Da Ya Think I’m Sphexy?

Sphex is a genus of wasp which Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Dennett, and other writers on cognitive science and philosophy of mind have sometimes made use of to illustrate a point about what constitutes genuine intelligence.  The standard story has it that the female Sphex wasp will paralyze a cricket, take it to her burrow, go in to check that all is well and then come back out to drag the cricket in.  So far that might sound pretty intelligent.  However, if an experimenter moves the cricket a few inches while the wasp is inside, then when she emerges she will move the cricket back into place in front of the burrow and go in to check again rather than just take the cricket in directly.  And she will (again, so the standard story goes) repeat this ritual over and over if the experimenter keeps moving the cricket.

Dennett, who has appealed to the Sphex example several times over the decades, tells us in his latest book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking that in fact this standard account is oversimplified and that it turns out the Sphex wasp isn’t quite as stupid as legend has it.  All the same, “sphexishness” has come to be a useful label for canned behavioral routines that can at best mimic intelligence but never reflect the real McCoy.  Sphexishness is not limited to cases as easy to detect as the robotic Sphex ritual.  A creature might exhibit a much higher degree of flexibility than the Sphex of legend, but still show itself to be “sphexish” in more subtle ways. 

What is it, exactly, that sphexish creatures are missing that intelligent creatures like us have?  In Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter answers:

[I]n the wasp brain, there may be rudimentary symbols, capable of triggering each other; but there is nothing like the human capacity to see several instances as instances of an as-yet-unformed class, and then to make the class symbol; nor is there anything like the human ability to wonder, “What if I did this -- what would ensue in that hypothetical world?”  This type of thought process requires an ability to manufacture instances and to manipulate them as if they were symbols standing for objects in a real situation, although that situation may not be the case, and may never be the case. (p. 361)

In his essay “On the Seeming Paradox of Mechanizing Creativity,” reprinted in Metamagical Themas, Hofstadter elaborates on the difference between us and Sphex:

I would summarize it by saying that it is a general sensitivity to patterns, an ability to spot patterns of unanticipated types in unanticipated places at unanticipated times in unanticipated media.  For instance, you just spotted an unanticipated pattern -- five repetitions of a word… Neither in your schooling nor in your genes was there any explicit preparation for such acts of perception.  All you had going for you is an ability to see sameness.  All human beings have that readiness, that alertness, and that is what makes them so antisphexish.  Whenever they get into some kind of “loop”, they quickly sense it.  Something happens inside their heads -- a kind of “loop detector” fires.  Or you can think of it as a “rut detector”, a “sameness detector” -- but no matter how you phrase it, the possession of this ability to break out of loops of all sorts seems the antithesis of the mechanical.  Or, to put it the other way around, the essence of the mechanical seems to be in its lack of novelty and its repetitiveness, in its trappedness in some kind of precisely delimited space. (pp. 531-32)

What Hofstadter is describing is essentially what the Aristotelian Scholastic philosopher would characterize as the intellect’s ability to abstract universal concepts from particular material things.  For the Scholastic, such concepts differ in kind and not merely degree both from mental images and from neural representations of any of the sorts posited by cognitive scientists and materialist philosophers of mind.  Mental images and neural representations may have a certain generality -- a dog’s mental image or neural representation of a ball may be triggered by a number of stimuli and direct the dog to pursue a number of objects -- but they lack the strict universality of concepts.  Their content is also inherently indeterminate in a way the content of concepts is not.  For these reasons, our strictly intellectual powers are incorporeal in a way our imaginative and sensory powers are not.  (I defend all these claims at length in my ACPQ article “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought.”)  I suppose I need to add for the village naturalists out there that these claims have absolutely nothing to do with belief in ectoplasm, immaterial “stuff,” magic, or any of the other straw men of materialist polemic.  Some materialists are positively Sphex-like in their sheer inability to see in their opponents anything but these ridiculous caricatures.

As that last gibe implies, human beings are not immune to what superficially resembles sphexishness.  Because we are rational animals capable of forming and making use of concepts, we necessarily transcend the true sphexishness that afflicts other animals.  But because we are rational animals, we are sometimes susceptible to behavior that is at least pseudo-sphexish.  For one thing, we can be injured in a way that impairs or blocks the exercise of our rational powers.  For another, our prejudices, emotions, and the limitations on our knowledge can get us into cognitive ruts.  But a healthy rational animal will in principle be able to perceive and rise above such ruts in a way that a sub-rational animal cannot.

