Functions of conversation: reflections on conspiracy theories

At a recent conference on metaphor, Andreas Musolff raised the important question about why people repeat and spread conspiracy theories – even totally absurd conspiracy theories. Recent thinking about the motivations for casual talk may shed some light on it. Robin Dunbar argued that language (conversation by means of talking or signing) arose initially as an expansion of primate grooming, a means of developing and solidifying allies (including but not exclusively friends.) Friendly touch releases endorphins, with a pleasurable and calming effect, thus increasing positive affect toward the groomer. Jean-Louis Dessalles (2014) objected that this account does not explain the complexity of language, or the prevalence of story-telling (around 40% of language use) and discussion (most of the remainder). Dessalles argued that, in a social context marked by social hierarchy and the potential for violence, effective language use is a means for demonstrating one’s own value as a friend. This adds to the pleasure of “grooming” five additional ways that conversation demonstrates one’s value as a companion and contribute to developing and strengthening friendships and alliances. Effective language use demonstrates: Ability to generate unexpectedness through narratives. Ability to generate emotion through narrative. Ability to recognize incongruencies. Ability to resolve incongruencies. Ready to share time, i.e companionship. The grooming function described by Dunbar implies a fifth characteristic: Ability to be entertaining – e.g. through humor, flattery, word-play, and so on. Among other phenomena, Dessalles’s ideas in particular seem applicable to the spread of gossip – and of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories demonstrate the first four characteristics: they are unexpected, they generate emotion, they center on incongruencies, and the provide a means of resolving those congruencies – however outlandish it may seem. Indeed, the more outlandish the conspiracy theory is, the more entertaining it is. Other well-known social psychological theories help to explain the persistence of conspiracy theories: Social proof, cognitive dissonance, motivated reasoning, selective attention.

The Eyes Have It

In Madrid for a few days before a conference in nearby Alcala de Heneres, I visited the Prado, which has a special exhibit comparing the styles of El Greco and Picasso, who studied and was inspired by El Greco. The point the curator emphasized in the exhibit notes had to do with how El Greco’s approach to structure (verticals) and perspective (relatively flat) inspired Picasso’s Cubist paintings in particular. The curator’s notes stressed the diminished use of perspective in both sets of paintings. Certainly there was no linear perspective or depth (smaller images to denote far away, etc.) but several of El Greco’s paintings in the show express a lot of emotional depth – a kind of perspective I think– and the Picasso cubist paintings in the sample create a sense of depth perspective, not through lines but through use of light and dark. They are nearly monochromatic – greyish-tans of varying intensities, but that narrow color palette emphasizes the effect of depth. So the curator focused on structure – and seems to have missed a remarkable feature of at least three of the El Grecos selected for the show, the eyes and lips, especially San Juan and San Bartolomeo. I thought about buying the printed guide but the photo reproductions do not capture the power in either eyes or lips: a great example of the superiority of viewing the original. I was first struck by the portrait of San Juan the Evangelist (St. John), dated 1610. His eyes are turned intensely left (viewer’s right), lips set and determined, as if he is engaged in an angry or fierce debate). A similar 1605 painting in the next room has similar disposition, but the lips slightly definite, eyes much less strong and hard, and even slightly watery; the two versions are otherwise quite similar. I went back and looked at St. Bartolomeo; his eyes also directed toward his left but they are softer, almost querulous. His lips are also softer, almost trembling; he looks old and tired. I didn’t read it as doubt or even pain, sorrow maybe. San Pablo (St. Paul) is reading, finger on a book (can’t tell if it’s a gospel), eyes softer (thoughtful, maybe), not at all fierce like those of John. That’s interesting because given the legalism and harshness of some of Paul’s letters I would expect to see more determination and precision, more like a thoughtful stare. San Simon is just intensely reading, eyes more centered toward the book. I didn’t even notice that portrait at first. I looked at several of the other religious portraits from El Greco’s time and even earlier: None of them have the intensity of El Greco’s San Juan or San Bartolomeo. For the most part the eyes are turned heavenward or (Jesus and Mary) downward toward the sinners and disciples. Eyes in most of the other examples in El Prado are softer, attempting to depict sorrow, piety, etc. That’s part of the reason these two caught my eye so strongly. El Greco’s understanding of facial expression seems quite modern – and I find his choices interesting in contrast to the conventional presentation of the saints. In contrast to the more typical allegorical presentation of saints, I was quite struck by how El Greco used lips and eyes to give these apostles individual personalities.

