I’ve struggled with writing this for several weeks, but it touches upon several points (involving Philosophy, Religion, art, and AI) that are clearly pain points for some of us. As a result, I decided to soldier on, and attempt to provide an epistemological breakdown of my own beliefs. Only time will tell if this represented a horrible mistake.

Some background: as many readers here know, I’m an engineer. I have longstanding and deep interests in computing hardware, as a designer of microprocessors; as well as an entirely unhealthy fixation on the Cold War and its various unholy offspring. When I was choosing my college, I wanted to choose one that would allow me to pursue both items: an interest in machine learning (which, in the early 70s, was in its infancy) and the related hardware, as well as the history of the development of nuclear weapons. As a downwinder, the latter was undertaken in an effort to conquer a paralyzing fear of them, via the naive concept of eliminating the fear of that which one does not understand.

I failed miserably in both pursuits, based upon my original criteria. And yet, in some sense, I actually succeeded; primarily by hitting targets that were not my original goals at all.

My parents had introduced me to writings of several philosophers. They were Randian Objectivists, and believed that they had found the holy grail of Humanist understanding by reading and arguing every aspect of Ayn Rand’s writings. I was well-steeped in this teapot: they studied “Atlas Shrugged” with all of the zeal and fervency that any Religious zealot brought to the “Bible”. As an example, I first read it at age 10. I eventually read all of her work, as well as that of Nathaniel Branden and other Objectivist acolytes.

So, with this background, I made my decision. I went to study at William Barton Rogers’ little school for steam engine operators in Cambridge, MA. This place, at the time, was the hotbed of original thought in the field of machine learning, as well as being the place where many of the Manhattan Engineering District alumni taught from their hard-won skills.

There, I took lectures from Harold “Doc” Edgerton in electronic design and strobe photography, from George Kistiakowsky in high energy physics (his daughter Vera became the Dean of Physics during that time), from many other greater and lesser lights from the Manhattan Project, and from Draper Labs and Lincoln Labs luminaries (missile guidance systems, radar, and the like). Oh, and in a marvelous bit of serendipity, even a few from a then-relatively-new professor of linguistics, whose focus in machine learning fascinated me: Noam Chomsky. I came to discover that his work straddled both domains.

I also attempted to formalize my understanding of a sort of applied Philosophy, which (as it turns out) represents the goal of machine learning: to learn about learning, to think about thinking, to know about knowing, and to reason through reason.

These were heady times! Even as an undergrad, the hallways resonated to the din of interminable arguments, mostly arguing about argument itself. Chomsky has been described as a Cartesian/Kantian Rationalist, and I initially believed that: that label serves as well as any other. But there was another Philosophical camp present that hated him as much as he hated them: the Criticalists, who later apparently relabeled themselves as the Critical Theorists. Oh, Chomsky despised the Criticalists.

Chomsky professed a belief in learning through research, which leans perilously closely to outright Empiricism. The Criticalists slagged him off mercilessly, and hated his approach. This is largely because they professed an unshakeable belief in learning only through argument, especially those having to do with Economics. They were everywhere: they didn’t know the answer, but they would bitch and moan and criticize and complain and argue everything, up to and including whether the sun would rise tomorrow; apparently for the sheer animal enjoyment of it.

Eventually they would learn something from this process, one supposes. They certainly could be counted upon to never buy the beer. However, after a few years, the amusement of this pursuit wore off. It became necessary for this author to mute the din, and to work instead on something that could be sold for money to buy housing and food, and of course beer. Economics thus reared its ugly head.

By the start of my junior year of undergrad, I achieved a twofold epiphany that carries me to this day. And it had to do with Religion, which is known to be yet another form of Economics: primarily having to do with how to most efficiently part the believers from their money. I believe in no Religion: I was raised in the complete absence of it.

Nearly every major Religion espouses, as one of its most basic primary tenets, that it alone holds the key to truth, or salvation, or whatever Good Thing they are selling that week. Only that single Religion is Right, and every other one is Wrong, and the adherents to such wrongthink will certainly burn in Hell, or go bankrupt, or whatever Bad Thing they are selling that week.

The first stanza of the twofold epiphany was this: if the clear and present fact that every Religion believes that every other Religion is Wrong is to be accepted, then by Gawd (and Occam) it follows that they must all be Wrong. Oh, and the other stanza? That my parents really were Religious zealots, because their Philosophy really was simply another Religion: the primacy of the dollar was not to be challenged, in our house.

Oops: that leads to the inevitable conclusion that all those impressive-sounding Labels That Must Be Capitalized were just glossolalia, disguising yet more categories of Religion; and it follows that they must also inevitably be Wrong. And thus Religion and Philosophy immediately collapse under their own weight into the singularity that is Economics, which we all know to be Wrong. Boom.

