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. :)
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Saturday, July 21, 2012
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!
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 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.”
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Mary Midgley says you can't rock someone's world. Everyone and their grandma disagrees.
PZ calls her a twit, and another hip & cool professor (name of ArithmoQuine) tries a more charitable interpretation.
PZ's right, but ArithmoQuine is being more helpful to the dialogue. Midgley is being a twit, saying that we ought not to turn the world-views of others upside-down and shake them for loose change. From her first sentence, "Science really isn't connected to the rest of life half as straightforwardly as one might wish", you can tell that she's arguing from human foolishness - just because people don't unfailingly connect science to their everyday lives doesn't mean that the connection isn't there. And yeah, sure, there's no One True sure-fire method for changing someone's mind on this or that topic (unless we count brainwashing, can we please count brainwashing?), but people change their own minds all the time and the words of other people often have something to do with it. Fuckin' duh. You'd think that a fellow philosopher, of all people, would have a clue about that. I mean, our favorite activity is sitting around in the lotus position trying to find ways to blow our own minds, and our second-favorite activity is sharing these techniques with others so we can watch them try it out.
ArithmoQuine takes a more effective tack and tries to grant Midgley the strongest case he can piece together from her writing. This is called the principle of charity, and it's how you avoid straw-manning the opposition: you help your opponent into the very best suit of armor the two of you can agree upon, and then proceed to show that not even this can withstand your A-bomb. (The A is for Argument.) And really, all Midgley can possibly be saying is that if you take on the underpinning of someone's whole damn world-view, then you're going to run into cognitive dissonance. Which is true. Who gives a shit?
Well, of course, we all give a shit. I mean, cognitive dissonance - well, our drive to resolve cognitive dissonance, more precisely - is what makes the rational world go 'round. And the irrational world. Rational folk, upon noting such dissonance, will reconcile the mis-match between their imperfect minds and obstinate reality by changing their minds to be more in-line with the observed facts. For clarity, I don't mean that this is how "people I'd call rational" consistently behave, I mean that when you do this, you are behaving as a rational person. The alternative, of course, is to try to force the world to fit your idea of how it ought to be when it's clearly not. This can often take the form of kicking the shit out of whoever's existence is causing you angst in order to preserve your idea of moral order in the world.
This is the kind of bullshit we're up against, and I don't just mean atheists: I mean people who accept reality and try to work within its confines. See, dropping your preconceptions about how you first happened to believe the world ought to be, and then accepting implacable reality for what it is, can help produce a kind of serenity that will allow you to become a peaceful, permissive, moral, fun-loving Dane. Siding with your preconceptions in opposition to implacable reality will cause you to brainwash your family and other miscellaneous fuckwits into becoming a national disgrace. Of course, these are the extreme ends of the spectrum and your mileage will vary: Denmark is towards the Very Good end, and Fred Phelps is towards the Fucking Horrible end, and most people pile up to form that smooth bell shape in the middle.
But this spectrum is a moving one, more of a travelling wave as we become ever more civilized over time. Those fuckers on the hump are better than the Phelpses of the world, but they sure provide a lot of dead weight for the Danes to haul along as they (i.e. the majority) passively reinforce the status quo by comprising it. This is where Midgley really screws the pooch: she claims in her closing that we need to try to improve existing world-views and take them on as wholes (good so far), with the implication that trying to actually change anything is a fool's errand. The comparisons to other changes in the status quo are numerous, easy, and left to the reader; ours is a campaign of memocide, and if ideas were people, then we'd be rotten to the core for even considering it. But they're not, so we can keep on truckin'.
Midgley is right, however, that plucking a few hairs from the beast won't kill it. The memes we're up against are self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing, and they're deeply entwined with other memes we don't like, such as patriarchy and tribalism, and the whole rotten thicket is itself a perfectly natural outgrowth of our very own psychological flaws, so excising this cultural tumor is going to be a task and a half. I said a-good-God-damn.
Midgley does make one profoundly stupid error, though, and I haven't seen anyone call her out on it yet, so I'm gonna. See, Midgley says,
I want to note that believing in the Loch Ness monster requires belief in Loch Ness, and in general requires some sort of world-view. We all have them, as Midgley correctly points out, and there's no "escaping" from them. You can't just "step out" from your world-view without "stepping into" another one, since world-views are the very framework within which we evaluate our experiences. Formally, this is known as the Duhem-Quine thesis, and it says that no single hypothesis can be tested in isolation because every testable hypothesis rests on background assumptions. So naturally, every belief in particular gods is going to go along with some sort of world-view in the actual minds of actual people in the actual world. Those world-views are, by virtue of accommodating one or more gods, categorically theistic. Successfully excising particular god beliefs from a theistic world-view will require one of two things:
Point is, it will eventually be cognitively easier to opt for #2 than to continue avoiding it, but there's no telling when for a particular person, and individuals vary wildly in this respect. Son of a bitch, you mean this is going to be hard? Oi, if I'd known that, I never would'a signed up!
Just kidding. All Midgley has done with the best possible version of her point is to clearly outline the problem before us with two scoops of pessimism. What does she want, a pat on the head and a warm glass of milk?
PZ's right, but ArithmoQuine is being more helpful to the dialogue. Midgley is being a twit, saying that we ought not to turn the world-views of others upside-down and shake them for loose change. From her first sentence, "Science really isn't connected to the rest of life half as straightforwardly as one might wish", you can tell that she's arguing from human foolishness - just because people don't unfailingly connect science to their everyday lives doesn't mean that the connection isn't there. And yeah, sure, there's no One True sure-fire method for changing someone's mind on this or that topic (unless we count brainwashing, can we please count brainwashing?), but people change their own minds all the time and the words of other people often have something to do with it. Fuckin' duh. You'd think that a fellow philosopher, of all people, would have a clue about that. I mean, our favorite activity is sitting around in the lotus position trying to find ways to blow our own minds, and our second-favorite activity is sharing these techniques with others so we can watch them try it out.
ArithmoQuine takes a more effective tack and tries to grant Midgley the strongest case he can piece together from her writing. This is called the principle of charity, and it's how you avoid straw-manning the opposition: you help your opponent into the very best suit of armor the two of you can agree upon, and then proceed to show that not even this can withstand your A-bomb. (The A is for Argument.) And really, all Midgley can possibly be saying is that if you take on the underpinning of someone's whole damn world-view, then you're going to run into cognitive dissonance. Which is true. Who gives a shit?
Well, of course, we all give a shit. I mean, cognitive dissonance - well, our drive to resolve cognitive dissonance, more precisely - is what makes the rational world go 'round. And the irrational world. Rational folk, upon noting such dissonance, will reconcile the mis-match between their imperfect minds and obstinate reality by changing their minds to be more in-line with the observed facts. For clarity, I don't mean that this is how "people I'd call rational" consistently behave, I mean that when you do this, you are behaving as a rational person. The alternative, of course, is to try to force the world to fit your idea of how it ought to be when it's clearly not. This can often take the form of kicking the shit out of whoever's existence is causing you angst in order to preserve your idea of moral order in the world.
This is the kind of bullshit we're up against, and I don't just mean atheists: I mean people who accept reality and try to work within its confines. See, dropping your preconceptions about how you first happened to believe the world ought to be, and then accepting implacable reality for what it is, can help produce a kind of serenity that will allow you to become a peaceful, permissive, moral, fun-loving Dane. Siding with your preconceptions in opposition to implacable reality will cause you to brainwash your family and other miscellaneous fuckwits into becoming a national disgrace. Of course, these are the extreme ends of the spectrum and your mileage will vary: Denmark is towards the Very Good end, and Fred Phelps is towards the Fucking Horrible end, and most people pile up to form that smooth bell shape in the middle.
But this spectrum is a moving one, more of a travelling wave as we become ever more civilized over time. Those fuckers on the hump are better than the Phelpses of the world, but they sure provide a lot of dead weight for the Danes to haul along as they (i.e. the majority) passively reinforce the status quo by comprising it. This is where Midgley really screws the pooch: she claims in her closing that we need to try to improve existing world-views and take them on as wholes (good so far), with the implication that trying to actually change anything is a fool's errand. The comparisons to other changes in the status quo are numerous, easy, and left to the reader; ours is a campaign of memocide, and if ideas were people, then we'd be rotten to the core for even considering it. But they're not, so we can keep on truckin'.
