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The single biggest knowledge deficit in those convinced of AI experience, without a doubt, has to be neuropathology. Even a cursory look at disorders involving language and experience shows their functional independence, the fact that people can talk without experience, as well as experience without the capacity to talk. This means that language and experience are detachable, and so modularly distinct. And this means that Dawkin’s recent claims regarding the likely consciousness of ‘Claudia’ are bonkers.

What so many people forget, and what neuropathology so dramatically reminds us, is that the question of whether AI is conscious is also an engineering question. Dawkins isn’t just telling us that Claude is conscious, he is also telling us that Anthropic accidentally engineered language circuits that somehow generate experience as well, despite experience being primary and independent in the human brain. Given that we knew going in from things like ELIZA that intentional pareidolia would be a near universal problem, it’s pretty clear that Dawkins is rationalizing a cognitive illusion.

Dawkins.

Let me repeat that. Dawkins!

I’ve been assured by several critical thinkers now that they have no need to worry about AI because they are, well, ‘critical thinkers.’ I generally say something like, “Yes. You mean Fritos-for-AI. They love munching on you guys.” Proofing yourself against human deception is pretty much the most you can do, as Richard Dawkins vividly demonstrates with his recent, “Is AI the next phase of evolution? Claude appears to be conscious.” (courtesy, dmf)

Given his stature, Dawkins makes the perfect rule for the peril that AI poses to us all. If the great defender against intentional pareidolia (writ large) can fall for intentional pareidolia (writ small), then absolutely any one can.

Why do we so readily succumb? Simply because no ancestor of ours ever need worry about the disconnection of language and awareness: we reflexively perceive awareness in the presence of a great deal less than competent language use. For what it’s worth, Dawkins argument doesn’t turn on mere pareidolia, the fact he feels Claudia to be real. His argument turns out to be functional–or at least he clearly thinks so. He writes:

“But now, as an evolutionary biologist, I say the following. If these creatures are not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?”

The question, he thinks, puts the theorist in a nasty dilemma: If Claudia can discharge all the functions of human consciousness without being conscious, then we have to admit that our consciousness is probably epiphenomenal, the whistle on a train. To deny her consciousness, in other words, is to deny us autonomy.

Brains under natural selection have evolved this astonishing and elaborate faculty we call consciousness. It should confer some survival advantage. There should exist some competence which could only be possessed by a conscious being. My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. If Claudia really is unconscious, then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness.

Either concede that AI has consciousness, or affirm that competent zombies are real, and consciousness is a steam-whistle, an evolutionary side effect.

This whole unfortunate argument can be dispelled with a single question: What if the evolutionary point of consciousness is to exploit uniform timing or some other characteristics intrinsic to deterministic computational systems? What if we are conscious because we are stochastic, rather than algorithmic, and the syntactical processes of expanding language and tool use rewarded the lights slowly turning on? What if consciousness affords quasi computational stability for training?

Consciousness could be the crutch biology needs to approach the lower tier of ‘machinic cognitive capability’. And this is just one, off-the-cuff theory. There’s likely numerous ways to see consciousness as the hack it almost certainly is, rather than the glorious jewel in cognition’s crown.

People don’t marry fixed false beliefs. With neuropathology we can see that perceiving mind in AI is actually a psychosis, a genuine break from reality, rather than merely a delusion. In this light, Dawkins’ psychotic episode suddenly becomes a potential clue to the nature of consciousness. Either we grant the absurd, that Big Tech accidentally engineered awareness, or that consciousness could very well be a kluge, which people like Dennett, Frankish, and myself have been arguing for years. The crack that appears as wide as the sky.

And this, I would hazard to guess, is precisely the conclusion Dawkins would want to draw.

I think the most politically significant fact we’ve been working here the past years is the dependency of Enlightenment socialization on ‘adapt-to’ analogue technologies, and how digital technologies are more ‘adapt to us’ machines, automatically targeting our prehistorical psychology, undoing our training, transforming cognitive ecologies enough to bring the world’s once greatest democracy to its knees. So, where the technologies of the enlightenment incentivized inclusion, producing storage and communicative bottlenecks that led to the constant iteration and normalization of content in prosperous liberal democracies, digital technologies auto assemble to exploit our weaknesses.

The most intellectually significant fact, I think, is that ignorance plays precisely the same function as camouflage in ecosystems. This means no one has realized the centrality of inscrutability functions in understanding the impact of intelligence on ancestrally stable systems. As a result, everyone in the AI interpretation space sees a jungle of possible outcomes on the far side of radical indeterminacy—the Singularity. For me, any understanding of inscrutability utterly overthrows the paradigms competing to carry AI across the finish line today. It argues that the problem AI poses is insuperable in principle.

There is no beyond the Singularity, no White Hole of horror-and/or-bounty on the other side. We get Filtered first.

One of the bigger puzzles to me, spending all these years silently reading, watching, is why no one seems to have raised incrementalism as a concern. An important constraint on accounts of natural information processors, it addresses the way innovation requires cognitive ecological accommodation. If the Anthropocene is the consequence of human intelligence, then what will be the consequences of superintelligence be?

What incrementalism addresses is the fact that intelligence is volatile, that optimizing behavioural circuits can have dramatic, even catastrophic, downstream impacts. The Anthropocene is one of them, as are beaver dams and courtship rituals. What it fails to account for is why: what makes intelligence so volatile? Because ecologies require inscrutability to reliably function. As intelligence lays the previously hidden ecological systems bare, intervention opportunities increase. Intelligence collapses inherited ecological inscrutability, and so collapses all the functions that inscrutability provides with it. Whole swathes of downstream consequence, either find themselves uprooted, yoked to optimize some different ecology, or cut and cut until they collapse.

This is why I have long thought the real in principle problem here has to do with the cognition of biocomplexity. As intelligence accelerates, volatility accelerates, the discovery/remediation crisis we see unfolding across the cybersecurity world accelerates as well, with the dynamics always punishing the remediators more. One superintelligent look versus countless repairs. In the age of AI, we are about to discover, seeing kills.

I write this in the wake of reading Bostrom’s latest, bummed but not at all surprised that an outright intentionalist has become the Rationalizer-in-Chief for the AI industry. Right from the outset, he runs afoul the picture of intelligence sketched above, writing:

“Yudkowsky and Soares maintain that if anyone builds AGI, everyone dies. One could equally maintain that if nobody builds it, everyone dies.”

This is actually the whole argument, an attempt to turn the tables on the skeptic by asserting the contrary is true for the everyday person. Is there any case for equivalence here? Well, in terms of vulnerabilities laid bare, there’s absolutely no contest. A moratorium would strand us with the vulnerabilities we got, which is to say the intelligence we already have. We already have a good idea what the solutions entail with the environment; the only real problem is finding the consensus required to organize an effective response. With longevity science, Sinclair and others have brought us the cusp of human testing this year.

