I’m very strict about this. I only accept claims that come out of science. I have a narrow definition of science based on lineage: you have to be able to trace it back to settled physics. Physics, chemistry, biochemistry, biology, molecular biology, neural biology, etc, all have strict lines of descent. Much of theoretical psychology, on the other hand (to give an example), does not; it’s ab initio theorizing. Anything that is not science (so narrowly defined) I take to be noise. Systematic and flagrant abuse of the “genetic fallacy” is probably the quickest way to truth.
poke
Karma: 301
I think the best way to display the sheer mind-boggling absurdity of the “problem of induction” is to consider that we have two laws: the first law is the law science gives us for the evolution of a system and the second law simply states that the first law holds until time t and then “something else” happens. The first law is a product of the scientific method and the second law conforms to our intuition of what could happen. What the problem of induction is actually saying is that imagination trumps science. That’s ridiculous. It’s apparently very hard for people to acknowledge that what they can conceive of happening holds no weight over the world.
The absurdity comes in earlier on though. You have to go way back to the very notion that science is mediated by human psychology; without that nobody would think their imagination portends the future. Let’s say you have a robotic arm that snaps Lego pieces together. Is the way Lego pieces can snap together mediated by the control system of the robotic arm? No. You need the robotic arm (or something like it) to do the work but nothing about the robotic arm itself determines whether the work can be done. Science is just a more complex example of the robotic arm. Science requires an entity that can do the experiments and manipulate the equations but that does not mean that the experiments and equations are therefore somehow “mediated” by said entity. Nothing about human psychology is relevant to whether the science can be done.
You need to go taboo crazy, throw out “belief,” “knowledge,” “understanding,” and the whole apparatus of philosophy of science. Think of it in completely physical terms. What science requires is a group of animals that are capable of fine-grained manipulation both of physical objects and of symbol systems. These animals must be able to coordinate their action, through sound or whatever, and have a means of long-term coordination, such as marks on paper. Taboo “meaning,” “correspondence,” etc. Science can be done in this situation. The entire history of science can be carried out by these entities under the right conditions given the right dynamics. There’s no reason those dynamics have to include anything remotely resembling “belief” or “knowledge” in order to get the job done. They do the measurements, make the marks on a piece of paper that have, by convention, been agreed to stand for the measurements, and some other group can then use those measurements to make other measures, and so forth. They have best practices to minimize the effect of errors entering the system, sure, but none of this has anything to do with “belief.”
The whole story about “belief” and “knowledge” that philosophy provides us is a story of justification against skepticism. But no scientist has reason to believe in the philosophical tale of skepticism. We’re not stuck in our heads. That makes sense if you’re Descartes, if you’re a dualist and believe knowledge comes from a priori reasoning. If you’re a scientist, we’re just physical systems in a physical world, and there’s no great barrier to be penetrated. Physically speaking, we’re limited by the accuracy of our measurements and the scale of the Universe, but we’re not limited by our psychology except by limitations it imposes on our ability to manipulate the world (which aren’t different in kind from the size of our fingers or the amount of weight we can lift). Fortunately our immediate environment has provided the kind of technological feedback loop that’s allowed us to overcome such limitations to a high degree.
Justification is a pseudo-problem because skepticism is a pseudo-problem. Nothing needs to be justified in the philosophical sense of the term. How errors enter the system and compound is an interesting problem but, beyond that, the line from an experiment to your sitting reading a paper 50 years later in an unbroken causal chain and if you want to talk about “truth” and “justification” then, beyond particular this-worldy errors, there’s nothing to discuss. There’s no general project of justifying our beliefs about the world. This or that experiment can go wrong in this or that way. This or that channel of communication can be noisy. These are all finite problems and there’s no insurmountable issue of recursion involved. There’s no buck to be passed. There might be a general treatment of these issues (in terms of Bayes or whatever) but let’s not confuse such practical concerns with the alleged philosophical problems. We can throw out the whole philosophical apparatus without loss; it doesn’t solve any problems that it didn’t create to begin with.