Midgley is right, however, that plucking a few hairs from the beast won't kill it. The memes we're up against are self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing, and they're deeply entwined with other memes we don't like, such as patriarchy and tribalism, and the whole rotten thicket is itself a perfectly natural outgrowth of our very own psychological flaws, so excising this cultural tumor is going to be a task and a half. I said a-good-God-damn.
Midgley does make one profoundly stupid error, though, and I haven't seen anyone call her out on it yet, so I'm gonna. See, Midgley says,
Belief in God is not an isolated factual opinion, like belief in the Loch Ness monster – not, as Richard Dawkins suggests, just one more "scientific hypothesis like any other". It is a world-view, an all-enclosing vision of the kind of world that we inhabit. We all have these visions.I call equivocation! See, the phrase "belief in God" could be understood either as the genuine world-view of theism, or as the "isolated factual opinion" of a particular person's particular belief in a particular deity (it might not be a clear idea, but it is a particular one). By not clarifying this ambiguity and then immediately trading on it, Midgley has committed textbook equivocation and should brush up on her basic logic. Sure, theism isn't an isolated factual opinion, but believing in this or that god sure the Hell is!
I want to note that believing in the Loch Ness monster requires belief in Loch Ness, and in general requires some sort of world-view. We all have them, as Midgley correctly points out, and there's no "escaping" from them. You can't just "step out" from your world-view without "stepping into" another one, since world-views are the very framework within which we evaluate our experiences. Formally, this is known as the Duhem-Quine thesis, and it says that no single hypothesis can be tested in isolation because every testable hypothesis rests on background assumptions. So naturally, every belief in particular gods is going to go along with some sort of world-view in the actual minds of actual people in the actual world. Those world-views are, by virtue of accommodating one or more gods, categorically theistic. Successfully excising particular god beliefs from a theistic world-view will require one of two things:
1) A different god must be placed in the god-spot, orSince the god-spot holds up huge chunks of the cognitive tapestry for many, of course most theists will shuffle gods in and out of their god-spots, taking great pains to ensure that any god in which they can no longer bear to maintain belief is taken out of the rotation. This helps them avoid the trouble of opting for number two, which is shit. But shit is natural and if you try to avoid it then you'll end up full of it, and I suddenly don't feel like pursuing this metaphor any further.
2) The world-view itself must be exchanged for a new model without a god-spot.
Point is, it will eventually be cognitively easier to opt for #2 than to continue avoiding it, but there's no telling when for a particular person, and individuals vary wildly in this respect. Son of a bitch, you mean this is going to be hard? Oi, if I'd known that, I never would'a signed up!
Just kidding. All Midgley has done with the best possible version of her point is to clearly outline the problem before us with two scoops of pessimism. What does she want, a pat on the head and a warm glass of milk?
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
I don't think that argument suggests what you think it suggests.
Alvin Plantinga recently made an appearance roundabout my neck of the woods. My good friend came out from grad school to see him, so I kind of had to go as well. I mean, catching up with a buddy in grad school and picking on a 77-year-old theist? How could I miss out?
I pick on Alvin because I like him. He's a lively and affable guy in person, and really quite bright - even if he thinks that entities can be defined into existence. I just happen to think he's sadly misguided, and in an innocent enough way to justify paraphrasing The Princess Bride. Anyway, the good doctor's talk was on his evolutionary argument against naturalism, a pretty decent piece of reasoning that just so happens to cut against him in the particulars. If you don't feel like clicking through, here's the Fucking Short Version:
1. The probability that human cognitive faculties are reliable1, given naturalism and evolution, is low2.2. If we accept both naturalism and evolution, and understand premise 1, then we have a defeater for the idea that our cognitive faculties are reliable.3. If we have a defeater for the idea that our cognitive faculties are reliable, then we have a defeater for any belief we may come to hold with those cognitive faculties (including a belief that naturalism and evolution are true).4. Therefore, we should not believe that naturalism and evolution are true, because they are self-defeating.Conclusion: Therefore, fucking magic!Notes:1 - Weasel word!2 - So what?! The Universe is a big place and rare things happen all the time.
OK, we've some unpacking to do here. As for that first premise, Plantinga leans on a quote from Patricia Churchland on the utility of truth for evolved animals: "Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four Fs: feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing. ... Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost." Plantinga uses this to develop his point by saying that natural selection can only work on behavior, not on beliefs (nevermind the fact that beliefs often inform behavior - seriously, don't mind this for now!), and therefore the truth value of this or that belief is irrelevant next to how adaptive or maladaptive the organism's behavior is.
This is, well, true. Natural selection simply can't act on what you believe independent of everything else. Plantinga goes to great pains to make this point. All other things being equal (which they never are, but still, we're ignoring that for now), the truth value of a belief is in fact irrelevant to the evolutionary process. To put his argument in more Cartesian terms,
"My evolved brain is not perfect, therefore it screws up. Because it's all I've got to work with, I might not be able to know whether it's screwing up at any given moment, because it might be screwing up right the fuck now. Therefore, I can never be 100% certain that I'm in my right mind."I want to press Pause to let everybody know that I am with him so far. Really and truly (I just conclude that we must live with "less than 100% certainty"). Here's where things start to get real funny, though:
"Since I can never be 100% certain that I'm in my right mind, I might even be wrong about that. Because this uncertainty is self-effacing, I ought not to buy it. Therefore, I shouldn't buy the reasoning that brought me to this conclusion. Theists don't have this problem because we believe that our brains were purpose-built by God, so we can trust them."Not joking! He says, "If my brain is evolved (i.e. not built by God), then I shouldn't trust it, even when it tells me that my brain is evolved; so I'll go with a belief system that ignores the problem of self-doubt instead." I mean, Alvin Plantinga wouldn't say that he's ignoring the problem, but that's what he does. Look, just because cars can break down doesn't mean that my car is broken down right now, and anyway you don't need to believe in Platonic Devices to avoid the uncomfortable possibility that your car might break down tomorrow. You can in fact believe something with 95% certainty and accept that one time in twenty, you'll be surprised. I mean, holy shit.
Enough cussing for the moment. I'm going to go right for premise 1 by granting it: given naturalism (i.e. not supernaturalism) and evolution (i.e. not IDiocy), the probability that my cognitive faculties are "reliable" in any strong sense is fairly low. Now, neither Plantinga nor I wish to speak of perfect reliability here; he even gives the example in his talk that if you ask five different witnesses about a car crash, you'll get five different stories (he says that their reliability is in the overwhelming agreement upon background beliefs that make their stories possible: the crash occurred on Earth and not Mars; the crash involved cars and not boats; cars drive on roads and not rainbows; blah blah blah). However, in order to achieve survivability, some reliability is necessary: bees need to apprehend reality to a degree in order to dance out directions to their cohorts, for example. So we're talking about a gradient of reliability here, really. He granted this during the Q&A session.
But then, that really gives it up, from his end. When we speak of the probability (P) of a degree of reliability (R) occurring in nature, given no supernatural input and a competitive environment, we no longer need to speak in terms of absolutes. Rather, we have freed ourselves to talk in terms of how reliable we need to be, how long we have to get there, and how lucky we're allowed to get along the way. Early on, the demand for R will be low, raising P (since lower Rs are more achievable). As time goes on, R can be refined, and in a competitive environment this will bring about ever-stricter requirements for higher Rs - so larger timescales also improve our P. Now I, for one, was born a piss-poor thinker, and I had to be educated rather heavily in the proper use of my gray matter - this education, in turn, was based on a long history of competitive educational systems in a world of scarce funding, and informed by a long tradition based on accumulating and revising knowledge.
So really, to get the R which I enjoy this very day, I only had to be born with enough R to be worked upon by something that was more or less evolved in its own right to do just that. And looking back before that in history, I mean, wow! People were nuts! They believed all sorts of crazy shit; Hell, we still do! Even within humanity, we see wild variance for R, from scientifically literate skeptics at one end to mental patients and uneducated children at the other. The reliability of our cognitive faculties is a fluid thing which can be honed or stunted; it can improve or atrophy over time.
Now comes the question, "How lucky are we allowed to get?" After all, homo sapiens is but one species among many on this teensy little rock of ours. Would it not stand to reason that at least one organism, with enough time, would develop enough cognitive reliability to improve upon it more or less exactly as we humans have in fact done? Plantinga's response was to ask, "Well, who's to say that it would be us?" Argh. I pointed out that whichever species did that would be the one to have these sorts of conversations, and then Plantinga said, "Well, maybe it's dolphins and they have the good sense not to argue about such things." Thank you, doctor. By this point, I had pretty much asked three questions, and things needed to be moved along. Ah, well. It was fun while it lasted.
