The Wax and the Grounding Problem

EDO SEGAL: Rene, you have an example that I think is the most underrated thought experiment in the whole history of this argument, and I want you to give it to us fresh, because most people have never heard it and it goes straight at Antonio's claim. The wax. Tell us about the wax.

DESCARTES: Take a piece of beeswax from the honeycomb. It has a taste, a smell, a color, a shape, a hardness; tap it and it makes a sound. Every property you could name belongs to it. Now hold it to the fire. The taste vanishes, the smell goes, the color shifts, the shape collapses, the hardness becomes liquid, the sound is gone. By every report of the senses it is now a different thing entirely — nothing it sensibly was remains. And yet everyone judges, instantly, that it is the same wax. So I ask: what is this same wax that persists, given that none of its sensible qualities did? It cannot be any of the qualities, for all were lost. The continuity is grasped by something other than the senses. It is grasped by the mind — by an inspection of the intellect that holds the wax as one extended, changeable thing, of which all those appearances were passing modes. We do not, strictly, see the wax. We judge it. I look out my window at hats and coats moving in the street and I say I see men, but I infer the men; I perceive only the surfaces. The mind supplies the unity, the persistence, the very thinghood the senses never deliver.

EDO SEGAL: And the reason this is a weapon: a machine learns from the surfaces. It has read every description of wax melting that humanity ever wrote. So the question is whether it grasps the wax or only the appearances of the wax — whether it has the men or only the hats and coats. Rene, you think it has only the surfaces.

DESCARTES: I think the machine is the purest case ever built of mastery of surface without grasp of substance. It is constructed entirely from the appearances — the words people use, the statistical regularities in the record. The wax argument predicts its exact profile: fluent about every appearance in isolation, strangely fragile about the persisting thing the appearances are appearances of. It has the hats and coats in unprecedented detail. It may not have the people.

DAMASIO: And here, for once, I am going to take Rene's own argument and turn it harder than he turned it — against the comfortable reading and toward mine. Because Rene says the mind grasps the wax "by inspection of the intellect," and he assumes that inspection is some pure intellectual act, the soul reaching past the surface to the essence. I say: where does that grasp come from? It comes from a body that has handled wax — that has felt it resist and then yield, felt the heat, felt the change under its own fingers. Your inspection of the intellect, Rene, is not bloodless. It is built on a lifetime of a body engaging a world that pushes back. The reason you know the melted wax is the same wax is not that your soul intuits an essence. It is that you have an embodied history with stuff that holds and stuff that flows, and that history is what lets you track the object through the change. So the wax argument is not an argument for the disembodied intellect. It is an argument for grounding — for the body as the thing that anchors the word to the world. And it indicts the machine more deeply than you said, because the machine has neither the intellect nor the body. It has only the third thing, the wake of words both of those would leave behind.

DESCARTES: That is an ingenious theft and I will resist it. You want my intellectual grasp to be nothing but very deep bodily pattern. But notice the cost of that move, Antonio — it is the move that hands the machine everything. If grasping the wax is just integrating enough experience of surfaces deeply enough, then the machine, which has integrated more surfaces than any human who ever lived, is further along that very road, not barred from it. You cannot have it both ways. Either grasping the wax is an act of intellect distinct from accumulating appearances — in which case it is my disembodied act, and your body is beside the point — or it is just deep accumulation of appearances, in which case the machine is doing it, and your body is also beside the point, because the machine has no body and is doing it anyway. The wax argument is a trap, and you have walked into the half of it that destroys your own thesis.

DAMASIO: No — because accumulation of which appearances? This is the grounding problem and it is exactly where you slip. The machine has accumulated appearances of words. It has the linguistic wake — the way "wax" travels with "melt" and "candle" and "soft." My body has accumulated appearances of wax — the felt resistance, the warmth, the yielding. Those are not the same accumulation in different amounts. They are different in kind. The word "pain" is grounded, for me, in having been in pain — in a bodily state the word reaches back to and stands for. The machine has the word connected to other words and to no pain, because there is no body that has hurt. So when you say the machine has integrated "more surfaces than any human," you are again sliding text-about-the-world into the-world. It has the tips of the iceberg, in unprecedented density, and no iceberg beneath. The grasp of the wax requires the iceberg. That is not a road the machine is further along. It is a road the machine is not on.

EDO SEGAL: Let me put my own skin in this, because I have watched the exact failure Rene predicts and I do not know which of you it belongs to. I have seen these systems write three flawless paragraphs about the phenomenology of grief and then make an error about object permanence a four-year-old would not make — confidently track a thing through a story and then lose it, lose the people behind the hats. Rene, that looks like your wax failure. Antonio, that looks like your ungrounding. Is there any difference between what the two of you are predicting, or are you describing the same gap and fighting over its name?

DESCARTES: We may be describing the same gap. I call it the absence of the act that grasps the substance. He calls it the absence of the body that grounds the word.

DAMASIO: And the difference is not nothing, Edo, because it tells you what would close the gap. On Rene's account, the machine might close it by becoming, somehow, the kind of thing that performs the intellectual act — no body required. On my account, the only thing that closes it is a body with a stake. That is a testable difference in the long run, and the whole future turns on it. If the systems get less brittle purely by reading more text, Rene gains ground. If they only get less brittle when we give them sensors and actuators and something to lose — when we put them in a world that pushes back — then I do.

EDO SEGAL: Mark that as the cleanest convergence yet, and the most useful: you agree there is a gap, you agree the machine sits in it, and you have just told the reader the experiment that would decide between you. That is a gift. Hold it. Because the next round is about the test Rene wrote three hundred years before Turing — the test the machine just passed — and what it means that the bright line he drew got crossed by a thing he is not sure is thinking at all.