MN I have
prepared an
extended abstract for CEPE (Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry)
2013. Could
you kindly look at it?
RC It is
very
comprehensive. Congratulations. You’ve done a lot of work trying to
understand
the roboethics debate in the “Far West”,
to
use the term in the sense coined by the French sinologist,
François Jullien
(Jullien 1995; Capurro 2010). This debate is based, as you write, on
the
subject-object dichotomy as well as on modern science’s faith in
quantification:
"The
important point is: the ethical and critical discussions on the
autonomy of
robots and artificial agents remain only at a shallow level, without
taking
into consideration the different meanings of autonomy as well as the
differences in theoretical assumptions behind them."
Yes,
this is a
key issue because the question of autonomy is mostly understood from
the
perspective a human subject separated from the world and other people.
Consequently autonomous robots are worldless isolated entities. Could
robots
ever be socialized? This is a speculative question! At the end of the
paper you
write:
“For example, we
can think of these names as examples of these scholars and authors:
Lucas
Introna (2007), Rafael Capurro (1995), Francisco Varela (1991) and
others who
show a great interest in world-views beyond the subject-object
dichotomy."
Thanks
for
quoting me. Your remark addresses an incipient intercultural dialogue
between
the “Far East” and the “Far West” on
roboethics based on the Japanese concept of Ba
(place) and the three-dimensional time of world-openness of human
‘being-here’
(Da-sein) (Heidegger 1976; Capurro
and Nakada 2011). Robots know nothing about world openness – and, in
particular, nothing about human existence as in-between birth and death
–
shared with other human beings. More than twenty years ago I held a
lecture
after the ‘habilitation’ or post-doctoral examination (Capurro 1990). I
have
the impression that nothing has basically changed since then with
regard to the
roboethics discussion, which was at that time a discussion on AI or
artificial
intelligence:
„Andererseits aber wird in reduktionistischer Weise der
Mensch mit einer
scheinbar von seiner Leiblichkeit und Geschichtlichkeit abtrennbaren
und in
einer anderen Hardware implementierten Intelligenz gleichgesetzt und
dieser
möglicherweise sogar untergeordnet. […]
Winograd und Flores (1986) zeigen aber, da diese Auffassung
des Menschen
auf einer verzerrten Idealisierung der tatsächlichen Bedingungen
unseres
"In-der-Welt-Seins" (Heidegger 1976) beruht. Denn wir befinden uns
ursprünglich – d.h. bevor eine abstrakte Trennung zwischen einer
objektiven
Außenwelt und einer in sich eingekapselten Subjektivität
durchgeführt werden
kann – in einem unmittelbaren praktischen Umgang mit den Dingen in
einer
gemeinsam mit-geteilten Welt.“ (Capurro
1990)
„On the other hand, humans are understood in a
reductionist way as having an intelligence that can be separated from
the body
and from history to be implemented in a bit of hardware to which human
intelligence may be even subordinated. [...]
Winograd and Flores
(1986) show that this conception of human beings is nothing but a
distorted
idealization of the real conditions of our being-in-the-world
(Heidegger 1976).
Prior to any kind of abstraction and separation between an objective
external
world and an isolated subjectivity takes place we are originally
dealing
pragmatically with things sharing a common world.”
Concerning
the
roboethics discussion in the “Far East” and particularly in Japan, my impression is that the debate
in the “Far West” based on the
subject/object dichotomy is
irrelevant not only for Japanese scientists and intellectuals but also
for
Japanese people because the Japanese way of being is not based on this
dichotomy. Robots, autonomous or not, can be more easily integrated
into the
Japanese BA than in the “Far West”
because
they are not seen as a threat by Japanese minds. The issue of an
autonomous,
worldless, artificially produced subjectivity and the ethical issues
arising
from it are imported from the “Far West” and belong, as you have
analyzed
several times, to Shakai or Western
customs, not to Seken or Japanese
traditional customs of human interplay (Nakada and Tamura 2005).