This post was featured in the 52nd Humanist Symposium.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Arguing on the Internet: Is there intelligent life on Earth? No, really - is there?
The following is an elaboration on a conversation I've been having with paradoctor over on Daylight Atheism. This whole mess started with a rather scholarly discussion of the conceptual failings of IDiocy, segued smoothly into talk of abandoned dinosaur cities on the Moon, and so far has come to paradoctor asking me if I think there's intelligent life on Earth (whether seriously or facetiously, I cannot tell). Then I thought of the following.There are days when I would be inclined to say, "No, intelligent life does not exist on Earth." But of course this is absurd, and I am not typically interested in advocating for absurd positions. Although I do freely admit that reality is absurd, I think the only positions worth taking are non-absurd ones - I agree with absurdists on a lot of things, in other words, I'm just not one.
In all seriousness, in my experience, what many people mean by "intelligent" is something along the lines of "has first-person experiences". However, we can't test for this directly, by the same line of reasoning that I can never "really know" what it's like to be a bat because I am not a bat. So we instead come up with things like the Turing test, which of course works for determining whether our candidate is able to do the things an intelligent agent is also able to do, but leaves the rather glaring problem that a Turing-complete philosophical zombie is absolutely indistinguishable from its genuinely "first-person experience-having" counterpart. Then comes Daniel Dennett to the rescue, "We are the zimboes," and blah blah blah.
As Dennett himself explains the idea, "Zimboes thinkZ they are conscious, thinkZ they have qualia, thinkZ they suffer pains – they are just 'wrong' (according to this lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover!" His point is that there is no meaningful difference between thinking and thinkingZ, therefore zimboes are no different from persons as we ordinarily think of them - le sigh... or thinkZ of them - and if there's no difference between two things then they're the same. Of course, this leaves the problem of whether things we might not even consider to have first-person experiences are zimboes just like ourselves. We have no reason to think so, of course, but the whole point is what if we're wrong? Pascal's Wager of animism, in other words, with a weird line-drawing problem that seems to center around nervous systems or perhaps circuits (we'll get to this line-drawing later).
The other main camp I've encountered means by "intelligent", "can demonstrate learning", conveniently bypassing the p-zombie problem. Of course, on this analysis, dogs and mice are intelligent for being able to learn non-instinctive behaviors and solve problems - which is generally unproblematic, as they are cute and fuzzy to most people, most of the time. But even pigeons have been shown to form superstitious behaviors, which to me would indicate both an ability to learn and a high probability of first-person experience. The problem here is one of principled interpretation: we say that a mouse has "solved" a maze by reaching its end, having been motivated to do so by the conditions of the experiment; could we not then say that the elements in the Miller-Urey experiment "solved" their situation by forming amino acids, having been motivated to do so by the conditions of their experiment? Both cases involve watching the behavior of particular configurations of mass-energy in an artificial environment. While it might be unproblematic to attribute (admittedly limited) intelligence to insects, for they still have brains, even amoebas engage in what looks like hunting, and they're just single cells! In both experiments, the things being experimented upon merely behaved in whatever ways they could, and I see no principled reason to attribute one with intellect and not the other (given the smooth gradations that can be made at every step of the way in between). Could not we humans, for all our scientific endeavors, be seen as a mere means in reality's effort to understand itself? A sort of cosmic navel-gazing, if you will, in which introspection on things like "purpose" is itself our very "purpose"!
While such wildly irresponsible speculation may make philosophers feel good about themselves, the slippery slope cuts both ways here: we can show that many organisms which "demonstrate intelligence" are completely uncommunicative in ways that we are able to recognize, so who's to say that other things don't simply possess lesser and lesser degrees of intelligence, whether or not they have first-person experiences? I mean, sure, we can draw a line somewhere between fish and rocks, but precisely where we draw it will make a difference (I promise, we're getting there!). Cutting back, when we say that a thing "acts as if" it has a higher level of intelligence than can be reasonably attributed to it, what's to say that purportedly intelligent things almost certainly possessed of first-person experiences aren't merely "acting as if" they have intelligence? The mystical "I" at the helm of consciousness is, after all, a story that the brain tells itself, ret-conning and confabulating memories will-ye, nil-ye.
Dennett argues (very persuasively, I think) that consciousness is more like fame than like being on television, insofar as it happens distributively and by degrees rather than in a strict "on or off" sense. The degree to which we are aware of the calculations performed by our brains is, to my mind, rendered irrelevant - the parts of our brains that execute whatever steps they have learned to execute are no more intelligent than the components of a computer running an installed program (and no less!). Or as Edsger Dijkstra put it, "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." But at the same time, any matter could be said to be "running" whatever "program" would perfectly describe whatever it is that it does. In fact, a biophysicist named Gregory Engels has discovered that plants accomplish photosynthesis at their level of efficiency by exploiting principles of quantum mechanics. The Scientific American version actually credits them with performing the computations, but my point is, what's the meaningful difference? (I suppose the "daffyrance" would be that the SciAm folks have never heard of pareidolia.)
So in one sense, "intelligent" is a word and words are made-up, so of course there's no intelligent life on Earth. In a more pragmatic sense, of course there's intelligent life on Earth, but the interesting question is how much of it can we call intelligent? Between these two extremes - nihilism and treating the matter as a necessarily open question - lies just a mess that relies on presuppositions and other motivations to get a clear answer. In short, the only clear answer is a semantically bizarre yet unequivocal No; Yes answers are by their very nature unclear and open to debate (which is awesome!). Of course, this won't stop a bunch of really sexy heroes sporting labcoats and degrees from pointing out which arbitrarily-arranged distinctions have this or that pragmatic value, and this is perfectly fine. But I have neither a labcoat nor a degree, I am instead interested in understanding the whole problem, and what this understanding tells me is that on the one hand there's nothing, on the other hand there's everything, and in between is just a mess. Viva la mess!
OK, finally. This all matters because a computer-based Synthetic Intelligence (there's nothing artificial about the Turing-complete sort of intelligence we're talking about here) would seem to warrant all the rights and responsibilities of any other person. And why not? If you were to upload your complete brain state to a sufficiently advanced computer to "run" you past the expiration of your organic body, would you not then be one such Turing-complete computer-based SI? Would you not want the termination or erasure of your process to be regarded as a murder? Anyone would! Including an SI "born" on a hard drive with no biological precursor. But how can you murder something that's not alive to begin with? And what about copies that modify themselves or blend with each other to the point of no longer being the same "person"? Do we need to count any form of intelligence as "alive"? Or can we simply regard the extinguishing of an intellect as "murder"? This would seem to handily resolve difficulties with people in persistent vegetative states, as well as the abortion of fetuses lacking brain tissues (at the very least). But eating meat would now well and truly be murder, unless we either genetically engineer brainless animals (which doesn't sound all that bad to me), or only eat animals that die of natural causes (which has problems of its own). We can push the problem back a bit by talking about legalistic "citizenship" rather than philosophical "personhood", but the issue remains that we want to make our in-group as wide as possible while still leaving the "stupid mass-energy" open to the sort of resource exploitation that we won't perform upon our persons/citizens/what-have-you. Double trouble if we assign intelligence to rocks, for "running" their "rock programs". (Then PETA changes their name to People for the Ethical Treatment of Mass-Energy, PETME, and comes up with new slogans: "Mining is murder!" "Minerals are people, too!" "Rocks are not ours to skip across the ocean waves or keep as pets in our homes!")
So in one sense, "intelligent" is a word and words are made-up, so of course there's no intelligent life on Earth. In a more pragmatic sense, of course there's intelligent life on Earth, but the interesting question is how much of it can we call intelligent? Between these two extremes - nihilism and treating the matter as a necessarily open question - lies just a mess that relies on presuppositions and other motivations to get a clear answer. In short, the only clear answer is a semantically bizarre yet unequivocal No; Yes answers are by their very nature unclear and open to debate (which is awesome!). Of course, this won't stop a bunch of really sexy heroes sporting labcoats and degrees from pointing out which arbitrarily-arranged distinctions have this or that pragmatic value, and this is perfectly fine. But I have neither a labcoat nor a degree, I am instead interested in understanding the whole problem, and what this understanding tells me is that on the one hand there's nothing, on the other hand there's everything, and in between is just a mess. Viva la mess!