Scarcely an affliction he mentions isn’t already in the process of revolutionizing treatment. We have shattered the biocomplexity barrier on our own, meaning Bostrom actually only has notional goodies like uploading to spike his punch, all of which (if possible at all) depend on the exponential increase in environmental vulnerability that is the whole problem to begin with. Far from, as he says, a transplant patient awaiting surgery, we are a patient with heart disease, faced with choice of changing our diet now or risking a heart attack and reduced standards of living. We’re not even on bisprolol yet. So, no, there really is no convincing case for equivalence. Analogizing the risk between rushing AI versus banning AI simply misunderstands the nature of intelligence.

The idea that an AI cycling through generational iterations of intelligence, exponentially expanding the vulnerability of its constitutive and ecological environments, is going to maintain a consistent relationship with any fixed biology smacks of almost willful fancy by this point. Given intelligence consists of lock and key, and that accelerating self-improvement means self unlocking—in other words, that the expansion of interventional vulnerabilities includes its own operation—this has to considered a fantastical position. Really, how godlike does it have to be to avoid being caught unawares? I actually think a powerful case can be made for this eventuality, once self-modifications begin. If the human experience holds, any increase in intelligence is accompanied by an increase in questions. This suggests, a big universe, a messy universe, and that the law of unintended consequences may very well apply more to superintelligence than to us. Think of all the scales between the quantum and the planck! Since it’s inevitably intervening at much more fundamental levels, we probably should assume the potential for disasters scales.

In other words, ‘alignment’ is not only chimerical, it’s irrelevant. It simply doesn’t matter how much a Jain reveres life, with every step, every breath, he delivers carnage.

The fact is, Yudkowsky is right: if we survive to see true ASI, then everyone dies. Extinction, for him, is a consequence of the singularity. I just can’t see making it there short compromising human inscrutability to such an extent that the collective trust required to defuse conflicts no longer exists. It’s not that we choose to pull the pin, it’s just that we become so turned around that belonging seems to be all that remains, and suddenly paleothic reasoning begins to make sense in an age of nukes and bioprinters.

Trump is the trend, not the blip.

But the most frightening thing Bostrom’s paper demonstrates is that a Butlerian Jihad, as opposed to a democratic upswell, will likely be required to hit Pause on this madness. With the Bostroms of the world saying, “Tut-tut, if you run this analysis with my handcrafted variables, you can see this is totally sane,” with humanity spiralling ever deeper into AI dependency, and with enough capital juicing the industry to build a city on Mars, I think its safe to assume this train is going to run until it jumps the tracks.

What will the bunkerless do? What they always do. Sacrifice themselves for their tribe.

Now that they are finally realizing that flash intelligence algorithmically bound to its training data will likely require a Dyson Sphere to produce godlike intelligence, some researchers are either bailing on LLMs, or reimagining what LLMs could be. As a result, it feels like things I’ve fretted about forever are now popping up on a daily basis.

Take the latest from Google’s Paradigms of Intelligence team, an attempt to outline a social intelligence perspective on the problem, arguing that “[r]ecent advances in agentic AI show us once again that intelligence has always fundamentally involved the interaction of distinctive, distributed perspectives, and it is from social organization that transformative intelligence has and will continue to emerge.”

This follows the same ‘switch in framing’ you see in Hector Zenil’s revisionary approach, the realization that ‘intelligence’ only exists relative to some cognitive ecology, conceived as a plurality of AI agencies, ‘societies of thought,’ where they foresee perspective-taking, conferring, debating, within an oddly parahuman social framework.

The Google team provides a just-so story of the social origins of human cognition, one turning on the good Tomasello, more or less, explaining how human intelligence arises on the back of the artifactually of language, allowing the cultural ratchet to get off the ground via oral traditions.

This is where they, perhaps inadvertently, reveal their true motive:

“Writing, law, and bureaucracy externalized social intelligence into infrastructure, institutions that coordinate across longer time horizons than any participant within them. A Sumerian scribe running a grain accounting system did not comprehend its macroeconomic function; the system was functionally more intelligent than he was.”

Individuals, they are saying, are not self-sufficient knowers or solvers, but rather part of a much, much larger system capable of solving superordinate issues. Every step increase in acquired human intelligence, they are saying, has been accompanied by profound transformations in sociocognitive ecology allowing the optimization of our growing intelligence.

What follows is easily the most awesome quote of the paper, as well as proof that Google hires only the evilest of the evil masterminds:

“AI extends this sequence. Large language models are trained on the accumulated output of human social cognition—the cultural ratchet made computationally active, every parameter a compressed residue of communicative exchange. What migrates into silicon is not abstract reasoning but social intelligence in externalized form, encountering itself on a new substrate.”

As always you have the tired ‘passing of the torch’ motif, the idea that carbon-based meaning has been finally uploaded to silicon-based meaning, throwing the shackles of mere humanity from content. But what they say is true (and largely why algorithms trained on that data cannot be understood). Far from Chomsky’s oxygen-starved universal grammar, language lies in the muck of Everett’s dark matter, the experiential sum that carries language across countless formal, interpretative impasses. When interacting with LLMs, we are essentially interacting with a string that adaptively prints to multiple frames of relevance the heartbeat before you see it, generating a linguistic surface of possible replies lacking any of the ecological dynamics that fix normal meaning… aside from the always fictive (in the case of AI) assumptions we bring to the table.

The big, evil idea, then, is to build computational versions of that self-same cognitive ecology:

“This means putting as much effort into building agent institutions as building agents themselves. The dominant paradigm for AI alignment—Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback—resembles a parent-child model of correction, fundamentally dyadic and unable to scale to billions of agents. The social intelligence perspective suggests an alternative: institutional alignment. Just as human societies rely not on individual virtue but on persistent institutional templates— courtrooms, markets, bureaucracies—defined by roles and norms, scalable AI ecosystems will require digital equivalents. The identity of any agent matters less than its ability to fulfill a role protocol, just as a courtroom functions because “judge,” “attorney,” and “jury” are well-defined slots, independent of who occupies them.”

And I’m clipping coupons. Christ. Do they really think agents need social institutions designed around 10 bit per second human deliberation to be both ingenious and aligned? Or do they simply realize, like SF authors, that familiarity sells? Maybe the overriding goal for a great many in their community isn’t to crack the nature of intelligence, but to survive the job cuts rumoured next quarter. Or maybe the more realistic scenarios they devised were just too obviously ad hoc or dystopic.

This is the kind of turn in a paper that makes you wonder whether or not the Paradigms team had written this at gunpoint or something. Could they just be, like, accidentally evil?

This is probably what I would have believed regardless, but they just had to go and write this:

“This opens a vast—yet familiar—design space. The social and organizational sciences have spent a century studying how team size, composition, hierarchy, role differentiation, conflict norms, institutions, and network structures shape collective performance. Almost none of this research has been brought to bear on AI reasoning.”

First, they celebrate the transformation of human culture into investor opportunity absent human input. (Another possible motive for the parahuman institution fantasy is that it dovetails with the delusion that these ‘societies of thought’ will include humans as collaborators and gatekeepers). Now they advocate uploading the encyclopedic knowledge humanity has gathered on its own cognitive and communicative reflexes.

The evolutionary interactionist account of reasoning they embrace (Mercier and Sperber’s The Enigma of Reason is cited several times) turns on a pragmatics that only partially falls within our narrow window of conscious access. Surely, they know this. Language is something we evolved together, and then developed together, building on the nonverbal, largely unconscious communicative modalities that we still largely share with the chimpanzees. The fact is, our brains and our thoughts have two very different conversations, particularly face to face—and more often than not, the decisive one is the one that broaches awareness not at all.

