Enter the Monkeysphere!

Working on Tooth and Claw some more, I'm across the 60K mark now and I just want to get this vignette all out before I decide whether to divide it up into parts or not.  But in the meantime!  I was talking with a friend about the monkeysphere, a term I've been tossing about as a casual way of referring to Dunbar's number, the sciencey term with which I'm more familiar (but which doesn't quite capture the oomph in its phrasing).

Tonight, I just found out that the term "monkeysphere" was coined by David Wong, senior editor of Cracked.com and the author of John Dies at the End and This Book is Full of Spiders (the reading of which convinced me, incidentally, that the supernatural weirdness and big-brain ideas of Tooth and Claw might actually be able to achieve some manner of commercial success... if I just write the fucker).

Anyway, his original article, What Is the Monkeysphere?, is fascinating reading.  You should check it out right now.  :)

Random things and stuff!

My new computer, which wasn't "supposed" to show up until the 16th, actually got delivered today.  Hooray!  But now I'm moving everything over, which is gonna take for-god-damned-ever.  It's easy, thanks to the aptly named Easy Transfer, which more or less amounts to a magic spell:  I wave my hands around and say, "You!  New 'puter!  Be just like my old 'puter!  Go!"  But Christ on a bike, this spell has a long-ass casting time!  I'm gonna be watching the progress on my sweet fuckin' 23" monitor until the wee hours, and until then I'm instructed, "Do not use this computer during the transfer."  Huh.  I sure hope blogging and blasting mp3s doesn't count as "using this computer."  :\

Anyway, I'm not up to any super-creative writing.  I'd meant to write another vignette for Tooth & Claw, I have it all planned out (more or less), but I just can't stop wanting my new 'puter to be ready.  So here are a few neat tidbits with no central organization.  First, scientists are hard at work decoding the visual experience of dreams from brain scans.  Here's a link to one article, focusing mainly on Japanese research.  And here's another one from Gizmodo, focusing mainly on what's been done at UC Berkeley (with video!).  An important note is that the constructed video is not a reading of the visual cortex, but actually a composite constructed from pre-existing video clips.  I caught the headline over lunch in USA Today (I think).  Those articles above are just what I was able to dig up in two minutes, but I have some more to say below the cut.

Second, here is a cool little infographic submitted to me by Allison on the visual IQ of Americans, showing how well (or poorly) we can identify certain people, symbols, and geographic regions on sight.

I was able to identify Boehner purely based on hatred of him as a person,

pick out the Euro, the Star of David, and the Twitter logo.  That... was it.

Third, Amina Tyler recently went missing after posting topless photos of herself on the internet in order to show that her body was hers to do with as she chooses.  The going speculation seems to be that her family kidnapped her, in direct contravention to Tyler's thesis, out of some bass-ackward idea of honor where "tits is bad" and it's somehow less embarrassing to abduct a member of your family than to let her do her own fuckin' thing.  Because Tyler's disappearance is probably going to be tragic, but it might not necessarily be just yet, (NSFW photos!) FEMEN recently organized a load of topless protests at a bunch of European mosques in order to say, "You think photos on the internet are bad?  Wait'll you see this all up in your fuckin' streets!"  OK, I was paraphrasing there, but here is an actual quote:  "We're free, we're naked, it's our right, it's our body, it's our rules, and nobody can use religion, and some other holy things, to abuse women, to oppress them... And we'll fight against them, and our boobs will be stronger than their stones."

Actions such as this were described as "evacuating" protesters.  Boy, those men

with truncheons sure evacuated the living daylights out of those half-naked protesters.

