“How much have you got on you?”
“Dead broke.”
“Well, that’s good because you’ll be both if you’re holding out on me.”
“I ain’t got shit, man.”
“I’m going to shake you ‘til your sack jingles.”
“Look it’s not mine, it’s my aunt’s; she’s been sick. It’s for her groceries.”

How many possible lies are going on here?

Possibly:

There’s the “dead broke” plea.

“Well, but that’s not really a lie ‘cause it’s his aunt’s.”
“Boy, your mama did raise a fool, didn’t she.”

There’s the “that’s good” bluff.

There’s the “ain’t got shit” complaint.

There’s the “shake you” threat.

There’s the final concession of coin with four deflections.

“Whatever a man does, I can make a machine that will do it.”
“You can make it have aunts and uncles and send birthday cards to them and notices of family reunions?”
“Come on, you’ve assumed that humans have to do these things; they don’t have to. My machine does not have to either.”
“No, I make no such assumption. People just do have aunts and uncles and send them cards. In fact you’re the one with the theory that says that sort of thing does not matter. I’m just saying people send cards; it involves something that they do with words. For a computer to do this makes no sense.”

“You can’t get away with this. You’ve got a hidden theory about humanity and family and such.”
“No, I just know that people have aunts and uncles and may hug ‘em or hate ‘em.”

“You see, I do not have a theory of what a human is. I just know that there are family trees. I do not need a theory to say this. You have to have the theory to discount what is in front of you, i.e., the genealogy, the aunts and uncles. I like to travel light; I do not need to pack a theory here. You’re the one with the heavy load.”

The point is not that computers cannot talk. They may do something which we should like, at some point, to call talking. But to import the meaning of much of what we do when we talk, into what computers do, is mistaken because it has no point.

Androids will not jilt each other in love.

Nor cheat each other in checkers.

Nor strut their stuff.

Nor is the point to deny looking at a man as a machine. You can look at a man in a lot of ways. Just remember what you miss when you look at him in only one way.

How about the cordialities of the game? What about ‘the tell’? Many things that we use to gain advantage in the game are gone. The game begins to lose its “human element.”

How could a computer be a four-flusher? Beyond the game, how could it be one?

Talking in poker is a very complicated business. It is part of the game, as people play it. The point of it becomes very fuzzy when machines play the game.

“Well, we can make a machine that can do all of this.”
“You mean just as you could make one that could lie?” (See posts of 6/1/06-6/6/06)

Once you get away from the notion that there are underlying conditions for talking and that you can achieve them, you cease trying to create machines that fulfill these conditions and therefore can talk.

How would machines play poker? Well, there would be no sense in sunglasses to conceal bluffing. Obviously, they could play the game in the sense that they could move cards around, compute probabilities, etc. But all of the tricks of reading body language, how would they use them?

On each other?

What would the money mean to them?

The rent? Next week’s groceries?

How about the raising of stakes until the opposition is crushed? How about not, in order to let the competition stay in the game?

“Let him stay in, I’m good for the difference.”

How about the deed to the ranch?

Looking at the conversations in these ways is not possible if they are programmed for androids. Androids do not do with the words what humans do. They do not come off as characters because they are not people. They do not insult, promise, defraud.

The key here is to follow Austin’s work on performative utterances.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/ihum54/Austin_on_speech_acts.htm

Ex hypothesi, because androids are programmed to say the words, they do not do what we do with the words. I’m not programmed to say “I will” when I get married. Had I been, I would not have been married, nor would I have gone through a minister’s counseling prior to the ceremony. Nor would there have been a need for a ceremony; nor would folks have thrown rice and bouquets later.

Androids are not slippery or foolish. For this you have to imagine them as people, as you do with R2D2 in Star Wars.

More appropriately, here the subject might be the effectiveness of simulation that the androids achieve.

“Suppose it is somehow a perfect simulation.”
“Wonderful, then, this marvel of engineering.”

The androids are simulating talking. They are not talking, at least not as we do, because they do not do what we do with the words. You may be able to program them to say everything but not do everything with words.

Suppose the first talker is of few words. Here is another way it might have gone.

