is your consciousness a stream?

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I recommend do-it-yourself (DIY) phenomenology. It is good for mental health to attend closely to our own experience, especially the ambiguous aspects of our inner lives, such as how we experience the will, the past, or our relationship to our own bodies. We should think about what we find when we introspect.

The goal is not to discover truths that will make us happy. Instead, we want to reveal complexities and depths that we can appreciate. By seeing ourselves as much more than suffering machines, we can increase how much we can enjoy being ourselves.

Here is an example of a phenomenological question that might attract your curiosity: Is your consciousness (or, you might say, your attention) a single “stream”?

William James coined the phrase “stream of consciousness” in 1890 as part of an argument that consciousness “does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life” (James 1890, p. 239, italics in the original).

James acknowledges that we can be interrupted, but he thinks that interruptions are always absorbed into the stream. For example, “what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it” (p. 241). He also acknowledges that our consciousness has an uneven pace. He says,

As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird’s life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period (p. 243).

However, other close observers of themselves do not find anything that looks like a “stream.” The philosopher Galen Strawson finds this metaphor “inapt.” For him, “Thought has very little natural continuity or experiential flow—if mine is anything to go by. It keeps slipping from mere consciousness into self-consciousness and out again” (Strawson 2018, p. 350). Strawson observes that his own consciousness seems to launch repeatedly from “prior state[s] of complete, if momentary, nonconsciousness. …. It’s as if consciousness is continually restarting. It keeps banging out of nothingness. It’s a series of comings-to.” (p. 380)

I do not think this dispute has been resolved, which is good news if you want an open question to whet your curiosity about your inner life.

It could be (as Strawson thinks) that people vary. Some of us have streams of consciousness, while for others, experience comes in disconnected blocs. If that is the case, an interesting question arises about what consciousness is, if it is subject to such variation. (This question is relevant to debates about whether a computer can be conscious.) Or it could be that either James or Strawson is right about consciousness, and the other one is interpreting his own inner life wrong.

Meanwhile, you are free to decide for yourself.

Sources: William James The Principles of Psychology, 1918 (first edition 1890); Galen Strawson, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc. (New York Review Books, 2018). See also: joys and limitations of phenomenology; some basics; people as clusters of attention

the worlds we can lose when intelligence becomes artificial

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In 1958, Hannah Arendt could see where were were headed:

This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. …

It would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company tor good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is. (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958, p. 3)

What is “human existence as it has been given”?

For most of our history, most human beings have lived with other people whose names they know. They have worked individually and collaboratively with materials in their context to make an environment that I will call a “world.”

A world has these features:

  • It is imbued with moral significance, because other people have made it, given it meaning, cared about it, and been affected by it. An individual cannot interact with a world without causing good or harm to other people.
  • It is real, not imaginary, and therefore it is stubborn. It rarely turns out the way we want, but we can learn from experience to work more effectively with it.
  • The other people involved in any world hold partially conflicting interests and goals and can be stubborn in their own way. Both the materials and the people resist any single will.
  • Each person has partial and even biased knowledge, beliefs, and feelings about the world. But their varied ideas can accumulate as they express them and record them. Each person can therefore explore not only a world but the accumulated human experience of that world.
  • Because we must act in the company of other people and learn by acting, our “thinking and speaking” are closely connected.
  • Because our deepest concerns (moral, spiritual, and otherwise) relate to the world that we shape with our minds and hands, our “thought” is also connected to our “know-how.”
  • Each world typically predates each human being and survives the person’s death, yet each person can affect it. In fact, the birth of any human being automatically changes the world, if for no other reason than a birth turns people into parents, siblings, and other kinds of relatives.
  • There is not one world but many human worlds. But worlds can interact to various degrees without becoming subsumed into one bigger world.

Why it is good to live in a world

It is not obvious that living in this kind of world is the best imaginable form of life. Most people have envisioned heaven or a political utopia differently. (For instance, in an ideal world, the other people usually become less stubborn!) But I could make three arguments in favor of living in a world like this.

First, it seems plausible that homo sapiens evolved for such a life. Our brains, senses, and bodies are equipped to navigate it.

