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“There need not be strict disciplinary boundaries between philosophy and other disciplines.”
In the following post, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Professor of Philosophy at VU Amsterdam and Professorial Fellow at Arché at the University of St. Andrews explains and makes a case for synthetic philosophy.
This is the first in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.
[“Abandoned Schoolhouse” by Gary Simmons]
A few years ago, the philosopher (and prolific blogger) Eric Schliesser used the term ‘synthetic philosophy’ to describe the work of Daniel Dennett and Peter Godfrey-Smith. Schliesser presented synthetic philosophy as “a style of philosophy that brings together insights, knowledge, and arguments from the special sciences with the aim to offer a coherent account of complex systems and connect these to a wider culture or other philosophical projects (or both). Synthetic philosophy may, in turn, generate new research in the special sciences…” Schliesser did not coin the term itself: the once influential but by now largely forgotten polymath 19th-century thinker Herbert Spencer (of ‘survival of the fittest’-fame) titled his mammoth 10-volume work covering biology, psychology, sociology and ethics System of Synthetic Philosophy.
But Schliesser can be credited for re-introducing the term to denote an approach in philosophy that has become more pervasive and widely accepted over the last two decades, namely one where philosophers engage extensively with work done in relevant (empirical) disciplines to inform their philosophical investigations and theories. Other recent examples of synthetic philosophers include Neil Levy (see his Bad Beliefs) and Kim Sterelny, who describes his book The Evolved Apprentice in the following terms: “The essay is an essay in philosophy in part because it depends primarily on the cognitive toolbox of philosophers: it is work of synthesis and argument, integrating ideas and suggestions from many different research traditions. No one science monopolizes this broad project though many contribute to it. So I exploit and depend on data, but do not provide new data” (Sterelny, 2012, p. xi). If this is a good description of synthetic philosophy, then it is fair to say that I have been (trying to be!) a synthetic philosopher for about 15 years now, so when Schliesser introduced the term, I adopted it wholeheartedly. (It is for sure much catchier than alternatives such as the cumbersome ‘empirically-informed philosophy’.)
The idea that there need not be strict disciplinary boundaries between philosophy and other disciplines enjoyed some popularity in the 20th century, in particular in the tradition of ‘scientific philosophy’ initiated by Bertrand Russell and continued by the Vienna Circle and later with their ‘heirs’ in the United States such as W.V.O. Quine (who used the ambiguous term ‘naturalism’ to describe the idea of continuity between philosophy and other disciplines) and Hilary Putnam. (Much before that, over the centuries, there was for the most arguably no strict separation between philosophy and other disciplines either; Aristotle was first and foremost a biologist.) But there was also much resistance within analytic philosophy to the idea that philosophical inquiry should in any way be informed by scientific findings (see this piece that I co-wrote on the dissonant origins of analytic philosophy). This resistance is to be traced back to G.E. Moore, who insisted that moral philosophy and ethics in particular were strictly non-scientific, purely conceptual domains. It continued with the so-called ‘ordinary language philosophers’, as exemplified by the damning critique of Carnap’s notion of explication in Strawson’s piece for the Carnap Living Philosophers volume.
To motivate a strict separation between science and philosophy, a point sometimes made is that scientists are involved in the merely descriptive inquiry of telling us how things are, while philosophers are involved in conceptual and (or) normative inquiry as well, which includes looking at how things ought to be understood, and how they ought to be. If true, this point has important methodological implications, as different methods are used for different types of investigation. Methods to investigate how things are include data collection, experiments, field work, etc. Methods to investigate how things should be include conceptual analysis, ‘intuitions’, thought experiments, etc. Some decades ago, however, this presumed neat separation was challenged by the so-called experimental philosophy approach, which prompted what might described as a small methodological crisis in analytic philosophy. Could philosophy be empirical/experimental after all? The X-Phi challenge made it clear that more sustained methodological reflection was needed, and philosophers spent much of the first two decades of the 21st century discussing the ins and outs of different methods for philosophical inquiry (see Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy and the Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology).
