Module 5 - Part 2 - Discussion

By Stephen Downes
Nov 19, 2021
Transcript of Module 5 - Part 2 - Discussion

Unedited audio transcription from Google Recorder

Okay, I've turned on the audio recording now as well. So for the audio recording, and for the video recording because I'll probably trim the front of this, I'm getting better at that. I was having issues with that. This is ethics analytics and the duty of care module what five parts to the discussion.

And I'm really glad we took the time to have the extra week. It gave me some breathing time. Yay. And I guess you guys some breathing tongue and it also allowed me to take the time to explore some of these topics. The way I felt they deserved to be explored which I think is good.

I hope it's good and also I've adjusted a wee bit. I've been putting more links to articles in the newsletter. I had forgotten that I used to do that with my MOOCs and it was always a good idea and I had focused so much on doing these videos that it sort of blinded me to, you know, all the other stuff.

But you know from my own from my own purposes, the the video doing the videos has been really productive. I don't know if they've been as productive for you guys, but they really helped me a lot in my thinking about a lot of the stuff. I've got one more lined up.

It's I'm almost prepared. I'll be doing it right after this session, I'll be recording it. So if you're actually curious, you'll be able to watch that live because I live stream them when I record them, which creates some interesting dynamics, because, of course, I'm live. Streaming them which means basically I'm blurting out the video beginning to end.

I'm not working from a script and not shows, but I am working from the slides and some text that I've compiled ahead of time, which keeps me on track. And again, I don't know how you guys followed the videos, especially from this module. I've been, I've been listening, listening, and or viewing.

Okay, perfect. You know most of them I, you know, sort of I'll go in a certain way and then I gotta do something else and then I'll come back. Yeah, but I find them really interesting. Is that it's almost, I've never taken of course, in philosophy. So, you know, listening and, you know, looking at the videos, certainly towards, you know, the end of, you know, middle of last week.

And then this week I feel like I'm taking a course on philosophy. Yeah, that's okay, right? Yeah, I mean obviously, you know, when the course with ethics in the title it would be kind of surprising if the philosophy didn't come into it. Yeah, so and you know, there was the danger at the beginning of the course.

I think that, oh, it's also technical. And also in a also analytical with all the divisions of all the different applications of ethics. Etc. So this part provides a bit of an antidote to that. I think. Although it would be useful and and, you know, I I think as time goes by, I want to create some some visual aids to some of the stuff, as well.

I mean, I have the videos I have the text, but I don't really know. I, I created for the very first module, a nice graphic with all the applications. I haven't done that with any of the other stuff since then it takes a bit of time to do, but I'd like to do that especially for the philosophy section.

Although, you know, I mean the the point that I'm trying to reach with this philosophy section is that I don't want to say quite this way, but you know the the philosophical approach to ethics is useless. Now, that's a bit strong. But, you know, the the whole approach of philosophy especially, you know, over the last five hundred years and especially recently, but the whole approach to philosophy of rationalizing and applying decision theory of some sort to how we should all select ethical actions.

Is though there were really any real dot in our mind about what class it is, right and wrong. You know, to me, all of that seems misplaced and I think that the discussion of the different ethical theories shows that this certainly does to my mind. I don't know if I'd satisfy another philosopher that it does.

But but that's the whole point. I mean, I'm not in the business of satisfying other philosophers. And that's I think where they get letter stray. They feel that they need to make an argument. That would convince other philosophers but I learned in my study of philosophy you'd never convince other philosophers it'd never works.

And they go into these internal discussions that never end and nothing gets resolved. And you know it's like early in my career early being kind of relative so things like 40 in my 30s, maybe I read something from Robert Nosek on philosophical explanations, which seems to me to be a bit of a better approach and, and it's something I adopted with respect to my own work since then, and that is, you know, I can't argue in favor of my position unless that or the other thing because if you don't believe it, you're not going to be convinced by the argument but I can explain what I'm doing and if I explain what I'm doing it least you can get a sense of what I'm thinking.

All right. And then you make your own your own judgment which you know may or may not be influenced by my explanation is something. I have no real control over and it sort of pointless to to keep trying.