The
real
intercultural ethical challenge in Japan is, I think, to ponder
how robots
become part of Japanese interplay between Japanese minds, which differs
from
the interplay in the “Far West”,– particularly as it is based on the
Buddhist
tradition of ‘self-lessness’ or Mu –
sharing a common Ba. How does such
Japanese cultural identity or whoness give rise to different kinds of
ethical
questions from those in the “Far West”
(Capurro et al. 2013)? If we are not able to see this issue then we
will
continue to have a dialogue of the deaf. When Japanese talk about
roboethics
they might just imitate or reproduce Western issues, ethics being
considered as
part of Shakai. In the “Far West”
we will continue our academic ‘mono-logical’ or
‘mono-cultural’ disputes with a strong belief that they are universal,
any
differences concerning specific customs and traditions being of
secondary
importance.
MN Thanks a
lot for your
kind words. Yes, I think that this is a very important point. My paper
focuses
on these questions. We might get good suggestions on these problems
from
traditional Japanese views such as oneness, Mu
and others. But at the same time, we have to find ways to modify these
old
concepts into newer and more practical methods and terms. By
'practical' I mean
that we have to find ways to solve problems coming from our separation
from the
world and also from other people. So I need the co-operation with
colleagues
and friends like you.
RC I am
happy to be able
to share my thoughts with you and to learn from you. Robots are not a
self or a
‘who’, but a what, although we (who?!) act as if they were selves. This
is the
sham that allows us (who?) to speak about robots as if they were moral
agents with
autonomy, responsibility, etc. This kind of discourse is fallacious and
sophistic since it attempts to deal with apparently serious ethical
issues
while in truth dealing with an imaginary problem.
Through
the free
interplay with each other and with the world we humans develop various
kinds of
‘identities’. I put this word in brackets because it is a metaphysical
word
that overlooks the difference between things and selves. Robots know
nothing
about the world and social interplay. They do not develop a self based
on
mutual esteem, indifference, fair or foul play, etc. From this
perspective, the
key issue of roboethics is very simple: how do we humans evaluate
robots for
our lives in a shared world, based on who we are, our customs or rules
of fair interplay
within a society as well as between societies? If we want to address
seriously
robo-ethical questions we have to deal with robots with regard to who
we are
instead of asking who they are, as if
eventually robots would become like us, in which case they would no
longer be
robots, or, in case we were to ask what
they are to do, this would be as if we were not involved with all the
cultural
differences that characterize human whoness. Blurring the difference
between
who and what no less than adopting a culturally detached view of the
embeddedness of robots in the human world lead to blind alleys in the
“Far
West” that are then imported to the “Far East”.
MN Concering Ba,
do you think that some aspects of
cognition are based on Ba related to human
relations or interplay if we understand Ba
as pertaining to our existence as finite beings? If so, then in this
regard, we
human beings are different from robots, as you say. I think so, too.
But, on
the other hand, what the English psychologist Wilfred Bion (1897-1979)
calls
“beta-elements” (Bion 2013) reminds me of Kant's “Ding an sich”. If my
understanding is correct, beta-elements sometimes intrude into our
minds as
something without meaning to be dealt with words. This is interesting.
RN Thanks
for telling me
about Wilfred Bion. If I understand him correctly from what I learn
from you
about him, he is right concerning our rejection of what is unacceptable
in
life. This can lead to paranoia if we are not able to accept it, each
person in
his or her own way. What is regarded as unacceptable? Well, life and
death and
the world itself, i.e. phenomena for which we cannot find a reason for
their
existence. Robots have no idea of this. Their cognition is therefore
completely
different from ours, in which case the term ‘cognition’ is used
equivocally.
Human cognition, as being always embedded in the world with others, is
confronted with “beta-elements” that arise from what is beyond what is
accepted
in a rationalized world or ‘life-world’. Art and literature as well as
our
dreams are ways in which the unacceptable and the terrible, or to deinon, as the Greeks called it, appear
in our lives and become part of our selves. If this does not happen,
then we
may fall into paranoia because such elements will address us all the
time, but
we will not know how to deal with them. We are addressed by
‘beta-elements’ for
instance in the moods of fear (“Furcht”) and anxiety (“Angst”) as
analyzed by
Heidegger (Heidegger 1976, 140-142, 184-191; Capurro 1990a).
