Posts Tagged ‘Socrates’
“[They] would think that the truth is nothing but the shadows cast by the artifacts.”*…
How do AI models “understand” and represent reality? Is the inside of a vision model at all like a language model? As Ben Brubaker reports, researchers argue that as the models grow more powerful, they may be converging toward a singular “Platonic” way to represent the world…
Read a story about dogs, and you may remember it the next time you see one bounding through a park. That’s only possible because you have a unified concept of “dog” that isn’t tied to words or images alone. Bulldog or border collie, barking or getting its belly rubbed, a dog can be many things while still remaining a dog.
Artificial intelligence systems aren’t always so lucky. These systems learn by ingesting vast troves of data in a process called training. Often, that data is all of the same type — text for language models, images for computer vision systems, and more exotic kinds of data for systems designed to predict the odor of molecules or the structure of proteins. So to what extent do language models and vision models have a shared understanding of dogs?
Researchers investigate such questions by peering inside AI systems and studying how they represent scenes and sentences. A growing body of research has found that different AI models can develop similar representations, even if they’re trained using different datasets or entirely different data types. What’s more, a few studies have suggested that those representations are growing more similar as models grow more capable. In a 2024 paper, four AI researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argued that these hints of convergence are no fluke. Their idea, dubbed the Platonic representation hypothesis, has inspired a lively debate among researchers and a slew of follow-up work.
The team’s hypothesis gets its name from a 2,400-year-old allegory by the Greek philosopher Plato. In it, prisoners trapped inside a cave perceive the world only through shadows cast by outside objects. Plato maintained that we’re all like those unfortunate prisoners. The objects we encounter in everyday life, in his view, are pale shadows of ideal “forms” that reside in some transcendent realm beyond the reach of the senses.
The Platonic representation hypothesis is less abstract. In this version of the metaphor, what’s outside the cave is the real world, and it casts machine-readable shadows in the form of streams of data. AI models are the prisoners. The MIT team’s claim is that very different models, exposed only to the data streams, are beginning to converge on a shared “Platonic representation” of the world behind the data.
“Why do the language model and the vision model align? Because they’re both shadows of the same world,” said Phillip Isola, the senior author of the paper.
Not everyone is convinced. One of the main points of contention involves which representations to focus on. You can’t inspect a language model’s internal representation of every conceivable sentence, or a vision model’s representation of every image. So how do you decide which ones are, well, representative? Where do you look for the representations, and how do you compare them across very different models? It’s unlikely that researchers will reach a consensus on the Platonic representation hypothesis anytime soon, but that doesn’t bother Isola.
“Half the community says this is obvious, and the other half says this is obviously wrong,” he said. “We were happy with that response.”…
Read on: “Distinct AI Models Seem To Converge On How They Encode Reality,” from @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
Bracket with: “AGI is here (and I feel fine),” from Robin Sloan and “We Need to Talk About How We Talk About ‘AI’,” from Emily Bender and Nanna Inie.
* from Socrates “Allegory of the Cave,” in Plato’s Republic (Book VII)
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As we interrogate ideas and Ideas, we might recall that it was on this date that the fictional HAL 9000 computer became operational, according to Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey., in which the artificially-intelligent computer states: “I am a HAL 9000 computer, Production Number 3. I became operational at the HAL Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997.” (Kubrik’s 1968 movie adaptation put his birthdate in 1992.)
“I was conscious that I knew practically nothing”*…
As Joshua Rothman reminds us, we have a lot to learn from studying our ignorance…
… The truth, of course, is that we’re ignorant about the future. Who will win the election in November? Will we lose our jobs because of A.I.? Will the planet boil or merely simmer? What will skyscrapers, or smartphones, or schools look like in thirty years? We’re not in the dark about these questions; we can make educated guesses or predictions. But there’s an odd way in which, the more informed our speculations become, the more they serve to highlight what we don’t know. “The knowledge we possess determines the degree of specificity of the ignorance we recognize,” the philosopher Daniel DeNicola writes, in his book “Understanding Ignorance.” The more you know, the more precisely you can say what you don’t.
