“But do androids dream of electric sheep?”: Is the title of a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick that ironically raises the question of the similarities and differences between human and artificial intelligence (the book inspired the film «Blade runner»). Understanding and interpreting those similarities and differences can help us refine artificial intelligence and robot performance, but also look at ourselves with a new eye and better understand the nature of our human intelligence.
Something like that, but much more, the webinar “Sneers and Robots. The logic behind laughter », which dealt with a number of topics related to science and philosophy in an accessible way. Speaking about it with «La Stampa», the organizer Silvia Pittarello, professor of Communication in Padua, thus introduces one of the focuses of the webinar: «Can logic make us laugh? The answer is yes and we are taught by Lewis Carroll, who has entertained generations of children by mixing logic and nonsense, and even suggesting that nonsense has to do with logic. I heard a professor say that “the story of Alice in Wonderland is enchanting because it is illogical”, but this is not true. To be able to laugh at something, logic is one of the indispensable elements. At the outset you need to know certain things and know the context in which they are inserted. Then it is essential to have awareness of oneself and until computers have none they will not understand the jokes: it is self-awareness that makes us understand where we are, where we are. Finally, we must perceive the logical distance that exists between things as they are envisaged and as they should be (between the real world and the wonderland). And you have to get there on your own, because if a joke needs to be explained it’s not funny. If I have to explain to a computer, with special instructions, why it has to laugh at a certain beat, it is impossible for it to catch the humor ». Pittarello concludes by citing a little-known fact: «In Lewis Carrol’s book there is a lot of logic because Carrol understood it, given that (apart from“ Alice in Wonderland ”) he also published several treatises on logic».
We ask one of the webinar speakers, Giovanni Sambin, professor of Mathematical Logic at the University of Padua, to approach the question, starting from a fact of everyday life that puts us in contact with Artificial Intelligence and its differences from ours. : every time we fill out an online form, we are eventually asked to check the box “I’m not a robot”. Is it possible that robots are so “stupid” as not to cross such a modest barrier? Does it take so little to act as a filter? And the subsequent test, that is the recognition of some letters of the alphabet by the human compiler, how can this be an impossible task for robots, which are instead very capable of distinguishing electronic signatures? After all, when a human being signs, he never signs the same way twice, yet the machine has enough plasticity to understand that the signatures of a certain person, even if they are all slightly different, fall into one typology; and instead when it is placed in front of the single letters, the same machine suddenly loses all its mental plasticity? How is it possible?
Sambin confirms that checking the “I’m not a robot” box is really an insuperable obstacle for a machine: “Robots have no conscience, they are just the result of instructions, they don’t know what they are, so they don’t get there: choosing to put a sign next to “I am not a robot”, moreover lying, requires self-awareness ». As for the question of electronic signatures, Sambin explains that computer programs do not break them down into individual letters: they receive them as if they were ideograms. However, “the fact that they are not able to recognize the deformed letters is entirely contingent, soon they will be able to overcome this difficulty”.
A doubt: are robots autistic, like Alan Turing, the father of computers? In the film about him, some colleagues are seen saying to him: Alan, we’re going to eat. Turing replies: yes. They insist: look at us going to eat: He just says: yes, I understand, but being partially autistic he does not immediately grasp the implication, that is, that they are inviting him to follow them. Then, with great delay, Turing realizes it, he almost bursts into tears: «In short, when I say one thing I mean that thing, while when you speak you always allude to something else. But would I be the wrong one? ». “I identify with Turing,” says Professor Sambin. Hearing this scene from the film evoked, «I often find it difficult to grasp the implications, and for this reason too I chose logic, which gives certainties».
But now let’s try to imagine a situation beyond all limits. The comparison between the human mind and that of a machine still falls within a sphere of human or trans-human relationships, since it is still a human being who programs the robot; but what about the future, hypothetical confrontation with a hypothetical extraterrestrial mind, completely alien to us? What would we discover in that case? Will the logic of the extraterrestrials turn out to be quite similar to ours, which will thus prove to have a universal character? Or maybe we will discover that the extraterrestrial logic is different from ours in everything, that is in the starting points, in the way of operating and in the final results? And if this were the case, what should we deduce from it? That our logic is completely arbitrary, relative, as good as any other?
Faced with this question, at first Sambin seems to evade the comparison (“I’ve never met an extraterrestrial, so I don’t know what kind of logic he can use, and what we can deduce from it”), but then he plays the game: “Not it would be easy, it would be a lot of effort, but I venture to say that in the end, as far as logic is concerned, there would be common ground between us and them. But our way of seeing would be modified, and also that of the extraterrestrials, by the encounter with a different point of view. As happened at the time of Marco Polo with the meeting between Europe and China ».
