David McFarland

This short (a little over 200 pages, not counting the end matter) book looks at how philosophers who think about this sort of thing have approached questions about the mental workings of non-human animals and (to a lesser extent and a bit more hypothetically) artificial intelligences. Can a robot even be said to have a mind at all? Is a dog who yelps at an injured paw really experiencing pain the same way humans do? That sort of thing.

It'd been some time since I'd read one of these philosophy-of-mind books, and going back to it now, I find I may have become a bit weary of the topic. Not that these questions aren't interesting. Indeed, I think minds are some of the most fascinating things in the universe, and probably not entirely just because I happen to be one myself and am not immune to narcissism. But I don't know. So much of it just seems to be what Sherlock Holmes called theorizing in advance of the facts. Because I really do think a lot of this stuff is more a matter for scientists than philosophers, or at least requires a lot more scientific knowledge to be able to philosophize about very usefully, and we just really don't have the scientific tools we need for it yet.

But if we're going to delve into this stuff anyway, is this a good book on the subject? Well, my feelings about that are a bit mixed, too. The first two chapters, in which McFarland spends a lot of time imagining some example robots that act kind of like animals seem to me really strange and unnecessary and not very useful at all to whatever point he's trying to make. Which is an annoying way to start off. After that, though, the rest of the book is more of an overview (albeit not, I think, a completely unbiased one) of different schools of thought and different takes that modern philosophers have on this stuff. It seems to be intended as something of an introduction to the topic, and I think McFarland does at least kind of try to be a little less jargony and dense than you usually get in this kind of writing, but that's saying very, very little, and my eyes did glaze over completely at least once.

Much of the time, I really just wanted to argue with McFarland, or the people he was talking about, or both. Sometimes it involved literal shouting at the page. There was a lot of me yelling stuff like, "Excuse me, but dogs aren't actually aliens, despite your subtitle, but share a common evolutionary ancestor with humans, and their brain functioning is in many respects much the same as ours, probably especially when it comes to very basic things like perception of and response to pain, so don't you think that just maybe the most parsimonious conclusion is that they can be said to feel pain in essentially the same way we do? Does this consideration really not deserve more than a brief, dismissive shrug-off in the epilogue?!" Or "Oh, you did not just seriously appeal to Searle's Chinese Room analogy and then airily wave aside all the objections to it without even bothering to discuss them? You come back here, sir! You come back here right now, and you face up to all the reasons why that's a really stupid argument!" (Spolier: he did not come back and do that. The coward.)

But, you know, allowing one the opportunity to yell at philosophers may actually be a large part of the appeal of this kind of thing, even if they can't hear you doing so. And McFarland does seem to be primarily interested in getting the reader to think about the topic and decide which approaches they find the most convincing, so arguably he's actually achieving his goals pretty well.… (más)

(posted on my blog: davenichols.net)

David McFarland, someone well-versed in biological robots and zoology, offers up this quick philosophical (not technical) discussion of just how we go about identifying 'alien' minds. 'Alien' here refers to non-human minds, not the ET variety, specifically those of animals and robots. He assumes as fundamental the need to identify both rationality and subjectivity in an 'other' before we could ascribe to it a mind. Most of the book involves dealing with the numerous and convoluted problems associated with those identifications.

To move his ideas along, McFarland uses his dog Border as the animal example, and a conceptual security robot for the other. Throughout the early parts of the book, the reader gets an intro to 'mindless machines' and the role design plays in both animals (through natural selection, environment, etc) and robots (engineer, programmer, etc).

The bulk of the book involves traditional philosophical considerations of intent, functionality, rationality, subjectivity, feelings, knowledge, and mind. Much of this discussion will be familiar to readers of Daniel Dennett (and Dennett is frequently referenced) and/or general philosophy of mind. There are some interesting applications of these concepts to robots (especially), but I'd advise the novice philosophy reader to find a quiet room and have an optimal mind set before proceding through the middle sections (as I would advise on any good philosophy book).

Toward the end, the reader gets stronger discussions of mind as they may (or may not apply) to robots and animals. Many of the contradictions are pointed out, as well as the inherent difficulty (impossibility?) of determining the mind, mind set, or subjectivity of anything which might house them.

The end of the book falls off the truck, unfortunately. Throughout the chapters, McFarland clearly appears to be laying groundwork for his conclusions (and yes, I use this word in the philosophical not empirical sense), only to turn in a 'hedging all bets' card in the epilogue without any real opinion. He offers what may be possible, states that philosophers are all in disagreement, and proposes weakly that its basically up to the reader to determine what is going on inside that skull/robot. I recognize (both from reading this book and previous knowledge of many of the subjects) that a conclusion of any sort would not be likely in strong empirical terms, but at least McFarland should have let the reader know this was an exploration without an actual purpose other than to discuss the issues (does the Intentional Stance come into play here in his narrative?). I never expected McFarland to state whether he thought his dog had a mind, but he presented enough points of view that I expected him to accept one at some point. He never did. It was all one big lecture for the reader (enjoyable though it was).

The strongest points for me were his determination that mind and consciousness were just as much products of evolution and purpose (or for the robot, design and purpose) as any other phenotypic effect. His one strong conclusion was that we cannot expect an animal or a robot to ever have a mind or consciousness like ours. They don't have human brains, haven't been selected (or designed) under the same conditions, and therefore, if they have minds at all, those minds would conform to the specific needs and conditions of their respective developments.

Guilty Robots was worth the read, and with a stronger finish this would have been a four-star review. However, the weak ending, the progressing obscurity of our main characters (security robot, Border), and a reader-must-decide 'conclusion' somewhat spoiled an otherwise solid effort (but not enough to render it a waste of time). Three and one-half stars.… (más)

This book centres on the twin questions of what is required for beings (animals and robots especially) to be conscious and how on earth would we know if they were. He combines his considerable expertise in animal behaviour and robotics to discuss the scientific and philosophical issues surrounding these questions. The philosophical issues are dealt with comprehensively and fairly, while he never strays from a professionally sceptical position on every single point - if there isn't foolproof evidence for a position, he won't advocate it, and at times is frustrating in his global agnosticism. The writing is absorbing, at times playful and normally very interesting (particularly when he's discussing his home territory of animal behaviour), and I felt swayed by his perspective and opinions. However, my main problem with the book concerns what he left out. For a book published in 2008, he should have spent a considerable portion of the book discussing the neuroscientific issues behind his psychological points. But apart from a few lines (see p70-71) where he does acknowledge that neuroscience will probably settle these profound questions, there is no real mention of the neuroscientific advances that are informing the debate on consciousness and the question of animal minds. In addition, the writing at times is somewhat repetitious and meandering, and would clearly have benefitted from another draft or two. The book is still definitely worth reading, particularly if you are unfamiliar with the standard philosophy of mind debates, but if you are looking for answers, or even a little bit of brave speculation about what such answers might look like, this book will not help. It will instead provide a framework and invite you to make your own mind, which is fine, except for the fact that he's the expert, so I would have welcomed him to share some of his conclusions with us.… (más)