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Why AI will never expose the “mind’s inner workings”

23 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by paceni in Uncategorized

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AI, Aristotle, Dr Hugh Morrison, New Scientist, Peter Hacker, Timothy Revell

The text of a letter submitted to the New Scientist in reply to an article by Timothy Revell on a claim that mind-reading devices can access your thoughts and dreams using AI.

As usual there has been no acknowledgement, response or publication by the New Scientist

Timothy Revell’s article Thoughts Laid Bare (29 September, p. 28) illustrates a worrying tendency of AI enthusiasts to over-hype the capabilities of their algorithms. The article suggests that AI offers the possibility of the “ultimate privacy breach” by gaining access to “one of the only things we can keep to ourselves,” namely, “the thoughts in our heads.”

Niels Bohr counselled that the hallmark of science is not experiment or even quantification, but “unambiguous communication.” AI has much to learn from this great physicist. When one scans an individual’s brain one does not thereby gain any access whatsoever to that individual’s thoughts; brains are in the head while thoughts are not. The brain isn’t doing the thinking. As far back as 1877, G H Lewes cautioned: “It is the man and not the brain that thinks.” To quote Peter Hacker, what neuroscientists show us “is merely a computer-generated image of increased oxygenation in select areas of the brain” of the thinking individual. Needless to say, one cannot think without an appropriately functioning brain, but thinking is not located in the brain; no analysis of neural activity will give insights to thoughts because thinking is neither an activity of the mind or the brain.

In ascribing thoughts to the brain or the mind (rather than to the individual) AI falls prey to a fallacy that can be traced all the way back to Aristotle: the “mereological fallacy.”

Dr Hugh Morrison, The Queen’s University, Belfast (retired)

drhmorrison@gmail.com

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Response to Professor Luckin’s TES (29.06.2018) article: “AI is coming: use it or lose it.”

14 Saturday Jul 2018

Posted by paceni in Uncategorized

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David Sumpter, Judea Pearl, ludwig Wittgenstein, M. R. Bennett, M. Rowlands, P.M.S. Hacker, Professor Alexander Todorov

 

Alan Turing 3

Alan Turing

 Dr Hugh Morrison (Queen’s University Belfast [retired])

Hilary Putnam 2

Hilary Putnam

Jerry Fodor 3

Jerry Fodor

Jerome Bruner2.png

Jerome Bruner

Given that Rose Luckin is professor of “learner-centred design” at UCL, one would expect that she has a strong appreciation of the meaning of the word “learning.”  This isn’t clear from her article.  Professor Luckin seems resigned to the fact that teachers must change and embrace a role for Artificial Intelligence in the classroom.  According to Luckin, this acceptance of AI will enable teachers to influence how its various products will be deployed in teaching and learning.  Professor Luckin’s sense of resignation is clear in the title of her piece: “AI is coming: use it or lose to it.”  The headline writer at the TES goes further, seeming to suggest that teachers should yield a substantial part of their current remit to machines: “When knowledge isn’t power.  Why teachers need to focus on the things machines can’t teach.”

Luckin TES June 18 AI

Alas, both Professor Luckin and the TES seem totally unaware that a “category error” lurks at the core of the AI project, a category error which should be deployed to protect the teaching profession from the impact of neural nets, deep learning and artificial intelligence.

Rose Luckin 3

Anyone familiar with the research of one of the giants of machine learning, the computer scientist Judea Pearl, will know that artificial intelligence, as currently conceived, has profound and intractable difficulties.  (Pearl describes AI as little more than curve-fitting.)  By way of illustration, consider a concept which should be close to the hearts of both Luckin and the TES, namely, “learning.”  If any profession can lay claim to expertise concerning the nature of learning, it is teachers.  From Professor Luckin’s TES article, I suspect she is unaware that AI suffers from a category error in respect of the concept “learning,” an error first identified by Aristotle, which goes by the name of the “mereological fallacy.”