And I think that something like that applies to ethics as well. Although in ethics we're not really in the business of offering explanations properly so-called and and that's part of the difficulty. But I think certainly we're not in the business or shouldn't be in the business of offering arguments probably can't be in the business of opera offering explanations.

And you know, it's this intractable thing. Most people not everybody because there are people who are what's word because it's psychotic or people who have no empathy. Most people though have a sense of ethics. Most people have a sense of right and wrong, whatever that happens to be, we could try to come up with generalizations through some sort of process of descriptive ethics.

But it would be pointless because they're just isn't enough commonality. And ethics, you know, as they show up in individual, people depends so much on the situation and the context and the background, and the knowledge. I've got a nice item from David Weinberger which just came out this week.

It's in my slide show at all be creating right after this session.

Talking about the role machine learning plays, just in understanding the world. But but it's the same thing with ethics and the idea is that I'm to scroll into it so I can find it here. Yeah, so he says you know in the complaint that we don't know how machine learning works.

We also hear that these models do indeed work and machine learning models work because they're actually better at reading the world than we are. And I think that's true. You know, they take into account much more complex phenomena than we ever could. There's one example he has and I'm just paraphrasing here.

He says, you know, a machine learning model. Will say that one thing causes another but it can also catch those contacts and what she can say, one thing causes another only, if another 50 factors are present and if those other 50 factors are present, then the causeful relationship holds and that's the sort of inference, it's about realities.

Pretty much impossible for us to, to draw out and characterize. And so he says and I agree. Well, I'm about to sneeze, it's already. Two. There are some professional video for you, our our encounter with machine learning models. Doesn't deny that there are generalizations laws or principles. I can be indifferent about that but it denies that they are sufficient for understanding what happens in the universe's complexes hours.

And I think all of us true of ethics as well. You know, I, I sometimes paraphrase it as a words are far too blunt and instruments to be applied to the domain of knowledge, they did don't capture, you know, it's like well it's like using a sledgehammer to I'm trying to come up with an acknowledging here.

Yeah using a sludge hammer to pin a poster to the wall. I don't know. It's not much of an example but maybe if I thought about it I can come up with a better one in educational technology. I often say, you know, it's like using a battleship to cross a river, you know, all of, you know again and I think that's true and that's what my investigation leads me to think, but I don't know.

Mark, even quiet. What do you think? Oh, I was just about to jump in found. So again, I'm not educated by that contemporary standards and I agree back at the beginning. I agree with you. I looked at philosophy pretty hard on my own when I was young and I basically agreed, you're saying conclusion.

And I say myself, you know, a lot of years, a study and tons of thousands of dollars that it just isn't useful, but I continue to follow along. So I really enjoyed the video that I was walking this morning, almost got to the end on social contract, skipping through philosophy, you know very well.

I have to say climate together. So what I was about to say is you just made some statements about machine learning and how we can take in more of the universe to reach them. And as a person to manifest decision, not to go and get educated machine learning, has no idea about reality or the audience.

It, it's completely disconnected from it and sitting on a silicon channel. That's why I begin across them because I want to doing a gauge with reality taking materials, applying the energy. Some people call at work. Yeah. And creating things that are useful. So that would be comparing sort of and this is one of my problems in higher education, it's it's disconnecting from reality being based on language and metaphor knowledging.

Similarly, in the bottom line is, it's unrelated to people walking down the street in a in a, you know, a primary way the foundational way which is why it's, you know, skeptically looked at not just in the United States you know, where our culture, particularly has that red. And then I do have to mention my favorite philosopher.

So after 2008, when I was no longer a professional craftsman because all the job disappeared, I went back to my first profession selling books. And so the book I kept on the counter was a book of philosophy. I was very small and I tried to sell it, to many people, small and cheap, and it's called on bullshit by Harry Frankford.

Yeah. And a little bit. I know that that was the key book to next couple of what administrations.

Yeah, that book did have quite an impact. I founded a bit dry personally, it was very good thing. Very highly up but well that's true. I know. It's well, argued. I just I just wish he had written in a moral approachable way, but but I think you know I you know I think you makes some good points are you know you're with the book.

I'm referring to. Yeah. Why don't you summarize it for her? Why? I was going to suggest that the philosopher do it. But what? I'll tell you what? I took away from it. All right, I've missed if I'm missing. He said basically that there are it's a three kinds of utterances.