DeNicola’s book is an entry in a subfield of philosophy called “agnotology”—the study of ignorance. As philosophical subfields go, agnotology sounds abstract and even a little contradictory: what could it even mean to study what’s unknown? And yet, because ignorance is actually an everyday condition from which we all suffer, the study of it is quite down to earth. Have you ever been in a bookstore, leafed through a weighty tome, and then returned it to the shelf? You are practicing “rational ignorance,” DeNicola writes, by making “the more-or-less conscious decision that something is not worth knowing—at least for me, at least not now.” (In an information-rich society, he notes, knowing when to maintain this kind of ignorance is actually an important skill.) Have you ever tuned out a gossipy friend because you don’t want to know who said what about whom? Deciding that you’d rather be above the fray is “strategic ignorance”; you embrace it because it will make life better, deploying it when you decide not to read the reviews before seeing a movie, or conduct a hiring process in which the names of the candidates are obscured. There’s a big difference between strategic ignorance and what DeNicola calls “involuntary” ignorance: “In the iconic image, Justice is blindfolded, not blind,” he writes.
My wife’s parents have a box of letters that were sent between her grandfather and her grandmother while he was serving in the Navy during the Second World War. The box is in the basement; no one has read the letters, and no one plans to. This reflects a valid concern for privacy, but it also involves what DeNicola calls “willful ignorance”—the persistent, long-term maintenance of a gap in one’s knowledge that could easily be filled in. Willful ignorance isn’t necessarily bad; it might be wise to avoid learning the disturbing details of a half-forgotten traumatic event, for instance, lest they keep the trauma fresh. But we should be wary of willful ignorance, DeNicola argues, because it often flows from fear. “Consider a mother who is so upset about her son’s military service that she refuses to discuss it while he remains on active duty,” DeNicola writes. Or a voter who refuses to read about a favored candidate’s ongoing scandal. “The benefits of willful ignorance tend to be overestimated by those who exhibit it”; knowledge can be a path to overcoming fear.
DeNicola argues that, even when we don’t choose ignorance, there are ways in which we must “dwell in ignorance,” no matter what we do. We’re ignorant of most of what happened in the past because, despite our efforts at historical reconstruction, “worlds disappear” in the flow of time. We’re ignorant about the future not just because we don’t know what will happen but because we lack the ideas needed to comprehend future knowledge: “Galileo could not have known that solar flares produce bursts of radiation,” for example, because the very idea of radiation depends on a “framework of theoretical concepts” that wasn’t developed until hundreds of years after he lived. It turns out that there’s a special word, “ignoration,” which describes the condition of people who “do not even know that they do not know.” In a broad, almost existential sense, we all live in ignoration all the time. Recognizing this makes knowing what you don’t know feel like a step forward—even an opportunity to be seized…
… In a recent book called “Sense, Nonsense, and Subjectivity,” a German philosopher named Markus Gabriel argues that our personhood is partly based on ignorance—that “to be someone, to be a subject, is to be wrong about something.” It’s intuitive to hold the opposite view—to say that we are the sum of what we know. But Gabriel points out that, even when you know something to be true, you probably also know that there are aspects of it about which you’re probably wrong. I encountered this phenomenon recently when my son asked me to explain the meaning of “E=mc2”—but, also, when I tried to tell him about how I’d met his mom. “We were riding up in an elevator, and we started talking, and then she got off,” I said. “And then, later, when I was riding down, she got back on.”
This story is true, but also wreathed in inevitable uncertainties. What exactly did we say to one another? What were we wearing, or thinking, or feeling, before and after? There are limits to recollection, and to noticing in the moment; life is short, and you can’t know it all, not even about yourself. But you can know, at least to some extent, what you chose not to know and what you wished you’d found out. You can understand what you looked away from, and toward…
“What Don’t We Know?” from @joshuarothman in @NewYorker.
* Socrates, from Plato, Apology 22d
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As we noodle on nescience, we might send bodacious birthday greetings to that most fabulous of flappers, Betty Boop; she made her first appearance on this date in 1930. The creation of animator Max Fleischer, she debuted in “Dizzy Dishes” (in which, still unevolved as a character, she is drawn as an anthropomorphic female dog).
“Is it not always the way of the people to put forward one man as its special champion and protector and cherish and magnify him?”*…
Matt Gatton on the clash of two Athenians, Alcibiades and Callias, half-brothers and students of Socrates, one of whom flirted with becoming the ancient city-state’s tyrant after leading a successful passage past Athens’ enemy Sparta…
… The road to Eleusis is open, and Alcibiades is a hero. The army is exalted in spirit and feels itself invincible under his command. The people are so captivated by his leadership that they are filled with an amazing passion for him to be their tyrant. (A tyrant is, of course, a person with sole political power, which, when matched with his sole military power as autocrat, would make Alcibiades more like a king than a general.)…
What Alcibiades thinks about the idea of being named tyrant is unknown, but it frightens many of Athens’s most influential citizens. Perhaps Callias most of all: imagine the sort of dread that would be triggered by the thought of a psychopath being given the power of a tyrant, particularly since this would-be tyrant has already profaned your religion, stolen your money, punched your father, possibly murdered your sister, and certainly plotted your own assassination. Anyone, but especially Callias, must have grave concerns about what Alcibiades would do with unchecked power. Callias had grown up with Alcibiades, they were “half” brother after all, and he knew him better than anyone else, knew his nature and his malevolence.
