Today, the national college entrance examination officially kicked off, and 10.78 million candidates rushed to the examination room. Not surprisingly, Chinese composition is still the most concerned topic on the first day of the college entrance examination. After the titles of the college entrance examination essays were successively revealed, the "can be and have a future" in the national volume A and the "people" character comic theme essays in the second volume of the national new college entrance examination have become the focus of everyone's hot discussion.
College entrance examination language and college entrance examination essays quickly became hot search topics on Weibo.
As a question in the language examination paper, the text of the college entrance examination is intended to examine the students' language accumulation and logical expression ability. However, looking back at the public opinion scene of the college entrance examination in previous years, chinese composition has invariably become the absolute star of all the high examination questions, from authoritative institutions, education experts to neighbors, everyone must comment on the topic, and the college entrance examination essay question has become a big test for the whole society.
Why can college entrance examination essays always become a hot topic of public discussion again and again? When we talk about college entrance examination essays, what are we still paying attention to? Why do college entrance examination essay questions often have a strong speculative color?
After the end of the first examination of the college entrance examination, the Beijing News reporter interviewed Xu Yingjin, a professor at the School of Philosophy of Fudan University, for the first time, and invited him to talk about his views on the composition topics of the 2021 college entrance examination from a philosophical point of view.
In Xu Yingjin's view, the current college entrance examination essay questions often appear in the form of philosophical images or metaphors, philosophy and language expression are very closely related, and a person's language ability determines the basis of learning philosophy to a certain extent. At the same time, in the process of practicing writing, we should also learn how to combine the common sense of our own lives to refine philosophy.
Written | Liu Yaguang
When it comes to philosophy, people often think that it and everyday life are two extremes. The former is full of a large number of complex and obscure theories, which contrast strongly with the vivid trivialities of the latter. When it comes to philosophers, most people may think of the serious image of Kant who lives in isolation, does not smile, and always paces back and forth with his hands behind his back.
Talking to Xu Yingjin will not give people this feeling at all. He is a professor at the School of Philosophy at Fudan University, where he specializes in the unfathomable philosophical science of "artificial intelligence philosophy", and in his spare time, he writes a historical novel based on the theme of the Three Kingdoms. From Nazi Blitzkrieg to Tolstoy's novels, history and literature often became unique resources for his philosophical thinking. He also appeared on podcasts, talking about hit films and television such as "White Tower" on the popular "Left and Right".
Yingjin Xu is a professor at the School of Philosophy of Fudan University and a doctoral supervisor. His research interests include Anglo-American analytic philosophy and artificial intelligence philosophy. He is the author of Mind, Language, and Machine: A Dialogue between Wittgenstein's Philosophy and the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, and Philosophy of Use.
In the newly published book "Philosophy that Can Be Used", Xu Yingjin wrote: "Philosophers should improve their sense of common sense, and this is not done by reading philosophical papers, but by reading many books of a non-philosophical nature, such as geography, meteorology, natural science, especially books on history and literature, to expand their horizons." In this book, he tries to connect abstract philosophical knowledge with concrete scenes of daily life, and write a kind of philosophical book with a sense of common sense.
This attempt will bring the reader a fresh feeling, but it will naturally also have to face the tension between philosophy and daily life. How can Spinoza's mind-body monotheism help you look at corporate culture? How to use the theory of gymphs to oppose various brainwashing techniques? How does Wittgenstein's opposition to private language inspire us to look at love in everyday life? Using a philosophical perspective to reflect on the learning in daily life and connect two seemingly incompatible fields will certainly make people feel open-minded, but it is also inevitable to encounter questions about whether to "misinterpret philosophy".
In Xu Yingjin's view, for the popularization of philosophy science, fish and bear paws are difficult to get at the same time, the popularization and popularization of philosophy must face a certain simplification, as a professional scholar, he can only try his best to express accurately, but the most important thing is whether the reader can harvest reflection on his life from it.
One of Socrates' famous sayings is often used as a philosophical endorsement: a life without reflection is not worth living. Reflection, perhaps the fate of modern life, as sociologist Anthony Giddens pointed out, in a society where risks and complexity are increasing dramatically, everyone needs to orient themselves through continuous reflection and make choices for their own lives. Perhaps because of this, college entrance examination essays on philosophical topics can trigger a wide range of social discussions, and cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence and gene editing, which involve ethical thinking, have provoked endless debates. Philosophy, though it may seem far from life, is a reflective impulse lurking in our hearts.