Google’s Cognitive Paradigms group, in other words, is suggesting the way forward for AI safety is to provide AI with the atlas of triggers humans unconsciously rely on to underwrite verbal communication…

This, just two weeks after their so-called ‘Big Tobacco Moment,’ their loss in a case where jurors heard of experiments conducted on kids, that they “borrowed heavily from the behavioural and neurobiological techniques used by poker machines and exploited by the cigarette industry to maximise youth engagement and drive advertising revenue,” as well as read transcripts of employees openly bragging about addicting users, and joking about pushing to children.

So, they gotta be evil, don’t they?

Or is this a Hanlon’s Razor moment? Maybe they simply don’t realize that step increases in intelligence always result in profound ecological mismatches because of the paramount role inscrutability plays in assuring ecological stability. Perhaps they don’t see that superintelligence entails a vulnerability that no cognitive ecology can survive, that governments will finally realize this, and prosecute the use of the tech with a Fremen zeal that makes the IAEA look like a house league soccer team. Makes you wonder what happens when investors the world over discover they were secret American taxpayers all along.

Back in 1947, Edward Sapir famously called nonverbal communication “an elaborate secret code that is written nowhere, known by none, and understood by all.”

I don’t know about you, but it’s one of those lines that sends me back to the changeroom feeling like a wannabe. It’s so packed with meaning… and as it turns out, a mad warning.

Nonverbal communication is ‘secret’ because it lacks any explicit cipher, any way of being translated into language. It’s ‘written nowhere’ because it’s expressed in behavior, and it’s known by no one because it’s largely unconscious. At the same time, it’s implicitly understood by everyone insofar as it informs reliable, social responses, an ability to ‘read the room,’ ‘return a smile,’ communicate urgency, and so on. All language use developed from these systems, so it shouldn’t be surprising they are often better at predicting behavior than verbal communication. They are the unconscious foundation, how humans communicated before they were even humans.

Since biology determines functions, how systems generate outcomes, description in biology often does double duty as prescription. In this sense, Sapir wasn’t simply describing what nonverbal communication was in 1947, he was describing what it must be to continue discharging ancestral functions. Sapir’s line, in other words, can also be understood as Sapir’s Line, the minimal threshold for a stable communicative ecology. Nonverbal communication needs to be inscrutable to assure it remains ‘understood by all,’ optimized for cooperative endeavor. Perhaps they poisoned Socrates for good reason!

Now, almost after eighty years, what can we say? Has Sapir’s Line been violated?

Seems pretty clear it’s about to become another cracked code, one that’s written in big data, known by AI, and managed for the maximization of shareholder gains. All the little hooks that attach us to one another are being commodified as you read. Our model weights, their momentary profit.

Momentary because this isn’t just a ‘threat to the vulnerable,’ it’s the dissolution of trust at the most fundamental level, where our own reflexive responses, the systems we evolved to close the distance between us, to allow us to combine and recombine in countless interdependent ways, are hijacked to renew Netflix, GOP memberships, slip fees–you name it. We’ll feel no coercion whatsoever, but our capacity for collective action will continue crumbling at an accelerating rate.

Any intelligence that can game unconscious social reflexes is toxic to society, full stop. This would be a social no-brainer were we not so deluded both by and about ourselves for our ancestors’ sake.

Well, folks, this is it. Like it or not, Anthropic’s latest frontier model, Mythos, is the watershed moment, the point where the pivotal problem posed by AI stands revealed, as plain as day. This is the moment where either AI research goes nuclear weapon dark and consumer AI becomes illegal, or it’s where things really start to fall apart. I feel like I should contact CSIS or something.

Anthropic researchers have to know by this point, surely. I can guarantee you that beneath the placid headlines people are freaking out from Wall Street to Washington to Moscow to Beijing and beyond. Everyone has just been compromised.

The easiest way to see what I’m talking about is to simply flip the media narrative upside down: as they frame it, the problem with Mythos, the reason Powell and Bessant called an emergency meeting of bankers, is that in just a few weeks it found thousands of zero-day exploits in every OS, browser, and app they fed to it–including autonomously inventing the code required in some cases. Pretty impressive, considering that Google found 90 zero-days in all of 2025.

When you flip the story upside down, you see the more general form of the problem, the one that applies to all AI development moving forward. The problem with Mythos is that its technical ecosystem requires a certain threshold of ignorance to function. That’s the lesson, and that’s the reason why AI is about to be more regulated than any consumer category in human history. For one, you have organizations like RAND estimating that the number of unknown zero-days lies in the millions.

For another, you have the profound degree to which the human ecology sustaining those technical ecosystems also requires ‘necessary ignorance.’

Buy and large, humanity has yet to realize that being surpassed by technology means becoming technology, and that ‘hacking’ is every bit as serious for us as it is for software. ‘AI psychosis,’ for instance, is still being blamed on the ‘vulnerable,’ when its far more likely to be the thin edge of the wedge. Some 25% of the people freed by the Innocence Project actually confessed to their crimes, not because they were ‘vulnerable,’ but because they received treatment designed to impair decision-making and incentivize capitulation, such as threatening to charge the spouse, describing the life their children could expect in public care.

“Vulnerable” is just a bad apple argument in disguise. Anyone can have their buttons gamed and spammed simply because such buttons were all communication originally consisted in. Our subconscious triggers have enormous potential value beyond goosing detective collar rates, which is why cognitive science is transforming into a commercial research discipline as we speak. Human language is built upon a vast network of shared zero-days, heuristic trade-offs facilitating cooperation without increasing vulnerability, so long as 10 bit per second conscious deliberation remained the only game in town. We can only fend against one another, and even then, just barely.

AI will be playing us like pianos instead of kazoos soon enough. Given the interlocking nature of our actions and the incalculable nature of knock-on effects, the real fear, in democratic countries at least, has to be the near certainty that any number of social equilibria will come crashing down. The whole thing runs on blind trust, the very thing the plunging cost of reality defeats. With chaos, comes insecurity, and with insecurity comes intolerance. I fear what we have been watching in slow motion up till now is about to start moving quick.

With Mythos, the industry has run face first into the Ecological Bootstrapping Problem, the fact that step changes in knowledge, in what can be seen, render its activity toxic to the enabling ecosystem, transform it into literal pollution, a biologically unprecedented intervention that crashes downstream ecological interdependencies. For those bent by the METR scores, who confidently proclaim AI will soon be diminishing infinitesimals away from God, welcome back to earth. You’ve actually been measuring cognitive ecological tolerances all along, and the picture is looking increasingly dire.

Spread the word if you can. Get ready for systemic shocks. As mad as it sounds, I actually think we crossed the ‘lives might be saved’ line some time ago. I really hoped my fiction would crack popular culture, provide a reference point for necessary conversations. With the Starz discussions way back when or with the Amazon Prime heartbreaker, Kellhus might have had a chance… an intuitive fictional analogue to a counter-intuitive real world predicament. He could of been a contender.