A true statement of a fact, a false statement of impact or two. Subcategories one is mistaken. And one is by that social path or psychopath imaging earlier, who doesn't care, whether it's true or false, it just gets them working. Yeah. Which I thought was bribe the compliments then and the other side of it is is that an awful lot of academia a lot and awful lot of discussion.

Generally is of that third category. Yes. And, you know, and that's the thing that I think is really important. You know, I had when I was a graduate student, I had some really interesting experiences when famous philosophers would come to visit, but also had some really disappointing ones. And the disappointing ones I thought were the ones that treated philosophy as a game and what they were doing is just saying, whatever.

They thought they could get away with saying. I thought that David Kay Lewis was one of those. One of his papers, for example, is the ontology of holes, okay. Maybe there's an interesting question there. I mean, it's the old sealed standard, right? How many holes does a straw? Have, you know, and you might think, well, it has two one at each and, but of course, it's one continuous hole, or maybe the reason to hold in a straw at all, or maybe if you slice, it vertically, there's an infinite number of hole, okay?

But it's not a real problem. And another one by felt was like, that was Jerry Foder and Jerry Folder advanced. The idea that we have a fully developed language of thought already in our mind, pre-born ready to go and all the words and all the concepts that we're going to use in our life and all the grammatical rules.

Everything already exists in our head pre-born and then we you know, the process of learning them really is just stripping away all the craft around them and allowing them to emerge, which I think is complete nonsense because I am pretty sure I wasn't born with say the idea of radar in my head or the idea of excel planets in my head, but voters, various and natural extension of Chomsky's theory that there's a manatee grammar in our head.

A Chomsky meant it seriously, but photo was just playing, I mean, yeah. So, these things I think would be categorized as Frankford's bullshit. But of course we've seen, as you mentioned, working wider society. This elevated to a high art form by some of our politicians.

And that's when it becomes an ethical issue, too. I think I think, you know, I mean, the people who are doing it think, well, you know, it's a game and it's just what I can get away with what levers I can pull, how much leverage I have, what I can get out of that.

And this is, this is the problem challenge idea that I've been struggling with in return to higher education. Is it seems that each silo or the older discipline is being played as a game of? And that it seems to me from the outside little knife on the outside and I'm actually enrolled in the university.

It's seems that the primary purpose is the preservation of the institution and that the primary subject is creating more teachers and ministers. Then secondary is now it's become a job training center for corporations. I'm old enough to remember corporations turning their own people. Yeah, you know and not that old I mean I'm old but I'm not that you know I'm not like 800 years old.

I mean, like a few decades ago, you could go into the mailroom or yeah, packaging. And you could end up if not the president of the company, you could end up a vice president or something. A strictly through internal to me and now you can't submit an application without a refugee, and I don't have you back here.

So basically I can't apply for them yet. And I think that's a problem especially when seven percent of the people who live here, don't have the best recipes. So what is going on? So there's that and then before I forget, I did want to pick a knit to you describe Hutchinson as Irish, but he was actually also Scott and then you didn't define Adam Smith or David here as Scottish and so I really like to point out against the Scotts, but created this world, that's not necessarily good thing but but it's kind of true.

So that's another one of my teams I'm working on because there's this term scotch and which is fine, feeling economically, and kind of culturally these days and the United States Scotch to be in our end in the rest of the Americans means to be disappeared as a term. Most often, you know, just being culturally obvious disappeared in yet.

I haven't heard that here. Oh, you haven't don't. That's what when, when you picked up off the streets, thrown in a little more band and dropped out of the helicopter, which is something prohibited, not not that long ago, that's called disappeared disappeared. I've heard of. Yeah. So you know, now it's spreading from a physical fact and cultural that and you know cancel culture can use party cancel because disappearing them here.

But again, on this silicon platform that the carbon based hand. So, yeah, I'm not gonna delve into the politics of ulcer scotch all. I'll just point out that my own background is Irish pretty Irish with a little bit of English mixed in because that's the history of the Irish.

