The Oracle of Ignorance, The Algorithm of Knowledge

“ So the superiority of wisdom, imputed to me by the oracle, is reduced merely to my being fully convinced that I am ignorant of what I do not know."
Thus we find Socrates, the wisest of men in the judgment of the god, and the most learned of all the Athenians in the opinion of all Greece, speaking in praise of ignorance. Were he alive now, there is little reason to think that our modern scholars and artists would induce him to change his mind. No, gentlemen, that honest man would still persist in despising our vain sciences. ”

“ To convict men, by cross-examination, of ignorance in respect to those matters which each man believed himself to know well and familiarly — this was the constant employment and the mission of Sokrates: not to teach — for he disclaimed the capacity of teaching — but to make men feel their own ignorance instead of believing themselves to know. Such cross-examination, conducted usually before an audience, however it might be salutary and indispensable, was intended to humiliate the respondent, and could hardly fail to offend and exasperate him. ”

“ They are literally an education of the thinking faculty. Their purpose is to discipline men to think for themselves, rather than to furnish opinions for them. In many of these dialogues Socrates affirms nothing. After producing many arguments, and examining a question on all sides, he leaves it undetermined. At the close of the dialogue he is as far from a declaration of opinions as at the commencement. His grand effort, like that of Bacon's, is to furnish men a correct method of inquiry, rather than to apply that method and give them results. ”

“ What is unjust? What is government? What is it to be a ruler of men?” In this form of question, however simple, the originality of Socrates is typified; and by means of it he laid the first stone, not only of the fabric of ethical philosophy, but of scientific method, at least in ethics, logic and psychology. Socrates never doubted that if men once knew what was best, they would also do it. They erred, he thought, from not seeing the good, and not because they would not follow it if seen. This is expressed in the Socratic dicta: “Vice is ignorance,” “Virtue is knowledge.” ”

“ Socrates, one might say, despised science. He did not believe in all the speculations about astronomy and about the structure of the universe in which the early philosophers indulged. He believed one could never gain any certain knowledge about these matters and he restricted his investigations to the nature of human character. He was not a man of science, he had no faith in it, and yet we all acknowledge him to be one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived. It is not Socrates, however, who created the antagonism that we find to exist later on between science and philosophy. ”

“ What then can we think of a system which reverses this evident order, overloads the memory with facts, and those of the most doubtful description, while it leaves us entirely in the dark with regard to the principles which could alone render this heterogeneous mass of any advantage or avail? Learning without knowledge, is but a bundle of prejudices ”

“ If the habit of "objective verification" has destroyed your native receptivity to such an extent that your eyes and ears are gone, and you must rely only on the evidence of instruments or objects not subject to your will, then, of course, nothing is left you but to stick to the belief that science is perfect knowledge. But if your eyes live and your ear is sensitive—throw away instruments and apparatuses, forget methodology and scientific Don-Quixotism, and try to trust yourself. What harm is there in not having universal judgments or truths? How will it hurt you to see sheep as sheep? ”

“ The questions put by Sokrates, though relating to familiar topics, are always difficult: they are often even impossible to answer, because they postulate and require to be assigned a common objective concept which is not to be found. They only appear easy to one who has never attempted the task of answering under the pressure of cross-examination. Most persons indeed never make any such trial, but go on affirming confidently as if they knew, without trial. ”

“ Such teachers will not copy the form; they will not imitate the awkward clap-trap; but, yielding to the inspiration of the dominant idea, they will, in a way more in accordance with nature, manage to thrill with life the teaching of facts, and will aid the mind in giving birth to its ideas. This is the old method of Socrates, the eternal method of reason, the only method which really educates. ”

“ All power is a like repose on the basis of common desires and perceptions in the race. The didactic method is an insult alike to the pupil and the universe. Socrates is master and gentleman with his questions, suggestions, seeking in me and acting as midwife to my thought; but all illuminati and professors, all who talk down or cut our meat into morsels, will quickly be counted aunties by the vigorous boys at school. Chairs and pulpits totter to-day with a scholastic dry rot, which is inability to recognize the equality of unsophisticated man to man. ”

“ A much more serious problem for development in the area of machine intelligence is the scientific analysis of data and the autonomous formulation of hypotheses and theories. Current expert systems technology cannot generate and test unique hypotheses that have not been preprogrammed by a human operator. This limitation restricts an exploratory device based on state-of-the-art AI to data analysis, categorization, and classification in terms of existing structures of thought or taxonomies of knowledge. ”

“ First, state-of-the-art At work on hypothesis formation is almost totally devoid of research on abductive inference. However, machine systems must have this capability in order to be true learning systems. Second, current AI work on analytic and inductive inference tends to proceed in the absence of relevant theories, and this seems to be the reason why state-of-the-art A1 treatments fail to give fundamental models their proper role in inference systems. ”

“ In this study, cognition and learning refer to the development of a machine intelligence capable of dealing with new facts, unexpected events, and contradictory information in novel situations. Many potential applications of advanced automation require a level of adaptive flexibility that is unavailable with present technology. Today's automatic computer-controlled machines handle new data by a method or approach programmed into them when they were developed. ”

“ The use by guess or cookbook of an obscure or hairy system, feature, or algorithm that one does not truly understand. The implication is that the technique may not work, and if it doesn't, one will never know why. Almost synonymous with black magic, except that black magic typically isn't documented and nobody understands it. Compare magic, deep magic, heavy wizardry, rain dance, cargo cult programming, wave a dead chicken. 2. Things programmers do that they know shouldn't work but they try anyway, and which sometimes actually work, such as recompiling everything. ”