There is no word on Socrates’s feelings about the chatter of Alcibiades being named tyrant, but Socrates’s perspective on tyrants in general is well recorded by Plato. To Socrates, the flaw of democracy is its vulnerability to tyrants. The populace—the mob, as he calls them—are gullible and can easily fall under the spell of a charismatic leader. Alcibiades certainly fits the bill. In Socrates’s estimation, the tyrant first appears as a protector. The people have something they fear, either inside or outside of the state, either real or imagined, from which the tyrant claims he can guard them. He will make them the “victors.” The people flock to him of their own accord, for he pays them in lies, lies they want to hear, lies they want to believe. They are “superior”; they are “true patriots.” His favorite tools are false accusations and unleashing his mob against the “threat.” In time, the tyrant erases any and all opposition, “with unholy tongue and lips tasting the blood of his fellow citizens.” He and his supporters are empowered by the purge, “and the more detestable his actions . . . the greater devotion he requires from his followers.” These words are as true in the modern world as they were in ancient Athens.
Many countries today still struggle with this structural defect of democracy: the majority of the populace in a democracy may elect a tyrant, who will invariably disassemble the democracy that elected him—a democracy can make a tyrant, but a tyrant can unmake a democracy. The weak portion of the populace yearns to be strong, so they attach themselves to a strong man; such is the allure of the bully, the appeal of the despot, the attraction of the tyrant. Ancient Athens is where democracy first began and first fell, and so can teach us lessons that are, unfortunately, still applicable…
A lesson from the past: “The Bloody Rivalry That Led to the Fall of Democracy in Athens,” in @CrimeReads. Excerpted from Gatton’s recent book, The Shadows of Socrates: The Heresy War, and Treachery Behind the Trial of Socrates.
* Socrates, in Plato’s Republic
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As we avoid autocracy, we might recall that it was on this date in 197 that Emperor Septimius Severus defeated usurper Septimius Severus in the Battle of Lugdunum, the bloodiest battle between Roman armies– 150,000 Roman soldiers engaged for both sides.
“Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?”*…
Bad news for those of us who occupy Plato’s Cave…
To all inhabitants of Plato’s Cave,
If you are receiving this letter, it means you have been designated a tenant of the cave—i.e., you are chained to the wall, you are forced to watch shadows for all eternity, you are projecting said shadow puppets, and/or you are a philosopher who was able to break free and understand the true shackles of reality (PhD candidates about to argue their thesis).
We are writing this memo to introduce ourselves, the new property managers of Plato’s Cave, and to let you know that this fall your rent will be raised.
We cannot wait to work with you as we journey together, but we also want to clarify that we mean real, actual money and not allegorical discussions on the concept of fiat currency.
- This is a memo and not a dialogue. You do not need to deconstruct the concept of reality or your interpretation of such. Please pay.
- Please be advised that we have changed our policies and will no longer accept imagined dialogues with Socrates and/or whimsical stories about Socrates.
- The rent will be used to address crumbling infrastructure as the upkeep of a completely underground cave is no easy thing. The money will go toward better walls, superior modes of imprisonment, a bigger and cooler fire, etc.
- To address any extra concerns, we will hold a fireside chat where you will be allowed to ask any remaining questions you might have. We understand you may not understand the “form” or “idea” of time, so we have allotted two weeks for this.
- Sure, you could break the chains of your supposed enslavement to the cave and embrace the complexity of reality, but consider we will offer Ice Cream Fridays. They will take place on the fourth Friday of every other month.
We do not undertake this lightly. As the costs of maintaining a cave meant to trap you in your ignorance increases year after year, we want you to know, from the bottom of our hearts, that we, too, are suffering. We get that times are tough, and we hope you can extend that sympathy to us, the managers of your cave…
Painfully funny: “Plato’s Cave Regrets to Inform You It Will Be Raising Its Rent,” from @Hellotherexu in @mcsweeneys.
* Plato, Republic
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As we tighten our belts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1945 that farmer Lloyd Olsen of Fruita, Colorado, planning to eat supper with his mother-in-law and sent out to the yard by his wife to bring back a chicken, tried to behead a five-and-a-half-month-old Wyandotte chicken named Mike. The axe removed the bulk of the head, but missed the jugular vein, leaving one ear and most of the brain stem intact. The chicken was still able to balance on a perch and walk clumsily. He attempted to preen, peck for food, and crow, though with limited success; his “crowing” consisted of a gurgling sound made in his throat. When Mike did not die, Olsen decided to care for the bird.