Philosophy that can be used, by Xu Yingjin, Ideal Country | Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore, May 2021 edition.
Most of the college entrance examination essay questions are philosophical metaphors,
Figuring out the intention of the question is crucial
Beijing News: In the topics of this year's college entrance examination, including the national volume, Tianjin volume, Zhejiang volume and other essay questions, some topics of great philosophical significance are discussed. How do you evaluate these topics? What's your favorite question?
Xu Yingjin: I think that when candidates write these more speculative questions, they should pay attention to choosing concrete examples, especially examples that they are interested in and have understanding. For example, on the basis of echoing the materials, I think we can clarify this philosophical principle from a historical point of view, for example, we can think of Chairman Mao's "On Protracted War", which is actually a good example of how to explain "can" -- how to give play to the advantages of our Chinese nation in war according to specific situations.
The material of the national volume B tells the metaphor of Yang Xiong's description of archery. In fact, archery has always been a very important metaphor in Confucian philosophy. Not only Chinese Confucian scholars, but also Ernst Sousa, as an American philosopher, his theory of moral knowledge is actually a model of archery as a metaphor. Archery itself requires repeated training, but also requires enough skills and methods. This is very similar to life, the cultivation of basic skills, the study of basic knowledge and values of various disciplines of human beings, and the wisdom of choosing a life path need to be combined. In fact, not only archery, I think this question can also be written in passing about the "six arts" other than the Confucian emphasis on "shooting". For example, life may also need coordination skills, team writing, which is the art of "royalty".
Ernest Sosa (1940-), a contemporary American philosopher, advocates the theory of moral epistemology, which is quite similar to the traditional Confucian theory of virtue.
Chairman Mao's words given to the I volume of the national new college entrance examination are also of great philosophical significance. On the surface, it is talking about a sports issue, but in essence, it is to say that everyone's innate conditions and foundations are different, and we need to use our own characteristics according to our own understanding. Some people may have a better body, but if they do not know how to use the "strong" of their body, they may become weak. Some people bully the weak because they have the strength, but eventually become the weak who are bullied. Here I also think that some examples of martial arts movies can be given, such as "Huo Yuanjia". In short, it is better to write such speculative topics in combination with the situation and common sense of your own life.
Personally, I prefer a few questions about "time", such as the Tianjin volume, which is very interesting about the anniversary. If the candidate's foundation is relatively good, you can talk about the understanding of time by philosophers such as Augustine. Man is the animal of history, and the day of remembrance is to help us resist the forgetting of the past. If you have spare energy, you can also write about the "ritual", which is also an important part of the anniversary.
Beijing News: Not only this year, but in recent years, the composition propositions of the college entrance examination have often appeared in this kind of speculative topic. Do you think this is a propositional trend? How to see the idea of this proposition?
Xu Yingjin: The philosophy essay questions of the French college entrance examination, such as directly asking you whether fairness is first or efficiency is preferred, are very similar to the debate questions of the debate competition. Our topics are speculative in relation to them, but the debate is relatively mild. And there are many times the direction of discussion also has some restrictions, such as this comic topic in the second volume of this year's college entrance examination, which is indeed very philosophical, but I think that the induction in thinking is still a little stronger, the comic itself is not enough blank, it has been said very clearly, "the pen is hidden but not revealed", but the reality is very complicated, such as is no one "starting to write" is very brilliant? Different people's life trajectories will have different stories and write different philosophies.
National New College Entrance Examination Volume II Comic Theme Essay Question: Reading Picture Material Writing.
Of course, I may also be a little harsh in saying this. Because after all, we are a big country with more than a billion people, this kind of large-scale selection examination needs to consider fairness. If the scope of the candidate's thinking and writing is too broad, it will cause great difficulties in scoring, and it will also bring trouble to the candidate. This is different from France. Of course, after everyone has passed the college entrance examination, in the philosophy class of the university, I am very much in favor of the confrontation and freedom of the debate topic.