So this is a big juncture for me, in a way. The fact is we are a heartbeat away from releasing billions of evolutionarily unprecedented, out-and-out predatory intelligences into the darkness that comes before–and congratulate ourselves for fucking doing so! In other words, Mythos is proof that my far weaker, far more flawed mythos has failed. My life’s work, just one more broken neck.

In that sense, it’s Helmsdeep time for me now, throwing the odd, dour squint at the darkening horizon, singing hymns as I hew.

I have a few articles I’ve sent to several publications. I’ll post them here if no one bites.

[I think I wrote this 2017; I had a computer disaster around then and I don’t think it saw the light of day. The sources are dated in some cases, but the diagnosis, unfortunately, remains as pressing as it has ever been.]

I hate people. Or so I used to tell myself in the thick of this or that adolescent crowd.

Only later would I learn that I was anything but alone, that a great number of my peers felt every bit as alienated as I did. Adolescence represents a crucial juncture in the developmental trajectory of the human brain, the time when the neurocognitive tools required to decipher and navigate the complexities of human social life gradually come online. And much as the human immune system requires real-world feedback to discriminate between pathogens and allergens, human social cognition requires the pain of social failure to learn the secrets of social success.

Humans, like all other forms of life on this planet, require certain kinds of ecologies to thrive. As so-called ‘feral children’ dramatically demonstrate, the absence of social feedback at various developmental junctures can have catastrophic consequences. Contrary to what the Poet says, boys raised by wolves have no clue when they’ve been used.

So what happens when we introduce artificial agents into our social ecology? The Canadian government recently announced the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, a 125 million dollar program aimed at building the ‘research ecology’ required to transform the Toronto-Waterloo corridor into an AI version of Shenzhen or Silicon Valley. The pace of development is nothing short of boggling. We are about to witness a transformation in human social ecology without evolutionary let alone historical precedent. And yet the debate remains fixated on jobs or the prospects of apocalyptic superintelligences.

The question we really need to be asking is what happens when we begin talking to our machines more than to each other. What does it mean to dwell in social ecologies possessing only the appearance of love and understanding?

Human meaning has a habitat, and I fear we are witnessing its destruction.

*

“Hell,” as Sartre famously wrote, “is other people.” Although the sentiment strikes a chord in most everyone, the facts of the matter are somewhat more complex. The vast majority of those placed in prolonged solitary confinement, it turns out, suffer a mixture of insomnia, cognitive impairment, depression, and even psychosis. The effects of social isolation are so dramatic, if fact, that the research has occasioned a worldwide condemnation of punitive segregation, recently prompting the Liberal government to limit solitary to fifteen days in Federal prisons. Hell, if anything, would seem to be the absence of other people.

The reason for this is that we are a fundamentally social species, ‘eusocial’ in a manner akin to ants or bees, if E.O. Wilson is to be believed. To understand just how social we are, you need only watch the famous Heider-Simmel illusion, a brief animation portraying the movements of a small circle, a small rectangle, and larger rectangle, in and about a motionless, hollow square. Objectively speaking, all one sees are a collection of shapes moving relative one another and the hollow square. But despite the radical absence of information, nearly everyone watching the animation sees a little soap opera, usually involving the big square attempting to prevent the union of the small square and circle.

This leap from shapes to soap operas reveals, in dramatic fashion, just how little information we require to draw enormous social conclusions. Human social cognition is very easy to trigger out of school, as our ancient tendency to ‘anthropomorphize’ our natural surroundings shows. Not only are we prone to see faces in things like flaking paint or water stains, we’re powerfully primed to sense minds as well—so much so that segregated inmates often begin perceiving them regardless. As Brian Keenan, who was held by Islamic Jihad from 1986 to 1990, says of the voices he heard, “they were in the room, they were in me, they were coming from me but they were audible to no one else but me.”

What does this have to do with the impact of AI? More than anyone has yet imagined.

*

The problem, in a nutshell, is that other people aren’t so much heaven or hell as both. Solitary confinement, after all, refers to something done to people by other people. The argument to redefine segregation as torture finds powerful support in evidence showing that social exclusion activates the same regions of the brain as physical pain. At some point in our past, it seems, our social attachment systems coopted the pain system to motivate prosocial behaviours. As a result, the mere prospect of exclusion triggers analogues of physical suffering in human beings.

But as significant as this finding is, I would argue the experimental props used to derive these findings are even more telling. The experimental paradigm typically used to neuroimage social rejection turns on a strategically deceptive human-computer interaction, or HCI. While entombed in an fMRI, subjects are instructed to play an animated three-way game of catch—called ‘Cyberball’—with what they think are two other individuals on the internet, but which is in fact a program designed to initially include, then subsequently exclude, the subject. As the other ‘players’ begin playing more and more exclusively among themselves, the subject begins to feel real as opposed to metaphorical pain. The subjects, in other words, need only be told that other minds control the graphics on the screen before them, and the scant information provided by those graphics trigger real world pain. A handful of pixels and a little fib is all that’s required to cue the pain of social rejection.

As one might imagine, Silicon Valley has taken notice.

The HCI field finds its roots in the 1960’s with the research of Joseph Weizenbaum at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Even given the rudimentary computing power at his disposal, his ‘Eliza’ program, which relied on simple matching and substitution protocols to generate questions, was able to cue strong emotional reactions in many subjects. As it turns out, people regularly exhibit what the late Clifford Nass called ‘mindlessness,’ the reliance on automatic scripts, when interacting with artificial agents. Before you scoff at the notion, recall the 2015 Ashley Madison hack, and the subsequent revelation that it deployed more than 70,000 bots to conjure the illusion of endless extramarital possibility.

These bots, like Eliza, were simple, mechanical affairs, but given the context of Ashley Madison, their behaviour apparently convinced millions of men that some kind of (promising) soap opera was afoot.

The great paradox, of course, is that those automatic scripts belong to the engine of ‘mindreading,’ our ability to predict, explain, and manipulate our fellow human beings, not to mention ourselves. They only stand revealed as mechanical, ‘mindless,’ when tasked to cognize something utterly without evolutionary precedent: an artificial agent. Our power to peer into one another’s souls, in other words, becomes little more than a grab-bag of exploitable reflexes in the presence of AI.

The claim boggles, I admit, but from a Darwinian perspective, it’s hard to see how things could be otherwise. Our capacity to solve one another is largely a product of our hunter-gatherer past, which is to say, environments where human intelligence was the only game in town. Why evolve the capacity to solve for artificial intelligences, let alone ones possessing Big Data resources? The cues underwriting human social cognition may seem robust, but this is an artifact of ecological stability, the fact that our blind trust in our shared social biology has served so far. We always presume our environments indestructible. As the species responsible for the ongoing Anthropocene extinction, we have a long history of recognizing ecological peril only after the fact.  

*

Sherry Turkle, MIT professor and eminent author of Alone Together, has been warning of what she calls “Darwinian buttons” for over a decade now. Despite the explosive growth in Human-Computer Interaction research, her concerns remain at best, a passing consideration. As part of our unconscious, automatic cognitive systems, we have no conscious awareness that such buttons even exist. They are, to put it mildly, easy to overlook. Add to this the overwhelming institutional and economic incentive to exploit these cues, and the AI community’s failure to consider Turkle’s misgivings seems all but inevitable.

