Dialogue

I've noticed a lack of dialogue-themed posts recently. This makes me sad, because when my inner monologue is replaced by a dialogue (or, if lucky, a multi-directional colloquy) I feel less alone (I feel alone because of the isolation of studying, not because of some failure of social maintenance, but I digress). This latest one is yet another ruse to help me study for an upcoming test. But who knows, maybe the subject matter is interesting to an audience beyond these two ill-defined, one-dimensional characters in my head.

Scene: A mesa. Dessicated soil all around. A tree. CHASE and SANBORN (with apologies to D. Dennett) are sitting on a single rotting wooden bench.

CHASE: You know, man, we have not made much progress in explaining cognition yet. Everywhere we run into mysteries. We run in circles when it comes to explaining ostensibly simple things like how we carve the world up, things that are so intuitively obvious it feels we're just trading obscurities. But the sad truth is we just don't know. We run into profound mysteries. We tried to analyze how the mind stores information, but memory is polluted by goals and context and seemingly irrelevant cues. So we said to ourselves: let's look at problem solving. And then we found out that intelligence is really important for properly formulating problems. And how are these problems formulated? Intelligently. And now this rationality shit? I've had enough.
SANBORN: What rationality shit?
C: Haven't you been keeping up with the readings?
S: From time to time.
C: What the hell does that mean?
S: Fine. I've been tweaking my mesolimbic dopaminergic system with recreational drugs for the last two weeks. It was rewarding.
C: Hey, don't pollute my head with that neuroscience shit! Don't you know that mind-talk can't be reduced to brain-talk? That the mind is multiply realizable in many different media?
S: I have my reservations about that thesis, but we won't get to that for a while yet. In the meantime, I'm content to just be your ignorant foil with occassional flashes of insight.
C: Fuck your insight. You have no idea where you got it from.
S: That's true. But we covered that. Most problems are formulated by unconscious processes.
C: Anyway, this rationality shit, as you called it...
S: ...you called it that...
C: ...um. Anyway, we have this huge corpus of evidence that humans don't behave in rational ways. For example, people do really badly at the Wason Selection Task, or syllogisms, or most kinds of reasoning. They exhibit confirmation biases, belief perseverance, pseudodiagnosticity, conjunction fallacies, just to name a few. Turns out that our assumptions that humans work rationally were flawed.
S: Hold on there for a moment. What kind of standard of rationality are you using?
C: Obviously, something that is actually rational, like math or logic.
S: Really? Well, that seems needlessly normative. Are you implying that the mind is churning through syllogisms or proofs in the course of making every decision? I doubt that many decisions can be modelled by that. You might be missing the point. We are looking for a descriptive theory of rationality. Now, you claim, on the basis of this experimental data, that humans are irrational. But you have forgotten that there could be other explanations. My major one is that we haven't a clue what we mean by rational. It seems an inherently normative concept. So how do we build a descriptive theory from it?
C: Well, we need to start somewhere. Although something tells me the whole effort will fall though, just like all the other efforts. We will have wasted our lives walking up and down the halls of academia and spewing words and papers...
S: Calm down there; something tells me you're just being really fucking emo right now.
C: Way to trivialize my feelings, asshole.
S: Look! Someone is coming. I bet he or she will help us make progress on the problem. The plot practically requires it.
C: Can we cut out the fourth wall bullshit, please?

Enter DHAL on a moped.

DHAL: Do you gents have some gas?
C: Do you have the conceptual means to help us make progress on our reationality debate?
D: I sure do. I'm also a peyote shaman.
S: How's that working out for you?
D: Oh, you know. Enough with small talk. There are essentially two sides and five arguments in this debate. The one side, exemplified by Chase here...
C: ...how do you know my name?
D: Peyote.
C: ...right.
D: ...the first view basically throws up its hands and admits this profound irrationality on the weight of the experimental evidence. The other view is not willing to give the concept up so quickly. They have four arguments, some of which are interrelated by various degrees: (1) there is a distinction, popular in linguistics, between competence and performace. Competence is the inherent capacity of all humans to produce language, but moment-to-moment performance is mediated by many other factors. For example, if you got a tongue piercing, your speaking performance decreases, and this has nothing to do with your competence. At least some of our systematic failures in rationality can be attributed to this, kind of like how children lose marks on a math test not because they don't understand the concepts of algebra, but beacuse they forgot a negative sign. Similarly, (2) we cannot expect perfect performance because human minds are computationally limited; we are not capable of churning through and calculating everything, so we have to make do with our limited resources. This might suggest that rationality is simply effective deployment of limited resources. (3) These people also point out that in many tasks, subjects construe the requirements differently, espeically if they have no experience in formal logic. An example is the "or" operator in logic, which is true if both arguemnts are true, which is not reflected in the colloquial meaning of "or", and finally (4) he norm we are using might be faulty. I guess that falls back on what we mean by rationality.
C: And what do you think rationality means, then? I guess that's the crux of the matter.
D: If I told you that, I'd be depriving you of a long, meandering spiritual journey.
C: Shit. Why did I know you'd say that?
D: Maybe because I'm a mystical peyote shaman?
S: OK, I think we get that,
D: Would you fellows like some?
S: Why not? We've got a long, long journey ahead of us.

They take the peyote. We will rejoin our confused anti-heroes on another "exciting" installment sometime before my goddamn fucking pain-in-the-ass test. But I really do like the subject matter.

Consider: "The scientific linkage of a gene with chemicals that affect happiness or sadness does not answer the question "Is there a God?" but rather "Why do we believe in God?"