If somebody said to me “morality is just what we do.” If they presented evidence that the whole apparatus of their moral philosophy was a coherent description of some subset of human psychology and sociology. Then that would be enough for me. It’s just a description of a physical system. Human morality would be what human animals do. Moral responsibility wouldn’t be problematic; moral responsibility could be as physical as gravity if it were psychologically and sociologically real. “I have a moral responsibility” would be akin to “I can lift 200 lbs.” The brain is complicated, sure, but so are muscles and bones and motor control. That wouldn’t make it a preference or a mere want either. That’s probably where we’re headed. But I don’t think metaethics is the interesting problem. The deeper problem is, I think, the empirical one: Do humans really display this sort of morality?
My response to these questions is simply this: Once the neurobiology, sociology and economics is in, these questions will either turn out to have answers or to be the wrong questions (the latter possibility being the much more probable outcome). The only one I know how to answer is the following:
Do the concepts of “moral error” and “moral progress” have referents?
The answer being: Probably not. Reality doesn’t much care for our ways of speaking.
A longer (more speculative) answer: The situation changes and we come up with a moral story to explain that change in heroic terms. I think there’s evidence that most “moral” differences between countries, for example, are actually economic differences. When a society reaches a certain level of economic development the extended family becomes less important, controlling women becomes less important, religion becomes less important, and there is movement towards what we consider “liberal values.” Some parts of society, depending on their internal dynamics and power structure, react negatively to liberalization and adopt reactionary values. Governments tend to be exploitative when a society is underdeveloped, because the people don’t have much else to offer, but become less exploitative in productive societies because maintaining growth has greater benefits. Changes to lesser moral attitudes, such as notions of what is polite or fair, are usually driven by the dynamics of interacting societies (most countries are currently pushed to adopt Western attitudes) or certain attitudes becoming redundant as society changes for other reasons.
I don’t give much weight to peoples’ explanations as to why these changes happen (“moral progress”). Moral explanations are mostly confabulation. So the story that we have of moral progress, I maintain, is not true. You can try to find something else and call it “moral progress.” I might argue that people are happier in South Korea than North Korea and that’s probably true. But to make it a general rule would be difficult: baseline happiness changes. Most Saudi Arabian women would probably feel uncomfortable if they were forced to go out “uncovered.” I don’t think moral stories can be easily redeemed in terms of harm or happiness. At a more basic level, happiness just isn’t the sort of thing most moral philosophers take it to be, it’s not something I can accumulate and it doesn’t respond in the ways we want it too. It’s transient and it doesn’t track supposed moral harm very well (the average middle-class Chinese is probably more traumatized when their car won’t start than they are by the political oppression they supposedly suffer). Other approaches to redeeming the kinds of moral stories we tell are similarly flawed.
This dialogue leads me to conclude that “fairness” is a form of social lubricant that ensures our pies don’t get cold while we’re busy arguing. The meta-rule for fairness rules would then be: (1) fast; (2) easy to apply; and (3) everybody gets a share.
(1) Buy a country. You could probably bribe your way into becoming dictator of North Korea or Myanmar or somewhere similar.
(2) Build a huge army.
(3) Crash the US economy.
(4) Take over the world.
(5) Profit.
You can fully describe the mind/brain in terms of dynamics without reference to logic or data. But you can’t do the reverse. I maintain that the dynamics are all that matters and the rest is just folk theory tarted up with a bad analogy (computationalism).
Unknown,
For all those who have said that morality makes no difference to them, I have another question: if you had the ring of Gyges (a ring of invisibility) would that make any difference to your behavior?
Sure. I could get away with doing all sorts of things. No doubt the initial novelty and power rush would cause me to do some things that would be quite perverted and that I’d feel guilty about. I don’t think that’s the same as a world without morality though. You seem to view morality as a constraint whereas I view it as a folk theory that describes a subset of human behavior. (I take Eliezer to mean that we’re rejecting morality at an intellectual level rather than rewiring our brains.)
