting to a habit of toddlerhood that most 8 year olds would disdain in nervous and embarrassed recollection of the folly of their youth. Yet such people hold enormous sway in modern,scientific, technological culture. And they have not produced anything that is an effective counter to the more vulgar materialists with whom they not only have so much in common but who they have helped empower with their demotion of morality.
Update: I should point out, in regard to the point about very young children attributing human minds to dolls and teddy bears, that Weizenbaum may have been unintentionally prophetic in his use of the character from Shaw's Pygmalion. The play given the name from the classical story of the sculptor who fell in love with one of the statues he carved. In that story, as I recall, it took divine power to bring the statue to life, not human agency. Something that atheists fervently believe is within human power. I have come increasingly to consider atheism as typical of many a superficial mind.