MN The other
day I asked one
of my colleagues in our university who is specialized in robotics the
following
question: ‘do robots experience optical illusion?’ His answer was, as I
expected, 'no'. I think that this is interesting too. In our minds or
in our
way of being, beta-elements get together or interact and also things,
mere
elements of perception, get together with our experience, like optical
illusion. I think that these are interesting subjects for us who are
interested
in differences between robots and humans.
RC Yes,
you’re right.
Because we experience things as this
or that, our perception of what things are is never fixed once and for
all,
although we rely on shared views. What is ‘real’ and what is an
‘illusion’ are
intertwined. If this were not the case, we would have no art, no
philosophy, no
scientific research and – no freedom! When we perceive things as this or that we do this within an
implicit background that Heidegger calls the “hermeneutic as” that he
distinguishes from the “apophantic as” in which the understanding of
something
is made explicit (Heidegger 1976, 158). In both cases we can experience
not
only illusions and also all kinds of errors, but also adopt new
perspectives
that challenge a fixed view of the world or ourselves. The interplay
between
what appears in the world-openness and what remains hidden Heidegger
calls ‘a-letheia’
using the Greek term for truth in which ‘lethe’
means hiddenness and ‘a’ means the
process of un-concealment (Heidegger
1976, § 44). Robots belong to the realm of what is unconcealed. It
is we humans
who bring them into unconcealment by making them. Since robots know
nothing
about ‘a-letheia’, they also cannot
make any difference between ‘reality’ and ‘illusion’, or rather, they
can do it
only insofar as we instruct them about it by programming them.
MN I think
this is
important. But I wonder what happens in the case of schizophrenia where
a lot
of illusions don't take place. This doesn't mean that in the case of
schizophrenia openness or existence related to death or life are not
there. The
patients are not different from us in terms of life, death or
infinitude. But
something changes. And also I ask myself what happens in the case of
the
'rubber hand illusion' (http://www.dump.com/rubberhand/)
as the phenomenon that we feel that a 'fake rubber hand' belongs to our
body
although we know that this is a fake rubber hand.
RC Good
questions! What
happens with schizophrenia, paranoia and other so-called mental
disorders is,
from a phenomenological perspective, that the person is also out there
or ek-sists but he (or she) is not able to
perceive the Ba as Ba.. This
three-dimensional time of
world-openness of human ‘being-here’ is perceived as
closure as described, for instance, by Paul Schreber (1842-1911)
in his “Memoirs of my nervous illness” analyzed by Freud (1973/1911).
Medard
Boss (1903-1990), a Swiss psychiatrist and a founder of the school of
‘Daseinsanalyse’ – following the path opened by Ludwig Binswanger
(1881-1966) –
who wrote a book on “Foundations of Medicine and Psychology” in
co-operation
with Heidegger (Boss 1975), describes schizophrenia as follows:
“Das Krankhafte des schizophrenen Menschen besteht darin,
daß ihnen eine Möglichkeit des Gesunden fehlt. Es mangelt ihnen in höchstem Maße
jenes Versammeln-können der ihr Da-sein konstituierenden
Verhaltensmöglichkeiten zu einem eigenständigen, freien
Selbst-sein, dessen
Offenständigkeit allem Begegnenden standzuhalten vermag. Vielmehr
verfallen die
schizophrenen Kranken in unterschiedlichem Ausmaß an die
Verhaltensweisen der
andern und an die Modi des Vorhandenseins lebloser Dinge. Ihr Da-sein
wird
gleichsam in das übermächtig andere Anwesende aufgesogen.
Solcherweise
existieren sie großenteils außer sich. Darum erfahren sie
das, was sich ihnen
zeigt, so oft durch äußere „Stimmen“ zugesprochen, und das,
was sie tun und
denken, als von andern gemacht.“ (Boss
1975, 507)
„The illness of schizophrenics consists in the
fact that they lack one possibility
of healthy persons,
namely, they lack in the extreme the capacity to gather those
possibilities of
behaving constituting their being-here into an independent, free self
whose
openness is able to hold its ground against all it encounters. Rather,
to
various degrees, schizophrenics fall into modes of behaviour of others
or into
the modes of being of simply occurrent, lifeless beings. Their
‘being-here’, so
to speak, is sucked up by the overwhelming power of what is present. In
this
way they exist mostly outside themselves. This is why anything that
appears to
them is experienced so often as external “voices” addressing them and
that what
they do and think is being done by others.”