Fourth, some scientists seem to believe that they're on the cusp of experimentally confirming the existence of dark matter, which would quite frankly be rad as Hell.  What gives me pause for thought, however, is that they're looking at positrons in space - and positrons are antimatter.  The difference, briefly, is that antimatter is normal matter with its polarity reversed (protons become antiprotons, same mass but opposite charge; electrons become antielectrons or positrons, same mass but opposite charge).  We use antimatter in routine medical procedures - the "PET" in PET scan stands for "positron emission tomography."  Dark matter, on the other hand, is simply stuff that has mass and takes up space, but "doesn't shine" in the way that everything else in the Universe does - it's there, it exerts gravitational forces upon whatever's around, but we just can't detect it since it's not shiny like "normal" matter.  However, this positron/dark matter connection gives me faint and tenuous hope that Douglas' exclamation that dark matter (rather than antimatter) cancels out regular matter is actually oddly prophetic rather than a stupid fuckin' typo on my part.  Whatever, I'll probably change it anyway because I also have a few other infelicities to remedy for the next edition.  They're the scientists, I'll trust 'em until I hear better.  :)

OK, by way of wrapping up, here are some of my thoughts on the decoding of the visual elements of dreams.

Thoughts on Virtual Worlds

So Guild Wars 2 recently released a fake April Fool's joke:  the Super Adventure Box.  I need to stress that this is a fake April Fool's joke, by which I mean that it looks like an April Fool's joke, but is actually entirely real.  I promise I am not making this up.

For the month of April, players will be able to use Moto's Super Adventure Box, a training device for young children learning to make their way in the world which uses games as a form of educating with entertainment - edutainment!  Of course, it's only "for young children" in the game world of Guild Wars 2; for players in the real world, it's a nostalgic romp through a neo-retro mashup of old video games united with a decidedly Minecraftian aesthetic.  Fuckin'... sign me up!  Why am I writing this and not playing right now?!

Look, they even made an 80s-tastic commercial for it!

Oh, right, because I thought about it for two seconds.  And now I have to write those thoughts down, or pretty soon they'll pile up and my head will explode (yes, this is actually why I write).  Then I can play.

And what will I be playing?  I'll be playing a game... which will be about my character playing another game.  I suppose this is just another mini-game in a way, but what got me thinking was considering it as not "just another mini-game."  Yes, yes, there are plenty of games with mini-games wherein the character you play then plays another game (a game within a game), and this is nothing special.  What's special about this is that I'm entering a virtual world, and in that virtual world, my character enters another virtual world.

It's not just a game within a game, this time; it's The Matrix within The Matrix.

On Cognition

Last spring, I took a class in the Interdisciplinary department on cognitive science - we covered philosophy of mind, computer science, and neuroscience, and it was awesome.  I gained a reputation in the class for hedging my answers very carefully, admitting when I didn't know things, but knowing quite a lot, and refusing to engage in wild speculation (unless I was explicitly asked to do so).  I was also the only philosophy major in the class, and I think I did a good job of representing the department rather well.  But then again, I also had at least five years on each of the other dozen or so students, and I had spent those years educating myself and arguing on the internet in my free time, so you could say I was a bit over-prepared.

The prompt for our final was, "What is the nature of human cognition?" and we were given six double-spaced pages to answer.  I think I did a rad job, and the material I brought together (almost all of which had been covered in class) was tremendously interesting, so I thought I'd share it with you, Dear Reader.  Enjoy!

Is Consciousness This Way or That Way?  A Robust Yes and No.

What is the nature of human cognition?  At the very least, we may say that it is complicated.  My own personal conjecture is that the first-person nature of consciousness is essentially a “story” that the brain “tells” to itself, after a fashion; but we humans have been using our minds to ponder our minds for millennia, and I probably stand very little chance of successfully advancing a new theory of mind in a six-page paper for an introductory course in cognitive science.  Three broad avenues of approach have been quite productive, however:  studying brains, attempting to manufacture consciousness “from scratch” (as it were), and inquiring as to what precisely we might mean when we talk about our minds.  Respectively, these may be called the empirical approach, the engineering approach, and the philosophical approach.  Each of these approaches has something to say on the three issues of brain brittleness, mental models, and the “directionality” of consciousness.  What I intend to show is that while each of the various answers proposed to the question, “What is consciousness?” contains at least a kernel of truth, no present account delivers the whole story and so we ought not to endorse one or the other as “essentially right.”