OK, finally. This all matters because a computer-based Synthetic Intelligence (there's nothing artificial about the Turing-complete sort of intelligence we're talking about here) would seem to warrant all the rights and responsibilities of any other person. And why not? If you were to upload your complete brain state to a sufficiently advanced computer to "run" you past the expiration of your organic body, would you not then be one such Turing-complete computer-based SI? Would you not want the termination or erasure of your process to be regarded as a murder? Anyone would! Including an SI "born" on a hard drive with no biological precursor. But how can you murder something that's not alive to begin with? And what about copies that modify themselves or blend with each other to the point of no longer being the same "person"? Do we need to count any form of intelligence as "alive"? Or can we simply regard the extinguishing of an intellect as "murder"? This would seem to handily resolve difficulties with people in persistent vegetative states, as well as the abortion of fetuses lacking brain tissues (at the very least). But eating meat would now well and truly be murder, unless we either genetically engineer brainless animals (which doesn't sound all that bad to me), or only eat animals that die of natural causes (which has problems of its own). We can push the problem back a bit by talking about legalistic "citizenship" rather than philosophical "personhood", but the issue remains that we want to make our in-group as wide as possible while still leaving the "stupid mass-energy" open to the sort of resource exploitation that we won't perform upon our persons/citizens/what-have-you. Double trouble if we assign intelligence to rocks, for "running" their "rock programs". (Then PETA changes their name to People for the Ethical Treatment of Mass-Energy, PETME, and comes up with new slogans: "Mining is murder!" "Minerals are people, too!" "Rocks are not ours to skip across the ocean waves or keep as pets in our homes!")
So to answer paradoctor's question, at long-winded last: there is intelligence on Earth in every way that counts; there is also life on Earth in every way that counts; but these do not always "go together". You can have unintelligent life, and intelligent non-life, depending on your definitions. In order to meaningfully answer the question, we need a more robust understanding of the problem with respect to which the question is being asked - it matters what else will be at stake. Or we could keep our answers provisional and revise them as new issues come up. I mean, it's not like we're codifying a religion here or anything.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Thoughts on "The Authoritarians"
It's not often that a book makes me feel naive. I've felt enlightened, when reading good philosophy; enriched, when reading good biology; depressed, when reading about the dirty tricks of advertising psychology; stupid, when reading beyond my ken. But Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians is the first book I can recall that made me feel naive.
Mainly, I suppose, this is because I was already halfway there, but at the same time only halfway there. See, back when I wrote Boss of Bosses, I was joking. Now, it's a well-known fact that nothing is just a joke, but even my inner cynic was saying, "Yeah, sure, it plays out as if this were the case a whole lot - but I deliberately invented a just-so story, nobody actually believes this shit if you'd straight-up ask 'em."
See, that's where I went wrong.
Allow me to introduce you to the RWA scale. I'll be using that acronym a lot, so you'd do well to have your inner Morgan Freeman pronounce that as, "arwah." You can read the whole thing on page 11 of the book (17 in the .pdf), but here are a a few of the items:
Mainly, I suppose, this is because I was already halfway there, but at the same time only halfway there. See, back when I wrote Boss of Bosses, I was joking. Now, it's a well-known fact that nothing is just a joke, but even my inner cynic was saying, "Yeah, sure, it plays out as if this were the case a whole lot - but I deliberately invented a just-so story, nobody actually believes this shit if you'd straight-up ask 'em."
See, that's where I went wrong.
Allow me to introduce you to the RWA scale. I'll be using that acronym a lot, so you'd do well to have your inner Morgan Freeman pronounce that as, "arwah." You can read the whole thing on page 11 of the book (17 in the .pdf), but here are a a few of the items:
OK, so agreement with those sorts of statements correlates very highly with disagreement on these other sorts of statements from the same test:
- Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us.
- It is always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in government and religion than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubt in people’s minds.
- There are many radical, immoral people in our country today, who are trying to ruin it for their own godless purposes, whom the authorities should put out of action.
- Our country will be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the “rotten apples” who are ruining everything.
- This country would work a lot better if certain groups of troublemakers would just shut up and accept their group’s traditional place in society.
There are twenty questions and on a nine-point response scale, this means scores can range from 20 to 180. Now, this is disguised as a public opinion survey and given to people who are not told that they're being psychologically profiled based on their responses, which means I was already a leg up and it's not really that impressive when I score a 26.
- There is absolutely nothing wrong with nudist camps.
- Our country needs free thinkers who have the courage to defy traditional ways, even if this upsets many people.
- A “woman’s place” should be wherever she wants to be. The days when women are submissive to their husbands and social conventions belong strictly in the past.
As an aside, what did surprise me was that although I scored absurdly low on the RWA scale (intro psych students in Altemeyer's classes average 75, their parents and also members of the USA's Libertarian Party averaged 90), and also on most of the other tests which are for things like how dogmatic or socially dominant you are, I paradoxically scored absurdly high on his test for zealotry (p. 124 book, 130 .pdf): "normal people" score in the 10-20 range on that scale, religious fundamentalists score around 40, and I scored a whopping fifty-four (it only goes to 72). Huh. I'm an un-authoritarian zealot*.
Anyway, what's important about the RWA scale is that high scores on it correlate very strongly to three types of behaviors: submission to authority, aggression on behalf of authority, and belief that everyone else ought to abide by one's own conventions. What's depressing to me is how much these things seem to "go together," and what infuriates me is how difficult it is to change this in people. There are ways to do that, of course: going to college, for example. Altemeyer writes,
"The drop [in authoritarianism] does not come from reading Marx in Political Science or from the philosophy prof who wears his atheism as a badge. These attempts at influence can be easily dismissed by the well-inoculated high RWA student. It probably comes more from the late night bull-sessions, where you have to defend your ideas, not just silently reject the prof’s, and other activities that take place in the dorms, I’ll bet."Hanging out with other people, in other words. And it turns out that people tend to turn out a little less authoritarian than their parents, regardless. And what does every parent tend to want for every child? To go to a good college! So the good news is that, as we can see with this whole "civilization" thing that's been going on around us, authoritarianism tends to go down over time. I mean, we have to interact with different people, so as long as we stop any one monolithic culture from literally taking over the world, we ought to be in pretty good shape (in the long run, that is - if there is a long run).
One of the more interesting things Altemeyer talks about is the Global Change Game. Basically, it's Axis & Allies for grown-ups, but with money and birth control and climate change and such: you take five-dozen people and divvy them up among nations, have self-appointed leaders (called "Elites") select themselves in each region, then tell the Elites they're allowed to embezzle and whoever embezzles the most wins, and let them all go! When Altemeyer had groups play with like-scoring persons on the RWA scale, fun things happened: the low-RWA game had a record-low death toll, a huge amount of cooperation, and improvements in all areas of life for all regions; the high-RWA game ended prematurely in nuclear war, had the clock turned back two years to try again, and continued down a path of bickering and one-upmanship.
But then Altemeyer ran two different high-RWA games, one completely devoid of social dominators (people who tend to be low-RWAs but tend also to be cynical opportunists - the test is on page 164, 170 in the .pdf), and one with social dominators sprinkled about. Now, you see, about 5-10% of people score highly on both the RWA scale and the Social Dominance scales, and so some of these "Double Highs" would have made it into the first high-RWA game. As Altemeyer puts it, Double Highs "win the gold medal in the Prejudice Olympics," and their authoritarianism seemed to make up for the amorality of the low-RWA dominators, so the dominant game went about as awfully as you'd expect it would (oddly, much less embezzling - the more money in your pocket, the less you can use to get your team ahead of the next guy's, apparently).
But take away the dominators, and what do you get? A whole lot of boring nothing. No fighting. No teamwork. When stripped of their leaders, the high-RWA folks proved a rather uncreative and insular lot. The crises that reared their heads more or less ran rampant, nobody thought outside the box to solve their problems, everyone just tried to work on improving things for their own in-game in-group and they pretty much stagnated their way into mediocrity.
There's a whole lot more that I didn't cover (politics is what you'd expect, religion is what you'd expect, but the numbers show some alarming things), which is why you should go read it. Did I mention it's free? Go read it! Also, Altemeyer bares good portions of his methodology in the footnotes, and I found his numbers very convincing - his results lead to the conclusions he concludes, so long as he didn't falsify his data. He also holds himself to higher standards than other researchers, again, so long as he's not outright lying about what the generally accepted standards are. All in all, I found it a very accessible and rather gripping read, which is not something I ever thought I'd say about a psychology book.