Boss emphasizes that “being outside” is also the
way of being of healthy
persons because human consciousness and unconsciousness is not to be
represented as inside a ‘psyche-capsule’ separated from the world. The
difference with schizophrenic ‘being outside’ is that they are not able
to
gather what appears to them as belonging to an independently ‘standing’
self.
The
'rubber hand
illusion' is a different matter with regard to schizophrenia insofar as
the
person is able to perceive it as such an illusion and also as an
extension of
his or her own bodily experience. This is possible because our body is
originally ‘out there’ in or as the Ba
in the world openness. If this were not the case, we would never be
able to
invent and use this technology or any other technology as what it is
and so
deal in different ways with the possibilities of the world openness.
MN I think
that this point
is crucial for roboethics issues. Do you think that where the Ba is not perceived as an open dimension
this is due to the fact that some level of consciousness is broken?
Some sort
of meta-consciousness?
RC Yes, but
in the case
healthy persons this is not just a matter of consciousness, but of not
seeing
clearly the phenomenon of Ba or
clearing or the world itself. In the case of schizophrenia it is
difficult to
say if this is due to organic reasons or to some kind of traumatic
event or to
both.
MN According
to Bin Kimura
(Kimura 1972), we have to think about the role of sensus
communis allowing us to combine different senses. If sensus
communis is combined with
“Mitsein” as analyzed by Heidegger (1976) or Ludwig Binswanger, then
two
aspects of sensus communis, namely
‘meta senses’ and common senses might be explained.
RC We can
understand by sensus communis a quality of subjects
separated from the world or as the experience of ‘being here’ sharing a
common
world. This original sharing of the world by at the same time making a
difference between what is common and what is proper to oneself or by
being
aware that this very difference is what is common to all of us, our sensus communis in an original meaning,
is what is lacking in the ontic experience of schizophrenia as pointed
out by
Medard Boss. In a different way this lacking of sensus
communis as lacking the common world is the problem raised
by the modern separation of subject and object or between an
encapsulated
subject and the ‘outside world’. This similarity or parallelism between
mental
disorders and modern subjectivity was analyzed by Kant with regard to
the
difference between metaphysics and madness in the case of Emanuel
Swedenborg
(1688-1782) (Kant 1977; Capurro 1993). In the case of metaphysics, the
question
concerning the being of beings is stated and answered in several ways.
But the
very fact that the question is raised makes the big difference from
madness or
schizophrenia where such a question cannot arise from oneself, but
rather
everything imposes itself as an absolute truth without the free space
of
in-between or Ba.
MN Concerning
the 'rubber
hand illusion,' as you say, we see can know the differences and
intertwinement between
'illusion' and 'to be aware of one's being. According to Bin
Kimura the
symptom of 'depersonalization' is characterized by the consciousness of
time;
the patients experience just a sequence of 'now', 'now,' 'now.'
RC Yes,
this “now-time”
(“Jetzt-Zeit”) or “vulgar understanding of time” (“das vulgäre
Zeitverständnis”)
as Heidegger calls it (Heidegger 1976, 421-426), means a levelling of
the three-dimensional
time of world openness in which things conceal and unconceal themselves
in
their being. The possibility of understanding something as
something is previous to the subject-object dichotomy. It also
makes possible the difference between ‘reality’ and ‘illusion.’ This
amounts to
the unconcealedness of concealment itself, since any illusion conceals
partially or wholly.
MN Terry
Winograd is very
famous because he combined Heidegger's hermeneutics with artificial
intelligence. But according to your explanation, he seems to have dealt
only
with a very limited understanding of Heidegger.