Now the speculative propositions of the college entrance examination are more in the form of philosophical metaphors, the language of the material is often very Zen, and it is also a bit vague, and candidates need to refine a clear point of view very well. Here I think it is a very test of the candidate's "ability to simulate his mind", which is essentially a question of figuring out the intention of the question. Candidates with stronger abilities in this area will have a great advantage.
Beijing News: Philosophical thinking and composition writing are closely related. How do you think students can train themselves in this kind of thinking in secondary school?
Xu Yingjin: It is very important to learn Chinese well. As I said, many of the current essay topics are not philosophical propositions in the strict sense, but give a metaphor with philosophical charm, and speculating on metaphors should be a basic skill in language class training. It is also important for middle school students to train philosophical thinking, and they can consider reading some general science works.
Beijing News: There is a "secular" version of the relationship between philosophy and science, that is, the "literary and theoretical dispute" that is very hot in the field of public opinion. Some time ago, the central bank's working paper once again aroused people's discussion of "the uselessness of the liberal arts" and "the theory of the misleading of the liberal arts". As a liberal arts professor, what do you think of this "liberal arts dispute"?
Xu Yingjin: This is actually a very troublesome question. I don't think there's a problem with too many liberal arts students, but the quality of liberal arts students is probably a problem. For example, in China's international community, it is difficult to have so-called "brand-style" humanities and social science scholars, and the overall influence of the liberal arts is relatively limited. The important issue here is also related to communication. For example, Suzuki Daisuke, who spread Zen ideas in Japan, once even made foreigners think that Zen Buddhism was Japanese. His characteristic is that English is particularly good, you know, using the language of other countries to talk about the affairs of other countries, in fact, it is not difficult to use the language of other countries to talk about their own civilization, but Suzuki does a very good job. I think especially for Asian countries like China, which themselves are suppressed to a certain extent by Western countries in academic discourse. We actually need more scholars who can complete this kind of intellectual dissemination to increase the influence of our country's liberal arts.
To study philosophy, we must first pay attention to learning Chinese
Beijing News: Now it coincides with the college entrance examination, and last year there was an essay with full scores in the college entrance examination that many people questioned "not speaking human words", which attracted attention. The topic of that essay is also more related to philosophy, did Teacher Xu pay attention to it at that time? One of the things that was criticized in that essay at that time may have been to talk about philosophy in a very obscure way, but it was contrary to the pursuit of clear reasoning in philosophy itself.
Xu Yingjin: Leaving aside the example of composition, in fact, the entire Chinese culture has not pursued "making things clear" in expressing this matter. I devote a special section to Robert's rules of procedure in this book, which are not only a few specific rules, but also embody a reasonable culture. Don't use too much vague rhetoric and say too vague words, which is a characteristic of a mature society with a market economy and a culture of rule of law. The most important text of the market economy is the contract, in black and white, and there can be no ambiguity. On the contrary, the less developed the two are, and the more serious the idolatry culture, the more often people are accustomed to vague and mysterious expression.
Robert's Rules of Procedure, by Henry Robert, translated by Yuan Tianpeng, Gezhi Publishing House, 2015.
Beijing News: I noticed that you put "language" in a very important position in the book, and used the philosophy of language to close the previous discussion of logic, epistemology, and philosophy of mind. In the previous answers, you have repeatedly mentioned the important role of language in the dissemination of culture and ideas. To what extent is the study of language the basis of the study of philosophy?
Xu Yingjin: Language itself is the embodiment of thought, and generally speaking, a person's mother tongue will lay the basic framework for a person's thinking. I think language is the foundation of any skill, discipline, but it may be especially important for philosophy. Because philosophical principles are often extremely abstract and profound, and there are always some lack of examples, the language of the text in front of you may be all you learn. So we joke that a person's philosophy is not good, mostly because the language may be taught by a physical education teacher.
We will find great philosophers like Kant and Heidegger whose greatness is reflected in their original ideas, and at the same time their language for expressing original ideas deserves attention. Before Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, hardly any philosopher had expressed purely original ideas in German. In his previous Leibniz-Woolf system, Woolf tried to express Leibniz's ideas written in Latin in German, but this was not an expression of original ideas. The greatness of Kant can be seen here. In the same way, Heidegger's philosophy has almost invented a new language, and we need to understand it in his own language in order to get close to his thoughts. In the United States, analytic philosophers are at least at the same level as lawyers.