A great example of this is Chomsky himself, who has always been funded by the military: his DARPA projects in machine learning were simply meant to provide better decision-making support with respect to whom should be incinerated today, and howm to most cost-effectively incinerate them. Some would call that Moral Relativism, and I suppose that that would be as good a label as any other.

I simply cried “Hold, Enough!”, and thereby passed up a very lucrative career of designing things to kill as many people as possible in a cost-effective way (which makes me a lapsed Economist, which I suppose is as good a label as any other). My basic Philosophy is one shared by the entirety of the Philosophy Department of the University of Wooloomaloo (2). I swore that I was done with it, and went on to only do non-military, non-weapony, non-explodey things. And that leads us to where we are today: with me broke and broken, having been run over repeatedly by the busfuls of Important People with Labels That Must Be Capitalized.

So now, let us speak of art, with a small “a”. I become enraged when people use Labels That Must Be Capitalized (hereinafter, LTMBC) to characterize art. I become apoplectically enraged when LTMBC are used to criticize art, and I tend to go completely supernova-scale asshole when LTMBC are used to cast aspersions upon the motivations of the artists. I was once told by a Criticalist, in absolute seriousness, that Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, "Ode to Joy", 1824, could not be regarded as art, because it was a work-done-for-hire.

Peace, out. One doesn’t get to do that when one's LTMBC beliefs are based upon the ravings of people who are bigger assholes that this author can even imagine on his most inflamed day. Chomsky certainly is one of those: one needs only to study his conflicts with e.g. Zizek (1) for great examples of world-class assholishness. And they are more than happy to return the compliment in kind. The beat, as they say, goes on.

Modern physics tells us that the area around a black hole within which the escape velocity (the velocity needed to escape the hole’s gravity) exceeds the speed of light is known as the Schwartzchild Radius: that which crosses that boundary is never seen again. It is commonly called the event horizon, but the two terms are not entirely interchangeable. My epiphany reveled to me that an analogous structure exists in Philosophy, which as we have seen is simply a splinter faction of Religion: the area within which the escape velocity required to avoid the inevitable, interminable arguments exceeds the maximum possible speed of human being running away at his or her maximum possible velocity is hereinafter referred to as the Bullshit Radius.

Finally, and with respect to AI: it has been created by people who are, to a man, pathologically unable to admit that they could be Wrong. Such people are therefore, by definition, on the wrong side of the Bullshit Radius. Which is why this author gave up on AI 40 years ago, and will never voluntarily contribute nor submit to its tender ministrations.

And now you know.

Respectfully submitted,

UFS

Bibliography and footnotes:

This author had originally documented all of the above terms and claims with an extensive bibliography, which came to a total of 42 items (all thanks to Douglas Adams). I have significantly edited them down for brevity, since I have already used far too many syllables (essentially my lifetime allottance). Now, only the most important 4 remain. (4)

1. I will let Chomsky speak for himself, from an interview given to Pax Marxista in 2012 (http://www.critical-theory.com/noam-chomsky-accidentally-provide-warrant...)

"First of all, I quite agree that just spewing out facts means nothing. In our discussion here we haven’t just been spewing out facts, it’s within a framework, a frame of understanding, principles and so on. The European intellectuals he is talking about have a concept of theory, which in my view, is largely divorced from facts and from theory, in any serious sense of the notion. It’s mostly big, complicated words that may be fun for intellectuals to throw around to each other but most of it, I think, is gibberish to tell you the honest truth. It’s not theory in any sense that I understand and I have been involved most of my life in the sciences where there are theories and so on.

So sure, if you can find a theory that has some real principles which are of some interest and you can draw conclusions from them which you can apply to interpreting the actual world around you then sure, that’s wonderful. If there are such theories, I am happy to see them. I don’t find them when I read Paris Post-Modernist talk. What I see is intellectuals interacting with one another in ways which are incomprehensible to the public and, to be frank, incomprehensible to me. So sure, let’s have theories that have some intellectual content, some consequences, can be refined, change and lead us to better understanding."

I always wanted to reduce Chomsky to a mere footnote. (3)

2. Palin/Cleese/Idle/Jones/Gilliam et. al., 1972, "The Bruce's Philosopher Song":

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable

Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table

David Hume could out-consume
Schopenhauer and Hegel

And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel

There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ye
'bout the raising of the wrist
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill

Plato, they say, could stick it away
Half a crate of whiskey every day

Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle
Hobbes was fond of his dram

And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart
"I drink, therefore I am."

Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed

3. I always wanted to put a footnote into a footnote, as well.

4. Who am I kidding? Nobody ever reads the footnotes.