RC Yes,
Terry Winograd and
his co-author Fernando Flores, a former Chilean Minister under Salvador
Allende, developed a kind of ‘Heidegger light' for computer scientists
and
managers (Winograd and Flores 1986). This was a first step toward
opening their
minds to phenomenology and hermeneutics. But even in this case, only a
few of
them understood their message (Floyd et al. 1992).
MN Our
capability of
understanding something as something
is prior to the subject-object dichotomy because it concerns the open
time-space of a shared world in which things and we ourselves conceal
and reveal.
Yes, I think that this is an important point. But I would like to
deepen it
particularly concerning the issue of the difference between our self or
who we are and what things are
as you together with Michael Eldred and Daniel
Nagel have recently analyzed (Capurro et al. 2013).
RC In our
everyday
experience we deal all the time with the issue of understanding things as this or that. When we look, for
instance, at the sun or the moon, they seem to be smaller than our
hands or
when we look at the stars, we may or may not be aware that we are
looking into
the universe’s past according to modern relativistic physics. This
experience
is also basic for understanding cultural difference or differences
between
individual and collective selves and the ways in which we have been
collecting
personal and common perspectives for understanding ourselves and the
world. In
this sense, the difference between ‘who’ and ‘what’ is essential
because, as
Medard Boss also explained, becoming a self is a question of selecting
and
gathering between different possibilities and also of making a
difference
between what we experience as a common world and what is proper to each
one of
us. Nietzsche’s perspectivism in the 19th century and
postmodernism
in the 20th century have also addressed this issue that
arises in
Greek philosophy and particularly with Protagoras as discussed by
Platon as
well as with Aristotle’s question of understanding ‘being as being’ (to on he on)
MN Oh, I
see. But then we
have to analyze how Nietzsche’s perspectivism and post-modernism are
related to
robots and roboethics. This is interesting and difficult too.
RC Nietzsche
was aware
that seeing something as something, or stating the question of what
things and
who we ourselves truly are, cannot be
answered once and for all but depends on perspectives. This does not
mean a
pure relativism or the dissolution of truth, but the insight that the
answer(s)
to such question(s) can be criticized again and again. We can program
some of
these answers into a robot so that it looks as
if the robot mirrored the true world. When we define something, we
are
always selecting among possibilities. “Determinatio est negatio”
(‘determination is negation’) as Spinoza and then Kant and Hegel said
(Melamed
2012). We can also fix rules of human behavior by programming, i.e.
‘pro-gramming’ them in a robot, and then call this fixed
pre-understanding a
robot morality. And we might even think that robots are or can be
artificial
moral selves. But this is, of course, an illusion.
MN We can
fixate some of
these perspectives in a robot program so that it looks AS IF the robot
mirrored
the world (past-present-future) and give 'similar' answers to ours. I
see.
RC It is
essential to
state the question ‘what are robots?’
as a phenomenological question. This means that we are able to see the
difference between a ‘what’ and a ‘who’ question. Otherwise we will
project the
what question into the way of being of humans or vice versa. In each
case we
will fail to see the difference between robots and humans which means
that we
will not be able to see robots as
robots. This difference is an ontological as well as an ethical one.
Only when
we question the view of humans as a what
and analyze beforehand who we are in
or as a free interplay sharing a common world can we see the
differences
regarding, for instance, the human body and robot hardware, or human
thought
and robot’s programs, etc. The present debates mostly level this
difference and
conceive either humans as robot-like beings or robots as human-like
beings,
sometimes even as potentially ’super-human’ entities (Capurro 1995).
Moreover,
the difference between robots as having no self or being ‘nobody’ as
different
from the question concerning ‘non self’ or Mu in the Japanese tradition
can and
should be carefully analyzed within an intercultural roboethics that we
have
been trying to develop for some years. The view of robots and their use
within
social interplay is consequently different in the “Far West” and the “Far East”. The basis for this discussion is that
we open
our minds to ask not only the question ‘what are robots?’ but also the
question
‘who are we?’ and most basically, Nabeshima and Kuniyoshi (2004) ‘what
is the
meaning of being in the “Far West” and in the “Far
East”?