Critique of Pure Reason, by Kant, translated by Deng Xiaomang, People's Publishing House, 2004.
I often feel that the difficulty of popularizing philosophy now is that everyone has not studied well Chinese and has not passed the language barrier. The greatest basic skill of learning philosophy in China is language. Language learning hopes to cultivate our ability to grasp long sentences, a long sentence comes, even if you can't understand it, but if you can quickly distinguish the subject and the object, this is actually a good start. Many times philosophical texts are read, and this language comprehension ability is required.
Beijing News: The language learning environment we are facing now is actually not good.
Xu Yingjin: Yes, this matter also makes me feel helpless. The current social communication environment is not conducive to us to train our ability to accurately understand long sentences. I actually have a view that may sound very depressing to the "post-00s" generation. I think the hope of language learning can be pinned on the "post-10s" generation. I think they have caught up with a new era of technology is the era of "point reading", the language played in the click reading device is at least standard Chinese, pronunciation, grammar are very standardized, not Martian language, network language.
"Versailles" is often ridiculed,
But there is potential to resist the corruption of language
Beijing News: There is now a very popular model of vague words - "golden sentences". The characteristic of the golden sentence is actually vague, there is a lot of room for interpretation, but it is really quite beautiful, so it can be called the flow magic weapon of the eyeball economy era. Making golden sentences has basically become a compulsory course for many self-media. What do you think of this linguistic phenomenon?
Xu Yingjin: In fact, this is a kind of "proverbial preference", which is a variant of the "easy to take shortcut" in psychology. Simply put, why do we like golden sentences? The golden sentence is very short, often rhyming, catchy, and it has a kind of harmony and beauty in rhyme, just like the proverbs and afterwords that we have passed on by word of mouth before. The fascination with the rhythmic sense of this language is actually an inherent human habit, which I also mention in the book. In the long evolution of human culture, the worship of music is also a by-product of primitive religious worship. Our fascination with them is also relatively irrational, such as "the young man does not work hard, the old man is sad", we are all mentioning, but does it have a logical reason in itself? Not necessarily.
The shortness of the golden sentence is also convenient to separate from the specific context. When you can't understand the relationship between a golden sentence and the specific context in which it was born, it's really likely to be misunderstood, but you're also unlikely to be able to counter it logically. In the current environment, the golden sentence can become a tool to "suck powder", but it must not be a tool for thinking about problems. Especially those of us who are engaged in philosophy, we need to be particularly vigilant.
Beijing News: In fact, behind these language phenomena is a problem of "language corruption" that we often talk about. In fact, its manifestations are also very diverse, do you think it is possible for us to counter this trend?
Xu Yingjin: We talk a lot about this issue, first of all, the causes of "language corruption" are very complicated, and there are many inconvenient things to talk about. I would like to mention here a special idea, now everyone is very popular to mention "Versailles", this word we often think is a negative word, "Versailles" does have some factors that will trigger class hatred, not very desirable, but I think "Versailles" contains a potential to resist the corruption of language.
What is the biggest feature of Versailles? The expression should be "tall", and without "tall" you can't play Versailles. These terms invisibly cast a barrier to language, which is formal, gorgeous, and even a little too cumbersome, but also resists the intrusion of some fragmented expressions. One of Versailles' masterpieces is Tolstoy's War and Peace, which adds French to the text in large quantities in order to restore the way Russian youth talked under the influence of French culture. Behind Versailles is actually a kind of identity in a small group of manifestations and consolidations, which will actually play an unexpected role in many professional fields. For example, circles such as law, medicine, biology and so on may have their own language barrier, which does raise the cost of understanding people outside the barrier, but at least maintains the purity of a language, at least resists "cuteness" and "Martian language".
Beijing News: You mentioned "War and Peace." We know you also write historical fiction in your spare time. You've written about the idea that if we want to improve our empathy, we can read more good novels, because good novelists tend to have excellent empathy. Many of today's issues, whether it's "gender war," online violence, or identity politics, are actually related to empathy. From a philosophical point of view, do you think it is possible to obtain true empathy between people and people?
