Stupid Flies, Stupid Humans?

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by TellMeStudios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Peter Coghill, Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing the fact that flies can find their way into a house but they can't seem to find their way out again. So Chris... Stay with us here people, it's gonna be good. So Chris, I believe you have some strong thoughts on this, paint us a picture.

Speaker B: 00:00:45

Well yeah so it's coming into spring at the moment and I have a large conservatory and I've noticed as a lot of people do at this stage that flies seem, appear at least, to be adept at doing lots of things. I mean they've been around for a long time as you know as a sort of group of species but they are definitely not very good at finding their way out of a conservatory or indeed you know a house. They never seem to find their way back to the open place but of course if they did find their way back to the open place we wouldn't know about it because they would presumably get pretty much straight out and we wouldn't hear them bouncing against it but nevertheless once stuck in a house they seem particularly poor at getting back out of the way they they came. So what this got me thinking about was first of all you know why is it they don't seem to be able to find their way out and thinking about what they might have evolved in order to do so I believe they follow a sort of pattern of random bounce once they come into contact with the window they then randomly go in a direction from there and you know in terms of thinking about what their function is and what they're trying to achieve in the outside world, the outside place, they are obviously sort of searching for things and trying to you know bees exhibit the same the same pattern when they get you know when they get against a window and you know that this approach might be very effective for finding the next flower or you know if you're a fly the next dead cat or whatever it is your dog turd you're trying to look for but in the event of being stuck inside a conservatory it's not a very useful approach and so it also started me thinking about okay so conservatories obviously they haven't evolved to deal with conservatories or human houses and glass but you know most of the time their approach to dealing with a collision is a very effective one and it got me thinking about us as a species and what it might be that we are we have evolved to deal with and you know what modernity has placed in our way what what are the equivalents of the windows which we are now smashing our faces against in a in a vain attempt to defenestrate ourselves and and get back to the outside outside place yes and what what are our you know what are our cognitive limitations okay

Speaker A: 00:03:39

nice there's at least there's at least two questions there but that was set up really nicely chris i like that um so either peter or nick help chris out with some of these questions well i

Speaker C: 00:03:50

just to partly explain why the why the flies might lack this i mean they they they are as you said a very successful species they've been around i think probably as a genre probably much longer than than humans um so they so they found a niche where they they don't need to have complicated processing they don't need to be able to model complicated 3d spaces and develop a strategy for getting in and out of them they and and part of the success comes from as again you've alluded they dead cats and dog turds and anything in between probably will do for a fly so they don't need complicated systems for working out what the strategy is and what the optimum food is so a random bounce approach works twinned with very very rapid gestation time and things so they can they can they come to maturity within within hours or days um means that they they don't need to they don't need complicated algorithms because they have they have volume and numbers so that i think that tidies up sort of why they are as they are so yeah and i like i like this uh this idea that using the fly as an analogy to explore what are the the windows that the humans butt up against uh is an interesting one because i think that we we like flies have evolved to live in a world which no longer exists for most of us we we now surround ourselves with complicated systems with uh ever more complicated systems including now autonomous and uh non-human agents agents that do things and make decisions on our behalf so presumably at some point we're going to have a similar sort of cognitive uh barrier like the fly that we can no longer appreciate what's going on and no longer operate make the right decisions make optimum decisions to to for ourselves or or as for our species as a whole uh nick well this is i think this is the question really is