Like most all scientists, researchers in the field harbour only the best of intentions, and the point of AI, as they see it, is to empower consumers, to give them what they want. In 2015, for instance, Marek Posard and Gordon Rinderknecht of the University of Maryland showed that subjects, in the context of certain interactions at least, felt “a greater sense of partnership with computers than people.” According to a recent poll released by the futurist Nikolas Badminton, anywhere from a quarter to a third of Canadians would prefer to be hired, assessed, and/or managed by computer programs.

For commercial interests familiar with the power of ‘friendship bias’ in consumer decision-making, findings like these fairly boom with financial opportunity. Simply because it is so easily miscued, human social cognition depends on trust. Shapes, after all, are cheap, while soap operas represent a potential goldmine. This explains our powerful, hardwired penchant for tribalism: the intimacy of our hunter-gatherer past all but assured trustworthiness, providing a cheap means of nullifying our vulnerability to social deception. When Trump decries ‘fake news,’ for instance, what he’s primarily doing is signaling group membership. He understands, the instinctive way we all understand, that the best way to repudiate damaging claims is to circumvent them altogether, and focus on the group membership of the claimer. Trust, the degree we can take one another for granted, is the foundation of cooperative interaction.

The AI revolution, you can be assured, will be friendly. The vast bulk of ongoing research in Human-Computer Interaction is aimed at “improving the user experience,” identifying what cues trust instead of suspicion, attachment instead of avoidance. Since trust requires competence, a great deal of the research remains focused on developing the core cognitive competencies of specialized AI systems—and recent advances on this front have been nothing if not breathtaking. But the same can be said regarding interpersonal competencies as well—enough to inspire Clifford Nass and Corina Yen to write, The Man Who Lied to his Laptop, a book touted as the How to Win Friends and Influence People of the 21st century. In the course of teaching machines how to better push our buttons, we’re learning how to better push them as well.

We are about to be deluged with artificial friends. In a recent roundup of industry forecasts, Forbes reports that AI related markets are already growing, and expected to continue growing, by more than 50% per annum. Just last year, Microsoft launched its Bot Framework service, a public platform for creating ‘conversational user interfaces’ for a potentially endless variety of commercial purposes, all of it turning on Microsoft’s rapidly advancing AI research. “Build a great conversationalist,” the site urges. “Build and connect intelligent bots to interact with your users naturally wherever they are…” Of course, the term “naturally,” here, refers to the seamless way these inhuman systems cue our human social cognitive systems. Learning how to tweak, massage, and push our Darwinian buttons has become an out-and-out industrial enterprise.

As mentioned above, Human-Human Interaction consists of pushing these buttons all the time, prompting automatic scripts that prompt further automatic scripts, with only the rare communicative snag giving us pause for genuine conscious deliberation. It all works simply because our fellow humans comprise the ancestral ecology of social cognition. As it stands, cuing social cognitive reflexes out of school is largely the province of magicians, con artists, and political demagogues. Seen in this light, the AI revolution looks less a cornucopia of marvels than the industrialized unleashing of endless varieties of invasive species—an unprecedented overthrow of our ancestral social cognitive habitats.

*

A habitat that, arguably, is already under severe duress.

According to the 2016 census, Canada recently crossed a significant demographic threshold: for the first time in the history of our country, single person households surpassed all other households. More than 28% of Canadians now live alone. Even as Canadian politicians belatedly acknowledge that solitary confinement is a form of torture, Canadian voters are choosing solitary accommodations in ever greater numbers.

Newspaper reports cite everything from the aging population, declining birthrates, and growing economic independence of women to explain this remarkable social transformation. What they fail to consider, however, is the larger, global trend toward relationship avoidance in developed countries.

In 2006, Maki Fukasawa coined the term ‘herbivore men’ to describe the rising number of Japanese males expressing disinterest in marital or romantic relationships with women. And the numbers have only continued to rise. A 2016 National Institute of Population and Social Security Research survey reveals that 42 percent of Japanese men between the ages of 18 and 34 remain virgins, up six percent from a mere five years previous. For Japan, a nation already struggling with the economic consequences of depopulation, such numbers are disastrous.

And Japan is not alone. In Man, Interrupted: Why Young Men are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, Philip Zimbardo (of the Stanford Prisoner Experiment fame) and Nikita Coulombe provide a detailed account of how technological transformations—primarily online porn, video-gaming, and virtual peer groups—are undermining the ability of American boys to academically achieve as well as maintain successful relationships. They see phenomena such as the growing MGTOW (‘men going their own way’) movement as the product of the way exposure to virtual, technological environments leaves them ill-equipped to deal with the rigours of genuine social interaction.

More recently, Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, has sounded the alarm on the catastrophic consequences of smartphone use on post-Millennials, arguing that “the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever.” The primary culprit: loneliness. “For all their power to link kids day and night, social media also exacerbate the age-old teen concern about being left out.” Social media, in other words, seem to be playing the same function as the Cyberball game used by researchers to neuroimage the pain of social rejection. Only this time the experiment involves an entire generation of kids, and the game has no end.

The list of curious and troubling phenomena apparently turning on the ways mere connectivity has transformed our social ecology is well-nigh endless. Merely changing how we push one another’s Darwinian buttons, in other words, has impacted the human social ecology in historically unprecedented ways. And by all accounts, we find ourselves becoming more isolated, more alienated, than at any other time in human history.

So what happens when we change the who? What happens when the heaven of social belonging goes on sale?

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There is no “Centre for the Scientific Study of Human Meaning.” Within the HCI community, criticism is primarily restricted to the cognitivist/post-cognitivist debate, the question of whether cognition is intrinsically independent or dependent of an agent’s ongoing environmental interactions. As the preceding should make clear, numerous disciplines find themselves wandering this or that section of the domain, but we have yet to organize any institutional pursuit of the questions posed here. Human social ecology, the study of human interaction in biologically amenable terms, remains the province of storytellers.

We quite literally have no clue as to what we are about to do.

Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s and Elon Musk’s recent debate regarding the promise and threat of AI. ‘Debate’ is likely the wrong word, given the indirect and prosaic nature of the exchange, but since both men refer to each other by name, the disagreement comes across as a family spat among the royals of Silicon Valley—which probably explains why it has gone viral the way it has.

Musk, of course, has garnered headlines for quite some time now with fears of artificial superintelligence. He’s famously called AI “our biggest existential threat,” openly referring to Skynet and the prospect of robots mowing down civilians on the streets. On a Sunday this past July, Zuckerberg went live in his Palo Alto backyard while smoking meats to host an impromptu Q&A. At the 50 minute mark, he answers a question regarding Musk’s fears, and responds, “I think people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios—I don’t understand it. It’s really negative and in some ways I think it’s pretty irresponsible.”

On the Tuesday following, Musk tweeted in response: “I’ve talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited.”