It is fair to say that scientific/synthetic philosophy ‘won’ the battle in that the Moorean rejection of engagement with empirical findings in philosophical inquiry has become much less widespread in the last decade. I speak from (anecdotal) personal experience: when I was working on the project that culminated in my monograph Formal Languages in Logic (2012), I often got remarks to the effect that it was all very interesting, but what I was doing wasn’t really philosophy. (My standard response was: well, I’m glad no one is saying that it’s all very philosophical, but not interesting.) By contrast, in later years the research that culminated in my monograph The Dialogical Roots of Deduction (2020) did not typically prompt the same kind of reaction, even though it was just as empirically oriented as my earlier work. The fact that The Dialogical Roots of Deduction won the Lakatos Award in 2022 (sorry folks, time for some shameless self-promotion!) attests to the widespread acceptance of synthetic philosophy as an approach to philosophical inquiry (though philosophers of science are, of course, from the start more amenable to the general idea of engaging with other disciplines).
In my opinion, philosophy is especially well-placed to facilitate much-needed interdisciplinary collaboration between different disciplines. It is now widely recognized that so-called ‘wicked problems’ require complementary approaches to be addressed, but each methodology has its limitations and dead angles. Experimental methods may lack ‘ecological validity’ (lab situations do not really reproduce the phenomena in the wild); quantitative methods are often not very fine-grained and may give rise to spurious correlations and ‘noise’; qualitative methods may be instances of ‘cherry-picking’ and have limited reach. Thus, what has become clear, in particular during the Covid-19 pandemic, is that triangulation of methods is essential for investigating complex problems.
It seems to me that philosophers have much to contribute to interdisciplinarity and triangulation efforts for two main reasons: philosophers are trained to engage in careful conceptual inquiry, clarifying and sharpening significant (scientific) concepts and sometimes introducing new ones (Carnapian explication, conceptual engineering); philosophers may be better able to see the forest rather than only the trees, as it were, by drawing on various scientific disciplines (as suggested in the Sterelny quote above) and noticing connections that may remain unnoticed within each specific discipline. Philosophy has much more potential for synthesis than is often recognized (even by us philosophers), and this is perfectly compatible with the centrality of analysis in analytic philosophy. (Traditionally, analysis and synthesis were viewed as two complementary rather than incompatible processes: you break things down to them put them back together again, usually in a different, more fruitful configuration.) (Note: commenting on an earlier draft of this post, Eric Schliesser remarked that my conception of synthetic philosophy differs in some important respects from his. He thinks that my conception resembles that of Kitcher’s, which he discussed in this blog post.)
True enough, there are also a number of difficulties, pitfalls and risks involved in attempting to do synthetic philosophy. For starters, the approach requires that the philosopher be conversant with various different scientific disciplines; she has to be a ‘polymath’ in some sense, which in the current scenario of scientific hyper-specialization is a formidable challenge. Secondly, there is a perennial risk of conceptual confusion/equivocation and ‘talking past each other’ for lack of a common vocabulary (a familiar problem in interdisciplinarity studies). Third, scientific studies themselves are not always reliable guides, with many important results not being replicated (see the famous ‘replication crisis’ in psychology and other disciplines).
However, while these issues are real and must be taken seriously, I submit that they should not be viewed as knock-down arguments against synthetic philosophy. (I have responses to each of them but I’m running out of space!) Sustained methodological reflection on the ins and outs of synthetic philosophy is still needed, but I hope to have established here at least that synthetic philosophy is an interesting and viable approach for philosophical inquiry.
The post A Plea for Synthetic Philosophy (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.
Enlarge / An AI-generated image from an #aicinema still series called "Vinyl Vengeance" by Julie Wieland, created using Midjourney. (credit: Julie Wieland / Midjourney)
Since last year, a group of artists have been using an AI image generator called Midjourney to create still photos of films that don't exist. They call the trend "AI cinema." We spoke to one of its practitioners, Julie Wieland, and asked her about her technique, which she calls "synthography," for synthetic photography.
Last year, image synthesis models like DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney began allowing anyone with a text description (called a "prompt") to generate a still image in many different styles. The technique has been controversial among some artists, but other artists have embraced the new tools and run with them.
While anyone with a prompt can make an AI-generated image, it soon became clear that some people possessed a special talent for finessing these new AI tools to produce better content. As with painting or photography, the human creative spark is still necessary to produce notable results consistently.
