Hegel's Absolute Idealism from an AI perspective

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A second pass these last few days at Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind (Spirit), a notoriously obscure but central work of the great German philosopher.

I ought to have read Hegels' book in the original German, but of course even native German speakers struggle with Hegel's technical and obscure terminology. It's never going to happen for me.

I rejected reading it in translation - it's still too hard and in any case, I'd be studying the translator's view of what Hegel really meant.

Perhaps a guide to The Phenomenology of Spirit? I have this:

Amazon link

.. but it still presupposes that the reader has grasped the problem Hegel is trying to address.

So in the end I reverted to Peter Singer (top of page) who assumes no special prior knowledge. And I learned that in the Middle-Ages under feudalism, there was no real questioning of what kind of thing the world might be (ontology) because the Bible told us that God had made it. Likewise there was no discussion about how we could come to know things (epistemology) because divine revelation was always to hand.

The rising bourgeoisie, with its campaign against superstition and arbitrary authority and its championing of transactional-rationality demanded a rethink. So we had Descartes' famous 'Cogito' and Kant's famous 'thing-in-itself' which we could never know .. and Hegel's attempt to finally resolve these issues and put Kant right.

Marxists believe that Marx in the end resolved most of these problems and I think that's right.

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There is a tradition that says that philosophers create artificial problems by over-abstracting - and then spend their careers failing to solve them. Over-abstraction means ignoring essential features of the problem - things like agency (in epistemology) and evolutionary biology (in ethics, morality and aesthetics) and social praxis (in ontology).

AI has often allowed philosophical problems of excruciating obscurity to be recast as engineering problems badly misunderstood.

What does AI (and mathematical logic) have to say about Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind?

I have some notes.

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Hegel's forms of consciousness

1. Sense-certainty

The raw elements of percepts. Like bitmaps.

The problem: uninterpreted, private and incommunicable as knowledge.

2. Perception

Codification of sensory data in a language of object and predicate names (like first-order logic). Requires a prior language. Formalised as a set of grounded atomic formulae ('facts').

The problem: where did the language come from? Not sense-experience - so must be a-priori.

3. Understanding

The interpretation of categorised sensory data in a web of knowledge and inference. Formalised as grounded atomic terms plus a relevant prior theory ('facts' + 'rules').

The problem: where did it come from? Similarly problematic to Perception above.

4. Self-consciousness

We now consider a consciousness which knows itself to be a consciousness and worries about how it comes to have facts and rules about the world. This requires a transition to named agents and epistemic logic.

Let a, b, .. be agents and K the epistemic operator.

If a knows the fact: 'the cat is in the mat' we write:

K(a, on(cat, mat)).

Trying to understand the concept of self-consciousness leads Hegel to his celebrated master-slave discussion and the notion of the 'unhappy consciousness'.

Mind becomes aware of itself as mind. It becomes aware of its theories, which give meaning to reality, as subsets of some universal theory which accurately captures all the objects and relationships which constitute universal history in its great narrative of development and progress.

Agents (individual people) are able to internalise part of this overarching theory - reflecting their partial and historically-limited experiences. But they can also be aware that absolute knowledge nevertheless exists - the upper bound of what can ever be collectively known about the universe.

Singer observes that it's difficult to understand what Hegel's ontological commitments are in his Absolute Idealism.

Consider this.

If there is some universal theory, U, then we can consider the model of that theory which comprises formal agents and their separate cognitive states in their environments over all time. The movie of the universe, if you like, expressed in a mathematical, computational sequence of states.

Yet this description is also a notated object in some 'programming language' and therefore also a theoretical construct.* Perhaps this program-plus-output is what is meant by 'universal knowledge'?

Could this be what Hegel was groping for, a century before programming languages were developed?

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* For more technically-inclined readers, what we are talking about here is a term algebra, or Herbrand universe. See the Wikipedia article.

Michael Roberts: Total Automation under Capitalism

Michael Roberts has a new book out:

Amazon link

Here is what he has to say about the impact of total automation on capitalism (pages 137-141).

"What does this all mean if we enter the extreme (science fiction?) future where robotic technology and AI leads to robots making robots AND robots extracting raw materials and making everything AND carrying out all personal and public services so that human labour is no longer required for ANY task of production at all?

