Lo scontro epico tra consapevolezza ed algoritmi

La consapevolezza che Recce'd propone (impone?) ai proprio Clienti è quella del "capire che cosa sto facendo e per quali ragioni". Su ogni mossa di portafoglio, su ogni posizione.

Noi siamo ad un estremo dello spettro delle possibilità per il Cliente che investe.

In mezzo, c'è il mare magnum, il grande mare dell'industria, quell'industria della "catena Fabbrica-Rete", quella che va dai Fondi Comuni al Cliente attraverso private bankers e promotori.

Qui il Cliente viene sempre tenuto all'oscuro, almeno in parte. Motivazione? "Troppo complicato, non potresti capire, non ne hai voglia": e poi, ovviamente ... avanti coi carri. Anche perché la gran parte dei "prodotti finanziari" non li ha capire neppure chi va a proporli al Cliente, che avrà letto sì e no tre o quattro paginette di corsa prima di uscire, ed infatti non sa spiegare come funziona. Ma che importa? Al Cliente ... non serve, basta una vaga infarinatura di concetti complicati. 

Infine, all'estremo opposto, rispetto a Recce'd, ci sono gli algoritmi ed i ROBO advisors: il Cliente in questo caso viene del tutto privato della possibilità di capire, visto che le scelte sono affidate al modellino matematico (che si assume sia "perfetto"). Il Cliente entra in un gregge, e viene spostato di qua e di là con il gregge.

Perché ne scriviamo di nuovo? Perché ci teniamo molto, ovviamente, al concetto di consapevolezza, il solo che viene persino davanti alla performance. Senza consapevolezza non potrà mai esserci né trasparenza, né efficienza dell'investimento.

Ma lo spunto questa volta ci è stato fornito da un articolo della New York Review of Books, che ci ha stimolato molte riflessioni,e di cui vogliamo qui riportare un estratto, nel quale a nostro parere si spiega alla perfezione perché le attività umane (come è l'investimento finanziario) non possono essere ridotte a modellini matematici o algoritmi:

Is it possible to put some order into our thoughts about consciousness, memory, perception, and the like? Hardly a day goes by without some in-depth article wondering whether computers can be conscious, whether our universe is some kind of simulation, whether mind is a unique quality of human beings or spread out across the universe like butter on bread. Many of us are not even sure what we believe in this department, or whether what we believe would bear much scrutiny from philosophers or neuroscientists.

For a number of years I have been talking about these matters almost daily with Riccardo Manzotti, the philosopher, psychologist, and robotics engineer. I have now suggested to him that we condense our conversations into a series of focused dialogues to set out the standard positions on consciousness, and suggest some alternatives. For my own part I’d like to add some reflections on the social implications of the various theories for what we think about consciousness, which is as much as to say what we think about who and what we are, inevitably has consequences for how we relate to one another, and to the world. But our first problem will be one of definition.

—Tim Parks

Tim Parks: Riccardo, what do we mean when we say “consciousness”? Are we talking about perceptive experience, memory, thought, trains of thought, or mental life in general?

Riccardo Manzotti: For most people “consciousness” will have various meanings and include awareness, self-awareness, thinking in language. But for philosophers and neuroscientists the crucial meaning is that of feeling something, having a feeling you might say, or an experience. An easy way to think about it would be pain. Instinctively we all agree that feeling a pain is something. It’s an experience. That is why we don’t like to hurt animals, because we have good reason to suspect that they feel what happens to them. And this feeling of what happens to us characterizes our existence. The technical term is “phenomenal experience,” or again “conscious experience,” but frankly both sound a tad redundant since experience is always something we feel.

Parks: I remember David Chalmers, a philosopher we’ll no doubt be talking about at some point, defining consciousness as an internal flow of images, “a movie playing inside your head,” and probably a lot of people would agree with him. But you want to stick to something more basic.

Manzotti: A definition like that suggests that we know a lot more than we do: that there are images in our heads, that they move forward in sequence, that there is some kind of split between the image and someone (who?) observing the image. It’s all very problematic. The truth is that we do not know what consciousness is. That’s why we’re talking about it as a problem. What we do know is that the way we experience reality, I mean that we feel the things that happen to us, does not really match up with our current scientific picture of the physical world.

Parks: In what respect?

Manzotti: Well, consider this: If we didn’t know that human beings experience the world, that they feel things, would we be able to deduce it from what we know about neurophysiology? Really, no. There is nothing about the behavior of neurons to suggest that they are any different with respect to consciousness than, say, liver cells or red blood cells. They are cells doing what cells do best, namely, keeping entropy low by generating flows of ions such as sodium, potassium, chloride, and calcium and releasing neurotransmitters as a consequence. All of that is wonderful but far removed from the fact that I experience a light blue color when I watch the morning sky. That is, it’s not easy to see how the physical activity of the neurons explains my experience of the sky, let alone a process like thinking.

Parks: So we might say that consciousness is the word we use to refer to the fact that rather than just physiological activity, mute like any other physical event—the sky in the morning, a cloud crossing the sun—we have experience, we have a feeling of that event?

Manzotti: Exactly. Instead of a world where we merely interact with external occurrences—the way a flower opens in the sun, or water freezes in the cold—we also have experience of the occurrence, the sun, the icy weather, and so on. This addition of experience (or in future we may want to suggest that experience and occurrence are one!) would be puzzling enough in itself. But it is even more puzzling that experience is usually described as experience of something else, of something that is not me. I experience a red apple. You experience a piece of music. Ruth experiences a landscape. How is this possible since, if we leave aside quantum mechanics (for the moment), our traditional view of nature tells us that an object is what it is and nothing more? William James put this very clearly when he asked, How can the room I am sitting in be simultaneously out there and, as it were, inside my head, my experience? We still have no answer to that question.