Speaker D: 00:05:54

whether or not we are like flies but just more complicated i mean the example that sprang to mind for me is that is obesity which you know but people no one no one voluntarily starves to death really except for a few very select um sort of disorders um but uh you know because because we have a very sort of powerful inbuilt evolutionary um urge to to eat stuff when we get hungry because we evolved in a world where that was a real possibility and it was a problem we had to face all the time and you know we've we uh will do anything we can to get hold of some food when we're hungry um but we've never evolved in a situation where we have more food than we need or more food than is good for us and we've never had to evolve um you know a desire to stop eating and to lose weight um and you know this has obviously led to one of the biggest health crises of recent years is you know the fact that we we're all um eating too much um very similar i think to a to a fly uh in that you know we know it's bad for us um you know at least we do i suppose that's different from a fly is that we do at least know what's going on and we're able to analyze it but you know it doesn't stop us behaving that way and all uh you know eating too much so so and that's a you know that's an example of where we do we simply have not faced an evolutionary constraint that we've had to optimize against there um and so you know we we are like very much like a fly um but i just want i mean to me the question is really well you know actually the point is we we realize that we are aware of that you know we know it's a problem and we can engineer solutions to it and and the question is whether or not uh humans do have in some sense a sort of qualitatively different type of intelligence which is capable of um of solving any problem really that there aren't really any any sort of insurmountable windows for humans um because we will always be able to work out oh actually it turns out that's a window and we need to do something about it whereas i think the characteristic of the fly is that it's totally blind to the idea that there's a window it doesn't seem to learn that oh hang on you know i've bounced into this thing 10 times now um i'm gonna go and sort of try somewhere else well i

Speaker A: 00:08:10

want to say something here because there's a nice summing up but so it seems to me that so the the similarities that the both flies and humans are living in a world which uh in an evolutionary terms we're not necessarily equipped for right um because of changes in the environment and so in theory as humans the difference between us and and flies is we can recognize that this is the case and we can analyze and come up with a solution but it seems to me that the solution would have to involve some kind of um i don't know automated process or or rules or something that we don't have control of because actually um trying to modify behavior even if we recognize that there's something uh wrong about that behavior or less than optimal still doesn't work so for example we all know that smoking is bad for us and yet we still do it okay um so yeah well i

Speaker B: 00:09:03

think there's a i think there's a difference between sort of um instinctive uh behavior um that's driven by uh a almost like a physiologic like an addiction um or uh something very very uh instinctive in us like like appetite something that's driven by a quasi-physiological um sort of mechanism versus things where we um where we are actually making a decision outside of that so we have strong we have strong urges as a species based on our physical body uh and those are difficult for us to to overcome but in the case of the the fly and the window it feels to me more like a sort of problem where um you know the fly isn't hitting its head against the window because it has a desire to do so uh it is um it's following a sort of you know a pattern of thought and for me um the equivalent is is perhaps something more like you know where are we making uh rational or where are we trying to make rational decisions that are um being clouded by irrationality that isn't derived from some drive within our our physiology um so so an example of that might be something like to to me um uh an analogy of the the fly in the window might be uh humans and um irrational prejudice for example uh so where we where we may have evolved to stereotype previously because of the environment we're in that may no longer be an effective way of um thinking about the world we live in and yet we yet we still do it because we're mentally um programmed to to do so in the same way as the fly is is to to hit the window. Peter? I think the

Speaker C: 00:11:14

I think both the problem that the fly suffers and the problem that we all suffer from our metaphorical window is one of practical computational constraints so if we took the fly and we upgraded his memory and plugged it into his random random bump algorithm and he could remember where he had previously randomly bumped and only tried new places eventually he would find a way out eventually it might take a long time but eventually he would find a way out very simple very simple change um but that so this this the next point about there being uh intractable problems is really is not the next point about us being a general intelligence or not and the fly being a general intelligence or not we we potentially could theoretically solve any problem if you took the time constraint off and you had enough people working on stuff but there are certain practicalities that you might you might take longer to than the life of the universe in order to solve particular problems so really it's it's whether I think whether or not we are a general intelligence is tainted by uh the practical constraints so it might be for the for the same in the same way for a fly the the windows in the just conceptualizing a window is an intractable problem it would take much longer than the lifetime of the fly for him to be able to work out what a strategy to get around it than random bump for us working out the complexities of geopolitics or a fair and equitable yet profitable and max and maximized system for global economics might be might be too big and and beyond the scope of our sort of limited general general intelligence in which case we need we need some turn something else to try and solve that for us