Mike achieved national fame until his death in March 1947. In Fruita, Colorado, an annual “Mike the Headless Chicken Day” is held in May.
“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom”*…
An argument for curiosity, openness, and the humility that underlies them both…
Philosophers aren’t the only ones who love wisdom. Everyone, philosopher or not, loves her own wisdom: the wisdom she has or takes herself to have. What distinguishes the philosopher is loving the wisdom she doesn’t have. Philosophy is, therefore, a form of humility: being aware that you lack what is of supreme importance. There may be no human being who exemplified this form of humility more perfectly than Socrates. It is no coincidence that he is considered the first philosopher within the Western canon.
Socrates did not write philosophy; he simply went around talking to people. But these conversations were so transformative that Plato devoted his life to writing dialogues that represent Socrates in conversation. These dialogues are not transcripts of actual conversations, but they are nonetheless clearly intended to reflect not only Socrates’s ideas but his personality. Plato wanted the world to remember Socrates. Generations after Socrates’s death, warring philosophical schools such as the Stoics and the Skeptics each appropriated Socrates as figurehead. Though they disagreed on just about every point of doctrine, they were clear that in order to count themselves as philosophers they had to somehow be working in the tradition of Socrates.
What is it about Socrates that made him into a symbol for the whole institution of philosophy? Consider the fact that, when the Oracle at Delphi proclaims Socrates wisest of men, he tries to prove it wrong. As Plato recounts it in the Apology:
I went to one of those reputed wise, thinking that there, if anywhere, I could refute the oracle and say to it: “This man is wiser than I, but you said I was.” Then, when I examined this man—there is no need for me to tell you his name, he was one of our public men—my experience was something like this: I thought that he appeared wise to many people and especially to himself, but he was not. I then tried to show him that he thought himself wise, but that he was not. As a result he came to dislike me, and so did many of the bystanders. So I withdrew and thought to myself: “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.”
If Socrates’s trademark claim is this protestation of ignorance, his trademark activity is the one also described in this passage: refuting the views of others. These are the conversations we find in Plato’s texts. How are the claim and the activity related? Socrates denies that his motivations are altruistic: he says he is not a teacher, and insists that he is himself the primary beneficiary of the conversations he initiates. This adds to the mystery: What is Socrates getting out of showing people that they don’t know what they take themselves to know? What’s his angle?
Over and over again, Socrates approaches people who are remarkable for their lack of humility—which is to say, for the fact that they feel confident in their own knowledge of what is just, or pious, or brave, or moderate. You might have supposed that Socrates, whose claim to fame is his awareness of his own ignorance, would treat these self-proclaimed “wise men” (Sophists) with contempt, hostility, or indifference. But he doesn’t. The most remarkable feature of Socrates’s approach is his punctilious politeness and sincere enthusiasm. The conversation usually begins with Socrates asking his interlocutor: Since you think you know, can you tell me, what is courage (or wisdom, or piety, or justice . . .)? Over and over again, it turns out that they think they can answer, but they can’t. Socrates’s hope springs eternal: even as he walks toward the courtroom to be tried—and eventually put to death—for his philosophical activity, he is delighted to encounter the self-important priest Euthyphro, who will, surely, be able to say what piety is…
Socrates seemed to think that the people around him could help him acquire the knowledge he so desperately wanted—even though they were handicapped by the illusion that they already knew it. Indeed, I believe that their ill-grounded confidence was precisely what drew Socrates to them. If you think you know something, you will be ready to speak on the topic in question. You will hold forth, spout theories, make claims—and all this, under Socrates’s relentless questioning, is the way to actually acquire the knowledge you had deluded yourself into thinking you already had…
It’s one thing to say, “I don’t know anything.” That thought comes cheap. One can wonder, “Who really and truly knows anything?” in a way that is dismissive, uninquisitive, detached. It can be a way of saying, “Knowledge is unattainable, so why even try?” Socratic humility is more expensive and more committal than that. He sought to map the terrain of his ignorance, to plot its mountains and its rivers, to learn to navigate it. That, I think, is why he speaks of knowledge of his own ignorance. He’s not just someone who acknowledges or admits to his ignorance, but someone who has learned to dwell within it.