Imagine setting out to explore a distant barren alien landscape, or somewhere earth bound like the “tortuous” glacial-carved topography of Sarek, Sweden, all accompanied by an electronic score composed by the likes of Carbon Based Lifeforms. Your imagination might very well conjure adventuring accessories similar to the Teenage Engineering’s Field System, a collection of functional bags and accessories equipped for exploration, earthly or otherwise.
The monochromatic collection is characterized most notably but its all-white minimalist theme, one realized in nylon 66 shell fabric complemented by black detailing across closure and zipper lines. The nylon material is both fire retardant and backed with polyurethane leather offering the wearer a 3000mm water repellent rating, affording confidence the contents within remain safe regardless whether you’re climbing up to investigate volcanic activity, plumb the depths of a glacial carved stream… or simply make it back to your car in the rain in this extremely wet winter.
The series is designed to go anywhere, with dry water repellent Japanese mini ripstop nylon accessorized with aluminum alloy hardware, including zips and rings.
Numerous pieces of the Field Series collection, like the Field Medium OP–Z Bag and Field Large OP–1 Bag, are designed specifically to secure Teenage Engineering’s catalog of synths and other musical devices, but are also adaptable for carrying all shapes and sizes of gear.
The Field Backpack includes a field keychain carabiner and even a sitting pad.
Embroidered graphic patches further play up the Interstellar-themed designs.
Beyond bags and carrying cases, the Field Series full range also includes t-shirts and sweatshirts emblazoned with mission/music oriented graphics, water bottles, notebooks, and bottle openers starting from $9 with the entire collection available now at TeenageEngineering.com.
Diamonds: carbon, transparent, expensive, symbolic of love and commitment — and many of them come dripping with human rights abuses. They also come with a heavy environmental burden, even the lab-grown ones. So what if diamonds could be done differently, with proper traceability and sustainability? That’s exactly where Aether, a diamond-growing company based in New York, is trying to change the narrative around diamonds.
“The only thing transparent in this industry are the stones,” says Ryan Shearman, CEO of Aether Diamonds in an interview with TechCrunch. “There is no supply chain on planet Earth that’s fully traceable with respect to mined diamonds. And the same goes for a lab-grown diamond; it’s better when you’re talking about a lab-grown diamond, but it’s still nowhere near fully traceable.”
Although people are more aware of the human impact of diamond mining, and terms such as “blood diamond” or “conflict diamond” are well recognized, the environmental impact of diamond mining is enormous and perhaps a little less well-known.
“Diamonds are particularly bad in terms of the ratio of earth that needs to be moved, compared to the actual product that makes it to market. For one carat worth of diamond, you have to move about as much earth that it takes to fill up the average American living room,” says Shearman. Of course, it isn’t just the scarification of the landscape, but the vast quantities of energy required to excavate and relocate that earth, the particulates released into the atmosphere in the process, the toxic waste it generates and the residues collected in tailing ponds or that run off into waterways. Then there are accidents associated with the mines themselves, or their aftermath.
If we have to have diamonds, there must be a better way — and that’s where Aether steps in. Aether’s direct air capture process builds on a CO2 to methane conversion reaction discovered by French chemist Paul Sabatier, but one that required enormous refinement to ensure that it was energy efficient.
Aether’s diamond-growing process takes carbon dioxide from the air, which it then synthesizes into the hydrocarbon material required to grow diamonds. This hydrocarbon feedstock, or Atmospheric Methane, as the company calls it, is injected into a chemical vapor deposition reactor, where the diamond grows, one atom layer at a time. The fully grown diamonds don’t emerge from the chamber ready to be set into engagement rings or pairs of earrings. They are still rough, requiring to be cut, polished and finished. But, they have been extracted from the air, are fully traceable, and are carbon neutral.
“We can tell you where every carbon atom in your diamond came from, and we can trace the path of that carbon atom all the way through to final sale,” says Shearman.
But carbon neutral? Isn’t that a bit of a stretch for a process that requires so much energy, even when you are extracting carbon from the atmosphere to produce the diamond itself?