Let's imagine a totally automated process where no human worked in the production process. Surely, value has been added by the conversion of raw materials into goods without humans? Surely, that refutes Marx's claim that only human labour can create value?

In Marx's economic theory, abstract labour is the only source of value and surplus-value. However, in the case of an economy where robots build robots build robots and there is no human labour involved, surely value is still created?

This was the argument of Dmitriev in 1898, in his critique of Marx's value theory. He said that, in a fully automated system, a certain input of machines can create a greater output of machines (or of other commodities). In this case, profit and the rate of profit would be determined exclusively by the technology used (productivity) and not by (abstract) labour. If 10 machines produce 12 machines, the profit is 2 machines and the rate of profit is 2/10, 20%.

Value reduced to use value has nothing to do with Marx's notion of value, which is the monetary expression of abstract labour expended by labourers. If machines could create 'value', this value would be use-value rather than value as the outcome of humans' abstract labour. But, if machines can create 'value', so can an infinity of other factors (animals, the forces of nature, sunspots, etc.) and the determination of value becomes impossible. And if machines supposedly could transfer their use-value to the product, this would immediately crash against the problem of the aggregation of different use-values.

For Marx, machines do not create value. Rather, concrete labour transfers the value of the machines (and, more generally, of the means of production) to the product. They increase human productivity and thus the output per unit of capital invested, while decreasing the quantity of living labour needed for the production of a certain output. Given that only labour creates value, the substitution of the means of production for living labour decreases the quantity of value created per unit of capital invested. ...

The Dmitriev critique confuses the dual nature of value under capitalism: use value and exchange value. There is use value (things and services that people need); and exchange value (the value measured in labour time and appropriated from human labour by the owners of capital and realised by sale on the market). In every commodity under the capitalist mode of production, there is both use value and exchange value. You can't have one without the other under capitalism. But the latter rules the capitalist investment and production process, not the former.

Value (as defined) is specific to capitalism. Sure, living labour can create things and do services (use values). But value is the substance of the capitalist mode of producing things. Capital (the owners) controls the means of production created by labour and will only put them to use in order to appropriate value created by labour. Capital does not create value itself.  So in our hypothetical all-encompassing robot/AI world, productivity (of use values) would tend to infinity while profitability (surplus value to capital value) would tend to zero. ...

This is no longer capitalism. The analogy is more with a slave economy as in ancient Rome. In ancient Rome, over hundreds of years, the formerly predominantly small-holding peasant economy was replaced by slaves in mining, farming and all sorts of other tasks. This happened because the booty of the successful wars that the Roman republic and empire conducted included a mass supply of slave labour.

The cost to the slave owners of these slaves was incredibly cheap (to begin with) compared with employing free labour. The slave owners drove the farmers off their land through a combination of debt demands, requisition in wars and sheer violence. The former peasants and their families were forced into slavery themselves or into the cities, where they scraped a living with menial tasks and skills or begged. The class struggle did not end. The struggle was between the slave-owning aristocrats and the slaves and between the aristocrats and the atomised plebs in the cities.

A fully robot economy means that the owners of the means of production (robots) would have a super-abundant economy of things and services at zero cost (robots making robots making robots). The owners can then just consume. They don't need to make 'profit', just as the aristocrat slave owners in Rome just consumed and did not run businesses to sell commodities to make a profit. So a robotic economy could mean a super-abundant world for all or it could mean a new form of slave society with extreme inequality of wealth and income. It's a social 'choice' or more accurately, it depends of the outcome of the class struggle under capitalism.

The key issue is Marx's law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. A rising organic composition of capital leads to a fall in the overall rate of profit engendering recurring crises. If robots and AI do replace human labour at an accelerating rate, that can only intensify that tendency. Well before we get to a robot-all world, capitalism will experience ever-increasing periods of crises and stagnation."

Everything Roberts says here is orthodox Marxist economics and yet there is something missing: the use of the abstract concepts of Marx's theory to reconstruct the concrete phenomena, to discern the details of the actual transition to 'a robot-all world'.

Marx was not a vitalist. He did not think that human protoplasm endowed human labour with some mysterious value-producing quality that mere steel and electronics could never replicate. So what if human workers were everywhere replaced by fabricated androids who also toiled in the factories, were paid wages and consumed ersatz food? Does capitalism still work? [Answer: of course].