Xu Yingjin: On the issue of empathy, the "two horses" of Marx Scheler and Karl Marx have provided some inspiration for our thinking. Scheler does emotional phenomenology, distinguishing between different emotional patterns, primary empathy may actually be everyone has, we see kittens and puppies being abused, we will feel painful, but this and we see people being abused, the degree is still somewhat different. At the same time, it feels more painful to see people closer to you being abused. So this is very much like Mr. Fei Xiaotong's analogy, our empathy is a self-centered empathy circle. Therefore, Scheler feels that education and tourism will slowly expand a person's empathy circle. From Marx's standpoint, this circle of commonality is even more associated with your mode of production. If you're a stockbroker and you have friends in Paris and Berlin, probably the whole of Europe is an empathy circle. In the same way, the racial struggle on the surface of the "black life is also life" movement has a lot to do with the economic circle to which the opposing sides belong.
Same-Heartedness and the Other, by Marx Scheler, Beijing Normal University, 2014.
So Marx asks us to think about empathy from the point of view of interest. Why can reading fiction help people develop empathy? Relatively speaking, reading novels is a non-profitable aesthetic experience, and reading novels is not to make money, on the contrary, reading novels requires money. We listen purely to the stories of people in other "circles" in fiction after breaking free of economic considerations, which is useful for us to expand our perception of empathy.
And the so-called "true empathy" we can only approach. If we deny the possibility of empathy because it is impossible to achieve 100% empathy, we will fall into skepticism. It is true that, for example, in the case of gender, it is possible that a man has cognitively understood many theories of feminism, but is subject to specific experience, and still has a lot of incomprehension about women, and the appropriate attitude at this time should be to acknowledge this part of his understanding and then try to do better. You can't even admit the points you've already scored because you can't get 100 points, it's a more constructive attitude.
Philosophy and Everyday Life:
Does reflection necessarily make life happier?
Beijing News: In "Philosophy that Can Be Used", you try to make efforts to connect philosophy and daily life, for example, at the end of each section, you will consciously use a specific scene to connect the philosophical thinking discussed in this section. It does become more popular when philosophy is connected to everyday scenes, but is there a risk of simplifying or even distorting philosophy itself? What do you think of this tension between philosophy and everyday life?
Xu Yingjin: There must be simplification, and it can only be balanced as much as possible. My personal view is that if philosophy is to reach more people better, then a little sacrifice of "simplifying the original meaning" at this point may not be a completely unacceptable price. Nowadays, many people abroad will regard some "golden sentences" as Confucius's words, but in fact, they are not, but this does not affect these sentences in the slightest to affect their attitude towards life. In the same way, philosophy enters everyday life, and it is important that one can derive his own inspiration from it, perhaps this inspiration and understanding is not exactly in accordance with the original meaning. This may not be the same as the popularization of historical knowledge. Of course, as a writer I must do everything I can to ensure accuracy.
Beijing News: There is also a common argument that philosophy provides this highly reflective way of thinking, which makes people think more and more complex about many simple problems in life. Especially when we deconstruct and analyze many phenomena and common sense in life, it is more painful, so there is a golden sentence that says, "I understand a lot of truth, but I still can't live a good life." How do you see the limits and risks of philosophical reflection itself?
Xu Yingjin: Wittgenstein also mentioned this problem, he has a metaphor about this "philosophical disease", people with this disease are like a fly flying in a transparent milk bottle, the bottle mouth is actually in front, but it can't fly, and it hits a bag. If we use philosophy to reflect on daily life, there is indeed a risk of over-reflection. Many times we abstract some objects of reflection from life, but forget about life itself. When I participated in a podcast before, I mentioned a metaphor about riverbeds and rivers, and many times our lives still need some basic foundations, and that riverbed, if our reflection touches on this level, is likely to affect some of the basic beliefs of life, which is risky. Therefore, in addition to studying philosophy, it is very important to often observe how people talk in life.
Beijing News: We know that a lot of philosophical thinking will use "thought experiments" to do so. For example, the well-known "brain in the cylinder", "tram problem" and so on. "Thought experiment" is actually a way for philosophy to compare "out of the circle", like the movie "The Matrix" based on the "brain in the cylinder" experiment is a popular philosophical expression. How do thought experiments affect our thinking about philosophical questions? How are the pros and cons weighed?