“From a sequestration standpoint, we would have to make a lot of diamonds to drive a huge impact. Where we have our biggest impact with diamonds is avoidance, we get to avoid all of the really terrible things that are happening with these other dirtier lab-grown diamonds and mined diamonds,” says Shearman, acknowledging that even lab-grown diamonds are an energy-hungry resource and can be terrible for the environment if that energy comes from, say, coal-fired power stations. Aether, though, claims that its production is entirely solar-energy run.
“We rely on solar, we invest in new solar development,” Shearman said. “Our manufacturing process nets out so that it’s carbon neutral, up to the point of producing the actual gemstone, not including the carbon that goes into gemstones. Any carbon that goes into the stone then takes us kind of over that threshold into carbon negative territory.” And Aether’s focus on carbon neutrality has further benefits than just its own diamond production business, too: “We are helping promote the expansion of renewables here in the States, especially in areas of the country that are currently underserved.”
Shearman says that the mythology around diamonds, around a glittering stone forged in the heat of the belly of the earth, is a romantic narrative that’s hard to overcome with a stone grown in a lab. But he senses that there’s a new story-telling opportunity here. First, it builds on the environmental and human costs that a lab-grown diamond obviates, and second, it encourages potential customers to think about a lab-grown diamond as a bit like vintage wine.
“The journey that the carbon has taken is really important for us and leans in on provenance. There’s never been a Paris diamond; there’s never been a New York City diamond, or diamond from May, or diamond from September.” Now, there can be.
For Shearman, the technology Aether is platforming is about a lot more than diamonds, though.
“We’re a carbon technology company. And we specialize in making ultra-high purity methane in a really efficient way, which will enable us in the future to get into other markets, where solid carbon products are vital,” says Shearman. Think of products such as tires and graphite for batteries, which can be produced in far more environmentally friendly conditions.
“If we can actually take that carbon from the air here in the United States and have a domestic supply, we think that can play a really interesting role in the future of that supply chain as it continues to mature.”
Now, if you were purely in it all for the environmental reasons, perhaps you could propose to a loved one with a sliver of a river-rock you found on your third date, but at least this helps move the narrative onward a bit, showing there are other alternatives than what we’ve been doing for a few hundred years.
Aether wants to shift you from blood diamonds to gems pulled from thin air by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Michael Middlebrooks, an invertebrate zoologist, is passionate about sea slugs, specifically photosynthetic kleptoplastic sea slugs. In other words, the ones who can harness solar power.
In his TEDx PSU Talk, Middlebrooks shares that photosynthetic animals are able to convert solar energy into biological energy, just like plants do. — Read the rest
Enlarge / A Formula 2 car on track in Bahrain. The cars are less powerful than an F1 machine, but still tricky to drive. (credit: Joe Portlock - Formula 1/Formula Motorsport Limited via Getty Images)
The 2023 Formula 1 season springs into life this weekend at the Bahrain Grand Prix, the first race of the year. Three days of preseason testing held last week suggest that Red Bull Racing still has the car to beat, although there is the tantalizing prospect of Fernando Alonso and Aston Martin having possibly found a lot of speed in the offseason.
But today's interesting news comes from the lower formulae, F2 and F3, where young drivers cut their teeth. Today, those series announced they are moving to sustainable fuels starting this season.
As we've previously detailed, F1 is moving to carbon-neutral gasoline in 2026, but as single-make formulae with a single fuel supplier (in this case, Aramco), it's possible for F2 and F3 to try something even bolder.
Depeche Mode were on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to promote their forthcoming record, Momento Mori. They performed "Ghosts Again" from the new record and a classic, "Personal Jesus," from 1990's Violator.
Momento Mori will be out on March 24. — Read the rest
A few months back, I received two separate PR pitch emails at nearly the exact same time. One was an invitation to a speaking event in Texas hosted by a "free speech" conservative publishing company, featuring Kyle Rittenhouse as a keynote speaker. — Read the rest
Enlarge (credit: Olena Ruban via Getty Images)
The 1960s was a big decade for cannabis: Images of flower power, the summer of love and Woodstock wouldn’t be complete without a joint hanging from someone’s mouth. Yet in the early ’60s, scientists knew surprisingly little about the plant. When Raphael Mechoulam, then a young chemist in his 30s at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, went looking for interesting natural products to investigate, he saw an enticing gap in knowledge about the hippie weed: The chemical structure of its active ingredients hadn’t been worked out.