But yeah, I mean human Smith definitely part of the Scottish enlightenment. No question about it. I think I actually use the words Scottish and latent and my most recent video, but I'm not positive. It's I know I've used it recently. So yeah, there is a recognition there that that they are Scottish but into me, you know, the reason I bringed up this hour of cultures I think I can say our cultures or culture, you know, was heavily things.

Let's say, yeah. Originally through the Scottish enlightenment and it's completely forgotten. I think I mentioned, another family talking Steven that there are no scattered studies in the United States. Yeah, you mentioned, yeah, I'm not seems odd to me personally and, you know, and I start going to conferences meeting people institutions and I started thinking like, you know, in the markets and looking across all of North America, there's only been Simon Fraser so that just seems odd to me.

You know, the foundation of your culture and nobody's explicitly starting. It's interesting because where I live here in Canada. I'm just on the fringes of an area known as Glengarry so Glengary County, which is part of a larger county now, which is deeply Scottish. It's got towns, like Alexandria and Maxville, and Don Vegan and others.

They have the Highland Games every year. And, you know, the the water tower for Maxville actually has a tart in on it. So there's a very strong Scottish presence. Very close to where I live but of course the town where I live or village more accurately. It's about 60% Franco.

Ontarian. So, it's interesting. I, you know, I literally live right on this dividing line between cultures such that, you know, I can move between several cultures just by taking a bike ride and I personally like that, you know, I like the idea that we have these, these different cultures that we can identify, you know, reasonably clearly and trace their influence to and you know, anyone who studies philosophy.

I think to any depth at all is going to see the influence of of multiple cultures on our society through history, you know, and and we think typically of the you know the angle of sex and kinds of cultures. But I'll also there are other the Norwegian cultures of the Danish cultures which are huge in England, but as well everything from Buddhism to Indian philosophy to these days Ubuntu and other kinds of philosophies coming into the mix as well.

And I think that's a good thing. A personally, you know, and I think it's worth looking at the influence of each of these cultures individually. And I also think it's interesting looking at how they interact and and, and how they, you know, work together in different environments. But again, that's where additionally, like, ethics becomes really difficult because each one of these cultures brings with its own tradition of what's valued, what our virtues, how society should be organized, what principles, constitute fairness, etc?

You know, and I think we can come to the idea that we have some something like a common system of ethics. Only if we only, if we never look outside our own particular culture that I see again, no one written California and it's from New Mexico and the state.

You know, that's pretty equally divided between maintenance. What is called? Well, Richard Nixon actually invented the turn to Spanish so what was called? Mexico's America and then Anglos. Yeah, so I just I've grown up in a multicultural situation between Los Angeles and there man. And actually, Charles Taylor is the next philosopher on the bookshelf, but it's actually more than doorstep.

Oh, but so I'm I don't know about your, you know, the next video. But it seems that we need a meta at this, right? Just the rules of how these multiple ethics, can engage on violence, are politically, right? You know, so because it's interesting looking all these technical systems and I, the more I look at them, the more I see that my ethics are just this bend diagram of my literal settler weapons, home studies, and the Los Angeles, public school system.

I need to start, you know, very weird ethics. I have, you know, mostly individualistic, but then I was insulting that you brought them over terrains and often left out of these decision. Oh, it'd be a responsible not to mention it. I think it's like, don't talk about that even though, you know, we have even feel more anywhere, you know.

It's, you know, so this whole thing is so fraught and that's what this, you know, that's been my experience this course, right? It's just like there's so many ethical systems and they're all you know rigged or how it whatever granted you know whatever to the to the advantage of the people writing the system that you know, here we are.

One thing that this conversation is is kind of triggering in my mind is that one of the areas that been built up at least in Canada. Probably, in the US as well. Has been the whole area of indigenous or first nations thought, etc, etc. So, Steven have you looked at any of the philosophy that it that comes from our first nation?

I have sure there are lots because I can't really say first nations for everybody. Yeah. And and that actually when we move into the philosophy of care will actually talk about that to some degree, you know? I mean, there's there's the if you are traditional philosophy of care. But yeah there I mean there are indigenous ways of knowing and indigenous ways of thinking about ethics.