The Phenomenology of Normativity: Towards a Scientific Ethics, part two

The goal of my last post on this subject was mainly to establish that ethics, as it has been done throughout history, has been more like a creative art and not a science. Whatever scientific endeavors we might wish to pursue, in ethics we are limited to scientifically examining the value we take as our source of normativity, since we cannot compare ethical systems on an ethical basis without begging questions. This is a step removed from studying normativity itself, which would be the goal of a "truly" scientific ethics.

Today, I'm going to switch gears and talk about the possibility of studying normativity itself. Whatever our basis for ethics, whatever our source of normativity, we certainly experience normative feelings, and that means there's a phenomenology lurking about (there's a "what it's like" to these experiences). Where there's phenomenology, there's brain states, and where there's brain states, there's neuroscience. While we cannot meaningfully compare systems of ethics on an ethical basis, we can evaluate our experiences in relation to those systems, and that may be a way "forward." Though, as I hope to explain, there will still be some fairly major roadblocks along the way.

Let's start with some predictions. If the idea that ethics is fundamentally arbitrary ever takes root, then I predict that ethics will take a much broader turn for the scientific in an effort to explain how we experience normative feelings in fearsome scientific detail (more precisely, this will become more popular at a rate greater than that at which it is currently so doing - it's going to "pick up"). There would be described something along the lines of a "right-on," corresponding to some brain state which results in feelings of moral righteousness or satisfaction, and a "hate-on" corresponding to brain states for moral disgust and outrage. Right-ons make you say, "Right on!" Hate-ons make you want to "get your hate on." Easy enough, yeah?

So we'll see all these right-ons and hate-ons, and we'll start to notice something. Within cultures, there will be certain shared values, to nobody's great surprise. But between cultures, and also within cultures, and even within individuals, there will be certain things that conflict with each other. Sometimes, generally reliable precursors to right-ons and hate-ons will behave in unexpected (well, not entirely unexpected) ways when placed at odds with each other. Sometimes, justice will have to compete with happiness, liberty with social order, sex with hunger, plushies with irony. Then we'll scientifically prove something we've known all along: people are messy and complicated, and we get inconsistent when pressed on matters. La-de-friggin'-da.

Fine and dandy, but then what? Well, we're probably going to try to base a "new and improved" ethics on all this sexy new research, which isn't a wholly bad idea, but again we'll run into a problem. There will be outliers, deviations from the norm, and we will need to accommodate these with our new system. We will find a platypus. Some of these will be easy: cultural differences valuing politeness over directness, or vice versa, can be chalked up to learned behaviors. Some things, like sexual orientation, could prove more difficult, depending on what cultural progress has been made. Most interesting, and most problematic, will be things like "insanity." For people whose brain states are so radically different from most anyone else's in terms of when right-ons and hate-ons are generated, it will be tough to deliver a principled (to say nothing of non-arbitrary) account of where to draw the line and say, "These brain states are acceptable and should be tolerated by all; those brain states are insane and should be quarantined and fixed."

So what's next? I'm thinking we'll start looking at behaviors to see if the misfit brain states are actually resulting in any problems, or if they just "look funny." Or we may come up with some sort of "rules of sanity," where you have to more or less pass a test to qualify as sane. Perhaps we may come up with a set of symptoms, not unlike now, where if you act like a crazy person then you're probably a crazy person. Does any of this sound familiar? This has been deliberately phrased to resemble the "classic" moral debate between consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, but no such resemblance is necessary. Whichever way things go, we're going to run into the same damn problem as we had before: when trying to figure out the "right" way to do something, there is no principled and non-arbitrary way to decide which among these competing accounts is best, since the criterion we'll be using for "best" will itself frame the terms of the debate into a circle. Or, in other words, we can never square ourselves up with "right" apart from "purpose," but purposes are categorically chosen and thus always suspect, so we will always have to second-guess ourselves. People have consequentialist intuitions, and they also have deontological intuitions, and they have aretaic intuitions as well; and they apply these intuitions inconsistently most of the time, and frequently in unprincipled and self-serving ways. When it comes to matters of public policy, we need to be all the more cautious.