Speaker D: 00:13:07

yeah because I mean there's no such thing as as no such thing as just general intelligence being a thing you either have or don't I mean there is you know obviously a sliding scale and um chimpanzees have you know reasonably good general intelligence we we seem to have the best general intelligence of any animal but there's no reason to think we're in any way any kind of theoretical maximum at all and you know the fact that um you know we can build machines that defeat us in narrow domains so for example I mean you know classic problem solving domains like uh playing simple computer games or playing games like chess or go where we can be defeated by machines um I mean I think if this doesn't it doesn't quite make sense to put it like this but you know a machine like alpha go um would look at a human playing go and you know if it could think would why are they doing that obviously stupid thing um you know which is going to lead to them losing in in 38 turns time it's kind of obvious to alpha go um but not to the human and I wonder you know is is that like is that a good analogy for how we feel when we look at a fly failing to find the gap in the window um or you know the alternative thought is to say well yeah I mean we there is a qualitative difference and it does come down to the fact that we at least know we are able to still consider the problem and realize that it's beyond our ability to solve whereas a fly simply doesn't have you know that sort of hypothesis based reasoning they don't entertain hypotheses well let's assume they don't you know they don't think what sort of object is this they don't conduct a scientific kind of process um and yeah so that's the question really I mean is it the case actually that we have evolved in uh you know to solve what looks to us like general intelligence uh which is what we believe we have are we in fact um mistaken in that you know is it is it the case for example that you know when we do start to consider problems about um which are outside of our evolutionary experience like uh you know how how the world of quantum physics actually works we just you know we we suddenly don't have the tools to do it um are there potential super intelligent alien species that might look at us in exactly the same way that we look at the flies

Speaker A: 00:15:27

um we're getting close towards to the end here um so Chris do you want to come in anything at this

Speaker B: 00:15:33

point is there something you'd like well I think only only sort of reflecting on Nick's um point about you know uh there's there's something very uh very tragic about the concept that we we know we can't do something we've got we've got enough intelligence to realize that that trying to trying to do something is is pointless and I think uh that to me seems um a very a very

Speaker C: 00:16:05

tragic situation um but I think there might be a whole class of problems that just working out whether or not the problem is solvable is actually an unsolvable problem so that this this strikes the very heart of computer science uh the p versus np problem whether or not uh all problems that are np are in fact p or not is a hypothesis is a question that's unanswered that problem in itself might be an answer or problem so um so just being able to in the same way that the fly has no ability to to understand the shape and form of a window to in order then to make some sort of strategy to get around it we have some of the problems that we look at we just cannot for for the sake of our limitations understand the shape and form of the problem in order to realize that that problem can't be solved or that problem could be solved um well actually no I was just

Speaker D: 00:17:03

going to say it's interesting I had on when I was at university and and uh you know put pretentious quotes on my wall I remember the one from Wittgenstein which is your role in philosophy is to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle um I think it is uh it's a powerful analogy I think for for you know fruitless pointless things that you repeatedly do even though they're wrong um and it you know it obviously does sort of resonate just just round this off um actually we're sort

Speaker A: 00:17:33

of starting to go there with Nick so there was a nice quotation about flies anyone got any either favorite facts that they know about flies or a favorite quote about flies we've already had one there from Nick I don't know I think you're holding on to the conch which is least reference

Speaker B: 00:17:47

to Lord of the Flies yeah uh Chris anything no the only the only fly associated uh thought I have really is about the the film The Fly and and what happened to the to the chap in a particular part of his uh anatomy um so uh so yes I'll probably leave that leave that thought out

Speaker A: 00:18:09

or avail over that yeah um well all I can say is how does it go um we are we are to the gods as flies to wanton boys they kill us for their sport where's that from it sounds like Shakespeare it is is it Hamlet King Lear ah I think it's Gloucester who says it all right we just have to leave you Chris I know what the solution is you need to knock down your conservatory to free the flies

Speaker B: 00:18:33

yeah well possibly I mean or or get better at swatting them um well the flies and it's a bit

Speaker D: 00:18:39

unfair because we've designed the house I mean a fly might reasonably say you know could you find your way out of a dog turd yeah um and I hope so I'm not sure you could as sufficiently sized on

Speaker A: 00:18:52

yeah okay well I think on that note we'll finish um gentlemen thank you as always I'm Fraser McGruer we've been here with Chris Wragg, Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Thank you for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. Thanks. Bye-bye.