MN The
following is part
of my paper that I mentioned at the beginning of our dialogue:
“In order to
overcome the narrow scope of the subject-object dichotomy, these
discussions
regarding the relations between human existence and modes of existence
of
things in this world are important. But on the other hand, we have to
see
various phenomena which seem to be related with different modes of
existence of
things. The following points are considered to be worth of thinking
about at
both levels, the technological and the ethical/ontological.
In other words,
the relation between the subject and the object is considered to
include the
roles of Body image / Body schema and these tripartite relations among
the
subject, the object and the body, in turn, include the following
phenomena. This
means that the subject, if we follow the terms of the subject-object
dichotomy,
is not an isolated entity or phenomenon but part of these plural
phenomena and
in this sense the subject is in a process. And even though some
roboticists and researchers have tried to build artificial intelligent
agents
reflecting part of these plural phenomena, the case of Nabeshima and
Kuniyoshi
(2004) and Murabayashi et al. (2008) show that the ethical and
critical
discussions on these phenomena by roboticists, ethicists and scholars
in the
related fields are very rare, at least in Japan:
1) Things
and tools being incorporated into bodily schema.
2)
There is
a comparison of or a confusion between changes in
sensation caused by actions of the self and changes with external
causes.
One
of the
important topics in neuroscience over the past years is the mechanism
of
comparison of different sensory information related to sense of agency.
According to the findings of neuroscience and psychiatry, the sense of
agency
is based on a comparison between an efferent signal from motor areas or
an
internal copy of an outflowing (efferent) movement-producing signal
generated
by the motor system and the sensory reafferences predicted as a
consequence of
movement (the reafferent sensory input or receiving information on
sensory
feedback about movement caused by motor areas).
To
put this in
another way, this comparison might be made between expected sensations
and
experiences (tickling and expectation of some sensory experiences about
tickling). Or, more simply, we might say that 'the integration of
efferent
information with afferent information in action contexts' determines
our
coherent sense of agency (body image) (Tsakiris, Schutz-Bosbach
and Gallagher 2007).
In this case,
the sense of the agent, which is thought to be strongly associated with
the
'status' of the subject or subjectivity, includes, in my view, the
roles of
three different kinds of subjectivity: the subject A makes motor
actions (and
sensory information needed for this purpose); the subject B receiving
information on the changes in outer worlds and inner worlds caused by
these
motor actions (or motor commons); and the subject C monitors the
differences or
collation between these two aspects of the subject-related activities
(the
subject making some kinds of judgement following the 'forward model of
motor
control'). It’s clear that these different 'statuses' or different
aspects of
subjectivity can't be separated from such levels of subjective
activities as
'expectancy' and 'observation,'”
I wonder how this
subject C is interpreted in the frames of, as you say, today's
mainstream
philosophy which does not like to make differences between humans (and
living
beings) and machines. In my view, this subject C can't be separated
from our
being or existence in time and space. But I wonder at the same time
about which
kind of time and space we are talking in this case.
RC Your last
remark is
crucial. The scientific discourse you describe is typical for the
levelling of
‘what’ and ‘who’ questions and blind for the phenomenological analysis
of our
being in the world. If robots will ever be able to see and understand
beings in
their being and being as being, then they will not be robots any more.
MN This is
an important
point. But in the case of human beings, to see and understand beings as
well as
to see and understand themselves seem to be unconscious in fundamental
ways.
RC The
difference between
conscious and unconscious is not the same as the difference between
(explicit)
understanding and (implicit) pre-understanding. The latter is the basis
of the
former. When I sleep or dream I am not separated from the world, but
share the
world in a different way from when I am awake. Freud put this
difference into
the subject following the modern subject-object dichotomy.
MN. I am
interested in the
process of how the self-monitoring process turns into a conscious one
arising
from the unconscious. How do human beings differ from robots at the
unconscious
level? In my paper I write:
“By employing
the model of Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (Blakemore 2003) we can explain the
meanings
of 'two modes of sensory information-flow' and 'two modes of
sensory
information processing' in the following way more clearly. And in doing
so, we
can summarize what is happening in these specific dimensions of time
and space
related with 'sense of agency.'