I have a guess as to what the root of the problem is. My guess has explanatory power, but I don't think it can be verified until we've got a much more robust neurological account of the phenomenology of normativity ("what it's like" to experience right-ons and hate-ons). I think that we crave moral authority. I think it is written upon the human brain that there is such a thing as moral rectitude and dammit, I gotta have that. We want to be able to know, in an uncaring and uncertain Universe, that we have done some manner of "right," and that counts for something. Righteousness, then, acts as a sort of emotional security blanket, telling us that no matter what happens, we're still good people and somehow different from and/or elevated above the hostile and insensate world around us in a meaningful way.

I think that we, as a species, need to get over this. For one thing, we'd save a lot of time and energy by not worrying about whether what we're doing is "right," and instead evaluating whether it's in line with the values of those concerned (ourselves, our loved ones, our culture, our neighborhood, etc.). Contextualizing our moral dilemmas like this, tying them down to actual values rather than an ethereal "good" independent of the full range of human concerns, would go a long way towards clearing up ethical debates. The reason for this is simple: contextualizing the dilemma, phrasing your ethical propositions in terms of chosen purpose and value, leaves less room for inconsistent views of the ethereal "good" and helps prevent people from thinking they're talking about the same thing when they're actually talking right past each other. It makes us clarify our ideas and that facilitates communication, plain and simple. Let's look at a few examples:

Mecca Religious Police, 2002: Our purpose is to follow the commands of Allah, and Allah commands that women not be seen in public without headgear, period. This means that women's fashion is more important than women's lives when it comes down to it, like in that burning building right over there.
Firefighters: Umm... fuck that! Our purpose is to save people from burning alive, no matter what your stupid god has to say about it! If that means pissing in your Cheerios, then so be it. Allah can take it up with us later if he likes.
- - -
Pro-Life Lady: Our purpose is to do right by God, and that means treating all these helpless embryos as full persons in their own right, protecting them from would-be murderers who carelessly create and then abandon them. We value the lives of people, from zygotes on up, more than the convenience of people with the luck to have been born already.
Pro-Choice Lady: Cute rhetoric, but our purpose is to secure the reproductive rights of women, which means that they don't have to reproduce if they don't want to. We also value born persons over unborn anythings, and while abortion's always a fucking tragedy, it's even worse for a woman to be unable to control her body because of something someone else is doing to her, which is the situation you'd be putting her in if a zygote has personhood.
- - -
Homophobic Man: I value marriage as something that only one man and one woman can do together. My purpose here is to stop teh gheyz from getting their relationships legally recognized, because that makes me feel like my kind of relationship is no longer more valued than theirs.
Normal Man: Grow a pair, you twit - that's the point! We value equality, and our purpose is to make it so that the love between any two people is equal in the eyes of the law. This way, anyone can marry anyone, and we can all drink from the same fuckin' fountain.

OK, so it wouldn't happen just like that, but I still think that phrasing our hypothetical imperatives as hypothetical imperatives, complete with values & purpose, would still help clear up all this talk of what's right. At the end of the day, nothing is really changed: "the good" still hasn't been settled, "how should we live" has not been solved, and ethics still has no more of a foundation than it has ever had. In a way, that's kind of my point: "the good" can't be settled, "how should we live" will always be an open question, and ethics can only be founded on arbitrarily chosen purpose and value. All science can do is identify some trends (which may or may not change), crunch some numbers (which may or may not apply to individuals), and give an explanatory account of how things got that way (which is an "is," not an "ought"). Don't get me wrong - these are useful things to have whether or not we end up with an objective ethics. I'm just saying that, in order to identify a source of normativity by way of science alone is an absurd notion, unless the source is our own imaginations. And that's a full surrender to my position that ethics is made-up and entirely in our heads.

Ultimately, I suppose that all this fancy talk doesn't have an impact upon the brute fact that we still have values and choose purposes. But acknowledging the fact that these are subjective and arbitrary, if we value things like reason and truth, is something that ought to be done.