For example, two ways seeing is such a phenomenon. I mean in Canada, of course is well, we have, you know, words like two spirit, which I don't think are present outside of Canada. And that's again, an indigenous concept. And I think indigenous ways of knowing create challenges. Because it I've done so tempted to just say because they're wrong, but which is a terrible thing to say and of course, goes against everything else I've been saying in this course.

So I'm not going to say that they're wrong but they're certainly not the way that I see the world. And and the question is, how do you accommodate that? Accommodate? Even is the wrong word. I mean how do you value and embrace that perhaps is a better way of putting it.

And the important thing is here is that we need to. But, you know, it's like, how do you value and embrace Christianity without becoming a Christian? How do you value and embrace indigenous spirituality, without adopting indigenous spirituality? It's a hard question, particularly when both of those exist side by side in your own community and and are being expressed by people in the community.

And then, on top of that, there is the long history in this country of racist practices, including the effort to exterminate the indigenous cultures in this country through the use of such devices as oppressive laws and residential schools, etc. You know, the it's and even now it's difficult for people to accept that how could we as an ethical people actually have tried to do that and and you know you reach inevitable conclusion how big it wasn't really very ethical to try to do that.

The other thing though, is none of the people who shouldn't say that I was going to say none of the people who tried to do that are still with us, but that's not true either. It's, you know. Yeah, I actually taught when I was working first nations communities in Alberta, I actually taught people who had grown up in residential schools and and in some of the cases.

Ironically, and interestingly, we were back in the same residential school. What is there? Had been forcibly? Put and it's, so there's kind of an odd experience. And yeah, and and for example, when I was teaching at the residential school just outside Saint Paul, I was working with blue quills in the they, at first because it was some distance from Edmonton.

I would go stay overnight and then teach in the morning and they suggest, well, why don't you stay at the school? We've got, you know, the oldies rooms you can stay in and people talked about, you know, but you know, you're gonna have to confront the spirits of all the dead people that are there and in the end.

I stated a motel in Saint Paul mostly because I wanted coffee in there, wasn't coffee and I still have a big coffee carafe. The students bought me because there were no services at all at this residential school, where everybody had to come from me to teach philosophy to them.

Yeah. And I didn't take seriously, you know, this whole idea of that, you know, there were spirits in the attic of this school, but maybe I should have taken it more seriously. Given what we now know about the body's buried outside, but, you know, it's interesting to me because even while I was there, I knew about the residential school system.

Now, this was in the would have been in the 1980s early 1990s that I was doing this. So, you know, it's just after the residential schools, basically shut down and we're being repurposed. And for the most part, there's a big empty shells of buildings that people are trying to find other uses for.

So I knew about that. But and I knew about the impact because they told me about the impact and this one of the things we talked about in these classes but, you know, you know, in an important way I didn't know about the impact either. So, you know, it's one thing and this is, you know, I actually am answering your question.

You know it's one thing to sit there and take if you will a rationalist perspective about indigenous ways of knowing and others such things and to interpret all of that literally. And the sense that these are statements that have truth values. These are statements that have some answer to imports if and only if they correspond exactly to states of affairs in the world or even these are statements that make sense only.

If they can be interpreted as principles of conduct in my metaphysics talk. All I refer to the movie tracks, which is an Australian film about a woman who learns, how to manage camels. And then walks with her camels, across the Australian outback and comes into interaction with aboriginal people from Aboriginal's ways of living, including some of the principles.

Like, for example, women don't handle the knife and you think of others, if you just think about as an ethical principle, it seems like really wrong. But if you think of it, as a reflection of the culture and the way of life, you know, as something that can and should be literally applied, in particular circumstances, especially on, aboriginal lands with aboriginal people.

And then it begins to make more sense and particularly when you tie it to this context, not just of the historical cultural values, but the lived experience that they have right now in the case of Australia with, you know, the challenges to their culture and their land, and the people and the history of disease and in Canada, the history of residential schools.

And the attempt to, essentially eradicate, the culture, all of that forms part of the truth of one of these statements. But again, it's not a true false kind of thing. And, you know, in my own thinking about statements. Generally I can't actually convince myself that there's such a thing as truth or literal truth or falsity of statements and rather.