Recent research, including neurological experiments, has again raised the problem of individual agency and its opposition to strong causality. To summarize: DNA plays a very strong part in determining a wide variety of traits, including intellectual and emotional traits. The rest is determined by environmental influences, primarily peers. All of this shapes the neural connections and activity in the brain. Neural activity needed to implement a decision begins as much as a half second before the individual is aware of making the decision. This has been interpreted as evidence that the experience of deciding to do something (in this example, push a button) is an illusion, consistent with the view that actions are fully caused by the activity of neurons, in turn shaped and fully caused by DNA interacting with life experiences. This is all consistent with a philosophical position of strong determinism – after the causal effects of all the “external” factors have been accounted for, there is nothing left for the “person” to “decide.” A person holding a gun encounters an unexpected stranger: He does not decide whether to shoot the stranger or not; the outcome (shoot him or welcome him in) is fully determined by the interactions of neurons, themselves fully “programmed” by DNA + accumulated experience. Agency, the ability to decide on a course of action and the potential to be held accountable (morally or otherwise) for the results, is an illusion. The individual actually has no agency because even the most trivial action is fully caused by the inherited DNA and its history of interactions with the biological, physical, and social environment. I believe that the arguments supporting this “strong causal” view all lead to paradox – and some are based on self-contradictory assumptions. The most common error, even among writers who vehemently reject the idea of a “soul-stuff” independent of the material brain, or a “man inside” (“homunculus”), is to allow the homunculus to sneak back in. Searle’s “Chinese Room” thought experiment provides an excellent example: He posits an intelligence who receives strings of Chinese characters, looks them up in a code-book that provides responses to each string (early AI was a lot like this). Searle uses this as an argument against strong materialism in many of his early writings, never seeming to understand that he has smuggled the homunculus back into the room. The person is the “room,” the interaction among all the body’s neural systems, which includes perception and memory, shaped by accumulated social interactions and the cultural practices that govern and shape them. There is no other person. Neural science has never been able to pin down where and how these interactions are consolidated and integrated. But no-one has ever demonstrated a location for anything like an independent self – or a language of the brain that might be used by an independent self. So there is no “Chinese room” in the brain – Chinese, or any other language the person has learned, is understood and used by the interactions among several areas of the brain. The same is true of all other actions. Killing the “man inside” leaves the argument for strong causality at best only slightly injured. However, the strong causality argument runs into two paradoxes. One is learning: If the neural system is incapable of even the weakest form of independent agency, then it is impossible to learn anything new, as several philosophers have concluded. Chomsky resolves this paradox for language by positing that a fundamental knowledge of language is innate. But that solution leads only to more paradox: The ability of humans to formulate and learn new ideas seems virtually infinite, but the genome is finite – and no-one has found evidence to support an innate “language of the brain.” The other paradox derives from evolution theory. We know that efficient use of resources is a fundamental law of evolution, and the human brain is an extraordinarily expensive organ, consuming 20% of the body’s energy intake. If it is incapable of assessing a situation, considering alternative courses of actions, overcoming the over-learned (fully caused) impulses in order to choose and enact the most promising, then how else does the large, expensive cerebral cortex pay for itself? Organisms live in an environment in which new events often occur more or less at random. If somehow a member of an already brainy species appeared (as a result of random alterations in DNA) with the ability to suspend or escape strong causality long enough to represent the current state of the organism in its environment then project and evaluate the results of alternative actions and choose the one that seemed most promising, this would present a tremendous improvement in reproductive fitness. Assuming a stray lightning bolt doesn’t kill the brainy-plus person, this capability would spread widely. That is precisely the primary function Antonio Damasio posits for the neural system, including the brain. All very nice, a strong causality proponent might object, but even the emergence of this new power is caused by something, and in turn it is constrained by the causal power of the neurons themselves and the data they report from the environment. I think this argument risks veering back into something very much like the homunculus error, in that it seems to impart an independent causal agency to the concept of causality. In an algorithm solving a complex set of equations, introducing a random number will often break the system free of a sub-optimal solution (a “local minimum”) so that it moves toward a better solution. The very appearance of a non-predictable event is random (with respect to the organism), with the potential to disrupt the routine, over-learned and fully caused response patterns. The ability to suspend these patterns long enough to consider and decide among alternative actions would be – is – a powerful contribution to reproductive fitness. No-one has yet shown how consciousness works. There is some evidence of how neural columns represent predicted futures and compare them to incoming data, but how all this is coordinated to produce agency is pretty fuzzy. However, projecting, evaluating, and choosing among actions and the alternative futures they present is one good candidate for answering the question, “what is consciousness for.” In sum, yes, most of our routine actions may be fully caused by the interactions among neural interconnections that are themselves determined by DNA+environment+experience. But some of these neural interconnections are capable of responding to unpredictable events in a considered way, i.e., they have agency. Agency is much more limited than we think it is, but it is real, and it makes an important contribution to reproductive fitness.