If one particular capitalist creates a totally automated factory (or one using purely slave labour which is - in Marxist terms - the same thing) is that incompatible with capitalism? [Answer: of course not].

As more and more capitalists automate their factories, displacing human labour, what is the process which unfolds before them and why? How do they perceive the capitalist economy failing before their eyes?

Or will they rather observe, as Peter Singer writes in his book on Marx: ‘Future capitalists will not find their profits drying up as they dismiss the last workers from their newly-automated factories’ (p. 76).

I outlined some answers here.

"Marx: A Very Short Introduction" - Peter Singer

I was impressed by the readability and erudition of Peter Singer's VSI to Hegel, so decided to read his take on Marx.

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I was disappointed. Singer is affectionately amusing on Marx's life and I agree with him that Marx retained a (materialist-reframed) Hegelian perspective throughout his life's work. But Singer struggles with Marx's notoriously tricky concept of value (abstract human labour), buying the argument that machines can create surplus-value. In Marxist thinking, only human labour can do that, reflecting the distinction between labour and labour-power.

Once you don't 'get' Marx's theory of value, then the theory of capitalist dynamics tends to go too, and you're left with a static evaluation of Marx's specific predictions, most of which did not track capitalism's evolution throughout the twentieth century.

Singer thereby concludes by seeing Marx more as an ethical philosopher than anything else, but that's a retreat too far. I would, however, be even harder than Singer on Marx's lamentably blank-slate view of human nature, which fatally undermines any naive presentation of Communism.

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Singer also wrote this book, which is on my list:

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I had thought I might be the only person in the world who cared about the synthesis between Marxism and evolutionary theory, specifically human sociobiology. But I guess that along with Peter Singer I should now add David Reich to my list of good guys too, although he's a liberal-leftist, not a Marxist.

"Hegel: A Very Short Introduction" - Peter Singer

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Some days (not often) I wake up and wonder if instead of being a Marxist, I should subscribe to Hegelianism. Trouble is, Hegel (1770-1831) is so hard to understand. Back in August of last year I ordered Frederick Beiser's book, Hegel, but I over-reached. I now appreciate that Peter Singer is the place to start for the Hegel neophyte.

After a biographical sketch (life and times) Singer starts the tour with the Philosophy of History. Here Hegel reviews world history from 'oriental despotism' through antiquity (Greece and Rome, not considered the same), continuing to Christianity and then to the modern post-enlightenment state. He sees history as marking a transition from initially complete unfreedom through to its final state as conscious, free and dutiful community. (Many people considered his ideal as not a million miles away from the Prussian state which sponsored him, although Singer makes a good stab at refuting this).

Underpinning Hegel's notion of the progressive nature of history is the evolution of consciousness. Singer now takes us through one of the more obscure but central of his works: The Phenomenology of Mind. Here Hegel's Idealism (vs Materialism) is foregrounded as he examines historical consciousness developing towards completely self-awareness and the absolute. Hegel's treatment here is notoriously opaque and tortuous, brushing with ideas of psychology and religion. Singer does his best to extract a coherent line of argument.

The progress of history, expressive of the growth of mind/spirit, is a dialectical one, a transformatory logic which Hegel documented in the Science of Logic. Singer gives this work a more summary, concise treatment, drawing the links with Marx's dialectics.

The book ends with the aftermath. Hegel's more youthful works were highly dialectical and abstract; his later thinking arguably more concrete (though remember, this is Hegel) and more engaged with celebrating the Prussian state. After Hegel's death in 1831 his followers split into two camps. The Right Hegelians followed his mature thinking and vanished into obscurity; the Left Hegelians attempted to 'rescue' Hegel' from inadequate radicalism: this movement gave birth to Marxism.

Peter Singer's book is excellent, almost the perfect scene-setter for further exploration. I now understand better Marx's notes about turning Hegel on his head and removing the mysticism in his development of historical materialism.

Singer successfully conveys Hegel's overarching scheme .. but how convincing is it? Hegel's preoccupation with consciousness, freedom and duty as the true foundations of a dynamic reality could only seem plausible in a culture steeped in religion and the immanent presence of the supernatural. When Marx reconceptualised history as the dialectical process of men making history, but not under conditions of their own choosing, Hegel's ungrounded abstractions lost their force. So I've ceased to feel any of Hegel's gravitational pull on my thinking.