Xu Yingjin: Thought experiment is an abstraction of complex reality, and the degree of abstraction of thought experiment may be higher than that of experiments in natural science. In the natural sciences, we may be able to simulate an environment that approximates a vacuum, but thought experiments abstract more complex social realities, and it is difficult to achieve a "vacuum." As a result, the explanatory power of thought experiment models is often questioned. I personally think that the philosophical thought experiment can only be used as a tool when we first enter the philosophical problem, but not as a universal method of in-depth study.
Stills from The Matrix.
Beijing News: Because the thought experiment is more image- and many times it also gives people an illusion that the thought experiment is easy to find loopholes and refute it very well. People's attitudes toward philosophy are sometimes the same, and they feel that everyone can comment on two sentences.
Xu Yingjin: In professional philosophical literature, there are usually more than a dozen or twenty rounds of debate in both positive and negative directions. Many of the problems in the thought experiment or philosophy may be the first round of debate, so it seems that it is not so complicated. The starting point for thinking about philosophical problems is often not very difficult, but the more you go on, the more complex it becomes.
Artificial intelligence that is not "smart" enough
The threat to humanity is even greater
Beijing News: When popular readers mention philosophy, they often think of the names of some European philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and the like (of course, they can't read and understand another). This is an interesting phenomenon. We know that the Continental Philosophical Society attaches great importance to the study of the history of philosophy and to the fine study of philosophers' texts. Your own path is more anglo-American analytic philosophy, and the book is more of a logical organizational structure based on problems than the history of philosophy. How do you evaluate the current practice of both continental and Anglo-American philosophies? As a scholar who mainly does analytic philosophy, what do you think of the significance of the study of the history of philosophy?
Xu Yingjin: No matter what kind of way of doing philosophy, it is very important to the history of philosophy. The characteristic of the discipline of philosophy is that many of the current cutting-edge problems can actually find ideological resources in very old problems. So when we do a lot of philosophical research today, we often have to go back to Plato and Aristotle. The difference may be in the attitude towards the matter of "reading", and Anglo-American analytic philosophy may emphasize the eternity of the philosophical question itself, and regard the ancients who raised the problem as the same people who think about it today. Relatively speaking, continental philosophy attaches more importance to the connection between the philosopher's thought and the specific era in which he lived, emphasizing the study of philosophical thought in a specific context of time.
Although both approaches to philosophy study the history of philosophy, attitudes toward the history of philosophy are very different. This actually gave rise to some antagonism between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. It is possible that many european philosophical researchers will feel that the researchers of analytic philosophy transplant the problems of the great philosophers in the history of philosophy directly into the present thinking, and do not take the sages in the history of philosophy seriously enough. However, here is a digression, in the philosophical reading, I personally feel that it is more important to learn the framework of thought than to the details of history. In fact, the same is true in cultural dissemination, for example, to let Chinese culture go out, we are destined to carry out a transplant, not to let people fully accept many of our cultural details as they are, but to spread a cultural framework.
As for what you said about philosophy, why we are talking about Continental philosophers, I think there are many reasons for this, and there must be a communication reason. For example, Sartre, in addition to being a philosopher, he also writes plays, and many times he will use a very literary language, and even spread his philosophical ideas through the form of drama, which is of course more efficient than the dry arguments of analytic philosophy. Sartre's plays sold particularly well, but Existence and Nothingness sold badly, and was called "One Kilogram" in Paris at the time, because Existence and Nothingness could be used as a kilogram of scales. There are many other European philosophers whose languages also have this characteristic, to use an inappropriate analogy, in the language of today's B station, they can "suck powder" in both literary and philosophical circles.
Existence and Nothingness, by Jean Paul Sartre, translated by Chen Xuanliang, du Xiaozhen, Life, Reading, and Xinzhi Triptych Bookstore, 2014 edition.
Beijing News: The study of the history of philosophy in continental philosophy may have more significance in the history of ideas.
Xu Yingjin: It is of value for the study of intellectual history. However, I personally feel that if we really want to do a kind of research on the history of ideas, we should also make more use of Marx's historical materialist perspective, that is, in addition to the history of ideas itself, we must also pay attention to the interaction between intellectual history and political history, economic history, and social history, rather than purely talking about the evolution of ideas within the text.