For instance, newborn infants already recognize faces, which are designed to communicate information and emotions. And our languages and cultures have accumulated deep resources for sharing a world with finite other human beings. The Proto-Indo-European language already used first-, second-, and third-person verbs and indicative, imperative, and subjunctive moods to make distinctions that are useful for group discussions about a common world. Thus a world is arguably our habitat.

Second, the combination of agency and humility seems morally compelling. It is fitting that we can affect our environment but not do just anything we individually want with it. And we should see our context as imbued with moral significance.

Third, navigating a world is a way for creatures like us to achieve comprehension, to make sense of matters. As Arendt writes:

There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the
singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves (1958, p. 4).

Threats to human worlds

Each human world has always been fragile, subject to destruction if invaders arrive, a plague strikes, or the community breaks down.

In addition, tyrants threaten any shared world because they can turn individuals into means to their solo ends.

Mass society puts each world at risk by bringing us into relationships with millions of others, whose names we will never learn. And mass economic exploitation makes matters worse. In Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt says, “loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, … is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man. [It is] is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the break-down of political institutions and social traditions in our own time.”

When history seems to move quickly and beyond anyone’s control, humans cease to feel that they are agents in any recognizable world.

Ideology can be defined as any system of thought that substitutes core assumptions for actual engagement with other people in a common world.

Finally, although media can enrich any given world, it can also disrupt it. Imagine people sitting alone or in passive company before a TV screen that tells them about gruesome crimes. Their actual world may be safe, or less dangerous than it was in the past, but the mediated world is cruel.

New threats in the age of AI

This theoretical framework comes from Arendt, who drew on Heidegger’s fundamental insight that the human form of being (Dasein) is always “‘in’ the world in the sense that it deals with entities encountered within-the-world, and does so concernfully and with familiarity” (Being and Time, H105, trans. by Macquarrie & Robinson). Arendt makes Heidegger’s theory political and republican by emphasizing that people can talk and decide what to do with their worlds.

I have sketched this view to help make sense of a new phenomenon: intelligence that is artificial (AI). But Arendt already feared that we might “need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking.”

When a person expresses a view, the content of what they say helps us to understand the world that the person inhabits. Even when people are flat-out wrong, the fact that they err or lie is part of our reality. In addition, a human view comes from a creature that can suffer. As such, it makes a claim on our compassion. In short, we attend not only to the content of the statement but also to the person who expressed it.

In contrast, when a large language model (LLM) answers a query (typically in the first-person singular and with emotive language like “I will be glad to …”), it does not reflect any particular perspective, nor does it come from a body that is capable of suffering. It just pretends to be a fellow participant in our world. We can attend to the words but not to the speaker.

Walter Cronkite was not really a visitor to Americans’ living rooms in 1970. He just appeared on TV screens. But he was a real person who could be assessed as such. An LLM is qualitatively different.

An LLM can be just another tool or resource, like a Heidegger’s hammer or perhaps like a library. I have collaborated with teams of Tufts engineering students to build the Civic Helpdesk and other applications of AI that are not yet publicly available. Working with them to fine-tune instructions or to design a user interface feels very much like collaborative work in a shared world. Note that I naturally said we “built” these tools, because the work feels roughly like building a shed, or perhaps an organization.

I have also developed what I think is a fairly tight practice of asking Claude about the Sanskrit and Pali original words in texts that I can only read in translation. This feels like a modest expansion of my inner life, if not a contribution to any shared world. (By the way, Claude is probably pulling these definitions from a finite set of published lexicons that have human authors.)

On the other hand, as Pope Leo notes in Magnifica humanitas, “current AI systems are more ‘cultivated’ than ‘built,’ for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence ‘grows.’ As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown.” This sounds more like Arendt’s nightmare of a time when our thoughts cannot grasp what we have done.

The deepest concern is that we have developed biologically and culturally to flourish in what Arendt would call a world, but an individual who uses AI is no longer there.

See also: the papal encyclical on AI; Reading Arendt in Palo Alto; the human coordination involved in AI; the difference between human and artificial intelligence: relationships; the design choice to make ChatGPT sound like a human; and love of the world

the papal encyclical on AI

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Magnifica humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”) is Pope Leo XIX’s XIV’s first encylical, subtitled “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.”