“ One is the relationship between human reasoning and AI; `neats' tend to try to build systems that `reason' in some way identifiably similar to the way humans report themselves as doing, while `scruffies' profess not to care whether an algorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as long as it works. More importantly, `neats' tend to believe that logic is king, while `scruffies' favor looser, more ad-hoc methods driven by empirical knowledge. ”

“ Unfortunately, AI is currently taking the empirical technology approach to hypothesis formulation. There is nothing mysterious about the theoretical approach it may be started by research into the 'patterns of logical inference by which hypotheses are formulated. Such an approach is limited only by the degree to which hypothesis formulation is logical and inferential. On the condition that it is, then the theoretical technology does not face a real world barrier to achieving full machine-hypothesis generating capability. ”

“ But the experience introduces the pressure of accelerated accumulation of data, information processing, and knowledge utilization. To understand the intimate relation between the performance of the digital engine and our own performance, one has only to think of a coal-burning steam engine driving a locomotive uphill. The civilization of illiteracy is a rather steep ascent, facing many obstacles-our physical abilities, limited natural resources, ecological concerns, ability to handle social complexity. ”

“ And the qualitative costs to education, learning, and research will multiply as our children become ever more dependent for the content of their knowledge upon computer-accessible databases—thereby condemning that which is not so accessible, say, the cultural content of early 20th-century history, to a kind of intellectual purgatory from which it will not easily emerge. ”

“ If a work’s traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. [26] For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt [27] from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. ”

“ The increased attenuation of human creativity from the actual generation of the final work will prompt challenging questions regarding how much human input is necessary to qualify the user of an AI system as an “author” of a generated work, the scope of the protection obtained over the resultant image, how to assess the originality of AI-generated works where the systems may have been trained on unknown pre-existing works, how copyright might best be used to incentivize creative works involving AI, and more. ”

“ WE hear much of the bad effects of machine politics, but it is questionable if the evils of machine education are not far worse. By machine education, we mean the rigid, mechanical, law-established routine applied to great multitudes of children of all conceivable sorts who are got together in large establishments and submitted to operations that go under the name of mental cultivation. Machine education is of the very lowest sort, and the best that can he said of it is, that it is barely better than nothing at all. ”

“ To my mind our danger is exactly the same as that of the older system. Unless we are careful, we shall conventionalize knowledge. Our literary criticism will suppress initiative. Our historical criticism will conventionalize our ideas of the springs of human conduct. Our scientific systems will suppress all understanding of the ways of the universe which fall outside their abstractions. Our modes of testing ability will exclude all the youth whose ways of thought lie outside our conventions of learning. ”

“ This has left scholars and activists wondering about the extent to which “openness,” while necessary, is sufficient for tackling inequalities in global academic knowledge production. Among the many arguments supporting this thesis in this chapter, we focus on those that allude to how open research practices may replicate epistemic injustices—a concept that refers to the devaluing of someone’s knowledge or capacity as a knower—particularly with regard to knowers and knowledge stemming from the Global South. ”

“ Such a knowledge of human nature might be left to itself, if the wrecks it causes were not so saddening.
“How terrible is the power of science!” a voice of authority warned a short time ago. “The unlearned are defenceless against the learned, those who know little against those that know much; the unlearned are incapable of independently judging the theories of the learned; error in the garb of knowledge impresses them with the force of truth, especially when it finds an ally in their evil lusts. ”

“ But we have no unifying principle, no definite aim; in fact, no philosophy of education. As a stream can rise no higher than its source, so it is probable that no educational effort can rise above the whole scheme of thought which gives it birth ”

“ The effect of this revelation of ignorance is not a despair of truth, but a humility which is the beginning of wisdom. The deepest thing in Socrates is his knowledge of the good life as a reality, and of the joy and peace which it brings. Secure in this, he can go on in the most fearless temper, and even with light-hearted jesting, to sift the questions. Intellectually, his main achievement is to bring out clearly the problems to be faced, and to give an immense stimulus to the higher class of minds. ”

“ This education has for its first and its last step humility. It can commence only because of a conviction of deficiency; and if we are not disheartened under the growing revelations which it will make, that conviction will become stronger unto the end. But the humility will be founded, not on comparison of ourselves with the imperfect standards around us, but on the increase of that internal knowledge which alone can make us aware of our internal wants. ”

“ Who can measure the weakness or the strength of another soul, and measure out judgment by shifting standards of right and wrong? Only by humility can we gain wisdom. Only by doing the will of the Creator shall we learn the doctrine of truth. ”

“ To be not only free from vanity, stubbornness and egotism, but to regard one's own opinions as of no value, this indeed is true humility.
He who is immersed in self regards his own opinions as Truth, and the opinions of other men as error. But that humble Truth-lover who has learned to distinguish between opinion and Truth, regards all men with the eye of charity, and does not seek to defend his opinions against theirs, but sacrifices those opinions that he may love the more, that he may manifest the spirit of Truth, for Truth in its very nature is ineffable and can only be lived. ”

“ By the practice of methodological doubt, if it is genuine and prolonged, a certain humility as to our knowledge is induced: we become glad to know anything in philosophy, however seemingly trivial. Philosophy has suffered from the lack of this kind of modesty. ”