Chatbots 2

So, chatbots can develop a nasty edge – just like humans.  And they have clearly passed – surpassed - the Turing test. There has been much discussion of whether that makes them “sentient” or in some sense even “conscious.” 

A common response is that AI reflects just the “scrapings” from everything on the internet which, of course, includes violence, sex, bigotry, hate and bullying along with the more benign content of friendly e-mail and texting, philosophy and science, poetry and humor.  

It is worth remembering that one of the primary ways humans acquire language is by encountering words and phrases many times in various contexts – which is also a primary way humans learn culture.  So to this extent, chatbots’ use of language is quite “human.” 

Humans also learn language (and culture) by association with the non-linguistic contexts in which they encounter words and phrases, including how others respond to their actions including their use of language.  Human language use and acculturation are also conditioned by biological and social drives and needs – hunger, sex, security, social contact, etc.  All of this entails the chemical environment of the brain / body, including oxytocin, adrenaline, and cortesol.  None of that context is part of AI training, except inasmuch as it might be reflected in the language people use to describe and respond to it.  It is difficult to imagine how this social, cultural, and chemical context might be incorporated into the training of AI, or what might substitute for the socialization this non-linguistic context provides human language learners.  

So we have created entities with a superhuman power of language – a power unconstrained by normal socialization.  Whether these entities qualify as “conscious” hardly seems important.  

What will they do? 

What will unscrupulous people – or well-intentioned but misguided people – do with them?  

Chatbots

            There has been quite a bit in the news recently about “chatbots,” AI programs that can engage in conversations and write essays, stories, or even poems on any topic, imitating any style.  Some of this discussion has been alarmist – a reaction I can understand, given the importance in my own teaching of student writing, including essay and short answer questions.  Before the holiday season I checked this out, giving the chatbot a typical midterm / final exam question on a couple of different topics.  As other commentators have noted, the results are pretty mediocre – correct grammar and spelling (in contrast to typical undergraduate writing) but unimaginative and dispirited (in contrast to the best student writing).  In a 200- or 300-level class, these essays would receive at least a C, maybe a B in lower-division classes.  So – take-home or do-at-home essay and short-answer questions have just become obsolete.  Hand-written in-class writing is still usable – but it can be painful to grade.  

            On the other hand, a couple of commentators have pointed out that the chatbot responses do provide a nice overview-level summary of current thinking and ideas about a topic, as well as an example of how a generalized discussion might be organized.  So – if these are accepted as a tool, students might be encouraged to begin with a prompt and chatbot response, then build an essay on that base.  Either way, I think it will require some fresh thinking about the purpose of student essay assignments, and perhaps about the learning objectives of humanities and social science classes.  

            In a future entry I will talk about another brief test in which I asked the chatbot to analyze metaphors in a passage or set of passages.    

Talking whale

I’ve been reading “How to Speak Whale” by Tom Mustill, and it is astonishing in many ways.  Overall, it illustrates the fact that, whatever topic you’re interested in, the number of researchers investigating that topic and the amount of new evidence they are producing (and publishing) is growing exponentially. That’s both bad news and good news.  The bad news:  everything I knew about animal communication and about research on animal communication just a year ago is obsolete. Forget about catching up or keeping up.  The good news:  if you have access to “big data” (huge data sets and the computer power to process them) you can answer questions that were impossible even to ask as recently as ten years ago.  And – something I vaguely knew that Mustill relates in some detail – “big data,” using advanced artificial intelligence learning systems fed by miniaturized observation instruments, is rapidly filling in what we know about the complex social lives and communication behavior of cetacians – and many other animal groups. 

I won’t even try to summarize all I have learned from this book.  The citations in the end-notes will keep my reading list overflowing for the rest of my sabbatical.  By then much of it will be already obsolete, and I’ll need to refresh it as well as I can. 

“How to Speak Whale”:  Highly recommended.  

Puzzles and language

  A recent article in New Scientist highlights some very interesting research by Gillian Forrester at Birkbeck, University of London.  She has been developing puzzles to test the ability of great apes (including human children) to use their hands to solve increasingly complex puzzles, designed to test conceptualizing abilities similar to those required for language learning and use.  The evidence she has garnered through this (and earlier) research supports the claim that sign language developed prior to vocal language, and further suggests a role for puzzle-solving ability.  This short video gives a flavor of her work: 

https://youtu.be/8edayRfe484 

If Robin Dunbar is correct in his claim that language evolution was driven primarily by the pressures of living in large and complex social structures, Forrester’s work would seem to suggest that solving social puzzles is related to solving physical puzzles.  I’m looking forward to the publication of Forrester’s work for further details!