Luciano Floridi's Reading List

"As I said near the beginning of this interview, I strongly believe we have been doing the philosophy of information without knowing it. Plato is a great philosopher of information without the word being there. When it comes to the classic image of the myth of the cave, you can reinterpret the whole thing today in terms of the channel of communication and information theory: who gets access to which information. The people chained in front of the wall are effectively watching television, or glued to some social media. You can read it that way without doing any violence to the text. That shows two things. First, why it is a classic. A classic can be read and re-read, and re-interepreted. It never gets old, it just gets richer in consequences. It’s like old wine, it gets better with time. You can also see what I mean when I say we’ve been doing the philosophy of information since day one, because really the whole discussion of the cave is just a specific chapter in the philosophy of information. The point I try to glean from that particular feature in the great architecture of the Republic is the following: some people have their attention captured constantly by social media – it could be by cats on Facebook. They are chained to that particular social media – television yesterday, digital technology today. Some of these people can actually unchain themselves and acquire a better sense of what reality is, what the world really is about. What is the responsibility of those who have, as it were, unchained themselves from the constant flow, the constant grab of attention of everyday media, and are able to step back, literally step out of the cave? Are they supposed to go back and violently force the people inside to get away, as the text says? Updated that would mean, for example, implementing legislation. We would have to ban social media, we could forbid people from having mobile phones, we’d put some kind of back doors into social media because we want control. Or do we have to exercise toleration? If so, it would be a matter of education. We’d have to go back and talk to them. In essence here Plato, by addressing these questions, is giving us a lesson in the philosophy of information."

"From Plato, to Descartes, to Russell — the last philosopher I know of who was good at this — philosophy has always had this valuable attitude of speaking to both sides of human interest: to the intellectual, the academic, the ivory tower; but also to the practical, ordinary aspects of the world. From Descartes, through Hume, even to Kant (not the most accessible philosopher, but at least he made an attempt), all the way down to Russell, we have this double channel of communication. It is not popularising philosophy, it is not making philosophy cheap, it is not philosophy for dummies, it is philosophy made interesting to interested people. There are different vocabularies, different ways of speaking. And that’s why Descartes wrote the Meditations in a language that was available to a well-educated person who didn’t have that much Latin. Meditations is not only a classic — it’s easy to find almost anything you want in it — but I also see it as one of the books that you could recruit into a history of the philosophy of information. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The debate about scepticism is often misunderstood. It is not an intellectual game, it is not by someone who has time and money to waste wondering whether he exists. Anyone who tries to refute scepticism is wasting their time and no decent philosopher has taken that sort of speculation very seriously. Scepticism in the Meditations is to be understood technologically. It works in the same way that you benchmark a particular product by testing it in extreme conditions, so that, when you put the product on the market, it is robust. You test a car in extreme conditions. Nobody would dream of driving that car in those conditions. Descartes is acting like an engineer testing ideas. Descartes wants to doublecheck that the science we’re building is going to be so robust that even when you run the most insane test it will still work. It’s silly to conclude from this that the task of philosophy is to refute the sceptic! That’s not the point. Scepticism in Descartes is a matter of increasing the pressure and showing how much his ideas can actually withstand. It is about resilience. There are many ways of reading the Meditations . Today Descartes speaks more directly to us if you understand him as the equivalent of an engineer testing a product. Much better to read it that way than suggesting that we are living in The Matrix ."