This brings us back to the question of humor, grin, laughter, smile. A Japanese director once said that Western audiences do not laugh at certain sequences that the Japanese find hilarious, while Westerners laugh at scenes (e.g. exaggerated, over-the-top martial arts performances) that appear serious in the East, or even solemn, spiritual, philosophical. Could this be the result (also) of different logics? Sambin confirms or, at least, does not deny: “I have not done specific studies on the question, but I expect so and that in the East they are used to organizing thought in a different way from ours and that also for this reason they can laugh, sometimes, in different way “. Certainly there is some difference in the way the brain works, not genetic of course, not racial: Far Eastern writing with ideographic rather than alphabetic symbols certainly develops different logical structures in the Japanese and Chinese – even if everything remains to be explained how this translates, in practice, into different senses of humor. Moreover, the difference in the way of laughing in the East and in the West is only relative, it is not absolute: as a rule we laugh at the same things and only occasionally a specificity is imposed on attention. Common ground prevails, as Sambin imagines possible even between terrestrials and extraterrestrials.
A side issue involves the congruence between logical-mathematical abstractions and physical reality. Logic would like mathematical formulas to be at the service of the physical interpretation of the Universe. But sometimes it seems that the opposite happens: there is the example of the so-called string theory (or rather of cords), which we are not defining here (it does not matter in this context) but of which we emphasize only one aspect: yes it is developed in an enormous theoretical-logical-mathematical corpus, lived and grown on a life of its own for decades, and of which experimental physical confirmations have been sought (in vain) for decades; now, if such very complicated theories actually found evidence of adherence to physical reality, how should we react? To be happy because we have discovered something great, of course; but perhaps also suspicious, because we have found what we wanted to find a priori? Perhaps it will not be that the Universe is actually just a chaos without rules, and that the logical / mathematical rules we invent from scratch, at will, and that we then find the experimental confirmations of any rule we have invented, so much in the Chaos can anything be found?
No, Sambin is not of this opinion: «Some theories work and others don’t. It is analogous to Darwin’s natural selection, there are scientific hypotheses that are selected and survive and others do not. The link between theory and experimentation must generate certainties, it is not the realm of the arbitrary ». Let’s try to propose a weak version of this doubt: alternative physical theories could be valid, even if they are different because they are conceived starting from different points of view, as can be those of a terrestrial and an extraterrestrial. For example, Einstein once said that it is not essential to consider the speed of light as absolute and all other physical quantities as relative, one could also choose a different point of view and keep a different variable fixed (it is enough that the relationships between the quantities remain the same) but thus the equations would become much more complicated; those proposed by Einstein are simpler, and for this, and for this reason alone, they are to be preferred (yet another application of Occam’s razor). On this point, Sambin agrees: «In front of Einstein I have no authority to contradict».
The relationship between theory and practice can be even more complicated than that. Let us think of Archimedes and Euclid: the ancient Greeks were very short of formulating the principle “sensible experiences, mathematical demonstrations” on which Galileo founded modern science. In the European Middle Ages Aristotle predominated, whose thought was rationalist, yet the Middle Ages did not produce modern science, while Humanism and the Renaissance did, when Plato’s thought predominated, less rationalist, contemptuous of sensitive reality, and more led to abstraction and mysticism. Yet Platonism itself, apparently unsuitable for modern science, made it germinate, because it accustomed Europeans to imagining disembodied entities such as numbers as real and transcendent, making it possible to mathematize and enclose everything in formulas, not only physics, but above all economics; the forerunner to Galileo’s equations was the invention of the double entry in Italy between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, defined by Goethe as “one of the most beautiful creations of the human spirit”.
It was not at all obvious that this was the case; the prevalence of Plato could have led the Europe of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to mysticism, rather than to mathematical and experimental science; Isn’t it a paradox that the course of things was what history tells us? Sambin agrees that “the outcome of Platonism was paradoxical in past centuries, but I find it more paradoxical that still in the 21st century there are so many people who prefer irrationality to science”.
A final observation regarding Alice’s humor, the electric sheep and the sneers of the robots, also in relation to the foundations of the various civilizations we have mentioned: while Nietzsche went to look for the roots of Western civilization in «The birth of tragedy », It would be interesting if someone else tried their hand at looking for them in comedy, humor and way of laughing, not only to learn more about our past but also to explore the future, waiting for the moment when the robots will start grinning at jokes.