* - Altemeyer opens the zealotry test by asking respondents, "Now I want to know, in my constantly nosey way, what you believe in. Do you have a most important outlook or way of understanding things? Maybe it’s a religion, a philosophy, a social perspective like socialism or capitalism. What do you use, more than anything else, to make sense out of things, to understand 'life'?" I thought about it and answered, "critical thinking." I read the first question, "This outlook colors and shapes almost everything I experience in life," and had the immediate knee-jerk reaction, "This is stupid. I'm not a zealot." But then I caught myself reacting to the threat of cognitive dissonance, and forced myself through the test, thinking carefully about what I really think, and yeah. I'm a critical thinking zealot - but I also know that acting like one won't get me my way most of the time (because being right and being successful don't always go together - thanks, critical thinking!), so I deliberately hold those types of urges in check.
So maybe it makes sense that when Silver Garou told me that everything written is true with a straight face at that one party, I nearly vomited. (True story.)
So maybe it makes sense that when Silver Garou told me that everything written is true with a straight face at that one party, I nearly vomited. (True story.)
Monday, January 25, 2010
Poison for Your Brain: The Stupid, It Burns (from both barrels)!
So I skimmed over PZ's take on Adams' childish whining, but then Rhodopsin sent me Orac's scathing excoriation and I just had to read up. I even gave Natural News my e-mail address just so I could see the whole damn thing.
This is Poison for Your Brain, and not something serious like, uhh... something... else... so I'm just going to up & say that this guy's showing more ego defenses than Jessica Rabbit shows leg. (Pro Tip: that would be, like, all of them.) Can we go through the list? I think we can!
We've got delusional projection, denial, distortion, maybe splitting (that one's a bit more of a stretch); the whole article is a case in acting out, there's clearly some fantasy at work, I'll give him a free pass on idealization and passive aggression (since I took splitting and I'm already a little stretched); actual projection, and this is not a joke, we can see the jealousy and injustice collecting common to any martyr complex and/or motivated troll; I'll give him another pass on projective identification and somatization because I don't care to play doctor that seriously with him; OK, I guess that's it, actually. The neurotic defenses are missing, as far as I can tell, and the mature defenses are also completely absent.
Seriously, take a look at the Cliff's Notes. This guy needs to see a shrink before he offs somebody. This is just stupid. And all over a fuckin' internet poll, for crying out loud.
What the fuck?!
In other news, neocons apparently think that theories of truth are a big fuckin' secret. (Also via PZ.) Seriously, these people need to take into account that Wikipedia exists (how about libraries?), or... or... or I don't know what. Fuck, who am I kidding, the shit either works or it doesn't. It all depends on whether the masses are idiots or educated enough to see through the bullshit. Whoops, I think my cynicism is showing!
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
101 Interesting Things, part thirty-three: The Placebo Response
The placebo effect was the reason that randomized double-blind trials became so necessary in medicine. You see, people sometimes get better all on their own, and us being the pareidoliac (did I just make up a word?) pattern-matching machines that we are, we tend to give the credit to whatever we were doing at the time. But as we all know, correlation does not entail causation, and so we must be a bit more thorough to make sure we're not hastily generalizing when we tell our friends, "Hey, I sang I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General while eating a fudgesicle in the shower, and the next day my cold went away! You should try it!"
And sometimes, having something cold in your mouth while your body's warmed up and you're exercising your vocal cords is just what you need to get rid of a sore throat. The world, it turns out, is a complex and confusing place. And so we come next to the idea of experimental control. When you suspect that this cause might have that effect, how can you coax reality into giving up the goods? You control for all other possible variables that you can identify, so that the only difference between trial A and trial B is your suspected cause. And if you can't? Randomize the other stuff and get as many trials as you can, a large enough sample for the random noise to cancel out so that a coherent picture of the situation can emerge.
In medicine, not only do patients vary in their bodies and minds, they also vary in the matter of precisely how disease X affects them, and there is also variance among and between doctors in terms of how they treat their patients. So to see if drug Y can really cure disease X, we need to "cancel out" those unhelpful stalwarts who convalesce on their own, or due to Doctor Z's magical bedside manner. Heroes in labcoats do this by blinding themselves to the matter of whether or not they are giving the "real" drug Y to their patients, and because informed consent is important, the patients know that they may be getting drug Y or a "placebo," but they don't know which is actually going down their gullet.
And there you have it! We've just walked through the last several decades or so of medical research (in principle, anyway). But now there's a new problem. What was once called the placebo effect, because some hastily generalizing folk perhaps thought that the inert sugar pill actually did something, is now being called the placebo response by Fabrizio Benedetti, because it seems to have more to do with the patient than the pill.
Oh, and it's getting bigger, too. Or "worse," if you're the kind of person who thinks that the command, "Body, heal thyself," ought to be medically inert. For my part, I think it would be awesome if that really worked!
Benedetti was mentioned in one of the latest issues of Wired magazine, in their article, The Placebo Problem. I'll bottom-line it for you folks: "Big Pharma" is trying desperately to find drugs that can be meaningfully distinguished from sugar pills, and they're having problems because people seem to be getting the benefits all on their own, in greater numbers. Drugs aren't stopping working, mind you - those methodologically problematic stalwarts I mentioned above are just getting more numerous. The drugs still do whatever it is that they do, but now Big Pharma is running out of places to intelligently throw money to prove things, because a whole host of confounding variables are now rearing their ugly heads.
That's right, folks: drug companies are fretting because their ability to scientifically prove that they're helping people is slipping through their fingers, and they don't know what to do about it. The principle they're operating on is a simple and obvious one: drugs that work are more profitable than drugs that don't. Bill Maher, you can just eat a big ol' bowl of dicks. (Special thanks to PZ and Orac for teaching me of the still-insightfully-funny man's peculiar and disturbing lunacy.)
Anyway, enough pimping for the system; what do we do? You can read the article to find out just how tangled this Gordian knot really is: the color of the pill can affect things, the culture of the place can affect things, the frequency of dosage can affect things, and a million other screwy things that can all interact with each other and we have no idea why. Yet.
And sometimes, having something cold in your mouth while your body's warmed up and you're exercising your vocal cords is just what you need to get rid of a sore throat. The world, it turns out, is a complex and confusing place. And so we come next to the idea of experimental control. When you suspect that this cause might have that effect, how can you coax reality into giving up the goods? You control for all other possible variables that you can identify, so that the only difference between trial A and trial B is your suspected cause. And if you can't? Randomize the other stuff and get as many trials as you can, a large enough sample for the random noise to cancel out so that a coherent picture of the situation can emerge.
In medicine, not only do patients vary in their bodies and minds, they also vary in the matter of precisely how disease X affects them, and there is also variance among and between doctors in terms of how they treat their patients. So to see if drug Y can really cure disease X, we need to "cancel out" those unhelpful stalwarts who convalesce on their own, or due to Doctor Z's magical bedside manner. Heroes in labcoats do this by blinding themselves to the matter of whether or not they are giving the "real" drug Y to their patients, and because informed consent is important, the patients know that they may be getting drug Y or a "placebo," but they don't know which is actually going down their gullet.
And there you have it! We've just walked through the last several decades or so of medical research (in principle, anyway). But now there's a new problem. What was once called the placebo effect, because some hastily generalizing folk perhaps thought that the inert sugar pill actually did something, is now being called the placebo response by Fabrizio Benedetti, because it seems to have more to do with the patient than the pill.
Oh, and it's getting bigger, too. Or "worse," if you're the kind of person who thinks that the command, "Body, heal thyself," ought to be medically inert. For my part, I think it would be awesome if that really worked!
Benedetti was mentioned in one of the latest issues of Wired magazine, in their article, The Placebo Problem. I'll bottom-line it for you folks: "Big Pharma" is trying desperately to find drugs that can be meaningfully distinguished from sugar pills, and they're having problems because people seem to be getting the benefits all on their own, in greater numbers. Drugs aren't stopping working, mind you - those methodologically problematic stalwarts I mentioned above are just getting more numerous. The drugs still do whatever it is that they do, but now Big Pharma is running out of places to intelligently throw money to prove things, because a whole host of confounding variables are now rearing their ugly heads.