Judea Pearl 2

Judea Pearl

Those computer scientists who work in the field of so-called “deep learning” claim to model the learning that occurs in the brain using extremely complex neural nets.  Look at any You Tube presentation in which an AI enthusiast lectures on the structures underpinning neural nets and you will likely hear the claim that learning and thinking are (neural) activities in the brain.  However, it transpires that it is nonsense to suggest that learning or thinking are processes located in the brain.

Popular science publications routinely refer to brains “learning”, “thinking”, “processing information,” “creating meaning,” “perceiving patterns” and so on.  Now where is the scientific evidence for these claims?  There are no laboratory demonstrations of brains learning or thinking.  Such activities are carried out by human beings, not their brains.  Needless to say, no one would dispute that without a functioning brain an individual couldn’t learn or think, but it does not follow that the individual’s brain is doing the thinking or learning.

While it is clear that learning would be impossible without a properly functioning brain, the claim that brains can learn or that learning takes place in the brain ought to be supported by scientific evidence.  There isn’t any.  To mistakenly attribute properties to the brain which are, in fact, properties of the human being is to fall prey to the “mereological fallacy” where mereology is concerned with part/whole relations.

To ascribe psychological predicates – such as “learn” and “think” – to the brain is simply nonsensical.  If the human brain could learn or think, “This would be astonishing, and we should want to hear more.  We should want to know what the evidence for this remarkable discovery was” (Bennett & Hacker, 2003, p. 71)[1].  “Psychological predicates are predicates that apply essentially to the whole animal, not its parts.  It is not the eye (let alone the brain) that sees, but we see with our eyes (and we do not see with our brains, although without a brain functioning normally in respect of the visual system, we would not see)” (Bennett & Hacker, 2003, pp. 72-73)[2].

“We know what it is for human beings to experience things, to see things, to know or believe things, to make decisions … But do we know what it is for a brain to see …for a brain to have experiences, to know or believe something?  Do we have any conception of what it would be like for a brain to make a decision? … These are all attributes of human beings.  Is it a new discovery that brains also engage in such human activities?” (Bennett & Hacker, 2003, p. 70)[3].

“It is our contention that this application of psychological predicates to the brain makes no sense.  It is not that as a matter of fact brains do not think, … rather, it makes no sense to ascribe such predicates or their negations to the brain. … just as sticks and stones are not awake, but they are not asleep either” (Bennett & Hacker, 2003, p. 72)[4].

If one casts one’s mind back through the many, many ill-conceived fads visited upon a long-suffering teaching profession, one may recall the “brain-based learning” movement.  Proponents of brain-based learning were constantly drawing the attention of mathematics teachers, for example, to the illuminated area of the brain devoted to the learning of mathematics.  A more careful, conservative approach which eschews hype would be to say that this area of the brain is “lit up” when the person learns mathematics.  Bennett & Hacker (2007, p. 143) demonstrate how careful science avoids the hype which characterises popular accounts of the functioning of the brain: “All his brain can show is what goes on there while he is thinking; all fMRI scanners can show is which parts of his brain are metabolizing more oxygen than others when the patient in the scanner is thinking.”[5]

Luckin proposes the following: “To ensure their place in the schools of future, educators need to move on from a knowledge-based curriculum that could soon become automatable through AI.”  Rather than urging yet further radical professional change on already innovation-fatigued teachers, she should be protecting schools from the over-hyped claims of the AI industry.  Luckin’s radical suggestion for the future of the teaching profession reveals a lamentable grasp of the fundamental concepts “learning” and “knowledge”: “It is not that the knowledge-based curriculum is wrong per se, the problem is that it is wrong for the 21st century.  Because now that we can build AI systems that can learn well-defined knowledge so effectively, it’s probably not very wise to continue to develop the human intelligence of our students to achieve this main goal,”

The key words in this quotation are: “we can now build AI systems that can learn well-defined knowledge.”  Surely the central aim of AI is to design machines which can “learn” and “know” in the same way as human beings learn and know?  I have already established that for human beings, learning is not an activity of the mind/brain.  What about Luckin’s claim that machines can have access to knowledge?  Wittgenstein teaches that “The grammar of the word ‘knows’ is … closely related to the word ‘understands’” (PI, §150)[6].  To know or understand is not to have access to inner states of the mind or brain; knowing and understanding are best thought of as capacities.  Rowlands (2003, p. 5) writes: “Thus, according to Wittgenstein, to … understand something by a sign is not to be the subject of an inner state or process.  Rather, it is to possess a capacity: the capacity to adjust one’s usage of the sign to bring it into line with custom or practice.  And this connects … understanding with structures that are external to the subject of this … understanding.”[7]