“Ok, onions.”
“The boy just isn’t going to make it this semester, is he?”
(First talker shakes head.)
“What about these tomatoes?”
“Hold em.”
“Did Dana get her car fixed?”
(First talker indicates uncertainty with a shrug.)
“What was the trouble?”
(First talker shrugs again.)
“I wish she’d dump him.”
“Umm.”
“Tomatoes…?”
(First talker nods in the affirmative.)
“Damn, that screen door has a new hole in it.”
(First talker notes and nods.)
“O, Baby, don’t put your hand there.”
(First talker squints at the mosquito on the cupboard.)
“Gottim...”

The second conversation does roughly the same things as the first. You can imagine the talkers being the same for each conversation. The first talker is just tired in the second conversation and does not feel prone to talking.

You can also imagine that the talkers are different and talk somewhat differently to each other. You can imagine a number of things.

You might see the first conversation as one between talkers who were more animated and more open with each other. You might see the second conversation as one between talkers who were not on quite the same intimate ground.

Perhaps the first shows a “sweeter couple” than the second.

The previous conversation(10/13/06) has no particular order. Moreover, philosophy cannot give it an order that makes it any clearer.

Knowing the setting, say, a kitchen, with a man and women while cooking, talking about their kids might add to the clarity. Knowing the recipe might add something.

Someone says that the talkers need to know language. Thus, knowing language is a condition for the possibility of the conversation. Gosh, isn’t that profound?

But they need to know how to cook as well. As well as what a firing order is, and a mosquito, too.

Where do we start with these as conditions? Why not some others? The talkers need to be alive to be talking. They need to know each other; indeed, quite well to have had the kids.

So someone says that language is integrally bound up in all of these other conditions and so we need to start with it. Then our task is to show how it is the tie that binds. We start using terms like ‘integrally bound up.’

Our neighbors puzzle. This is a bad sign.

This is also how we get tempted into doing philosophy by inflating the trivial. We slouch toward the Bethlehem of circularity(See posts of 8/30/06 to 9/12/06).

You can see why I like minced onion and hold my minimal position that tells philosophy:

"There you go getting philosophical on me."

There are more palpable distinctions in the onion.

A reference that links from Enowning's site:

http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=6475802&postID=116083906015145141

"The greatest success of the hermeneutical movement has been achieved in recent decades, beginning in the closely related movement of "deconstructionism" in literary criticism. Headed by the French theorists Michel Ricoeur, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Derrida, deconstructionism in the Western Hemisphere is led by the formidable Department at Yale University, from which it has spread to conquer most of the English-literature departments in the United States and Canada. The essential message of deconstructionism and hermeneutics can be variously summed up as nihilism, relativism, and solipsism. That is, either there is no objective truth or, if there is, we can never discover it. With each person being bound to his own subjective views, feelings, history, and so on, there is no method of discovering objective truth. In literature, the most elemental procedure of literary criticism (that is, trying to figure out what a given author meant to say) becomes impossible. Communication between writer and reader similarly becomes hopeless; furthermore, not only can no reader ever figure out what an author meant to say, but even the author does not know or understand what he himself meant to say, so fragmented, confused, and driven is each particular individual. So, since it is impossible to figure out what Shakespeare, Conrad, Plato, Aristotle, or Machiavelli meant, what becomes the point of either reading or writing literary or philosophical criticism?"

http://www.mises.org/story/2337

The solution is to summarily fire the academic departments of most universities and quit paying $35,000/year for your kid's privilege to listen to these gasbags.

“Ok, it’s time for the minced onion.”
“The boy just isn’t going to make it this semester, is he?”
“Well, if he does not quit fighting, he won’t.”
“What about these tomatoes?”
“Let ‘em stew awhile.”
“Did Dana get her car fixed?”
“Still in the shop.”
“What was the trouble?”
“I don’t know if they know, sounds like a firing order problem, but those guys are pretty dim.”
“I wish she’d dump him.”
“He’s got a firing order problem, too. His can’t be fixed.”
“Tomatoes…?”
“Throw ‘em in.”
“Damn, that screen door has a new hole in it.”
“I’m going to kill that dog.”
“O, Baby, don’t put your hand there.”
“Kill that mosquito on the cupboard, will you?”
“Gottim...”

This conversation does not stumble, but does it know where it is going?

(Without a theory of it that just fits it as it is stated right here, what can you say? If you come up with a theory of it, you are doing something akin to splicing polynomials to account for a piece of a financial time series. They will possibly fit just that part of the series, and on the next part you’ll drop your fortune.)