According to
Blakemore (2003), the meanings of 'sense of agency' can be related to
questions
such as: how do we know that our own actions belong to us?; how are we
able to
distinguish self-generated sensory events from those that arise
externally?:
why do patients with delusions of control confuse self-produced and
externally
produced actions and sensations? In short, these questions can be
reduced to a
simple one: the 'self-monitoring mechanism' may work or may not work in
various
cases, including the cases of patients with delusions of control. One
of the
important points regarding 'sense of agency' and keeping conditions for
the
(inner and outer) environment-adaptive-set of motor actions and sensory
information
processing, according to Blakemore's explanation, is based on the comparison of:
a) actual
process of motor commands (transmitting motor commands from the central
nervous
system to the efferent division of the peripheral nervous system) and
actual
feedback of sensory information (reafference) and
b) the predicted
(or imaginative) sensory response using 'a forward dynamic model'
(which makes
predictions about the next state of the system and compares this with
the
desired state) and 'a forward output model' (which makes predictions
about the
sensory consequences of the movement and compares this prediction with
the
actual sensory consequences of a movement). These processes are
considered to
consist of the actual outflow of sensory motor commands, actual
inner-directed
flow of sensory feedback (reafference) and copy (i.e. imitation or
imagination)
of outflowing of sensory motor commands as well as prediction of sensor
feedback coming from the outer world to the inner world.
In my view,
these processes mean that our bodily existence and the outer world
related to
our bodily existence include the imaginative Ba
(place). And therefore the specific dimensions of time and space
related with 'sense of agency' mentioned above range from actual to
imaginative. And this suggests that the tripartite relations among the
subject,
the object and the body discussed above need specific dimensions of
time and
place as well as combined Ba (place)
of actual and imaginative information flow.”
RC I think
that the cases
described by Blakemore and your interpretation are very interesting
because
they show that in the case of humans, the bodily experiences of
patients with
some kind of ‘mental’ and/or ‘organic’ disorders coincide with the
phenomenological
analysis as provided by Medard Boss, even if the subjectivist thinking
is still
being used in the case of Blakemore, levelling the difference between
humans
and robots.
MN We have
to think about
what the difference in understanding and pre-understanding means in the
cases
of robotics and roboethics.
RC I think
that
pre-understanding in the case of robots means that we humans
objectivize in a
program part of our own pre-understanding also according to our
cultures,
traditions etc. so that a robot moves and acts according to this
program which
is a ‘pro-gram’ and not really a ‘pre-understanding.’ Robots can
'learn' but
this is again due to the limits and conditions we put.
MN I'm
wondering how this
difference or the question about being and beings can related to the
concrete
problems, for example, the autonomy of robots.
RC Robots
act according to
specific views of the being of beings and of our understanding of being
itself.
Their 'autonomy' is based on such ‘pro-grams’ programmed by human
pre-understanding.
MN When I
refer to the
subject and the object, I do this as the advocator of the
subject-object
dichotomy, but I want to overcome this dichotomy, using the terms based
on this
dichotomy. This is because, as you said, most of discussions on robots
and
ethics are presented using the terms coming from this dichotomy.
RC I see.
This is a good
tactic in order to avoid the usual polemic. The subject-object
dichotomy and
what is based on it is wrong as such. If it regards itself as the only
true one it becomes not only an ideology
but
it
makes us blind for understanding ourselves as who we are and our
relation to
the world. This blindness leads then to an assimilation between robots
and
humans, i.e. to different kinds of reductionism, particularly that of
conceiving the human being as some kind of machine processing
representations
in an encapsulated consciousness which is then transferred to the
conception of
a robot processing data representations input to it from the external
world
(Capurro 1992). As far as we are able to see such reductionism as a reductionism, we are doing first
steps towards roboethics.
MN Besides
what we have
discussed already, I want to relate the difference between conscious
and
unconscious to the discussions of autopoiesis
and particularly to Prigogine's self-organizing systems (Prigogine and
Nicolis
1977). I wonder what 'self' means in the phenomena of
self-organization.
RC ‘Self’
means in this
case that the processes of nature are not produced by an 'other' or by
a cause
outside the organism or system. This is a different concept of self
from the
one we discussed before relating to the human self.