According to Wittgenstein, human knowledge is best construed as a capacity rather than an inner actuality.  An AI machine capable of knowing or understanding the concept “molecule,” say, as a human being does, would have to be capable of adjusting its use of the concept “molecule” so that it accords with the established use of that concept in physics, biology, and so on.  In short, a machine capable of non-collusively agreeing with the human practices which surround it!  Moreover, these human practices lie outside the computer.

I disagree with the headline on the front page of the TES; the invaluable mathematical knowledge I acquired from my teachers and lecturers allows me to confirm Judea Pearl’s claim that deep learning algorithms amount to little more than mathematical curve-fitting, and machines capable of knowing, thinking, learning and understanding are a fantasy.  My mathematical knowledge protects me from hype.  Pace the front page of the TES, knowledge is power.

David Sumpter Outnumbered

ISBN 978-1-4729-4741-3

The teaching profession would be well advised to give AI a wide berth.  AI research conducted at Cambridge and Stanford universities has been described as “incredibly ethically questionable” by Professor Alexander Todorov, who warns that “developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning have enabled scientific racism to enter a new era” (see The Guardian 07.07.18).  I will leave the last word to mathematician David Sumpter (2018, p. 226).  He reports on a Future of Life Institute meeting: “Despite the panel’s conviction that AI is on its way, my scepticism increased as I watched them talk.  I had spent the last year of my life dissecting algorithms used within the companies these guys lead and, from what I have seen, I simply couldn’t understand where they think this intelligence is going to come from.  I had found very little in the algorithms they are developing to suggest that human-like intelligence is on its way.  As far as I could see, this panel, consisting of the who’s-who of the tech industry, wasn’t taking the question seriously.  They were enjoying the speculation, but it wasn’t science.  It was pure entertainment.”[8]

[1] Bennett, M.R., & Hacker, P.M.S. (2003).  Philosophical foundations of neuroscience.  Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Bennett, M.R. & Hacker, P.M.S. (2007).  The conceptual presuppositions of cognitive neuroscience.  In M.R. Bennett, D. Dennett, P.M.S. Hacker, & J. Searle, Neuroscience and philosophy (pp. 127-162).  New York: Columbia University Press.

[6] Wittgenstein, L. (1953).  Philosophical investigations.  G.E.M. Anscombe, & R. Rhees (Eds.), G.E.M. Anscombe (Tr.).  Oxford: Blackwell.

[7] Rowlands, M. (2003).  Externalism.  Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

[8] Sumpter, D. (2018).  Outnumbered.  London: Bloomsbury Sigma.

 

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Why Randomised Controlled Trials in education are a waste of money.

21 Thursday Sep 2017

Posted by paceni in Uncategorized

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Ben Styles, Dr Hugh Morrison Queen's University Belfast, Education Endowment Fund, EEF, IES, Institute of Education Sciences, Institute of Education UCL, ludwig Wittgenstein, National Institute for Health Research, NFER, NFER Education Trials Unit, Professor Stephen Gorrard, Queen's University School of Education, Randomised Controlled Trials, RCT, The Nuffield Foundation, UCL, York Trials Unit

 

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

The National Foundation for Education Research (NFER) via their Education Trials Unit have issued a challenge to Professor Stephen Gorard  (Durham University) regarding his book on Randomised Controlled Trials in education. Unfortunately, both parties have it completely wrong on the matter as made clear by the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein Brown Book

   The mathematics behind randomised trials only works if the attribute being studied is first-person/third person symmetric, like the properties of plants in Fisher’s Cambridge garden.  However, attributes of interest in education are, with few exceptions, first/third asymmetric.  So-called evidenced-based education research is nonsense, pure and simple. Those who fund it are wasting public money.  In his “Brown Book” Wittgenstein described the error of confusing symmetry with asymmetry in the ascription of attributes (via criteria) as “a disease of thought.”