A Little Taste of Heaven: The Happiness Machine (part 2)

About a month and a half ago, I started writing something and then put it on hold to try and track down some research. I have been unable to find that research, but I still have some things to say without it. First, I want to briefly discuss that research I couldn't find (my Google-Fu must be weak, please forgive me), and then I'll get to my objections to the Happiness Machine.

There was a research study done on a mother chimpanzee, where she was separated from her child by a partition through which she was able to see. The mother was only able to interact with her child by pressing a button which would dispense a meal-sized portion of food to it; she had access to another button which would inject a small amount of heroin into her system. During a certain interval, five minutes or so, the mother chimpanzee could only press one of the two buttons. For a while, the mother behaved responsibly enough, regularly feeding her child and getting a fix whenever she wanted; but over time, the mother pressed the heroin button more and more, eventually neglecting her child entirely. I'm not sure exactly what the interval was, nor how long it took the mother to succumb to addiction. I'm actually unclear on a lot of the details, as I heard about the study through verbal conversation with another person, which is why I wanted to look it up. The point, though, was that the experience of an intense enough bliss will change the subject, and I meant to use the study to show that no matter how many safeguards we stipulate into the thought experiment, something about human psychology gets somehow fucked up by such an experience. Can we separate the experience of bliss from the contingent facts of human psychology? I mean to show that we can not, by way of a brief digression about Heaven.

In Ebonmuse's original post on the Happiness Machine, he cites a post by Lynet of Elliptica entitled Challenging the Paramounce of Happiness., where she concludes that the Orgasmotron is functionally an end state like death - and Lynet doesn't want to die, even if she gets to go to Heaven. Ultimately, I suppose my objection boils down to the contrapositive of Lynet's: I don't want to go to Heaven, even if I get to die at the end.

When I lost my faith, one of the toughest things for me to let go of was the idea of Heaven, the ultimate happy ending to life, the Universe, and everything. I was finally able to do so only by reasoning that Heaven is simply Church Forever, which I find boring - I simply don't want to go to Heaven. But since it's stipulated that we'll be happy in Heaven, the person that I would be in Heaven would not find Church Forever to be nearly such a boring thing. But that future version of me is so fundamentally different from the current me that I know and love, that I consider it an entirely different person about whom I neither know nor care. Similarly, for me to be OK with plugging into a Happiness Machine, I would have to be a much different person - so much so that I think I would no longer be recognizable to my current self as "me." What would be so different? Well, for one thing, the me that would be OK with a Happiness Machine would be, by stipulation, satisfied with unconditional pleasure. I am not satisfied with the idea of unconditional pleasure at present.

I want to be happy, sure, but I want to be happy because of things that I do, and I want my happiness to be based on a sense of accomplishment rather than simply something I experience "just because." I am aware that this means I am consigning myself to the very real possibility that I will not experience as much happiness as I possibly could, but I am comfortable with that risk for the same reason that I play video games on difficulties higher than "noob-sauce" - specifically, I don't merely want to win at the game, I want to overcome a challenge. I don't merely want to "win at happiness," I want to overcome challenges to obtain it. Sure, if happiness is good, then this may mean that I'm not the most moral person in the world - but morality is, for me, only one concern among many.

I am also aware that a Happiness Machine, by the very stipulations of the thought experiment, would overcome these objections and satisfy these other desires in me. In a way, that is the essence of my objection: I do not wish to come under such an overpowering influence. Maybe it's some irrational rebellious streak in me, but I don't want to be subjected to something to which I won't ever want to say "no." These two facts - that I could not be unhappy with the Happiness Machine by stipulation, and that I don't want to be unconditionally happy with the Happiness Machine - cannot be reconciled. Experiencing the effects of the Happiness Machine, at least for me, is not something that can be done independent of my existing psychology - I would have to be changed by the experience, and in a way that I consider to be undesirable.