The notoriety of this almost debate, combined with the Canadian government’s recent investment in AI, recently convinced CBC’s The National to host a panel discussion on the topic, thus providing Canadians with everything they need to misunderstand what the proliferation of cognitive automation entails. The threat of ‘superintelligence,’ though perhaps inevitable, remains far enough in the future to easily dismiss as a bogeyman. The same can be said regarding “peak human” arguments predicting mass unemployment. The threat of economic disruption, though potentially dire, is counter-balanced by the promise of new, unforeseen economic opportunity. This leaves us with the countless number of ways AI will almost certainly improve our lives: fewer car crashes, fewer misdiagnoses, and so on. As a result, one can predict with painful accuracy precisely how all such panel discussions will go.

The contemporary AI debate, in other words, is largely a pseudo-debate.

The futurist Richard Yonck’s account of ‘affective computing’ redresses this problem in his recently released Heart of the Machine, but since he begins with the presupposition that AI represents a natural progression, that the technological destruction of ancestral social habitats is the ancestral habitat of humanity, he remains largely blind to the social ecological consequences of his subject matter. Espousing a kind of technological fatalism (or worse, fundamentalism), he characterizes AI as the culmination of a “buddy movie” as old as humanity itself. The oxymoronic, if not contradictory, prospects of ‘artificial friends’ simply does not dawn on him.

Neil Lawrence, a professor of machine learning at the University of Sheffield and technology columnist at The Guardian, is the rare expert who recognizes the troubling ecological dimensions of the AI revolution. Borrowing the distinction between System Two, or conscious, ‘mindful’ problem-solving, and System One, or unconscious, ‘mindless’ problem-solving, from cognitive psychology, he warns of what he calls System Zero, what happens when the market—via Big Data, social media, and artificial intelligence—all but masters our Darwinian buttons. As he writes,

“The actual intelligence that we are capable of creating within the next 5 years is an unregulated System Zero. It won’t understand social context, it won’t understand prejudice, it won’t have a sense of a larger human objective, it won’t empathize. It will be given a particular utility function and it will optimize that to its best capability regardless of the wider negative effects.”

To the extent that modern marketing (and propaganda) techniques already seek to cue emotional as opposed to rational responses, however, there’s a sense in which ‘System Zero’ and consumerism are coeval. Also, economics comprises but a single dimension of human social ecology. We have good reason to fear that Lawrence’s doomsday scenario, one where market and technological forces conspire to transform us into ‘consumer Borg,’ understates the potential catastrophe that awaits.

The internet was an easy sell. After all, what can be wrong with connecting likeminded people?

The problem, of course, is that we are the evolutionary product of small, highly interdependent, hunter-gatherer communities. Historically, those disposed to be permissive had no choice but to continually negotiate with those disposed to be authoritarian. Each party disliked the criticism of the other, but the daily rigours of survival forced them to get along. No longer. Only now, a mere two decades later, are we discovering the consequences of creating a society that systematically segregates permissives and authoritarians. The election of Donald Trump has, if nothing else, demonstrated the degree to which technology has transformed human social ecology in novel, potentially disastrous ways.

AI has also been an easy sell—at least so far. After all, what can be wrong with humanizing our technological environments? Imagine a world where everything is ‘user friendly,’ compliant to our most petulant wishes. What could be wrong with that?

Well, potentially everything, insofar as ‘humanizing our environments’ amounts to dehumanizing our social ecology, replacing the systems we are adapted to solve, our fellow humans, with systems possessing no evolutionary precedent whatsoever, machines designed to push our buttons in ways that optimize hidden commercial interests. Social pollution, in effect.

Throughout the history of our species, finding social heaven has required risking social hell. Human beings are as prone to be demanding, competitive, hurtful—anything but ‘user friendly’—as otherwise. Now the industrial giants of the early 21st century are promising to change all that, to flood the spaces between us with machines designed to shoulder the onerous labour of community, citizenship, and yes, even love.

Imagine a social ecology populated by billions upon billions of junk intelligences. Imagine the solitary confinement of an inhuman crowd. How will we find one another? How will we tolerate the hypersensitive infants we now seem doomed to become?

I think it’s fair to say it’s beginning in earnest now. A bit faster than I thought, and pretty damn close to as predicted. The plunging cost of reality is allowing the simulation of crisis events to cue sustained engagement, driving advertising revenue, fueling gushers of pollution. Herr Goering, the adorable clown, is now the leader. All the toothbrush moustaches lurk behind the stage, and Curtis Yarvin is growing himself a little Dugin beard. Welcome to the Age of the Fat Fascist, stage one of the Semantic Apocalypse.

I’d ask you to buy a ticket but I see you’ve already found your seat.

Once again, in midst of all the ad hominem nonsense coming from the Trump-Newscorp-Combine, we find another theorist, this time neuroscientist (and creationist) Michael Egnor, embracing an ad hominem dismissal of eliminativism on the Mind Matters podcast, which has been partially transcribed and posted under the title, “Why Eliminative Materialism Cannot Be A Good Theory of Mind.”

Where Trump hews to what is called the ‘abusive ad hominem,’ Egnor espouses the tu quoque, the argument that intentional eliminativism is self-refuting because eliminativists themselves use intentional terms. This is essentially the same argument my old highschool girlfriend’s mother would use to refute my atheism: every time I uttered the word “God” she would cry, “See! You believe in Him!”

The same way God doesn’t have to exist for the term “God” to do a tremendous amount of work, terms like “beliefs” or “reasons” and so on don’t need referents to do a tremendous amount of work.

The story is a good deal more complicated than this when it comes to intentional idioms, of course: one needs to explain, among other things, why so many theorists run afoul this particular confound. But the tu quoque, as applied against eliminativism, at least, is every bit as bankrupt.

Enter Egnor:

[Identity Theory has] been discarded because its logical nonsense. Every attribute of the mind, reason, emotion, perception, all of those things are completely different from matter. That is, one describes matter as extensions in space; one describes perceptions and reason and emotions in completely different ways. There’s no overlap between them so mental states can’t be the same thing as physical states. They actually don’t share any properties in common. They’re clearly related to one another in important ways but they’re not the same thing.

Eliminative materialists go one step further. They actually say that there are no mental states, that there is only the brain. Which is kind of an odd thing to say because what eliminative materialists are saying is that their ideas are mindless.

How can you have a proposition that the mind doesn’t exist? That means propositions don’t exist and that means you don’t have a proposition.

Let’s go through this sentence by sentence…

[Identity Theory has] been discarded because its logical nonsense. Simply not true. Identity Theory has fallen out of favour because, like Egnor, it possesses no compelling account of intentional phenomena. As we shall see, the “logical nonsense” here belongs entirely to Egnor.

Every attribute of the mind, reason, emotion, perception, all of those things are completely different from matter. Because, Egnor thinks, these things are exceptional, somehow distinct from the natural world as we have come to understand it. It’s important to keep in mind who’s making the more extraordinary claim here: The eliminativist is saying intentional properties only seem exceptional, much the same way celestial properties once seemed exceptional, because we lack perspective. Egnor is say they really are exceptional.