Beijing News: Overall, the rise of British and American analytic philosophy is more obvious, and philosophy is increasingly interacting closely with science. You also mention many times in this book the connection between philosophy and the disciplines of psychology and neuroscience. Last year, the Chinese Academy of Sciences also established the Institute of Philosophy, in your opinion, what is the current relationship between philosophy and science?
Xu Yingjin: Philosophy and science were originally inseparable, but in recent years it can be said that they have returned to the union between the two. Take, for example, the philosophy of artificial intelligence that I have studied myself. Many people think that artificial intelligence is only a problem in the field of science, and philosophers can't help much. I think philosophy can play at least the following role in this frontier field.
The first is integration. In particular, immature subject areas such as artificial intelligence, which are still growing, integrate computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology and other knowledge. Secondly, it also involves very important ethical and regulatory issues, which may not be clearly considered by experts who may specifically design artificial intelligence. If we go back a little further, the earliest generation of artificial intelligence was symbolic artificial intelligence, and its basic technical logic is mathematical logic, which is itself a problem area for philosophers to think about. So in the field of artificial intelligence, there are deep roots between philosophy and science. At present, we are more of an artificial intelligence as a simple technology, but our understanding of artificial intelligence still has to go deep into the cultural and ideological soil that shapes it, for example, artificial intelligence is a typical Western cultural product from the concept, behind it is logicism, mechanism, I think philosophers also have a very important task is to help the public understand these new concepts of artificial intelligence behind these ideas, cultural foundations.
Beijing News: Back to the issue of artificial intelligence. In recent years, there have been many predictions about the future development of artificial intelligence, and some scholars are even worried that the emergence of so-called "strong artificial intelligence" will threaten the survival of mankind. Do you think artificial intelligence may reach such a state in the future? If you open your mind, suppose we do face a situation where we need to coexist with artificial intelligence, will you take an "anthropocentristic" stance?
Xu Yingjin: I think the most important premise of this question is, how far is the future you say? Pull the time scale to infinity, and everything is possible. But if we talk about the foreseeable future that is relatively close to us, I think it is unlikely that strong artificial intelligence will be born. Although my view of the philosophy of mind is against "neuroscience chauvinism", that is, the idea that general principles about "intelligence" can also arise in non-neuronal environments. However, from the existing status quo, there are few signs of successful large-scale general artificial intelligence research and development.
Many people will talk about AlphaGo's victory over Lee Sedol, which has great engineering significance, but I think the scientific significance is actually limited. In an engineering sense, Go is difficult to play, and now we can make machines win over humans, which is undoubtedly remarkable. But the ones it uses, including deep learning or Monte Carlo algorithms, are actually things that have been around for a long time, and the underlying logic does not have a particularly big breakthrough. It can even be said that there is no essential difference between AlphaGo's defeat of Lee Sedol and Kasparov's defeat by Deep Blue many years ago.
The score between Lee Sedol and AlphaGo was 1:3, in which the winning game was also the only victory of human intelligence against AlphaGo, in order to commemorate this victory, Lee Sedol's recent victory over AlphaGo was preserved and auctioned in NFT form, and finally sold for 60 Ether (currently about 1.3 million yuan).
So far, even alphaGo's level of artificial intelligence is still far from what you call strong artificial intelligence, it is still a specialized artificial intelligence, which can only be comparable to or even surpass humans in a certain function, but it is not yet a general artificial intelligence. AlphaGo's brains are born to play Go, but human brains aren't designed to do something specific.
My "Fifteen Lectures on the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence" (Peking University Press), which is about to be published, I put forward a basic point, which is simply that compared to the special artificial intelligence used to achieve specific functions, general artificial intelligence may be a more human-friendly technology. Unintelligent artificial intelligence — the "artificial retardation" we now ridicule — is a threat to humans, it is not intelligent enough, so it needs a lot of data, our privacy, to do analysis. On the contrary, if artificial intelligence really evolves to be as smart as humans, it may not rely so much on big data, it will have stronger reasoning ability, and it will not be particularly harmful to our privacy.
So like Hawking, they are worried that artificial intelligence will rule mankind, and I think this idea is still far away from us, and in comparison, maybe problems like the epidemic are more worth worrying about now.
Written | Liu Yaguang
Edit | LI Yongbo; WANG Qing
Proofreading | Wei Zhuo; Liu Baoqing