I you know I mean if I'm forced to define what I mean by that, I would define it as, you know, the degree to, which I can't not think of that statement or something like that, right? It's just, you know, it's a statement about me not a statement about the nature of the world and and so indigenous knowledge is a statement about them.

But also a statement about me with respect to my relationship with them. And now I'm on the way to something, you know, that now, I'm on the way to being able to say, well, okay, here are these people who literally believe that there are spirits in the attic. Possibly those of the children who died while at residential school, except it doesn't make sense to say that they literally believe it even if they actually do, literally believe it.

Because that's not the right way to understand it. And that's how you have these the different ways of seeing the world, these different ways of understanding the world. And yeah, on the one hand, if and this is important, if you come from the logical, analytical tradition which by the way I did, then it really sounds like a lot of handwaving.

And and you know, I really amself critical about I handwaving I don't want to handwave. I want to be precise in what I say and the exact and how I express it, but on the other hand, words are too blunt and instrument to express it else like Michael Polanya, used to talk about tacit knowledge and the essence of tacit knowledge is that.

It is literally ineffable. It cannot be expressed in words. And you know, how do you assess the truth or false to be a proposition? That cannot be expressed in words but that's the reality of indigenous knowledge. And that's what takes me back to that. Bit about David Weinberger and talking about machine learning and about it being way too complex, you know, it works.

But it's way too complex. If you think as as I think that there is a commonality between human learning and machine learning that a lot of the is are the same. Then those statements applied to what we know is well as to what machines know, we can know things without being able to say how we know these things or what justifies, what we know.

I think the evidence of that is the fact that we do that and one of the instances in which we do, that is ethics, where we know things. But the 2500 year old project to explain what it is that we know and why it is that we know it has been to my mind and utter failure and the evidence of that is the fact that it's so hard for our culture to comprehend what's going on in indigenous indigenous knowledge.

Because if this undeniably knowledge open, but that's my take on that. This reminds me of the person that I found most helpful when you're in these conundrums who was known a philosopher but was a scientist. So he's rapid was John C, Willey who said that? Whatever you believe to be true.

Is true within the certain limits to be tested experimentally and verified. And it seemed to me that indigent. And also, I have to say that the certain indigenous cultures because there's not longs certain individuals culture has been a fascinating mind. I can say, literally since I was five years old and as of my travels to New Mexico.

And so I had spent any morning amount of time and I've come and saying completely you have, it's don't get it. Yeah, but under John C, Willey's theory. They have theorized these principal problem, ethical principles and they've tested them repeatedly and they constructed system. Now, we would say that a test learned qualifiable I guess.

With either first thing, you would reach for as rational investment, but there's no denying that they tested their beliefs and retaining, the ones they found most useful.

And I just had, I stumbled on a quest in this week because of my work looking first or Scottish studies and working the last studies which was also a very majority. The population there's no study of their culture ethics that I can find, it's bigger in the United Kingdom, they recognize the classes and study them but the US registered on their classes.

So, you know, so we have this one period class which I did, you know, we used appointments middle class but then we economically eliminated them. So right, so I did. So I came to this question this week because of my struggles entire education are all education institutions residential schools in the, you know, you can't say I mean we treat them as if they're too separate.

And but they're not, they came out of the same church at the same time in the same place so that was, that's my question. Yeah. So this week you know, are all schools residential schools and to bring it back to this course. That's what so attractive about connectivism as it's not institutionalized and it may rely a little too heavily on individual agency, but at the same time it's reaching for overtly it's reaching for this sharing of knowledge and building new knowledge, lack of human or I don't know which all which abandoned the United States and it begins with calm.

You can't say it in the United States and that includes commonwealth. So so I use a word commonwealth. Yeah, that's why. That's my American out. Yeah, you could also use the word leviathan and just confuse your commentators and you might mean more or less the same thing. Just so another reason I banded, phil is nobody in America characters.

Well, and again, I'm I'm really hesitant to to classify all of America in in a, in a single statement. I mean, you know, I mean, it's it's the same country, the same country that has Barack Obama has Florida, man, you know, there's such a wide variety, the culture that you describe, for example, certainly is a culture.