That's right, folks: drug companies are fretting because their ability to scientifically prove that they're helping people is slipping through their fingers, and they don't know what to do about it. The principle they're operating on is a simple and obvious one: drugs that work are more profitable than drugs that don't. Bill Maher, you can just eat a big ol' bowl of dicks. (Special thanks to PZ and Orac for teaching me of the still-insightfully-funny man's peculiar and disturbing lunacy.)
Anyway, enough pimping for the system; what do we do? You can read the article to find out just how tangled this Gordian knot really is: the color of the pill can affect things, the culture of the place can affect things, the frequency of dosage can affect things, and a million other screwy things that can all interact with each other and we have no idea why. Yet.
My pet speculation on this matter is that people are a whiny and suggestible lot, and when you live in places that are developed enough to do things like make happy pills, people think that they ought to be happy all the time. We deserve it, right? Oh, man... I feel a rant brewing.
I'll just say that I've done my share of wrestling with depression, and I've been on pills before. Everyone's different, and a multiplicity of treatments is best, because then we can treat more people more effectively (but we have to pay attention to them, and not treat it like a magic spell!). Merck can't dominate the central nervous system with drugs alone; they ought to branch out to psychotherapy techniques or something if they want to keep on top of the game. Some people's problems just can't be solved with a pill, they need some damned TLC and to think that someone important cares about them; other people's problems can be solved with any pill, it seems, so long as they think that their problems are being acknowledged. And a million fuckin' things in between.
So think about it, Merck: when your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Faith needs protection. No joke.
Kid gloves: off. Rant: on.
So there's a bunch on the 'tubes about atheist advertisements being complained into censorship, about atheists being vilified for trouncing others' beliefs, about the insensitivity of all us modern folk for criticizing each others' faiths, about the problem of everyone rubbing elbows while we disagree so vehemently on matters metaphysical, and a bunch of other nonsense that amounts to children whining that they don't want to hear this or that. "Boo-hoo, I don't wanna hear that stuff, wahh-wahh, why can't you just be quiet back-stage while I'm loud and in the spotlight?"
Let's get this straight, right off the bat: if you complain that something offends you, then you are whining. Offense is not harm. If you complain that something harms you, then your complaint is legitimate. And if something offends you and is harmful to you, then confine your complaint to the actual harm (as opposed to the pretend harm) or you will be seen as a whiner and the legitimate component of your complaint will probably be drowned out.
As Thomas "I owned slaves but still had relatively progressive values for my time" Jefferson said, "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." Tru Fax, right there - the very truest. There is a piece of the puzzle that is missing from the public discourse, one that makes sense of the whole debacle, and that piece is simply this: only stupid ideas need protection.
That sounds flippant, but I'm being perfectly serious here. And also flippant. Good ideas are backed by evidence and/or argumentation, and they get a foothold in the meme pool based on those merits. While they may not be as infectious, prolific, or enduring as others of their kin, these merits are all that good ideas need. Furthermore, it is these merits which cannot be taken from good ideas and cannot be conferred upon stupid ideas, and this is why faith needs protection. Faith does not have redeeming qualities as a rational idea or as an empirically supported idea, it only has the memetic merits of being infectious and communicable. These flaws make faith vulnerable to rational and empirically supported ideas, and acknowledging these facts in public discourse is anathema to the maintenance of faith in practice because cognitive dissonance is a bitch.
"Faith" is a great many things to a great many people. Let's take a quick tour along the continuum: faith is the hope of things unseen; faith is believing what you know ain't so (thank you, Samuel Clemens); faith is believing without or despite reason and/or evidence; faith is trust; faith is patience; faith is kindness. Atheists, skeptics, and humanists may all "argue in good faith," and this is not a problem for us faithless heathens, for "to argue in good faith" is to trust in one's argumentative partner. Same letters, different idea. I, as a humanist, place faith in the goodness of humanity, insofar as I expect us to do all the good that it is in us to do (though we often fall far short, I still have that faith as an expected standard - this is called "optimism" by some). I have faith in my brother, insofar as I believe that he will find happiness in his life; though I also recognize that he may in fact fall short of this. Faith, like all words, has multiple meanings.
I'm talking about one kind of faith here: belief without or despite reason and/or evidence. "Faith" is shorter, but you can replace every use of "faith" with "belief without or despite reason and/or evidence" if you ever find yourself confused as to what exactly I'm yelling about here (except, of course, for the last paragraph). That's the kind of faith that is stupid, and that's the kind of faith that needs protection. Faith is frail and weak; evidence and reason are enduring and powerful. Faith must be shielded from evidence and reason, for those things erode faith. Believers are humans, though, and humans have psychological needs, some of which include:
Kitty Genovese died also because a large number of individuals saw a group doing nothing, and therefore assumed that "nothing" was the right thing to do2. Absent a telepathic time machine, that's the best reconstruction we can get of the situation. This has been tested over and over, and it's why advertisers continuously show people using the advertised product: they're trying to hack your decision-making process by showing you, true or not, that other people do the thing that they want you to do.
Social proof is one of the biggest protections that faith has had in place for the last several thousand years running. The publicly acknowledged existence of happy, moral atheists is a direct and imminent threat to that. This is why the faithful can't stand to see a bus sign that even acknowledges that there are those who don't believe in God. This is why the faithful go into conniptions when they see atheistic displays during the holidays. This is why the faithful tell atheists to sit down, shut up, and keep their unbelief to themselves: our existence is a threat to their way of life, insofar as their way of life includes building up that wall of social proof around the useless bauble of faith. And soon, we shall see this power harnessed for good or for awesome as it gives Bill Donohue a pants-shitting heart attack, hopefully on live television.
This is also why the faithful oppose stem cell research, or evolution, or reproductive rights, or gay marriage, or anything that threatens their worldview: scientific and cultural progress of any kind erodes the protections they've built for their faith, because results are undeniable (and cognitive dissonance is a bitch). This is also why the faithful tend to accept the comforts of civilization they grew up with (thanks, science!), while decrying the imaginary iniquities of further-civilizing efforts: change for the better implies that there was a "worse" to come from, and that undermines faith. But the advances they grew up with are familiar, so those are seen as non-threatening. Did you catch that? Even though the "new and threatening" innovations are a natural outgrowth of the same principles that fueled the development of the "old and safe" innovations, they don't see scientific progress that way because they don't think about it enough (usually). It only goes as far as "new and threatening" versus "old and safe" for quite a lot of them. But public misunderstanding of science is another topic for another day.
In closing: Faith (as a belief held without or despite reason and/or evidence) really needs protection, not as a deontological maxim, but because it can't stand on its own. Social proof has historically been brought to bear in service to this task, but social justice and free speech and generally being civilized persons gets directly in the way of the social proof which the faithful so desperately crave. And so of course we shall be met with shrieking opposition every step of the way, because the better the situation gets for us, the worse it gets for the faithful, as their social proof collapses and exposes their frail faith to the better ideas that undermine it. They see this as "bad." It would be better termed as "growth." And, barring another Dark Age, it is inevitable.
Fuckin' hooray!
Let's get this straight, right off the bat: if you complain that something offends you, then you are whining. Offense is not harm. If you complain that something harms you, then your complaint is legitimate. And if something offends you and is harmful to you, then confine your complaint to the actual harm (as opposed to the pretend harm) or you will be seen as a whiner and the legitimate component of your complaint will probably be drowned out.
As Thomas "I owned slaves but still had relatively progressive values for my time" Jefferson said, "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." Tru Fax, right there - the very truest. There is a piece of the puzzle that is missing from the public discourse, one that makes sense of the whole debacle, and that piece is simply this: only stupid ideas need protection.
That sounds flippant, but I'm being perfectly serious here. And also flippant. Good ideas are backed by evidence and/or argumentation, and they get a foothold in the meme pool based on those merits. While they may not be as infectious, prolific, or enduring as others of their kin, these merits are all that good ideas need. Furthermore, it is these merits which cannot be taken from good ideas and cannot be conferred upon stupid ideas, and this is why faith needs protection. Faith does not have redeeming qualities as a rational idea or as an empirically supported idea, it only has the memetic merits of being infectious and communicable. These flaws make faith vulnerable to rational and empirically supported ideas, and acknowledging these facts in public discourse is anathema to the maintenance of faith in practice because cognitive dissonance is a bitch.