I'm going to switch gears here and "ruin" the thought experiment with some principled realism. We know what "too much happiness" can do to a mind, by way of subverting or overriding existing drives - we have both clean and dirty evidence from which to draw what conclusions we will. But let's suppose, for a moment, that we are not talking about a "Happiness Machine," but instead a "Square Circle Machine," and the thought experiment goes, "Suppose a machine were invented that was capable of creating square circles." While a naive interpretation may hold that the laws of logic may somehow be changed to allow such a thing, anyone who "really understands" geometry will know that we have departed from the logically possible in a very real sense. Similarly, I would argue that penn's Happiness Machine 2.0 is in some way a Square Circle Machine - if we "really understand" how minds work, then we know that any mind presented with unmitigated happines (however "pure" the form) will be unable to turn it down in the future. I maintain that not just our existing drives, but any drives at all, are incompatible with "the experience of pure bliss" and "the pursuit of other ends." If we experience pure bliss, we simply won't be able to care about other ends; if we stipulate ourselves into being entities which are capable of reconciling these influences, then we're not talking about us any longer and the thought experiment fails - we just aren't the droids we're looking for.

So there's my objection to the Happiness Machine. It's not a defeater, but it's not supposed to be; I'm simply saying that I don't want to plug in. Other people with different values may disagree, and that's OK.

I do want to finish with a note on ethics in general, though, because Lynet's post mentions Aristotle and I think that Aristotle himself would have a better objection than "the purpose of Man is to reason, the Happiness Machine prevents that purpose from being fulfilled, so the Happiness Machine is bad, The End." Both Kant's Categorical Imperative and Utilitarianism fail to provide any intrinsic resistance or principled objection to penn's Happiness Machine 2.0, and this is where Aristotle comes in. Nicomachean ethics provides a principled objection, in short: that's not the sort of thing that good people do. At length, the Aristotelian mean dictates that pursuit of pleasure should not be a maximizing thing, but should be appropriate to an otherwise full human life (in a way, this is a more robust version of Lynet's Aristotelian objection). In a nearly Buddhist fashion, a virtue ethicist would take the tack that happiness ought to be something obtained by conditional means, not reduced to a switch that one only need set to "on" and then receive in unlimited supply. Just as one may be too courageous, too righteous, too throughtful, too emotional, too pragmatic, or too cunning, so one may also be too happy. I believe that this shows, at one stroke, both how our moral intuitions are outgrowths of emotion-based value judgments, and how virtue ethics can capture our moral intuitions in ways that deontology and consequentialism cannot.

It doesn't matter if the Happiness Machine is non-addictive, or even "resets" our brains against habituation - it's still an end state, a final destination, a stagnating "and they lived happily ever after" ending. It makes you as happy as possible for as long as possible, and if happiness is your ultimate goal, then what more could you possibly want in life? But some people don't want "just happiness," some people want different things, like "meaning." But what's the meaning of "meaning," when stacked up against perpetual bliss? That depends on how we define "meaning" - and because this post is getting a bit lengthy as well, I'm going to cut to the chase and just say that "meaning" means "having an alternative available." Material wealth has meaning only in relation to an economy of scarcity - if everyone has all they want, then what's the point in having more than your neighbors? Physical fitness only has meaning when there are fat slobs lounging about - if everyone had perfect bodies, then a stellar physique would cease to distinguish one from one's peers as an attractive mate. Life has meaning only so long as death is an option - in Heaven, one's continued existence is an irrevocable given, and so the absence of the spectre of death removes all urgency from life. And if happiness can be obtained unconditionally, as penn's Happiness Machine 2.0 clearly makes possible, then the actions and objects that can grant us conditional happiness are robbed of all meaning.