"We all know that he couldn’t write, no matter how much he tried. Even German people prefer to read him in English translations because the translations clarify what he might be saying. I find reading Kant a bit like understanding cricket as a foreigner: hard to get at first, but once you get it, it’s very enjoyable. Once you start to understand the rhythm of that way of thinking, it’s mind-boggling. It’s quite extraordinary. You can feel the power of that way of conceptualising problems. What I have learnt from Kant is an important lesson: when you discuss any philosophical problem there is one fundamental clarification that has to precede any discussion. This is, ‘Does that question make sense to us given the conditions of possibility of the debate?’ When we overstep the limits of what we can process, the information that it is sensible to ask about, then we know that we are stepping into pure metaphysics. For us, today, it is pure speculation when there is no way of being wrong. There’s a lot of philosophy of that sort — especially the philosophy of technology, and some popular philosophy — that’s just pure discourse. Or there is speculation in the manner of a Sudoku game or a chess problem. I have no time for speculating about some possible metaphysical world, while the current one is burning. Kant is a good antidote both to pointless speculation, the anything goes approach, and the purely logical one in which you make some hypothetical assumptions and see what you can deduce. That’s interesting, but it’s no longer philosophy. It’s not talking to its time and to relevant problems that are of genuine concern. It’s intellectual fun, but ultimately pointless. Kant helps us focus on real philosophical problems. Philosophy has a major role to play today. What is happening is that some problems can, in principle, be solved by maths, experiments, and facts, and therefore we don’t call them philosophy any more. Meanwhile, there are more and more philosophical problems arising from new technology and new ways of living. Philosophy deals with the problems that lie between the world of facts and the world of logical possibilities. That’s fundamental. Kant has a lesson that we still have to learn which is that any form of naïve realism — based on the way the world seems to me, or the way science tells me the world is — should not be taken seriously. What Kant tells us is that we process input (the message) from the world (the source of the message) – what we’d now call data. Information is constrained by the data: if you jump out of the third floor window, you’ll break your neck. You don’t build the world from your imagination. Nevertheless, the world isn’t just as it seems to us. The analogy here is, once again, with cooking. The data are the ingredients of our dish. We process them to obtain a specific outcome, which is our information. The relation between the dish and the ingredients is not one of representation, but one of constraining affordances: given those ingredients/data there are only a few ways of cooking/knowing that make sense and transform them into the right dish/information. To put it differently, I find it very naïve when people talk about knowledge as if it were “of” reality: reality is the source of the signals, but our knowledge is of the signals. It’s a bit like saying you hear music on the radio. The music is sent by the radio, but it is not about and does not “represent” the radio. Versions of structural realism in philosophy of science support this view."

"The quintessential Turing for philosophy is certainly the Turing test as described in The Imitation Game . The Turing test has in it a Kantian lesson. Sadly, if you look at the Loebner prize, they have a medal that has ‘Can a Machine Think?’ on it. Unfortunately they missed Turing’s answer to that question, which is that it is “too meaningless to deserve discussion.” He didn’t ask that question in the paper. What he did say is that because this question doesn’t provide the conditions of possibility for an answer – because we don’t know what ‘think’ is, and we don’t even know what a ‘machine’ is – we can’t answer it. But we can run a test and if you can’t see a difference between the answers of a human and a machine, then the machine has passed the test. So what Turing tells us is that you need to be clear about the level of abstraction at which your discussion is taking place. Unfortunately ‘level of abstraction’ has a technical sense in computer science which is often misunderstood in philosophy because there are no levels – levels of abstraction don’t come in a hierarchy. If you look at a house, you can look at it from the perspective of the owners, the council, economic, a lawyer’s perspective – these are all different levels of abstraction. In the Turing test, the level of abstraction is provided by the questioning game and the comparison of the two players at the level of their abilities to understand questions and answer them meaningfully. There’s something of Charles Sanders Peirce in this, you’re right. He’s another of my heroes, another figure in the history of the philosophy of information, and if I’d had six book choices I’d have included him. Sometimes you really have to stop looking for the essence of the ingredients but look at the effects that the ingredients have."

"I wanted to include a more contemporary book. The reason Lyotard’s book is on my list is that I read it when I was too young, and I misunderstood it badly and didn’t think much of it. I re-read it when I was more mature and now realise that there were fundamental lessons and extraordinary insights there that I had missed completely when I was an undergraduate. Selecting only one, perhaps the most fundamental, lesson that I learnt from Lyotard relates to the socio-political aspects of technology. There’s an emphasis in Lyotard’s book on the connection between politics and technology, the politics which manipulate and affect technologies and so impact how we live. The politics of information is a notion that we need to explore much more deeply than we have done so far. We used to think that power was about either the creation or the control of things, that it was about the means of production of goods. That’s what Marx thought. It was not about the production of experiences or services. Then society switched to a focus on power being expressed through the control of information. Once control of information is recognised as a source of power, then any powerful entity wants to control this information. Governments and empires all want to control information. What we’re seeing today is the very beginning of another switch, from power over things, to power over information, to power about the questions that shape the answers that give the information about things. If you take the view that semantic information is broadly speaking delivered as a question plus an answer, then those who control the questions shape the answers. That’s the new power we need to understand and manage properly today."