Clearly, it does not know where it is going. But it is intelligible. Yet, at each remark, it might have gone somewhere other than it did.

How many ways could it have gone?

Well, if it does not know where it is going, how can you say?

If you are going to say that there is a set of possibilities, what is the principle of the set?

Where it has gone up to now does not say where it might go.

Nor, if you splice it from smaller pieces, can you say.

It’s serendipitous.

Election Interlude(2)

The prior conversation is typical of many. It starts out stumbling a bit until some ground gets cleared. It does not have to go any particular direction.

It could have started and stopped just like this:

“How do you figure all this stuff on the war?”
“Got no idea, and I gotta go get feed.”

So did they have a conversation in this two-liner? Not really, maybe. A witness could say that the two never talked about the war.

Then again, he could say that the second talker said he had no idea and that that reply indicated no further interest in talking about it. So there was a tiny conversation.

It depends what we want to mark off as a conversation. There is not a mystery as to what a conversation is.

(Was there really one here or was there not? Did anyone get a glimpse of the ghost?)

The conversation did not have to be about politics. It was not the only subject other than “the war itself."

What about the war as to the latest news releases? As to weaponry? As to casualties? Does “the war itself” include these or not? Again, it depends on what we want to mark off as the war itself.

The direction of the conversation may depend on “markings off” like this. The talkers may stumble about to mark off what they are going to talk about. They may get clear and then stumble again before they mark off something further.

There is not a matrix or set of possible directions to go here. Where possibilities are indefinite, there is no place to begin such a thing.

There is no Big Chief ‘How’. (See post of 6/17/06)

When you look at what people do when they talk, you see that such an idea is mistaken, because it takes, as it were, the life out of talk.

There would never be comedy.

Election Interlude

“How do you figure all this stuff on the war?”
“You mean the war itself, or the war in politics?”
“Well, the war itself seems to have been consigned to the wife and the dog.”
“Yeah, so I guess you mean politics.”

(Pause for a cow’s flatulence. The talkers move to the upwind-end of the pen.)

“I guess so. You know…, what if Bush hadn’t gone into Iraq?”
“We would not have lost over 2000 people. We would not have had all of this torture business. Arabs would not be all fired up. Afghanistan might have been easier. The French would have sold more wine. You tell me.”
“I’ll tell you for sure, Bush would not have been re-elected in ’04.”
“Why?”

(First talker takes a dip of fresh Cope, slightly wincing with the new buzz.)

“Powell and Foggy Bottom would have won on restraint. Then Cheney’s people, to gain ground back, would have leaked all the intelligence that turned out to be wrong.”
“But we would not have known that it was wrong, so they could have said it was right.”
“Right, we would not have gone to Iraq and seen that it was wrong.”

(The wind shifts and the talkers move back where they were.)

“So you’re thinking that there would have been a whole bunch of Republicans that would have thought Bush was unfit for command, for not going.
“Yes, and all the Democrats, with Mr.War Hero Kerry, would have looked fit as a fiddle.”
“So Bush loses in ‘04. Then the Dems are happy and get to call him a liar anyway over the intelligence that no one knows is false.”
“You bet. And Bush is a sunk puppy with his wife and dog.”

(The wind goes calm.)

“So you’re saying that the Dems are mad about the war, only because it got Bush re-elected in ‘04.”
“Right. It is all you need to make sense of it.”
“And my neighbor’s little girl, who is enlisting in the Navy, does not mean a pinch of what just flopped in that pen.”
“Right. She means nothing to either party now.”
“So Bush is defending the war because it got him elected in ‘04, and he is staying the course for the party. Can’t go over to the other side without losing everything.”
“Right.”
“ And the Dems now have to do everything they can to make the war look bad, since they did not ever get to wrap themselves in the uniform.”
“Afraid so. Just power politics trying to fake a moral high ground.”
“ Well then…, I guess the best liar wins.”

You cannot save them all.

They thrive on going round about
With words the size of New York City,
None the width of Omaha.

They glaze their notions:
Ceramic, square to posit forth,
Mosaic glass to pause by,
Slab marble for peripety,
Serpentine their import.

Their colleagues ‘Oh’
And then go ‘Ah’
At such fine flooring.

All the while the grout ignoring.