Kantian Robotics:
Building a Robot to Understand Kant’s
Transcendental Turn
The Second Asia-Pacific Computing and
Philosophy Conference, AP-CAP 2005
January 7 - 9, 2005,
Novotel Hotel, Siam Square, Bangkok, Thailand
4/10/2015
©Lawrence M. Hinman
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Overview
• Understanding the
Transcendental Turn
• Building the Robot
• Transcendental Aesthetic:
space and time
• Transcendental Analytic:
categories of the
understanding
• Conclusion
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Understanding the Transcendental Turn
• Kant tries to demonstrate that there are certain
structures of the mind that are necessary
conditions of the possibility of any human
experience whatsoever.
• The challenge: to help students to understand the
way in which these are prior to experience and
constitutive of all possible experiences.
• They are subjective (coming from the subject) and
objective (conditions of the possibility of any
objects whatsoever).
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©Lawrence M. Hinman
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The Copernican Revolution
and the Transcendental Turn
• Copernicus: from geocentric to heliocentric
view of the cosmos
• Kant:
• To see that the motion that apparently is coming
from the sun is actually coming from the rotation
of the earth
• More generally: some things that seem to belong
to the object are actually coming from the subject.
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The Ptolemaic Cosmos
In Ptolemy’s worldview,
the earth is the center
of the universe and
everything else
(including the sun)
revolves around it.
This put human beings
at the center of the
cosmos.
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The Copernican Universe
In Copernicus’ view
of the cosmos, the
sun becomes the
center of the universe
and the planets
revolve around it in a
way roughly
equivalent to our
contemporary view.
Human beings are no longer at the center of the cosmos, and this is the
standard interpretation of the Copernican Revolution.
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©Lawrence M. Hinman
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Kant’s Copernican Universe
Kant’s crucial insight
was that he
understood that the
movement that
appeared to be in the
sun actually came
from the earth’s
rotation.
This led to Kant’s crucial insight that motion and other
characteristics that appear to be in the object may actually
becoming from the perceiving subject.
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©Lawrence M. Hinman
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The Assignment
Class assignment:
• build a robot—whom we will call
“Immanuel”--that moves around an area and
collects information, a more primitive version
of the unmanned Rovers that explore the
moon’s surface.
• Immanuel does not have to manipulate its
environment.
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Building the Robot
• Imagine a computer without a
keyboard, screen, mouse, printer or
network connection. Nothing could go
in or out
• Epistemological solipsism
• Psychological autism
• The issue: getting data in and out:
• First critique: the input problem
• Second critique: the output problem
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Sensing the Environment
• Immanuel must have some way of sensing his
external environment.
• Begin with a typically human mode of sensing
that environment: vision.
• Let’s begin to construct Immanuel’s I/O
system by adding a camera
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Incoming data
The key to understanding Kant is to understand how much the
mind has to add to the above photos in advance (that is, a
priori) if they are to be meaningful.
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Adding temporal/date tags
The first step in this process is to assign some kind of time stamp to these images. At the
very least, a sequential (“before” and “after”) stamp; ultimately, as Immanuel gets more
perceptions and eventually has to communicate with others (David, Georg, Gottfried,
Johann, and others), he has to stamp these in a way that has intersubjective validity.
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Spatial Tags
Each image has to
be tagged for
spatial location.
The location tagging will vary in level of sophistication, depending on whether
Immanuel is mobile and whether he has to communicate with others.
The simplest schema is where Immanuel is not mobile, but the fixed center of his
universe.
If Immanuel can move, the there must be some scale of spatial reference (here the
issue of absolute space lurks in the background) in which objects can be located
in some objective (i.e., not Immanuel-relative) way.
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Categories of the Understanding
• Incoming data are in fact much less coherent than
the everyday pictures suggest.
• In fact, we have given this computer data much more
coherence than its original format—ultimately, a
series of ones and zeros—would suggest.
• The important point, both pedagogically and
philosophically, for students to realize is how
incredibly raw this incoming visual data actually is.
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Incoming data, 1
Incoming visual
data might
initially look
like this.
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Incoming data, 2
Then as the categories of
the understanding are
applied to it, it starts to look
more like this….
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Incoming data, 3
…and then like this.
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Kant, Helmholtz, and Seurat
Interestingly, Seurat’s painting
technique (called “pointilism”)
comes directly from Kant via
Helmholtz, who elaborated Kant’s
ideas for physics and optics.
Seurat wanted to mix the colors optically in the
viewer’s eyes rather than physically on the canvas
in order to make them more vibrant.
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A nutty problem
The challenge is to recognize the
same object AS the same despite
changing perspectives.
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The Concept of a Physical Object
• The first step in in process of making sense of this
incoming data—William James’ “blooming,
buzzing confusion”—is to organize it in terms of
discrete objects.
• The Kantian point is that the concept of a physical
object is not something that we derive from
experience—à la Hume—but something that we
have to impose in advance to make any sense out
of this incoming sense data.
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Noumenal-Phenomenal World
The thing-in-itself
Unknowable
Possible realm of freedom
Morality
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The thing-as known
Structured by human understanding
Domain of scientific knowledge
Cause-and-effect
©Lawrence M. Hinman
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Kant and Nietzsche
• Building the robot helps us to see a principal point of which
Kant and Nietzsche diverge.
• Both Kant and Nietzsche would agree that incoming sense
experience is a series of radically different data.
• Kant says that sameness and objectivity come from the
necessary structures that the mind imposes on experience,
the a priori forms of intuition and the categories of the
understanding.
• Nietzsche claims that the continuity we appear to find in
experience is fundamentally a metaphor, carrying over one
thing onto another that
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©Lawrence M. Hinman
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Conclusion
Two unresolved questions:
• Kant’s challenge: if you were in the position
of the robot, how could you figure out the
necessary limits of your own ability to know?
• The second critique: if such a robot could act
freely, what laws should constrain its actions?
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