Near the beginning, Leo makes a plea for “a shared discernment process.” He warns against worrying only about “contingencies” and “a succession of emergencies.” It is urgent to think ahout AI more deeply.

He observes that “most people are watching and waiting, observing from afar and merely hoping for the best. For this very reason, crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”

When the Catholic Church practices “discernment” about social conditions, it “does not claim to offer ‘a definitive opinion'” but strives “to listen to and distinguish the many voices of our times and to interpret them in the light of God’s word.” Leo says that the Church is open not only to technical expertise but also to “a diversity of opinions” about values. Leo mentions previous papal letters with gratitude but also “gratefully acknowledges” the development of human rights doctrine through documents like the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which did not originate with the Church.

Coming from outside the Church, I also welcome a basic inquiry into human intelligence at a time when computers are supporting a different kind of intelligence that poses risks for humans. The “central question” of the encyclical is indeed a basic question of our day: “what does it mean to safeguard our humanity?” I welcome the normative contributions of Catholic social doctrine, in much the way that Leo says he welcomes other views.

In paragraphs 11-14, Leo names four principles that are essential for “building a city founded on the common good.” The first is “a firm relationship with God.” I respect that idea but cannot follow it. But the second one is important and can be developed outside of Christianity. Leo says:

Today, the human desire for fullness of life is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness, and models of wellbeing that leave behind entire populations. All too often, we place our hope in unlimited ‘upgrades,’ in forms of progress that exacerbate inequalities, and in immediate solutions incapable of healing people’s wounds. As a result, while some pursue the illusion of unlimited self-assertion, many are deprived of basic necessities. The Church reminds us, with a firm yet humble voice, that true fulfilment is not achieved by eliminating weakness but through harmonious growth. It is found where freedom and responsibility are intertwined with mutual care and true solidarity, and where progress is measured by the dignity of each person and the good of all peoples.

This is very much like Hannah Arendt’s understanding of love for the world (amor mundi). We must love the species we happen to be (including the male portion, by the way). Our love for people should not be contingent on believing that we are good or smart.

When we can improve the human condition, we should. For example, if we can use gene therapy to cure a debilitating disease, then it is our obligation to do so. But the goal is never to perfect human beings. It is to help humans do the best we can with what we are, together.

Leo’s reference to a “city” based on love involves two Biblical stories that he briefly sketches near the outset. The Tower of Babel resembles a modern Large Language Model (LLM):

Fearing being scattered across the earth, [the people] sought to guarantee stability and power for themselves, and above all to ‘make a name’ for themselves. It was an impressive feat: a single language, a single technology, a single direction. However, the project concealed a profound danger. It was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion. When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused and people no longer understand each other. The result is not unity, but dispersion.

The other city is Jerusalem as it was rebuilt by Nehemiah–a story with deep civic resonance that I have discussed on this blog and in What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life (pp. 81-83)

The teachings of the Church are grounded in biblical narratives like these but have developed through previous efforts of discernment in modern times. Leo discerns the following components of today’s Catholic Social Doctrine: the equal dignity of all human beings; the supreme value of human rights; the principle of the common good; the principle of the universal destination of goods; the principle of subsidiarity; the principle of solidarity and the principle of social justice.

I will mention a few points that interested me from this framework.

First, the encyclical develops an interesting view of property rights in an era of data science and AI. Leo acknowledges that “certainly there is a right to private property, which has its own specific meaning and purpose.” (He does not explain the purpose of private property, but it could be to permit individuality and thus human dignity.) However, for Leo, private property is “always subordinate to the universal destination of goods,” which means that “the earth’s goods — soil, water, air and natural resources — are given by God to the entire human family to sustain the lives of all, and … every person has an inherent right to the use of such goods, both now and in the future.”

So far, this is established Catholic Social Doctrine, but the novel point in Magnifica humanitas involves intellectual property: “Today, among the goods that are universally intended for everyone, we must also include new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data.” Later, Leo says, “Data is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few. It is necessary to think creatively in order to manage data as a common or shared good.”

Prevalent legal frameworks treat software and intellectual property as the work of human beings who have the right to own the fruits of their work. But Leo traces all goods back to God. When a human being invents software or a machine, there is no second creation. The output is still meant for the entire human family.