"Faith" is a great many things to a great many people. Let's take a quick tour along the continuum: faith is the hope of things unseen; faith is believing what you know ain't so (thank you, Samuel Clemens); faith is believing without or despite reason and/or evidence; faith is trust; faith is patience; faith is kindness. Atheists, skeptics, and humanists may all "argue in good faith," and this is not a problem for us faithless heathens, for "to argue in good faith" is to trust in one's argumentative partner. Same letters, different idea. I, as a humanist, place faith in the goodness of humanity, insofar as I expect us to do all the good that it is in us to do (though we often fall far short, I still have that faith as an expected standard - this is called "optimism" by some). I have faith in my brother, insofar as I believe that he will find happiness in his life; though I also recognize that he may in fact fall short of this. Faith, like all words, has multiple meanings.
I'm talking about one kind of faith here: belief without or despite reason and/or evidence. "Faith" is shorter, but you can replace every use of "faith" with "belief without or despite reason and/or evidence" if you ever find yourself confused as to what exactly I'm yelling about here (except, of course, for the last paragraph). That's the kind of faith that is stupid, and that's the kind of faith that needs protection. Faith is frail and weak; evidence and reason are enduring and powerful. Faith must be shielded from evidence and reason, for those things erode faith. Believers are humans, though, and humans have psychological needs, some of which include:
- To maintain an image of oneself as consistent.
- To maintain an image of oneself as rational.
- To maintain an image of oneself as intelligent.
These are all directly opposed to faith - it is not consistent, it is not rational, and it is not intelligent to believe something without reason or evidence. We require reason and evidence in all other areas of our lives: whether we're poking around on Snopes or looking up the latest health scare, we typically follow evidence and reason to form our beliefs. Nobody drives by faith, writes a grocery list by faith, balances their checkbook by faith, or does bids on e-bay by faith. In all of those activities, the overwhelming majority of people behave in a mostly-rational fashion for the overwhelming majority of the time (at least as far as the whole "forming beliefs about the way things are" activity is concerned). So faith is not consistent with our day-to-day lives.
Neither is faith rational, as a matter of definition. While I am defining my way to victory on this point (and deliberately confining my tirade to faith that does in fact lack or defy evidence and/or reason), I am not merely defining my way to victory here. This is a pertinent point for the simple reason that many people do in fact believe things without or despite reason and/or evidence, yet most people do have a psychological need to consider themselves as rational beings. We're complicated, you see. This kind of faith - which many people actually have - is directly opposed to this deep-seated bit of human nature. This matters, in other words, and no amount of cultural apologetics can fix it. Y'know, just in case there's anyone out there who cares to point out that there's no rule saying we have to be rational, or that humans aren't rational all the time; sure, the former point is true and the latter point is true, but faith is still a problem for this reason.
Last, faith is not intelligent. It's just not smart to believe something with all your heart but without or despite reason and/or evidence, The End. There are many different forms of intelligence, and trying to come up with a universally acceptable one is a fool's errand. Just the same, I challenge anyone to propose a workable definition of "intelligent" that allows for the behavior of "adopting a belief without reason or evidence and deliberately ignoring obvious questions that would undermine said belief." Pro Tip: This can't be done without special pleading or begging the question (or flat-out arbitration, I suppose). Conversely, I'll bet we could all come up with three definitions each of "stupid" that would cover such a behavior. Here's one: "failing, deliberately or otherwise, to adhere to rationality and general thoughtfulness; absent-minded or flighty in one's conscious thought processes." We're all guilty of stupidity from time to time (especially under this definition), and I'll be the first to admit that I have some pretty epic bouts of The Stupid. Here, watch: "I'm the first to admit having an epic bout of The Stupid! Neener-neener!" But that's part and parcel of the homo sapiens gig: we all make mistakes, and we don't stop until we die. Faith is still stupid, though.
And so we see that, because faith is a dumb idea, it needs protection from the good ideas that would otherwise supplant it. Faith needs tricks to keep itself in place. Faith can't survive on its own in a truly free marketplace of ideas. Faith is a crutch for when we lack explanation or authority but want it anyway, and when a real explanation or an actual authority is found, faith evaporates like dew in the morning sun. When the crutch is no longer needed, the patient needs to learn to walk unaided; for some, this will be a very painful and awkward process; for others, it can be easy. But there are those who wish to walk around with their crutch as a permanent fixture, they get so attached to the crutch that it seems an essential part of their sense of self, and they'll fight anyone who tries to take the crutch away or even say that they don't need it. To take the metaphor to its appropriately awkward conclusion, some of these folks even get upset at the very idea that some people live entirely crutch-less lives, it's so ingrained into their way of life.
So how does faith get the protection it so desperately needs? It's called "social proof," and it's one of the bigger foibles of this whole brain-having business. I would argue that it's the main reason that most faithful aren't formally diagnosed with a delusional disorder: it's just not practical to classify most of a population as "delusional," even if one person alone would be so-classified, and so religion gets a special exemption. You see, when we come under the impression that a lot of other people think something, we tend to see that something as "correct," or at least "legitimate." It's that same old line, "Ten million screaming Elvis fans can't be wrong," but wearing a psychologist's hat and nodding sagely from a leather armchair while you talk about your childhood. It's also one of the reasons that Kitty Genovese died - contrary to popular belief, it is not urban depersonalization that made it possible for her assailant to repeatedly attack her in view of an entire apartment complex. Nor did all those onlookers simply assume that "someone else" would take care of things1. The truth is more subtle and less satisfying.
Neither is faith rational, as a matter of definition. While I am defining my way to victory on this point (and deliberately confining my tirade to faith that does in fact lack or defy evidence and/or reason), I am not merely defining my way to victory here. This is a pertinent point for the simple reason that many people do in fact believe things without or despite reason and/or evidence, yet most people do have a psychological need to consider themselves as rational beings. We're complicated, you see. This kind of faith - which many people actually have - is directly opposed to this deep-seated bit of human nature. This matters, in other words, and no amount of cultural apologetics can fix it. Y'know, just in case there's anyone out there who cares to point out that there's no rule saying we have to be rational, or that humans aren't rational all the time; sure, the former point is true and the latter point is true, but faith is still a problem for this reason.
Last, faith is not intelligent. It's just not smart to believe something with all your heart but without or despite reason and/or evidence, The End. There are many different forms of intelligence, and trying to come up with a universally acceptable one is a fool's errand. Just the same, I challenge anyone to propose a workable definition of "intelligent" that allows for the behavior of "adopting a belief without reason or evidence and deliberately ignoring obvious questions that would undermine said belief." Pro Tip: This can't be done without special pleading or begging the question (or flat-out arbitration, I suppose). Conversely, I'll bet we could all come up with three definitions each of "stupid" that would cover such a behavior. Here's one: "failing, deliberately or otherwise, to adhere to rationality and general thoughtfulness; absent-minded or flighty in one's conscious thought processes." We're all guilty of stupidity from time to time (especially under this definition), and I'll be the first to admit that I have some pretty epic bouts of The Stupid. Here, watch: "I'm the first to admit having an epic bout of The Stupid! Neener-neener!" But that's part and parcel of the homo sapiens gig: we all make mistakes, and we don't stop until we die. Faith is still stupid, though.
And so we see that, because faith is a dumb idea, it needs protection from the good ideas that would otherwise supplant it. Faith needs tricks to keep itself in place. Faith can't survive on its own in a truly free marketplace of ideas. Faith is a crutch for when we lack explanation or authority but want it anyway, and when a real explanation or an actual authority is found, faith evaporates like dew in the morning sun. When the crutch is no longer needed, the patient needs to learn to walk unaided; for some, this will be a very painful and awkward process; for others, it can be easy. But there are those who wish to walk around with their crutch as a permanent fixture, they get so attached to the crutch that it seems an essential part of their sense of self, and they'll fight anyone who tries to take the crutch away or even say that they don't need it. To take the metaphor to its appropriately awkward conclusion, some of these folks even get upset at the very idea that some people live entirely crutch-less lives, it's so ingrained into their way of life.