Now, I can't stress enough here that I am a staunch proponent of freedom of conscience and individual self-determinacy, and thus I think it should be left to the individual to decide what experiences they wish to have - provided that they are adequately informed, of course. If one is aware of the risks of heroin, cocaine, PCP, mescaline, DMT, skydiving, bungee jumping, kayaking, drag racing, travelling abroad, mountain climbing, playing tennis, or any of a variety of things up to and including a fully-functional Happiness Machine 2.0, that is to my mind their call to make. I would fight for Happiness Machine legalization, I might even be willing to do research and development for it - but I wouldn't use it. My point with this second post is simply to show that it is possible to make a principled and rational objection to using the Happiness Machine upon oneself, by virtue of the fact that happiness is for many people simply one goal among many - and the fact that, once used, the Happiness Machine likely cannot be turned down at any future point, indicates that the principled and rational choice for some will be to "just say no." But please understand that I fully accept that for many, the principled and rational choice will be an unqualified and enthusiastic "yes."

Arguing on the Internet: The Happiness Machine (part 1)

I recently read a post over on Daylight Atheism concerning the thought experiment of the happiness machine. I dig thought experiments, especially ones that primarily concern ethics, and the happiness machine is no exception. I do, however, have a few things to say about Ebonmuse's reasoning. A good deal of this has been covered in the comments, but there are a couple key points that I did not see raised in my cursory read, so I want to go over those today.

First, I want to say that I don't disagree with anything he says - so far as his argument goes, I'm more or less with him. However, there are some issues that he doesn't address either in the main post or in his responses to comments; this is the scope I intend to establish for this particular post. I'll be digressing a bit at the end for a lead-up to the following post, which will concern what empirical observation tells us when juxtaposed with our intuitions, and what that means for our "moral sense."

My only real beef, from which all of the following proceeds, is that thought experiments have an introspective diagnostic quality to them, which seems to have been ignored. Because a thought experiment is carried out by your mental apparatus, with your mental apparatus, on your mental apparatus, the "experiment" has nothing to do with the world itself, and everything to do with your mental apparatus. Thought experiments don't tell us things about the world, they help us to illuminate our own thought processes - provided that two key conditions are met:

1. The subject is honest.
   
2. The subject takes the thought experiment seriously.
   

Of course, there is an exception: when the thought experiment is done on multiple people, it can actually tell you about the world (specifically, about the people in it). But one person doing a thought experiment is really just introspecting fancily.

As one commenter (called "penn") points out, the happiness machine isn't a real machine in this world, but rather a perfect hypothetical machine in a hypothetical world which only differs from ours in that said machine exists. The question (as clarified by penn) is not, "Would you use a happiness machine if I offered you one," but rather, "Would you accept a life of unvaried but certain bliss, at the expense of your current life of varied but uncertain experience?" That is the crucial bit of the thought experiment, and that is what I would wager most people find repugnant about the happiness machine. People tend to crave variety and meaning in their lives, not mere happiness. To paraphrase Roger Williams, author of The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, a novella which addresses (in part) just such a happiness machine and its philosophical ramifications, it's not about how many hedons you've accumulated at the end, it's about whether you have accomplished something (source).

Ebonmuse's answer to penn's question concludes with, "Sure, maybe using the Happiness Machine is the best course of action in that world. But I think that world is so utterly and completely different from our own that we shouldn't have any confidence that conclusions that are drawn there can be ported over to our world." This misses the point of the question, to my mind. The point is not whether the thought experiment, as laid out, is possible to carry out in (or carry over to) our world; the point is to draw out just how committed the subject of the thought experiment is to certain principles when those principles are pitted against each other. In other words, the question, "Would you accept a life of unvaried but certain bliss," is one member of a set of questions meant to determine the answer to the "larger" question, "Would you maximize happiness at the expense of everything else (except the necessary preconditions for life itself)?"

Some might say yes. But I imagine that a lot of people would say no, or would try to qualify a "yes" with things that they think might give their life more meaning than simply being locked in a vat hooked up to a brain-poker (basically, for the same reasons that people like me turn down heroin: I'm afraid that it's going to be too good). For instance, some might say they'd do it if it were more like being hooked up to the Matrix, with simulated experiences providing variable "background noise" to the unchanging state of contentment. Others might insist that they'd want it to be a neural implant, a pleasure-dispensing chip so that they can go through real life "unimpeded." But it doesn't matter how much we change the world to make the happiness machine possible if we're not altering the architecture of our own brains.