I’d do everything I do now. You can’t escape your own psychology and I’ve already expressed my skepticism about the efficacy of moral deliberation. I’ll go further and say that nobody would act any differently. Sure, after you shout in from the rooftops, maybe there will be an upsurge in crime and the demand for black nail polish for a month or so but when the dust settled nothing would have changed. People would still cringe at the sight of blood and still react to the pain of others just as they react to their own pain. People would still experience guilt. People would still find it hard to lie to loved ones. People would still eat when they got hungry and drink when they got thirsty. We vastly overestimate our ability to alter our own behavior.
I think you have to be careful when you say,
trying to use your brain to understand something that is not like your brain.
We can’t use our brains to understand brains that are like our brains. We don’t have that kind of access. Empathy is a function and not something you just get for free on account of similarity. Where we have obvious faculties in this area—understanding the emotional state of another person—I don’t see any strong differences between same sex and opposite sex empathy. We can all tell when a member of the opposite sex is distressed; the hard part is figuring out why. Where there are such differences—as with motivations—I don’t see much evidence that we’re particular talented at getting it right with members of the same sex either.
Anecdotally, the few times I’ve had to wrestle with the motivations of a member of the same sex to the same degree one does in relationships on a regular basis, they’ve been completely opaque to me. But it’s rare that a member of the same sex is in the position to really screw with you to the point that you dwell on their motivations. Nor are we particularly concerned with pleasing them or self-conscious about how they perceive us. If you listen to a man or woman talk about the motivations of a problematic same sex family member, an area where we often do have volatile relationships, it can be quite similar to how men and women talk about their partners (i.e., total confusion, disbelief, etc). Even the way people talk about their bosses can be similar.
So while I’d never claim to understand women, I’d challenge the claim that I understand men.
So is the reason I should believe this space of minds-in-general exists at all going to come in a later post?
I can certainly agree that you rely on this sort of reasoning a lot. But I don’t think what you do is much of an improvement over what you’re criticizing. You just take words and make “surface analogies” with “cognitive algorithms.” The useful thing about these “cognitive algorithms” is that, being descriptions of “deep causes” (whatever those are) rather than anything we know to actually exist in the world (like, say, neurons), you can make them do whatever you please with total disregard for reality.
Saying that a neural network never gets at “intelligence” is little different from saying the descriptions of biology in textbooks never capture “life.” Without a theory of “life” how will we ever know our biological descriptions are correct? The answer is as blatantly obvious as it is for neural networks by comparing them to actual biological systems. We call this “science.” You may have heard of it. Of course, you could say, “What if we didn’t have biology to compare it too, how then would you know you have the correct description of life?” But… well, what to say about that? If there were no biology nobody would talk about life. Likewise, if there were no brains, nobody would be talking about intelligence.
You essentially posit a “decision algorithm” to which you ascribe the sensations most people attribute to free will. I don’t think this is helpful and it seems like a cop-out to me. What if the way the brain makes decisions doesn’t translate well onto the philosophical apparatus of possibility and choice? You’re just trading “suggestively named LISP tokens” for suggestively named algorithms. But even if the brain does do something we could gloss in technical language as “making choices among possibilities” there still aren’t really possibilities and hence choices.
What it all comes down to, as you acknowledge (somewhat), is redefining terms. But if you’re going to do that, why not say, “none of this really matters, use language how you will”? Actually, a lot of your essays have these little disclaimers at the end, where you essentially say “at least that’s how I choose to use these words.” Why not headline with that?
There are basically three issues with any of these loaded terms—free will, choice, morality, consciousness, etc—that need to be addressed: (1) the word as a token and whether we want to define it and how; (2) matters the “common folk” want reassurance on, such as whether they should assume a fatalistic outlook in the face of determinism, whether their neighbors will go on killing sprees if morality isn’t made out of quarks, etc; (3) the philosophical problem of free will, problem of morality, etc.