I don't know if it's a majority culture or not. I mean, there are huge other cultures and the US, the whole silicon valley, culture is a culture, the, the Pacific Northwest thing, whatever they've got going on up there. It's it's something again different you know and and the US is interesting in the sense that is got these cultural islands that out of the cities and each city is its own thing.

And then, you know, the rural hinterland which is a distinct and there's a very distinct rural culture as compared to the urban culture and then there's the urban core nearby. Pardon also. Yeah. But but not so. And that's probably true of most countries. I mean, Canada is well has this urban world, divide England has London and then everything else and then Scotland, and then also, which is its own thing, you know?

And and Europe, all Europe. All right, talk about multicultural and, you know, we go to India with its hundreds of individual languages, we depict as a monoculture. But, you know, there are attentions between mandarin and cantonese. And then, of course, there's the Tibetans the weagers amongolians and also in China, there's very much an urban rural split.

It's totally different in Beijing which is a modern as modern and industrial cities. You can get, it's incredible. But outside Beijing you know looks like being outside the city in North America is a very different environment and I could go on. Right. So how does connectivism help us to draw these knowledges yet?

That's, I guess. So yeah, so if I had to say it this way, you know, because you know I think like first of all, I think of culture as an emergent property rather than a thing in and of itself, that's the rationalist me speaking. And you know, when we talk about things like Ubuntu and relatedness and all of that, you know, I want actual causal mechanisms, I'm picky that way and and again all that a cultural bias but that's part of what I think connectivism is which is why I define a connection as a link between two entities, such that a change of state.

In one of the entities can result in a change of state and the other entity, right? So you have these networks of interrelated people and and we can, you know, we we can also talk about the artifacts created by people, you know, the the contents they create the concepts, they exchange, however we want to define this and there are different ways of defining it each way of defining, it gives us a different network.

As long as we have that causal connection between them so that the change of stage can propagate. That's the basic understanding that I have, right? That's how I think brains work. That's how I think societies work that's how I think that. Connectionist neural network systems work right? There are these connected individuals and you can say, well, you shouldn't look at it at that level, but I think then that we take concepts like culture and for that matter, concepts like ethics or to follow a David Hume kind of approach concepts like causing effect.

It's all very circular right. These are what are called emergent properties of this network of connections. And what that is, is a property of the network that exists as a result of the way, the network is organized and operating. So, and the idea of an emerging property is that it's not the same as one of the, you know, it's not the same as a property in one of the individual entities, right?

It's not simply one of their properties large. It's something that exists over and above it, but it's existence is kind of different in that it exists only if it is perceived or recognized by another neural network, using the first neural, network input. So cultures are emergent properties but cultures exist as things in and of themselves, only to the extent that they are recognized as being cultured by a perceiver.

For example, a person who's studies cultures similarly with ethics, right? Ethics are emergent properties of the interaction of these entities in the network, all of these related entities. But the really only recognized as entities by people who perceive them. And, you know, if we had this a what they are, they are patterns of phenomena in these networks.

And so, what we're doing when we look at these networks is we're looking at these patterns, but what are these patterns, what makes something a pattern only that it is recognized as a pattern? It's not a mathematical property. It's not you know, an external property. It's not intrinsic to the network itself.

It's just perceived as what, but that doesn't mean they don't have causal force. They certainly do if you recognize a pattern in phenomena and respond to it. Then that pattern is that causal force and you need to tell this story. But so that's how this all to me all ties together.

So is the technology and the ethics or rules of the interaction is that determine the, I mean, is that why we would want to dominate the production of the technology or dominate the rules making? Because it's the tournament of the outcome. Well, it's influences the outcome, but it's, you know, I mean, you're trying to get back to simple principles of motivation and probably everybody, who's involved in trying to dominate, others has their own very complex, individual story.

You know, that's one of the things about Donald Trump, right. Donald Trump is completely unique and and we see that and we think, oh man weird, but every human is completely unique. It's just we see it. So clearly in Donald Trump, you know, but I mean a way of putting this, but I think it's relevant to a lot of what's happening today, is that, you know, there are competing ways of recognizing patterns and phenomena.

There are, for example, ways of looking at the interactions of people in the world, where you can say, there is such and such a culture, there are such and such a culture, there is such and such a culture and other ways that you say, well, here's a culture, here's a culture, but that one doesn't really exist.