The problem is, the above qualifiers do not change the fundamental part which has been shown experimentally to override all other concerns: the brain's reward pathways, once tapped in such a way, simply drown out everything else. It doesn't matter if it's a chip, a program, or a hermetically sealed pod - experiencing unconditional pleasure breaks brains, plain and simple. It doesn't matter whether you're able in principle to move around and interact with the world or not, because once you're wired in, all other motivations will be drowned out except those that most efficiently keep the good times rolling. And when the happiness machine makes it so that you don't need to do anything to maintain the perfect high, well, in all likelihood you simply wouldn't do anything.

This is getting a bit lengthy, so I'm going to stop here for the moment and pick this up later. The point, so far, has been more or less that to most people, "happiness" in and of itself is not really all they want in the world - or so they think. In other words, most people think that they have more standards of value than the mere feeling of happiness (while research shows that if happiness is supplied in unlimited quantity, all other concerns take a back seat). Part of what's making this take so long (for me) is that I'm poking around the internet to find research on that "or so they think" part (I need to back up that last paragraph, after all), and it's leading me down some rabbit holes. I'll wrap this up in the next post, concerning the aforementioned research as well as what the thought experiment says about our concept of morality.

Continue to part 2.

101 Interesting Things, part 2: Pain Asymbolia

Pain asymbolia is a neurological condition resulting from brain damage that causes the victim to lose the affective quality of pain while still experiencing the stimulus as pain.  In other words, the qualia of pain is lost.  This condition can be brought about intentionally by performing an operation upon the insula, a treatment sometimes used for patients with chronic pain.

Sense perception and qualia can be very strange to our common-sense notions at times.  Much is made of the "redness of red" when speaking of qualia, but a better example is available:  that of taste.  It can be conceptually difficult for one to distinguish the ideas of a perception of wavelength x of light and the qualia of redness, even though one may be well-versed in the operations of the eye's rods and cones and the brain's optical processing mechanisms.  Taste is a better example because the taste buds react based on the shape of a molecule and the mind produces the qualia of sweet, or sour, or whatever.  But pain asymbolia forces a further distinction:  not only that a painful stimulus creates a sensation in the mind, but also that the sensory experience is itself distinct from the qualia of pain.

Adam "Ebonmuse" Lee (of Ebon Musings and Daylight Atheism fame) writes, in "A Ghost in the Machine," pain asymbolia is distinct from pain insensitivity and other related disorders, in that:

"Patients with this condition lose no sensory perception - they can tell the difference between heat, cold, touch, and various other sensations - but what they seem to lose is the emotional response to pain (Feinberg 2001, p. 4). ... After the operation, they are invariably much more cheerful, and say things such as, 'The pain is the same, but I feel much better now' (Damasio 1994, p. 266). What have these people lost if not their 'pain' qualia?"

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on pain, one of the common ideas about pain is that "pain experiences are essentially painful, awful, abhorrent, so that it is a logical impossibility to have an affectively neutral pain experience."  Pain asymbolia would seem to directly undercut that, in line though it is with our common-sense notions of what pain is like.  It could be that the "awful" component of pain is a purely emotional response tied to a particular set of stimuli, and this is corroborated by the fact that the role of the insula is related to emotions.  However, it seems a bit strange on first blush to suggest that the "painful" aspect of pain is not a direct result of the damage caused by the physical stimulus (patients with pain asymbolia show no difficulty in sensing this part, as it is handled by the somatic sensory cortex), but an entirely emotional response generated by a different part of the brain.

Furthermore, the SEP article also points out that the dissociation caused by pain asymbolia is distinct even from similar dissociations that can arise in lobotomy patients or people on morphine.  These latter groups still respond to momentary pains (e.g. small cuts or pinpricks), but those with pain asymbolia do not.  It appears that just as involuntary reflexes (originating from the spine) are reactions to stimuli that do not involve any conscious processing at all, so too is the qualia of pain a separate process, even though common experience would suggest the opposite.  How interesting!