 

To understand the full extent of NFER’s misunderstanding of the limitations of RCTs in education watching Ben Styles’ performance during the U Tube video referenced below may be illustrative.

 

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Unionists fail to maintain examination parity in UK

18 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by paceni in Grammar Schools, Uncategorized

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Arlene Foster, Belfast Newsletter, DUP, Emma Pengelly, GCSE changes, John O'Dowd, Northern Ireland Education Minister, Parental Alliance for Choice in Education, Parity in UK

Access the Newsletter article online here

Scan_20160117

The DUP First Minister Arlene Foster education vision may become a nightmare on parity

 

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Deep flaws in the OFMDFM ILiAD Project

09 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by paceni in Grammar Schools, Uncategorized

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Antonio Gramsci, Assessment for Learning, Belfast Newsletter, CCEA’s Revised Curriculum, Comparison of achievement models, Direct Instruction, Dr Cathal McManus, John O'Dowd, Michael Gove, Northern Ireland Education Minister, OFMDFM, Peter Robinson MLA, Peter Wier MLA, Pierre Bourdieu, Professor Joanne Hughes, Professor Ruth Leitch, project follow through, Protestant working-class underachievement and unionist hegemony, Queen's University School of Education

In a Comment piece in the News Letter of 10 December, I argued that a project designed to investigate the link between deprivation and academic under-achievement was deeply flawed.  OFMDFM, who financed the ILiAD project, didn’t seem to appreciate that the sought-after link had already been investigated in one of the most sophisticated education experiments ever conducted: the USA’s Project Follow Through.

Follow Through

 

Project Follow Through monitored the academic attainment of 79,000 pupils from 180 low-income communities for 20 years.  It arrived at an unequivocal conclusion: those pupils who were taught by traditional methods consistently reached academic standards approximating to their middle class peers.  This conclusion was replicated by two other highly-regarded bodies.  Progressivist curricula – such as those centred on the pupil’s ability to “learn how to learn” – were demonstrated to damage the attainment of children from disadvantaged backgrounds.  This is important because our Revised Curriculum is just such a curriculum.

lyndon johnson

 

The lessons from Project Follow Through are clear: abandoning the Revised Curriculum and returning to traditional approaches to teaching and learning would benefit all of our children, but particularly children from poor backgrounds.  In addition, a great deal of money could be saved if we turned our back on notions like Assessment for Learning (where children are required to mark their own work) and “levels of progression” (which no country on the planet uses).  We could invest more money in our teachers if we weren’t funding what Michael Gove dismissively called “the blob.”

 

Gramsci

 

I am writing now to report something I discovered after the publication of my  Comment piece.  I began to feel even more uneasy about the ILiAD project when I read a paper by one of the project’s authors: Dr Cathal McManus of the School of Education at Queen’s.  In an article which addressed “Protestant working-class underachievement and unionist hegemony” and published in Irish Studies Review he argues that the ideas of Antonio Gramsci offer a superior theoretical lens through which to view the underachievement of Protestant working-class boys, than the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu.

OFMDFMjpg

 

What is curious is that the ILiAD project use Bourdieu for their theoretical lens.  Why wasn’t Gramsci chosen?  His reasoning reinforces the findings of Project Follow Through.  Could Gramsci’s rejection of curricula like the Revised Curriculum, and enthusiasm for traditional approaches to the classroom, explain the curious choice of the ILiAD team?

 

Stephen Elliott

 

Chair, Parental Alliance for Choice in Education

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Bangor Grammar School’s response to fair comment

15 Monday Mar 2010

Posted by paceni in Grammar Schools, Uncategorized

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Bangor Grammar School, C & J Black solicitors Belfast, Freedom of Information Act schools

On the 8th February, 2010 PACE posted a thread highlighting Bangor Grammar School’ s approach to the Freedom of Information Act.

Ten days later a letter from solicitors representing the school was sent to the Chairman.