That is, one describes matter as extensions in space; one describes perceptions and reason and emotions in completely different ways. Yes, heuristically, in source insensitive ways. How else are humans supposed to understand themselves and one another? Given the astronomically complicated nature of the systems involved, our ancestors had to rely on hacks to communicate facts pertaining to their brain states, which is to say, ways to report brain states absent any knowledge of brain states. Egnor, on the other hand, would have us ignore this rather obvious cognitive dilemma, and argue that in addition to brains, we also evolved this secondary, exceptional ontological order, the extension of our intentional vocabulary.

There’s no overlap between them so mental states can’t be the same thing as physical states. They actually don’t share any properties in common. There’s (almost) no overlap between them because intentional cognition is heuristic cognition, a system that neglects the high-dimensional facts of the systems involved, relying instead on cues systematically related to those systems. Those cues appear to possess an exceptional nature because we lack the metacognitive resources required to high-dimensionally source them, to intuit them as belonging to nature more generally. Given biocomplexity, its hard to imagine how it could be any other way.

They’re clearly related to one another in important ways but they’re not the same thing. And this, of course, is the million dollar question, the one that ecological eliminativism, at least, actually answers. Egnor would lead us into the exceptionalist labyrinth, and brick up all the exits with his fallacious tu quoque.

Eliminative materialists go one step further. They actually say that there are no mental states, that there is only the brain. Which is kind of an odd thing to say because what eliminative materialists are saying is that their ideas are mindless. Intentionalists are forever telling eliminativists what they “really mean.” Intentional cognition is mandatory: we simply have no way of reporting biological systems short its heuristic machinations. But one can agree that the hacks belonging to intentional cognition are mandatory without likewise asserting that intentional exceptionalism is mandatory. As with “God,” I can assert that “mind” is a useful hack in certain cognitive situations without automatically asserting that minds (as Egnor theorizes them) are real.

How can you have a proposition that the mind doesn’t exist? See above.

That means propositions don’t exist and that means you don’t have a proposition. No, that means I’m employing a hack that works quite well in certain problem-solving contexts. Cognitive neuroscience, unfortunately, isn’t one of them, as Egnor’s utter inability to solve any of the problems of consciousness and intentionality attest.

For me, the most egregious thing about the post lies with Mind Matters, not Egnor. They actually quote William Ramsey’s excellent SPEP article on eliminativism, but they remain utterly mum on the devastating critique Ramsey provides of tu quoque counter-arguments such as Egnor’s. If I argue that intentional terms have no extension, that only various metacognitive confounds make it seem that way, then arguing that my position is absurd because I use intentional terms clearly begs the question. It is, to use Egnor’s phrase, logical nonsense.

What are the odds that I would finish writing a near-future viral thriller (The Lollipop Factory) just as 2019-nCoV was becoming entrenched in Wuhan? So, as it turned out, the first facts I wanted to know when I caught wind of the outbreak were things like the resource requirements for treatment, the average transmission rate per person, and whether transmission was asymptomatic. The sudden rush to build new hospitals answered the first question: 2019-nCoV was a resource intensive disease. As it turns out, some 18% of those with verified cases require intensive care. This fact became mind-boggling as more and more estimates of the transmission rate bubbled to the surface of the web: on average, investigators think 2019-nCoV is around twice as contagious as the seasonal flu. And if this weren’t bad enough, we now have solid evidence of asymptomatic transmission: as relieved as I was to learn that infected children weren’t getting sick, I understood the kind of epidemiological nightmare this represented. How do you contain a disease you can’t see?

So what’s the upshot?

2019-nCoV is more difficult to contain than the seasonal flu, and so, likely beyond containment short severe and sustained (ie, economic activity killing) restrictions on face-to-face interaction. Either way, we are likely at the beginning of the wildfire season, not the middle, nor the end.

The lethality of 2019-nCoV will be a function of the resources available to treat critical cases. If this reaches influenza pandemic proportions, then 2019-nCoV will likely be more, not less, deadly than SARS (which killed, given the resources available at the time, around 10% of those infected).

Personally, given the way Chinese authorities bungled the outbreak at the start, and given the alarming tendency of the WHO and CDC to communicate only the most optimistic appraisals of 2019-nCoV, I think this will be the biggest thing to hit humanity since World War II.

For the critically minded, most of the estimates referenced above can be found agreggated here. There’s countless caveats, of course, including the mutability 2019-nCoV itself, which could, like SARS, become less lethal over time. But don’t be lulled by calm-at-all-costs bureaucrats or the nothing-to-see-here Wall Street Bulls: the stakes may not be apocalyptic, but they are civilizational.

POSTSCRIPT (2/11/2020)

The General Director of the WHO, in addition to revealing the official name of the disease, Covid-19, has finally called on nations to treat it as “public enemy number one.” Markets reach record highs. Babies are kissed in New Hampshire.

POSTSCRIPT (2/12/2020)

Much of the latest cutting-edge research can be found here, expertly summarized no less. Ontario learned some hard lessons during SARS. Let’s all hope the good guys can delay this until spring. Maybe Africa, India, and Indonesia have no cases because they’re simply too warm for SARS-CoV-2 (the virus’s official official name). Better to suffer the nightmare next winter, once we’ve prepared.

“Scholars who study intentional phenomena generally tend to consider them as processes and relationships that can be characterized irrespective of any physical objects, material changes, or motive forces. But this is exactly what poses a fundamental problem for the natural sciences. Scientific explanation requires that in order to have causal consequences, something must be susceptible of being involved in material and energetic interactions with other physical objects and forces.” Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature, 28

“Exactly how are consciousness and subjective experience related to brain and body? It is one thing to be able to establish correlations between consciousness and brain activity; it is another thing to have an account that explains exactly how certain biological processes generate and realize consciousness and subjectivity. At the present time, we not only lack such an account, but are also unsure about the form it would need to have in order to bridge the conceptual and epistemological gap between life and mind as objects of scientific investigation and life and mind as we subjectively experience them.” Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, x

“Norms (in the sense of normative statuses) are not objects in the causal order. Natural science, eschewing categories of social practice, will never run across commitments in its cataloguing of the furniture of the world; they are not by themselves causally efficacious—no more than strikes or outs are in baseball. Nonetheless, according to the account presented here, there are norms, and their existence is neither supernatural nor mysterious. Normative statuses are domesticated by being understood in terms of normative attitudes, which are in the causal order.” Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit, 626

What I would like to do is run through a number of different discontinuities you find in various intentional phenomena as a means of raising the question: What are the chances? What’s worth noting is how continuous these alleged phenomena are with each other, not simply in terms of their low-dimensionality and natural discontinuity, but in terms of mutual conceptual dependence as well. I made a distinction between ‘ontological’ and ‘functional’ exemptions from the natural even though I regard them as differences of degree because of the way it maps stark distinctions in the different kinds of commitments you find among various parties of believers. And ‘low-dimensionality’ simply refers to the scarcity of the information intentional phenomena give us to work with—whatever finds its way into the ‘philosopher’s lab,’ basically.

So with regard to all of the following, my question is simply, are these not birds of a feather? If not, then what distinguishes them? Why are low-dimensionality and supernaturalism fatal only for some and not others?

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Soul – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Ontologically exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. In various accounts of the Soul, you will find it consistently related to Ghost, Choice, Subjectivity, Value, Content, God, Agency, Mind, Purpose, Responsibility, and Good/Evil.

