My father commented that the last two posts seemed connected by a common thread. I hadn't consciously designed them that way, but now I'll take up the implicit challenge and spell out the connections.
The posts frame two questions: (1) "Are video cameras good for baseball?" and (2) "Are strict, universal standards good (or possible) for software?" The problem underlying each question is a thorny one: What makes us different from machines?
My negative answer to question (2) stems from the fact that machines do not, as yet, possess any kind of generative, creative capability. They lack the associative intelligence that is critical for bridging separate domains of study; they can only deal with the objects that are directly modeled for them by the programmer, and can't perceive the homologies of structure between different modeling domains. Your checkbook software, for example, can't handle your datebook needs, even though there is a homology of structure between a checkbook entry (time, date, to whom/from whom the payment was made, etc) and a calendar appointment. If your computer had intelligence like you do, it could adapt to your needs by realizing the structural similarity between the different types of data you are giving it. Instead, it has to be programmed individually to respond properly to the requirements of different activities or data structures.
The generative capacity is intimately linked to our faculty of free choice. To sum it up in the language of Sartre, whose Being and Nothingness I've been reading recently, consciousness has being, but yet is not a thing in the same way a table is a thing. Consciousness has the peculiar ability to transcend its factual existence as a thing (a brain) and posit possibilities that it is not (a mind). Our brains are things, organic substances full of fermenting chemistry, but yet our minds are something else: they have the capacity to negate being, to go beyond what is given and make choices. This choice-making ability, the possession of an interior negation, shows up in part in our capacity to generalize from one world-model to another. A mere understanding thing, one which lacked the capacity of negation, could never transcend the factual givens to make a generalizing leap across disparate domains. In other words, without freedom, a thinking computer could not truly think. It would forever be stuck at the level of the models given to it.
What you see with advocates of video review in sports is a wish to correct for human fallibility, to constrain human choice and judgement under the (supposedly) objective eye of a machine. Instant replay does this already in football, which is a sport heavily given over to the machinization of human activity. (This is no coincidence, considering football's allegorical reenactment of military operations.) In football, everyone has their assigned and specialized routine, and orders are given by a team of coaches linked up by headsets; there is very little room for creative action on the field, because all the possibilities have been worked out beforehand and drilled into the players' minds with a set-play handbook. The players are following a script, and the referees are following a script too -- a script that is subject to instant correction at the hands of the video replay unit. It's telling that when a referee goes to review a play, he has to bend over and submerge himself in the black shroud of the replay machine.
While replay is an interruption to football, it is not so directly antagonistic to the spirit of the sport. But in baseball, the disruptiveness of video review arises from the centrality of human choice. The whole core of the game consists in the batter's being given a strictly limited number of opportunities from which he picks a pitch to hit. From this limited three-strikes and four-balls set piece (notwithstanding foul balls) he must find a pitch that is acceptable to him, or strike out. He gets a finite set of chances, and he must choose -- even if he chooses not to choose and strikes out looking. There is an infinity lurking as a possibility in this finite set of choices, which is the possibility that an at-bat may go on forever (the batter can foul off as many pitches as he likes, if he can reach them). This infinity-wrapped-in-finitude mirrors the human condition as an organic (limited, contingent) being which can make free (infinite, undetermined) choices. By introducing an element of mechanical judgement onto the field, this whole beautiful structure of freedom is turned into a machine-operated contest, where the machine's opinion becomes the root and standard of the human activity.
Similarly, with a universalist approach to software standards, you see humans engaged in structure-making that essentially capitulates their thinking human nature to the formal, rigorous nature of machine "thought". Scot's comment to the effect that machines are stupid and so we need to provide them with formally-defined inputs is absolutely correct. But that contention hides the fact that we are lowering our standards to the level of the machine we are supposedly controlling. By adopting and propagating rigid standards we become like the machines we operate, and thereby lose something of what makes us unique as thinking, negating, creatively generative beings.
It's absolutely true that defined standards have utility for programmers. It's much easier to program when you have a framework for how to define your data, organize your code, name your variables, and so on. But this is the same as saying it's easier to be a machine than to be a human being. Computers are limited, stupid, mechanical machines, while humans are free, unlimited animals. It's essential to keep in mind the difference, even as you adopt machine-talk in order better to cope with the limitations of the machine-intelligence.
Posted by Chris at November 14, 2004 05:48 PM