Admittedly, this may seem like a paradoxical project. It’s one thing to be missing your wallet—you will know it once you’ve found it. But suppose you’re missing not only your wallet, but also the knowledge that you ever had a wallet, and the understanding of what a wallet is. One of Socrates’s interlocutors, Meno, doubts whether it’s possible to come to know anything if you know so little to begin with. If someone doesn’t know where she’s going, it doesn’t seem as though she can even take a first step in the right direction. Can you map in total darkness?
Socrates’s answer was no. Or at least: you can’t do it alone. The right response to noticing one’s own ignorance is to try to escape it by acquiring someone else’s knowledge. But the only way to do that is to explain to them why you aren’t yet able to accept this or that claim of theirs as knowledge—and that is what mapping one’s ignorance amounts to. Socrates stages an exhibition of this method for Meno by demonstrating how much geometrical progress he can make with a young slave boy by doing nothing but asking questions that expose the boy’s false assumptions. It is when he refutes others’ claims to knowledge that Socrates’s own ignorance takes shape, for him, as something he can know. What appears as a sea of darkness when approached introspectively turns out to be navigable when brought into contact with the knowledge claims of another…
Socrates saw the pursuit of knowledge as a collaborative project involving two very different roles. There’s you or I or some other representative of Most People, who comes forward and makes a bold claim. Then there’s Socrates, or one of his contemporary descendants, who questions and interrogates and distinguishes and calls for clarification. This is something we’re often still doing—as philosophers, as scientists, as interviewers, as friends, on Twitter and Facebook and in many casual personal conversations. We’re constantly probing one another, asking, “How can you say that, given X, Y, Z?” We’re still trying to understand one another by way of objection, clarification, and the simple fact of inability to take what someone has said as knowledge. It comes so naturally to us to organize ourselves into the knower/objector pairing that we don’t even notice we are living in the world that Socrates made. The scope of his influence is remarkable. But equally remarkable is the means by which it was achieved: he did so much by knowing, writing, and accomplishing—nothing at all.
And yet for all this influence, many of our ways are becoming far from Socratic. More and more our politics are marked by unilateral persuasion instead of collaborative inquiry. If, like Socrates, you view knowledge as an essentially collaborative project, you don’t go into a conversation expecting to persuade any more than you expect to be persuaded. By contrast, if you do assume you know, you embrace the role of persuader in advance, and stand ready to argue people into agreement. If argument fails, you might tolerate a state of disagreement—but if the matter is serious enough, you’ll resort to enforcing your view through incentives or punishments. Socrates’s method eschewed the pressure to persuade. At the same time, he did not tolerate tolerance. His politics of humility involved genuinely opening up the question under dispute, in such a way that neither party would be permitted to close it, to settle on an answer, unless the other answered the same. By contrast, our politics—of persuasion, tolerance, incentives, and punishment—is deeply uninquisitive…
Knowing takes radical collaboration: an openness to being persuaded as much as an eagerness to persuade: “Against Persuasion,” from Agnes Callard (@AgnesCallard)
* Socrates
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As we listen and learn, we might recall that it was on this date in 1966 that the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party was hastily convened to advance Mao Zedong’s by then decidedly radical agenda for China– teeing up “Red August,” a series of purges of reactionary or otherwise impure thinkers. According to official statistics published in 1980, from August to September in 1966, a total of 1,772 people—including teachers and principals of many schools—were killed in Beijing by Red Guards; 33,695 homes were ransacked and 85,196 families were forced to leave the city. (1985 statistics, which included the areas immediately around Beijing, put the death toll at around 10,000.)
Red August kicked off the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, or as we tend to know it, The Cultural Revolution, which lasted until Mao’s death in 1976. Its stated goal was to preserve Chinese communism by purging alternative thought– remnants of capitalist and traditional elements– from Chinese society, and to impose Mao Zedong Thought (known outside China as Maoism) as the dominant ideology in the PRC. A selection of Mao’s sayings, compiled in Little Red Book, became a sacred text in what was, essentially a personality cult.
Estimates of the death toll from the Cultural Revolution, including civilians and Red Guards, vary greatly, ranging from hundreds of thousands to to 20 million. The exact figure of those who were persecuted or died during the Cultural Revolution, however, may never be known, as many deaths went unreported or were actively covered up by the police or local authorities. Tens of millions of people were persecuted (especially members of ethnic minorities): senior officials were purged or exiled; millions were accused of being members of the Five Black Categories, suffering public humiliation, imprisonment, torture, hard labor, seizure of property, and sometimes execution or harassment into suicide; intellectuals were considered the “Stinking Old Ninth” and were widely persecuted—notable scholars and scientists were killed or committed suicide. Schools and universities were closed. And over 10 million urban “intellectual youths“ were sent to rural areas in the Down to the Countryside Movement.
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