This correspondence was immediately passed on to PACE’s legal representatives.

Acting upon their legal advice and on the principle of fair comment, debate and free speech and with full reservation of all legal rights PACE now publish the correspondence for the benefit of readers.

N.B. No copy of the PACE Blog was attached as indicated.

To read the entire letter see PACE BGS001

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Anti-selection Catholic principals forced to offer tests

02 Wednesday Sep 2009

Posted by paceni in academic selection, Grammar Schools, Uncategorized

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BBC, Caitriona Ruane, transfer test, unregulated system

A draft post from PACENI  April 20, 2009 is now published.

 In an effort to distract from the continued and unexplained silence on the matter of academic selection to Catholic grammar schools by their fellow principals the Catholic anti-selection group have announced the formation of yet another Catholic education body.

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8008139.stm

The BBC Northern Ireland Education report claims:

“They are forming an association which they say will speak for those whose views have not been adequately heard.”

Nothing could be further fro the truth. The Northern Ireland public have heard nothing but anti-selection rhetoric for years parroted ad nauseum by carefully selected “educationalists”

It is ironic that despite having an unfettered run at delivering their objectives they are no further along than ever. Parents and wider society have grown tired of  their ineffectiveness.

The principals say Caitriona Ruane’s admission criteria make testing unnecessary and no Catholic school should have any problem with them.

Perhaps the 30+ grammar principals should explain their change in approach four months later.

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How to interpret Education Minister Caitriona Ruane’s statements and opinions

08 Monday Dec 2008

Posted by paceni in 11-plus, academic selection, Grammar Schools, Numeracy and Literacy, The Department of Education N.Ireland, Uncategorized

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Bullshit charter, Northern Ireland Education Minister

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth.  Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. … [The bullshitter] does not reject the authority of the truth. … He pays no attention to it at all.  By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are. … Bullshit is unaviodable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.  Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic.  This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled … to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.
 
Harry Frankfurt, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Princeton
Otherwise known as the Bullshitter’ Charter. It appeared in the Belfast Telegraph in response to a serious critique of the Minister’s “vision” for children’s education.
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/caitriona-ruane-why-school-reforms-are-in-interest-of-all-children-14095724.html
Read the common sense comments on her article.

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Teachers’ Union refuses to Teach

21 Tuesday Oct 2008

Posted by paceni in Uncategorized

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expulsion, Movilla High School, suspension, teachers, teaching unions

A teacher’s union, the NASUWT,  has been on strike for a second week over an alleged assault on one of its members. This is remarkable given that there were 272 physical attacks on staff resulting in suspension. Additional figures available for Northern Ireland schools on the DENI website indicate that 5 assualts on teachers resulted in expulsion in the last year.

No figures were available on the number of pupils cautioned, charged or convicted.

Why the inequality in this particular case?

In addition to the accused pupil an additional 540 pupils have been denied their legal right to an education by the union members.

The Education Minister, Caitriona Ruane, asked for a speedy resolution, suggesting a role for the Childrens Commissioner.

http://www.4ni.co.uk/northern_ireland_news.asp?id=83846

The Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children, Patricia Lewsley offered to mediate on the dispute but her intervention and comment

Corporate abuse of children’s rights

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/school-strike-spirals-into-slanging-match-14008176.html

provoked the union into seeking legal advice.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/education/teachers-union-may-take-action-over-comments-14008856.html

The latest news is that the pupil in question is to be charged by the DPP and will appear in court in November.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7682097.stm

No doubt all the PC, hand-wringing, crocodile tear-shedding union representatives will be delighted to pass the buck to the PSNI and DPP

In the meantime 540 pupils are denied their right to an education.

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Exams Chief doesn’t like examination himself

23 Saturday Aug 2008

Posted by paceni in Uncategorized

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11-plus, Add new tag, CCEA, Gavin Boyd

Joining the parade of culprits is none other that the boss of the Education and Skills Authority (ESA) Gavin Boyd. Remember that CCEA, his former employer, are the equivalent of judge, jury and executioner on curriculum and exams matters in Northern Ireland.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/1192926.stm

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