Mechoulam set to work.
The first hurdle was simply getting hold of some cannabis, given that it was illegal. “I was lucky,” Mechoulam recounts in a personal chronicle of his life’s work, published this month in the Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology. “The administrative head of my Institute knew a police officer... I just went to Police headquarters, had a cup of coffee with the policeman in charge of the storage of illicit drugs, and got 5 kg of confiscated hashish, presumably smuggled from Lebanon.”
An excerpt from The Rumpus Poetry Book Club‘s March selection,
SYNTHETIC JUNGLE by Michael Chang
forthcoming from Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press on March 15, 2023
HAPPY WARRIOR
she fell off her scooter staring at me, determined as a drillbit
don’t trust anyone who doesn’t drink soda, we want lots & lots of pop
write poems in my head how other azns do math
u don’t need my help dazzling co-eds
my mouth pretty for when u come to town
so hot u cook an egg on it
so hot sunglasses come out all warped
so hot u get the chili pepper on ratemyprofessor
my mother knew better than to pretend-leave me someplace
i would’ve said ok peace i’ll let u know either way
discerning as shibboleth, daylight savings can’t buy shit
i hate that most memoirs are abt other ppl
see how they huddle, pretending to be something they’re not … beefsteak tomatoes
unpitying boy im going to love u like sweet corn congee
teach u different ways to say calves like cantaloupes
make u mushroom soup from scratch
caress u furry creature
ditch our umbrellas in a rainstorm, get soaked like last week’s dishes
dog & bone is a lazy name for a restaurant
try: the rooster, reluctant poet, & little halfwit who invented the universe
the same grave, the height of ridiculousness
ur lime jello, im fruit suspended in u
we hear the excited cries, think: he looks good out there
***
Excerpted from SYNTHETIC JUNGLE by Michael Chang. Copyright © 2022 by Northwestern University. Reprinted by permission, courtesy of Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press.
Enlarge / An AI-generated image of an exploding ball of music. (credit: Ars Technica)
On Thursday, researchers from Google announced a new generative AI model called MusicLM that can create 24 KHz musical audio from text descriptions, such as "a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff." It can also transform a hummed melody into a different musical style and output music for several minutes.
MusicLM uses an AI model trained on what Google calls "a large dataset of unlabeled music," along with captions from MusicCaps, a new dataset composed of 5,521 music-text pairs. MusicCaps gets its text descriptions from human experts and its matching audio clips from Google's AudioSet, a collection of over 2 million labeled 10-second sound clips pulled from YouTube videos.
Generally speaking, MusicLM works in two main parts: first, it takes a sequence of audio tokens (pieces of sound) and maps them to semantic tokens (words that represent meaning) in captions for training. The second part receives user captions and/or input audio and generates acoustic tokens (pieces of sound that make up the resulting song output). The system relies on an earlier AI model called AudioLM (introduced by Google in September) along with other components such as SoundStream and MuLan.
Enlarge / Excerpt of a 1923 cartoon that predicted a "cartoon dynamo" and "idea dynamo" that could create cartoon art automatically. The full cartoon is reproduced below. (credit: Paleofuture)
In 1923, an editorial cartoonist named H.T. Webster drew a humorous cartoon for the New York World newspaper depicting a fictional 2023 machine that would generate ideas and draw them as cartoons automatically. It presaged recent advancements in AI image synthesis, one century later, that actually can create artwork automatically.
The vintage cartoon carries the caption "In the year 2023 when all our work is done by electricity." It depicts a cartoonist standing by his drawing table and making plans for social events while an "idea dynamo" generates ideas and a "cartoon dynamo" renders the artwork.
Interestingly, this separation of labor feels similar to our neural networks of today. In the actual 2023, the "idea dynamo" would likely be a large language model like GPT-3 (albeit imperfectly), and the "cartoon dynamo" is most similar to an image-synthesis model like Stable Diffusion.
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