So how does faith get the protection it so desperately needs? It's called "social proof," and it's one of the bigger foibles of this whole brain-having business. I would argue that it's the main reason that most faithful aren't formally diagnosed with a delusional disorder: it's just not practical to classify most of a population as "delusional," even if one person alone would be so-classified, and so religion gets a special exemption. You see, when we come under the impression that a lot of other people think something, we tend to see that something as "correct," or at least "legitimate." It's that same old line, "Ten million screaming Elvis fans can't be wrong," but wearing a psychologist's hat and nodding sagely from a leather armchair while you talk about your childhood. It's also one of the reasons that Kitty Genovese died - contrary to popular belief, it is not urban depersonalization that made it possible for her assailant to repeatedly attack her in view of an entire apartment complex. Nor did all those onlookers simply assume that "someone else" would take care of things1. The truth is more subtle and less satisfying.
Kitty Genovese died also because a large number of individuals saw a group doing nothing, and therefore assumed that "nothing" was the right thing to do2. Absent a telepathic time machine, that's the best reconstruction we can get of the situation. This has been tested over and over, and it's why advertisers continuously show people using the advertised product: they're trying to hack your decision-making process by showing you, true or not, that other people do the thing that they want you to do.
Social proof is one of the biggest protections that faith has had in place for the last several thousand years running. The publicly acknowledged existence of happy, moral atheists is a direct and imminent threat to that. This is why the faithful can't stand to see a bus sign that even acknowledges that there are those who don't believe in God. This is why the faithful go into conniptions when they see atheistic displays during the holidays. This is why the faithful tell atheists to sit down, shut up, and keep their unbelief to themselves: our existence is a threat to their way of life, insofar as their way of life includes building up that wall of social proof around the useless bauble of faith. And soon, we shall see this power harnessed for good or for awesome as it gives Bill Donohue a pants-shitting heart attack, hopefully on live television.
This is also why the faithful oppose stem cell research, or evolution, or reproductive rights, or gay marriage, or anything that threatens their worldview: scientific and cultural progress of any kind erodes the protections they've built for their faith, because results are undeniable (and cognitive dissonance is a bitch). This is also why the faithful tend to accept the comforts of civilization they grew up with (thanks, science!), while decrying the imaginary iniquities of further-civilizing efforts: change for the better implies that there was a "worse" to come from, and that undermines faith. But the advances they grew up with are familiar, so those are seen as non-threatening. Did you catch that? Even though the "new and threatening" innovations are a natural outgrowth of the same principles that fueled the development of the "old and safe" innovations, they don't see scientific progress that way because they don't think about it enough (usually). It only goes as far as "new and threatening" versus "old and safe" for quite a lot of them. But public misunderstanding of science is another topic for another day.
In closing: Faith (as a belief held without or despite reason and/or evidence) really needs protection, not as a deontological maxim, but because it can't stand on its own. Social proof has historically been brought to bear in service to this task, but social justice and free speech and generally being civilized persons gets directly in the way of the social proof which the faithful so desperately crave. And so of course we shall be met with shrieking opposition every step of the way, because the better the situation gets for us, the worse it gets for the faithful, as their social proof collapses and exposes their frail faith to the better ideas that undermine it. They see this as "bad." It would be better termed as "growth." And, barring another Dark Age, it is inevitable.
Fuckin' hooray!
Notes:
1. This phenomenon has been identified and has nothing to do with urban environments (as opposed to rural environments), but rather large groups (as opposed to small groups), and it's called "diffusion of responsibility." From the Wikipedia article: "Diffusion of responsibility is a social phenomenon which tends to occur in groups of people above a certain critical size when responsibility is not explicitly assigned. This phenomenon rarely ever occurs in small groups. In tests, groups of three or fewer, everyone in the group took action as opposed to groups of over ten where in almost every test, no one took action." And for clarity, though the Wikipedia article states that diffusion of responsibility can manifest in a bystander effect, the bystander effect page lists diffusion of responsibility as just one of its multifarious causes. Hooray for overlap!
2. Yeah, OK, it's still more complicated than that. I know. But in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Cialdini argues pretty much this idea in chapter four ("Social Proof: Truths Are Us"). He goes on, he lays out a great case, but the point is that this bystander effect is huge and not a lot of people really understood it until the studies were done. It's not just diffusion of responsibility.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
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 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."
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."
Saturday, March 14, 2009
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:
- The subject is honest.
- 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.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
The Lenient Policy
In his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Dr. Robert Cialdini writes about many of the tricks used by what he calls "compliance professionals" to get their marks to accede to their demands. He details the use of six such "weapons of influence" using case studies and real life examples to explain the psychology behind them, as well as how to protect yourself against them (and how not to become overzealous in doing so, as many of these principles are generally helpful to us).
Look, it's a great book, and an interesting read, but I'm not here to sell books. I'm here to talk about prisons. Cialdini writes, in "Commitment and Consistency,"
During the Korean War, many captured American soldiers found themselves in prisoner-of-war (POW) camps run by the Chinese Communists. It became clear early in the conflict that the Chinese treated captives quite differently than did their allies, the North Koreans, who favored savagery and harsh punishment to gain compliance. Specifically avoiding the appearance of brutality, the Red Chinese engaged in what they termed their "lenient policy," which was in reality a concerted and sophisticated psychological assault on their captives. After the war, American psychologists questioned the returning prisoners intensively to determine what had occurred. The intensive psychological investigation took place, in part, because of the unsettling success of some aspects of the Chinese program. For example, the Chinese were very effective in getting Americans to inform on one another, in striking contrast to the behavior of American POWs in World War II.Cialdini goes on to describe how the Chinese would "start small and build," deftly planting a tiny seed in the minds of their captives and letting their own internal psychological pressures do most of the work. Reluctant as I am to quote ad nauseum, Cialdini describes the process rather succinctly:
...prisoners were frequently asked to make statements so mildly anti-American or pro-Communist as to seem inconsequential ("The United States is not perfect." "In a Communist country, unemployment is not a problem."). But once these minor requests were complied with, the men found themselves pushed to submit to related yet more substantive requests. A man who had just agreed with his Chinese interrogator that the United States is not perfect might then be asked to indicate some of the ways in which he thought this was the case. Once he had so explained himself, he might be asked to make a list of these "problems with America" and to sign his name to it. Later he might be asked to read his list in a discussion group with other prisoners. "After all, it's what you really believe, isn't it?" Still later he might be asked to write an essay expanding on his list and discussing these problems in greater detail.It's really rather insidious, when you think about it: between these almost casual conversations, discussion groups, and essay contests - yes, essay contests! - it sounds almost like a retreat. I mean, except for the squalor and inability to leave and all that. I'm not at all trying to trivialize the prison experience of these POWs, my point is that the program to which they were subjected had zero violence and got great results. One of the best parts is that it was cheap, too: in the aforementioned essay contests, trivial prizes were handed out. A pack of cigarettes, or some fresh fruit. This was entirely deliberate, because too-tempting prizes could allow the contestants to rationalize their writing as "for the prize." But when the prizes are trivial, the contestants are forced to own more of their decision to write what they write.
The Chinese might then use his name and his essay in an anti-American radio broadcast beamed not only to the entire camp, but to other POW camps in North Korea, as well as to American forces in South Korea. Suddenly he would find himself a "collaborator," having given aid to the enemy.
On top of that, the winning essays weren't always the most pro-Chinese, pro-Communist, or anti-American ones submitted; often, winning essays were selected apparently for sincerity, making only minor concessions to the Chinese while still being largely pro-American. These minor concessions would then be built upon with those individual writers, who would likely be softened upon winning a contest with a pro-American essay, and a message was sent that the contest was one of merit and not of lip service. This way, prisoners could not submit just any old dreck that exalted the ideology of their captors, thereby insulating themselves from influence.
The principle upon which this whole operation hinged was to subtly get the prisoner to change his own self-image. Once that is done, internal pull towards consistency will do the rest. The trick is to hide from the captive that this is the objective, and to create an environment that facilitates and encourages desired behaviors circumstantial to the final goal, but all pushing together directly towards it by slowly changing an inner mindset. Indoctrination, in a word.
Rhetorically speaking, this is fighting dirty, but what cannot be denied is its efficacy. Torture assaults both the body and the mind, but pits the victim's loyalty against the captor's brutality. The lenient policy is another kind of battle of wills, one that does not attack the ideological fortress outright, but corrodes it from within. Please do not mistake my words - I do not mean to insinuate that this is worse than torture, and far from it. What I mean is that this sort of technique is far more effective than torture, despite (perhaps because of) its subtlety.
I guess the question now is: why does anyone torture any more? I mean, the only thing that torturing gets you is the sadistic glee of causing pain to the Other.
Oh, wait.
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