Leo also makes a strong argument against tech-bro economics:

It is important to ensure that this growth in appreciation of human dignity is not obscured by the pressure of new ideologies or very powerful interests in today’s world. Among these ideologies, I consider particularly insidious the one that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective. From this perspective, persons end up being reduced to a means of achieving results, a resource to be used and exploited, and are no longer recognized as a proper end in themselves who should never be instrumentalized. The value of persons, however, does not depend on what they achieve or produce. There are rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them.

The practical concerns that the encyclical catalogues include propaganda and misinformation, loss of meaningful work, rising inequalities of power and wealth, and deadly militarism enabled by “autonomous” weapons systems.

These are valid topics, and the encyclical sometimes reads like a thoughtful but relatively conventional policy white paper.

At times, however, the specifically Catholic perspective lends additional depth to its conventional recommendations. For instance, here is some general advice regarding education in a time of AI:

We need adults to rediscover their vocation as artisans of education, prepared to work patiently each day, with the support of extensive and shared educational partnerships. Today, accompanying children and young people in using technology for developing responsible relationships, helping them to recognize the risks and choose what fosters inner freedom, is a concrete form of charity and will safeguard their dignity. Teaching new generations that technological evolution does not follow a predetermined path, but can be guided by personal and collective responsibility, constitutes one of the most valuable services to the common good.

A purely secular nonprofit could have written those sentences, although perhaps without the reference to charity (caritas). But only the Church would preface this passage with the preceding sentence: “Indeed, we must consider the digital world as a new continent to be evangelized, one that requires generous missionaries who are mature in the faith.”

I suppose I would have liked to read a bit more about the spiritual costs of intelligence that is artificial rather than an activity of the human mind. In the history of the Catholic Church, technology has repeatedly changed how human beings have formed and communicated ideas and meanings. The codex, the confessional, the cathedral, the printing press, and the broadcast studio have restructured individual and collective mentalities. We have survived such changes so far, as has the Church. But right now, we must think deeply and act effectively to prevent AI from reducing us to “data, a cog in a machine or a commodity” so that it can instead become an “instrument of growth, justice and fraternity.”

See also: Reading Arendt in Palo Alto; the Nehemiah story: on the pros and cons of walls; AI as Satanic; love of the world; the encyclical Laudato Si and the power of peoples to organize; etc.

attitudes about AI by age

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In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg writes that college students are jeering at tech oligarchs who give commencement speeches about the benefits of AI. A Wall Street Journal article begins, “The only thing growing faster than the artificial-intelligence industry may be Americans’ negative feelings about it—as former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt saw on Friday” when he was booed at University of Arizona.

I had been wondering about this topic. The students I know best tend to be highly critical of AI, but presumably their generation holds varied opinions.

The Quinnipiac Poll asked Americans their attitudes about AI, and here I show those broken down by age.

Older people are the most likely to say that they are not excited at all by AI. Millennials (now at least 30 years old) are the most likely to say they are very excited, although that it is true for only 12% of them. Among Gen Z (under 30), the most common response is “not so excited,” and only 4 percent of them are very excited.

When asked whether AI will do more good or harm to people’s own day-to-day life, most Americans say “more harm,” and that is true of 55% of Gen-Z. The youngest generation is the most likely to say that AI will harm education (68% think it will harm education and 29% that it will help).

Just over 40% of each generation is somewhat concerned about AI overall, with no age differences. A bit more than half of Gen Z are very concerned, but rates of concern are higher among Millennials, who are quite polarized on the topic.

Without access to the raw data, I can’t see how age, education, gender, ideology, race, and personal experience with AI relate to opinions about AI. However, respondents who have more education and income are generally more favorable to AI in this poll. Those patterns hint that current college students may be more sanguine about AI than their contemporaries who are not going to college.

an overview of civics in higher education

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On April 10, the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University and the Alliance for Civics in the Academy (ACA), with support from GBH, held a one-day national summit on civics in higher education. All day, we heard from leaders of exemplary programs that emphasize various combinations of community engagement, academic coursework, and research and experimentation on democracy.

GBH has posted a video of the substantive portions of my opening remarks. My 7-minute talk may also serve as an overview of civic education in the academy as I see it today.

(The subtitles are a little inaccurate, but close enough …)