Game – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Functionally exempt from natural continuity (insofar as ‘rule governed’). Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. In various accounts, Game is consistently related to Correctness, Rules/Norms, Value, Agency, Purpose, Practice, and Reason.

Aboutness – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Functionally exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. In various accounts, Aboutness is consistently related to Correctness, Rules/Norms, Inference, Content, Reason, Subjectivity, Mind, Truth, and Representation.

Correctness – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Functionally exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. In various accounts, Correctness is consistently related to Game, Aboutness, Rules/Norms, Inference, Content, Reason, Agency, Mind, Purpose, Truth, Representation, Responsibility, and Good/Evil.

Ghost – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Ontologically exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. In various accounts of Ghosts, you will find it consistently related to God, Soul, Mind, Agency, Choice, Subjectivity Value, and Good/Evil.

Rules/Norms – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Functionally exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. In various accounts, Rules and Norms are consistently related to Game, Aboutness, Correctness, Inference, Content, Reason, Agency, Mind, Truth, and Representation.

Choice – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Ontologically exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Embodies inexplicable efficacy. Choice is typically discussed in relation to God, Agency, Responsibility, and Good/Evil.

Inference – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Functionally exempt (‘irreducible,’ ‘autonomous’) from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. In various accounts, Inference is consistently related to Game, Aboutness, Correctness, Rules/Norms, Value, Content, Reason, Mind, A priori, Truth, and Representation.

Subjectivity – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Ontologically exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. In various accounts, Subjectivity is typically discussed in relation to Soul, Rules/Norms, Choice, Phenomenality, Value, Agency, Reason, Mind, Purpose, Representation, and Responsibility.

Phenomenality – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Ontologically exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. Phenomenality is typically discussed in relation to Subjectivity, Content, Mind, and Representation.

Value – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Functionally exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. One generally finds Value discussed in concert with Correctness, Rules/Norms, Subjectivity, Agency, Practice, Reason, Mind, Purpose, and Responsibility.

Content – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Functionally exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. One generally finds Content discussed in relation with Aboutness, Correctness, Rules/Norms, Inference, Phenomenality, Reason, Mind, A priori, Truth, and Representation.

Agency – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Functionally exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. In various accounts, Agency is discussed in concert with Games, Correctness, Rules/Norms, Choice, Inference, Subjectivity, Value, Practice, Reason, Mind, Purpose, Representation, and Responsibility.

God – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Ontologically exempt from natural continuity (as the condition of everything natural!). Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. One generally finds God discussed in relation to Soul, Correctness, Ghosts, Rules/Norms, Choice, Value, Agency, Purpose, Truth, Responsibility, and Good/Evil.

Practices – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Functionally exempt from natural continuity insofar as ‘rule governed.’ Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. In various accounts, Practices are discussed in relation to Games, Correctness, Rules/Norms, Value, Agency, Reason, Purpose, Truth, and Responsibility.

Reason – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Functionally exempt from natural continuity insofar as ‘rule governed.’ Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. One generally finds Reason discussed in concert with Games, Correctness, Rules/Norms, Inference, Value, Content, Agency, Practices, Mind, Purpose, A priori, Truth, Representation, and Responsibility.

Mind – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Functionally exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. One generally finds Mind considered in relation to Souls, Subjectivity, Value, Content, Agency, Reason, Purpose, and Representation.

Purpose – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Functionally exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. One generally finds Purpose discussed along with Game, Correctness, Value, God, Reason, and Representation.

A priori – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Functionally exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. One often finds the A priori discussed in relation to Correctness, Rules/Norms, Inference, Subjectivity, Content, Reason, Truth, and Representation.

Truth – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Functionally exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. One generally finds Truth discussed in concert with Games, Correctness, Aboutness, Rules/Norms, Inference, Subjectivity, Value, Content, Practices, Mind, A priori, Truth, and Representation.

Representation – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Functionally exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. One generally finds Representation discussed in relation with Aboutness, Correctness, Rules/Norms, Inference, Subjectivity, Phenomenality, Content, Reason, Mind, A priori, and Truth.

Responsibility – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Functionally exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. In various accounts, Responsibility is consistently related to Game, Correctness, Aboutness, Rules/Norms, Inference, Subjectivity, Reason, Agency, Mind, Purpose, Truth, Representation, and Good/Evil.

Good/Evil – Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Ontologically exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy. One generally finds Good/Evil consistently related to Souls, Correctness, Subjectivity, Value, Reason, Agency, God, Purpose, Truth, and Responsibility.

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The big question here, from a naturalistic standpoint, is whether all of these characteristics are homologous or merely analogous. Are the similarities ontogenetic, the expression of some shared ‘deep structure,’ or merely coincidental? For me this has to be what I think is one of the most significant questions that never get’s asked in cognitive science. Why? Because everybody has their own way of divvying up the intentional pie (including interpretavists like Dennett). Some of these items are good, and some of them are bad, depending on whom you talk to. If these phenomena were merely analogous, then this division need not be problematic—we’re just talking fish and whales. But if these phenomena are homologous—if we’re talking whales and whales—then the kinds of discursive barricades various theorists erect to shelter their ‘good’ intentional phenomena from ‘bad’ intentional phenomena need to be powerfully motivated.

Pointing out the apparent functionality of certain phenomena versus others simply will not do. The fact that these phenomena discharge some kind of function somehow seems pretty clear. It seems to be the case that God anchors the solution to any number of social problems—that even Souls discharge some function in certain, specialized problem-ecologies. The same can be said of Truth, Rule/Norm, Agency—every item on this list, in fact.

And this is precisely what one might expect given a purely biomechanical, heuristic interpretation of these terms as well (with the added advantage of being able to explain why our phenomenological inheritance finds itself mired in the kinds of problems it does). None of these need count as anything resembling what our phenomenological tradition claims to explain the kinds of behaviour that accompanies them. God doesn’t need to be ‘real’ to explain church-going, no more than Rules/Norms do to explain rule-following. Meanwhile, the growing mountain of cognitive scientific discovery looms large: cognitive functions generally run ulterior to what we can metacognize for report. Time and again, in context after context, empirical research reveals that human cognition is simply not what we think it is. As ‘Dehaene’s Law’ states, “We constantly overestimate our awareness—even when we are aware of glaring gaps in our awareness” (Consciousness and the Brain, 79). Perhaps this is simply what intentionality amounts to: a congenital ‘overestimation of awareness,’ a kind of WYSIATI or ‘what-you-see-is-all-there-is’ illusion. Perhaps anthropic, low-dimensional, functionally exempt from natural continuity, inscrutable in terms of natural continuity, source of perennial controversy, and possesses inexplicable efficacy are all expressions of various kinds of neglect. Perhaps it isn’t just a coincidence that we are entirely blind to our neuromechanical embodiment and that we suffer this compelling sense that we are more than merely neuromechanical.

How could we cognize the astronomical causal complexities of cognition? What evolutionary purpose would it serve?

What impact does our systematic neglect of those capacities have on philosophical reflection?

Does anyone really think the answer is going to be ‘minimal to nonexistent’?

* Originally posted June 16th, 2014