MN As you
say, the
difference between "outer world" and "inner world" is
typical of modern subjectivism. Yes, but in some cases, this difference
might
be useful. For example, the symptoms of schizophrenia seem to be
explained by
the failure of combining the information from outer world and the
information
from inner world. We might find some important problems related to both
robots
and mental patients.
RC Yes, as
we discussed
before, lacking the possibility to make a difference between what
appears to us
and the self that selects and gathers the messages sent to it is
crucial in the
case of schizophrenia. But the lack of the self in the case of humans
is not of
the same kind as the lack of the self of robots. Schizophrenics are
even in
this case still in the world with
others while robots are basically worldless and ‘self-less’.
MN What does
pre-understanding mean in the case of philosophers and roboticists
defending
classical computationalism or symbolism?
RC Phenomenologists
say
that we humans are always embedded in the world understanding it in
some way
and making this understanding sometimes explicit. This is the
difference
explained by Heidegger in Being and Time
between the “hermeneutic as” and the “apophantic as” I already
mentioned.
Roboticists may try to 'translate' this difference saying that what
they
program into the robot is some kind of “hermeneutic as” and what the
robot 'says'
when it is asked for something is a kind of “apophantic as”. But this
is just
an analogy, of course.
MN If we
don't share the
world with someone, it might be that talking about being and beings
fails to be
understood.
RC Yes, I
think so too.
Beings appear in the openness or Ba.
As far as we know only we humans can understand beings presenting
themselves in
the Ba as beings.
MN I
couldn't write the
rest of my paper on robots today, because I am thinking about self in
the case
of self-organization systems and the 'autonomous' robots which can
compare 'a
copy of the signal (for motor actions) known as an efference copy'
and
'the actual sensory feedback' from 'outside.' An efference copy is very
interesting because almost no one has used this term giving any clear
definition. What is a 'copy' of sensory information? Can this copy be
considered to be something similar to imagination as suggested for
instance by
Hiroshi Tsukimoto?
RC
Imagination in the case
of humans is related to three-dimensional time in case we do not
conceive it as a representation in consciousness
(Capurro 1996). We are always imagining something, i.e. projecting
ourselves
into the future or letting the future come to us. The issue of copying
sensory
information is based, once again, on the subject-object dichotomy.
Robots'
bodies are not really bodies in the sense that our bodies are as
extended into
past-present-future. A robot's body is always in the present or
“vorhanden,”
simply ‘occurrent.’ It is we who program robots as if
they were related to future and past. But a robot's body has
no idea of past and future, even if we install a memory of the past.
But
this is
again a metaphor because its so-called memory is only a set of present stored data. The meaning of being when we ask the
question, 'what is a robot?', is computability, that is to say, that
the more computable a being is, the more and the better it is. This is
why, within this cast of being – or within this paradigm, to put it
in the usual terms of epistemology –, a robot is
more and better than
a human.
MN When you
say that
"self" means that the processes of nature are not produced by 'other'
or a cause outside the organism or system and that this is another
concept of
self than when we speak of the human self that is a social self sharing
a
common world, does this mean that self is not confined to human beings?
RC As far as
we know, we
humans are the only beings that are not only a what but also a who
or that
are themselves as a self in interplay with other selves and with the
world
they share. When we speak about self-organizing systems, no self
is
implied but just the fact that (living) systems organize themselves.
Varela
defines natural organisms as “selfless selves” (Varela 1991). We humans
are
self-organizing systems or “selfless selves” as well as selves. On the
basis of
this difference we can not only better understand who we are with
regard to
other living systems, but also with regard to robots as artificial
selfless and
worldless systems. Robots are heteropoietic systems although they look
like
natural autopoietic ones. We should start a new intercultural dialogue
in the
future about the difference between the natural and the artificial. All
this is
basic for roboethics and a good basis for an intercultural dialogue on
robotics
and roboethics between the “Far East” and the “Far
West.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We
thank Dr Michael
Eldred (Cologne)
for his critical advice as well as for polishing our English.
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Last
update: May 1, 2017