Existence is rather important

Consider the ontological argument:

"The ontological argument attempts to prove God’s existence through abstract reasoning alone. The argument is entirely a priori, i.e. it involves no empirical evidence at all. Rather, the argument begins with an explication of the concept of God, and seeks to demonstrate that God exists on the basis of that concept alone.
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All forms of the argument make some association between three concepts: the concepts of God, of perfection, and of existence. Very roughly, they state that perfection is a part of the concept of God, and that perfection entails existence, and so that the concept of God entails God’s existence.
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The ontological argument was first formulated in the eleventh century by St Anselm in his Proslogium, Chapter 2. Anselm was a Benedictine monk, Archbishop of Canterbury, and one of the great medieval philosopher-theologians. Anselm’s ontological argument rests on the identification of God as “that than which no greater can be conceived”. Once it is understood that God is that than which no greater can be conceived, Anselm suggests, it becomes evident that God must exist."

The usual rebuttal, due to Kant, is that "existence is not a predicate".

There is a biological analogue: that the zoological properties of a species are predicated upon that species actually existing. An animal's behaviour is such as to ensure the continuing existence and successful reproduction of its genes: in the jargon, its inclusive fitness.

I think about this every time I hear some clever-stupid contortions in moral philosophy.

Take Peter Singer's observations that we would all help a drowning child in a pool before our very eyes - even at the cost of ruining our maybe-expensive clothes. Yet there are people in similar dire circumstances across the planet but out of our view, right now. We should therefore make similar material and effortful sacrifices for them too.

But, unless we are very gullible, we don't much (don't get me started on virtue signalling). So there's a moral deficit to explain and counter - if you're a moral philosopher of that persuasion.

The proximate reason we help the drowning child in front of our very eyes* is that we feel a strong emotional reaction, that of empathy, which drives us to action. And the causal reason we experience that emotion is that we have mirror neurons in our brains which emulate the child's fear and panic.

Let us progress. The ultimate reason for the evolution of empathy (and its enforcer, guilt) via the apparatus of mirror neurons was to facilitate reciprocal altruism. Reciprocal altruism allows cooperation with non-kin across time and space to mutual advantage and can therefore be subject to positive selection (Robert L. Trivers).

We have a term for the network of those with whom we can work to the benefit of our mutual inclusive fitness: family and friends. The outer limit to the number of people you can do deals with has been quoted as around 150. Beyond that, people are just an anonymous mass.

When E. M. Forster made his over-quoted remark “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” he was capturing the essentially fictive notions of 'fatherland' (and indeed ethnicity) as objects of spontaneous emotional attachment. **

Politicians, religious leaders and ethnic spokespeople have to work hard to create feelings of mass emotional solidarity, ("Brothers and Sisters ...!", "Friends ...!"), misusing the language of small-group bonding. Sometimes they are right to do so, as there are indeed inclusive fitness benefits to some social organisations of scale. And sometimes they are just conning people and reducing their life chances (cults such as scientology come to mind).

Giving away your material goods to people with whom you can never hope to have any reciprocal relations of advantage is plainly a case of the latter. Which is why, (except for the most gullible who invite their extinction from the gene pool), people tend not to do it.

The argument above is related to this issue:

... the “problem of human ultra-sociality“: from an evolutionary point of view, how was it possible for the human species to go from living in small foraging bands of close relatives in the Palaeolithic to the global network of billions of anonymously interacting strangers that we see today ?

To read more, refer to this current post from Pseudoerasmus.

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* We should note the perverse power of television in making the whole world appear as 'in front of our very eyes' and thus further scamming our emotions. Expect things to get worse in the coming days of virtual reality.

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** Suppose that in a foreign and dangerous land you happen to meet a fellow country person. You might well feel a warm feeling of anticipatory camaraderie, as did those merchant seamen who, captured by the enemy, were rescued by sailors who were strangers to them with the cheery words "The navy's here!". Plainly a shared culture and heritage can make it more likely that there is a basis for future reciprocal altruism - prosocial dispositions may facilitate such an outcome.