Reason, Intents, Causations

To everything, there is a reason or a design (Louise Bourgeois)

Related readings:

Reason vs Design

The extraordinary advances made by generative artificial intelligence technologies in the last three years have left engineers, managers, regulators, and philosophers dumbfounded: engineers are keen to push boundaries further, managers are ready to pull down any of them, regulators wish to get a grip on shifting shadows, and philosophers speculate on the nature and contours of the emerging beasts. 

The unfortunate combination of deep perplexity with wide incentives has produced deafening definition games that leave little room for rational assessments. Still, the dual meaning of the concept of reason can provide an anchor for arguments about the nature of  intelligence.

The Two Faces of Reason

Reason admits of two understandings — explanatory and teleological, as the debate between Darwin’s natural selection and intelligent design makes plain: the former operates in vivo, from effects to causes, emerging a posteriori in the mind of actual observers; the latter operates in vitro, assuming a prior purpose in the mind of virtual designers.

Ontological prisms bring this distinction into sharp relief:

  • Explanatory schemes (left) go counterclockwise: starting from intelligent observers whose purposes (concepts) organize their observations of reality (facts), and whose reverse engineering identifies the underlying designs (categories).
  • Teleological schemes (right) go clockwise: starting from intelligent designers who project purposes (concepts) onto realities (facts) engineered from designs of their own (categories).

For instance, compare the “reason why” test to spider webs and fishnets, or bto eaver dams and hydro dam.

FURTHER READINGS