All right? And that's where you get your conflict. Now beginning to happen, you know, do you recognize something as a culture, do you recognize it? You know, and you thoughts as a valid ethic, do you recognize indigenous ways of knowledge as knowledge, right? It's it's a recognition thing and because it's recognition, you know, we can trace it down to fact, but we can trace all of these recognitions down to facts and there's none of them that has any particular inherent truth or value or strength or whatever over the others.

And so for me ethics is a question of how do these things? How can all of these things interplay together but that's a much harder problem. So, this connectivism recognized groups or is connectivism only relevant to individuals Connectivism hits that. Sweet. Halfway point between groups and individuals. So there are groups, there are individuals but are typical understanding of them as undifferentiated entities in and of themselves is mistaken.

And there's no individual that isn't embedded in and completely dependent upon the network. And there's there's no group that is completely self-sufficient over and above an independent of its individual entities, that compose it, you know, both individuals and groups are ways of recognizing aspects of the patterns in the network.

So the patterns of perception would would you consider a technology and entity or robots? Yeah. Would you consider that and entity in a network? It could be. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, why not? Right? Does it satisfy the conditions? Right? There's a change of state in it, resulting in a change of state and something else say another robot or a person or, you know, a hydro plant.

Yeah. Sure. Of course, you know is it a self aware entity? Well, that's a completely different question. But sure. Of course, it can be an entity in a network. A power plant can be an entity and how work you know, no problem with that. Oh, no, you're not very complex networks but they don't have to be complex, to be networks.

It's just that, you know, the the complexity of the phenomena that can be recognized then in these networks is more limited. That's all. So that leads me back to the waiting of connections and because the robots are built by groups that are made up of individuals, but typical then a culture.

And so if we can wait these communities it might be helpful to point out that the artificial intelligence was created within this area in this culture and that would be a seems to me a way to judge is not the right word analyze our idea. But anyway recognize. Yeah, mmm recognize see, perceived detect.

Yeah. And and waits can be in our used amount way and and one of the things that I did actually this week because I had a little more time. So, I went back to Matthias Melcher's charts, and developed way to put weight in all of the links. So now we can have thick links and thin links depending on the weights.

And also the nodes that was a little bit of fun, but the idea is now I take that back to, you know, all of these graph inputs. So that developed for the course and now what I'll be able to do is, you know, look at talked about before, take one of these grids, put it up on Twitter, how people reply and then be able to wait the corres in connections that are created between all the entities and then draw the graph with thick lines or thin lines depending on the weight and then we just look at it.

We see right? And that's what I mean by emergent phenomena, right? We look at this chart and we just see, oh yeah I can see this flow this movement or this cluster or whatever.

So what next week we begin to look at some of these ideas and I think we look at them in their their messy formulation as what has come to be called the duty of care. But but it's it's a formulation that that, you know. It's it goes beyond just the pedagogy if of care or the epistemology of care as expressed by the feminist theories, but it looks at that kind of concept more broadly.

Something that is more relational. Something is not rationally defined or not does not describe using, the typical language of rationality, which makes it really fuzzy and unheard to get our hands on. But, but at the same time, when we look at this, we can see that. Oh yeah. No, they are.

Actually, they're on to something there and it's something that's feeding back in, and this is simply matter of observation, it is something that's feeding back into the ethics of artificial intelligence, but what it is and how it's feeding back in is, is an interesting question. So, I hope you're looking forward to that.

I know I am. So I got to go because I have to record another video which will start prominent about 10 or 15 minutes. So if you're if you're curious that it'll it'll just be on my on my YouTube channel. Are you both able to find my YouTube channel?

Okay, good because that's where it'll be. And so you'll see that me wrapping up some of that discussion. You'll probably see echoes of this discussion in that video and and then I get into a car drive to Montreal and go watch a football game. So that's my weekend, maybe in football.

Yeah. Also known as real football. All right man. So okay talk to you all later. Yeah, that was a good weekend. Thanks, I will, bye. Yeah me too, although they're in the last place and out of the playoffs, you know, you can only hope for so much by everyone.

But the kitchen.

Even.

Been.

To be.

Good kitties

Force:yes