Now, Dennett, perceptive fellow that he is when he wants to be, argues in Chapter 2 of his book Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting that any purely physical system is going to be essentially sphexish.  The reason is that qua physical such a system can only ever be sensitive to syntactical properties, and syntactical properties can never add up to semantic properties.  Now a non-sphexish creature would have to be sensitive to semantic properties.  Hence a purely physical and thus purely syntactic system is inevitably going to be a sphexish system.  Dennett thinks it can at least approximate non-sphexishness, however, because a sufficiently complex “syntactic engine” will in his view at least approximate a perfect “semantic engine.”   And sphexishly dogmatic materialist that he is, Dennett insists that human beings are purely physical.  Hence, though we seem non-sphexish, Dennett insists that we really are sphexish, but -- being exquisitely complex syntactical engines -- in so subtle a way that for practical purposes we can treat ourselves as if we were not.

But as Howard Robinson points out in the introduction to his edited volume Objections to Physicalism, Dennett’s position is a muddle.  A purely syntactical engine will not even approximate a perfect semantic engine, because it will fail to be semantic at all.  Syntax by itself doesn’t get you imperfect semantics; it gets you exactly zero semantics, just as the ketchup kids use for blood at Halloween time will never get you even imperfect real blood no matter how much of it you pour out.  Dennett knows this, which is why (as Robinson notes) he has to resort to the essentially instrumentalist position that our sophistication as complex syntactic engines makes it useful for us to interpret ourselves as if we were semantic engines.  But this too is a muddle, for interpretation is itself an act that presupposes real semantics rather than a mere ersatz.  Dennett’s further reformulations of his position (e.g. in his paper “Real Patterns”) only ever paper over this fundamental incoherence rather than resolve it, but his dogmatic materialism makes him think there must be some way to make it something other than the reductio ad absurdum that it is.

In any event, it would be a mistake to suppose that our basis for regarding ourselves as non-sphexish is that our behavior so closely approximates non-sphexishness.   It is not a kind of inductive inference to the effect that since we usually act unsphexish, we must really be unsphexish (as if further empirical evidence could in principle lead us to revise this “opinion” about ourselves).  It is much simpler and more obvious and conclusive than that.  It is that we have things sphexish creatures do not have: concepts.  End of story.  The reasoning isn’t: “We don’t act very sphexish; therefore we must have concepts.”  It’s rather: “We have concepts; that’s why we don’t act very sphexish.”

It is silly to object: “But a sphexish creature would think the same thing!”  No it wouldn’t, because a sphexish creature, being by Dennett’s own admission devoid of semantics, wouldn’t think at all in the first place.  It wouldn’t have even sphexish concepts (whatever that might mean), because it wouldn’t have any concepts at all.  Nor can we possibly be wrong in supposing that we have concepts (whatever “supposing oneself not to have concepts” might mean), for reasons that are blindingly obvious but which, if you really have any doubts, are spelled out in the ACPQ paper referred to above.  (See also the many posts about eliminativism you’ll find on this blog, such as this one, this one, this one, and this one.)

Now, you’ll recall from a recent post the notion of a cognitive zombie -- a creature physically and behaviorally identical to a normal human being, but devoid of concepts and thus devoid of the other aspects of rationality.  You might think that a cognitive zombie would be sphexish, but that is a mistake.  If it was sphexish, it wouldn’t be behaviorally identical to a normal human being, and thus by definition wouldn’t be a cognitive zombie.  A true cognitive zombie would be something which would, like a sphexish creature, be devoid of concepts, but which, like a normal human being, would behave as if it had concepts.

The notion of sphexishness thus helps to clarify the notion of a cognitive zombie.  If ya think I’m sphexy, then you don’t think I’m a cognitive zombie.  A sphexy Rod Stewart on his best day wouldn’t pass for a cognitive zombie.  A James Brown sphex machine wouldn’t pass either.  People magazine’s Sphexiest Man Alive definitely wouldn’t be a cognitive zombie.  The notion of a cognitive zombie is the notion of something as utterly devoid of concepts as the simplest of any of Dennett’s purely syntactical engines, but whose lack of concepts is nevertheless more perfectly undetectable than that of even the most complex and perfect of Dennett’s syntactical engines.  Is this notion even coherent?  I think not, but that is a topic for another time.