Hacker Cinema
Being in the World
2009 · Film · documentary · 81 min
Directed by Tao Ruspoli
Being in the World is a celebration of human beings, and our ability, through the mastery of physical, intellectual and creative skills, to find meaning in the world around us. This film takes us on a gripping and surprising journey around the world meeting extraordinary people, showing how we go from following rules to proficiency, to becoming masters in the form artists, craftsmen, athletes, and, ultimately, unique human beings attuned to the sacred.
5 positive1 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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7 comments on Hacker News
Hubert Dreyfus worked on Heideggerean critiques of AI while at MIT rubbing shoulders with Marvin Minsky and the like.
There’s a good documentary called “Being in the world”; last time I checked it had been posted on YouTube.
A documentary I strongly recommend to everybody (it's on YouTube): Tao Russell's "Being in the world".
It's ostensibly about the life and work of Hubert Dreyfus, the famous MIT philosopher that was an AI skeptic. But it interviews carpenters and jazz and flamenco musicians and cooks etc. and (way oversimplifying here) the takeaway is that the skill is not in you, it's in this moment of skillfull interaction with the world.
Gigerenzer seems to come awfully close to this point, but keeps missing it. At the critical moment the genius baseball batter is one with his bat, with the wind, with the noises, with each signal coming from his musculature -- this is not a Cartesian subject metaphorically manipulating levers and keys to move a robot, this is a situation. It's a whole thing.
This is why even in sports where pitch sizes are regulamented (like soccer) there's a substantial home game advantage even in the absence of crowds. That's where they train. This is why pure mathematicians obsess over that particular chalk. This is why Kenny G sounds so shitty, he's recording against a backing track in an aquarium in a studio, and why improvised jazz sounds so great.
There’s a very nice documentary movie titled “Being in the world” (available on YouTube and elsewhere) which introduces the Heideggerian perspective. I’ve also heard good things about Hubert Dreyfus’ interpretation/translation of Heidegger.
This this this, the real answer! The truth has always been determined through meaningful social consensus. This doesn’t scale well — you need a diversity of people in your life (eg boss, friends, clients, spouse, local hipsters etc) to build knowledge. People in this thread are trying to synthesize a folk epistemology when in reality knowledge of facts is also a lived-in fat just as know how is.
Watch the documentary “Being in the world” for more.
The documentary Being In the World (2010) talks around similar issues, and the implications for how we conceive of the mind and intelligence. It includes contributions from a number of performers but, most importantly for this crowd, also Hubert Dreyfus.
Dreyfus's account of AI is the most interesting and well developed critiques I've encountered, and it's nice to see him giving his positive account of mind, rather than his negative account of AI.
I'm not really the right person to answer, but some recent philosophy that's been influential to my thinking, and also to a lot of people in the humanities and art, is the "object-oriented ontology" as put forth by people like Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost (whose main object of investigation has been video games) and others.
For something more obviously relevant to this crowd, you could look at the work of Hubert Dreyfus, a Heidegger scholar whose insights into the limits of viewing intelligence as symbolic cognition has actually been influential in the history of AI. It's not super recent, but maybe it takes some time for philosophy to become intelligible; when it is really interesting, it also probably seems weird when it's fresh.
A few references for Dreyfus:
1. His recent paper "Why Heideggerian AI failed and how fixing it would Require making it more Heideggerian"; a quote below. http://cid.nada.kth.se/en/HeideggerianAI.pdf
"As I studied the RAND papers and memos, I found to my surprise that, far from replacing philosophy, the pioneers in CS had learned a lot, directly and indirectly from the philosophers. They had taken over Hobbes’ claim that reasoning was calculating, Descartes’ mental representations, Leibniz’s idea of a “universal characteristic”—a set of primitives in which all knowledge could be expressed,—Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, Frege’s formalization of such rules, and Russell’s postulation of logical atoms as the building blocks of reality. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program.
At the same time, I began to suspect that the critical insights formulated in existentialist armchairs, especially Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s, were bad news for those working in AI laboratories– that, by combining rationalism, representationalism, conceptualism, formalism, and logical atomism into a research program, AI researchers had condemned their enterprise to reenact a failure."
2. David Chapman's curious autobiographical book review of a somewhat hokey book on "integral philosophy", that goes into his own story at MIT's AI lab and his encounter with Dreyfus's critique; quote below. https://meaningness.com/metablog/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artificial-intelligence
"In 1987, we wrote a computer program called Pengi that illustrated some of what we had learned from Dreyfus, Heidegger, and the Continental philosophical tradition. Pengi participated in a life-world. It did not have to mentally represent and reason about its circumstances, because it was embedded in them, causally coupled with them in a purposive dance. Its skill came from spontaneous improvisation, not strategic planning. Its apparently intelligent activity derived from interactive dynamics that—continually involving both its self and others—were neither subjective nor objective. Pengi was a triumph: it could do things that the old paradigm clearly couldn’t, and (although quite crude) seemed to point to a wide-open new paradigm for further research. AI was unstuck again! And, in fact, Pengi was highly influential for a few years."
3. Dreyfus's book about his reading of Heidegger, called Being-in-the-world, and if one wishes, a recent movie of the same name. Here is one of my many highlighted passages from the book, which is flattering to computer scientists, but also might make you wonder if there is any philosophy that is critiquing current AI research in a way that will seem prescient years down the road:
"Having to program computers keeps one honest. There is no room for the armchair rationalist's speculations. Thus AI research has called the Cartesian cognitivist's bluff. It is easy to say that to account for the equipmental nexus one need simply add more and more function predicates and rules describing what is to be done in typical situations, but actual difficulties in AI—its inability to make progress with what is called the commonsense knowledge problem, on the one hand, and its inability to define the current situation, sometimes called the frame problem, on the other—suggest that Heidegger is right. It looks like one cannot build up the phenomenon of world out of meaningless elements."
This is evergreen:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus%27s_views_on_artificial_intelligence
See also, if you can, the film "Being in the world", which features Dreyfus.