Philosophers have made a living trying to convince us that their abstract arguments have some relevance to the concerns of the common man and that if we ignore them we’re being insensitive or reductionist and are guilty of scientism and fail to appreciate the relevance of the humanities. That’s egregious nonsense. Really these are three entirely separate issues. I get the impression that you actually think these problems are pseudo-problems but at the same time you tend to run issues 2 and 3 together in your discussions. Once you separate them out, though, I think the issues become trivial. It’s obvious determinism shouldn’t make us fatalistic because we weren’t fatalistic before and nothing has changed, it’s obvious we won’t engage in immoral behavior if morals aren’t “in the world” since we weren’t immoral before and nothing has changed, etc.
michael vassar,
I think you misunderstand me. I’m not being cynical; I’m trying to demonstrate that moral dilemmas and moral deliberation aren’t empirically established. I tried to do this, first, by pointing out that what most people consider the subject of morality differs substantially from the subject of academic philosophers and, second, by arguing that the type of moral reasoning found in philosophy isn’t found in society at large and doesn’t influence it. People really do heroically rescue orphans from burning buildings in real life and they do it without viewing the situation as a moral dilemma and without moral deliberation. I don’t think a world where moral philosophy turns out to be perfectly worthless is necessarily a bad one.
The type of possibility you describe is just a product of our ignorance about our own or others psychology. If I don’t understand celestial mechanics I might claim that Mars could be anywhere in its orbit at any time. If somebody then came along and taught me celestial mechanics I could then argue that Mars could still be anywhere if it wanted to. This is just saying that Mars could be anywhere if Mars was different. It gets you exactly nothing.
michael vassar,
I’m skeptical as to whether the affirmed moralities play a causal role in their behavior. I don’t think this is obvious. Cultures that differ in what we call moral behavior also differ in culinary tastes but we don’t think one causes the other; it’s possible that they have their behaviors and they have their explanations of their behaviors and the two do not coincide (just as astrology doesn’t coincide with astronomy). I’m also therefore skeptical that changes over time are caused by moral deliberation; obviously if morality plays no causal role in behavior it cannot change behavior.
What anthropologists call moral behavior and what most non-philosophers would recognize as moral behavior tends to coincide with superstitions more than weighty philosophical issues. Most cultures are very concerned with what you eat, how you dress, who you talk to, and so forth, and take these to be moral issues. Whether one should rescue a drowning child if one is a cancer researcher is not as big a concern as who you have sex with and how you do it. How much genuine moral deliberation is really going on in society? How much influence do those who engage in genuine moral deliberation (i.e., moral philosophers) have on society? I think the answers are close to “none” and “not at all.”
I agree that determinism doesn’t undermine morality in the way you describe. I remain, however, a moral skeptic (or, perhaps more accurately, a moral eliminativist). I’m skeptical that moral dilemmas exist outside of thought experiments and the pages of philosophy books and I’m skeptical that moral deliberation achieves anything. Since people are bound to play out their own psychology, and since we’re inherently social animals and exist in a social environment, I find it unlikely that people would behave substantially different if we eliminated “morality” from our concept space. In that respect I think morality is an epiphenomenon.
Some people want to take part of our psychology and label it “morality” or take the sorts of diplomacy that lead us to cooperate for our mutual benefit and label it “morality” but they’re essentially moral skeptics. They’re just flexible with labels.
I picked up an intuitive sense that real thinking was that which could force you into an answer whether you liked it or not, and fake thinking was that which could argue for anything.
This is very dangerous. I think a great example of its danger is Colin McGinn (popularizer of mysterianism) in his The Making of a Philosopher. He says that what attracted him to philosophy was the ability to reason ones way to contrarian opinions. Being forced to an answer itself has an appeal. This is a major problem in the transhumanist and libertarian communities, for example, where bullet biting is much more highly regarded than having your facts straight.
mtraven,
Got a better one?
Biology and physics. Google Tim Van Gelder for a philosophical perspective on the benefits of using dynamics to explain cognition. I think he has papers online.
Presumably your brain is processing symbols right now, as your read this.
I think there’s an important distinction between being able to manipulate symbols and engaging in symbol processing. After all, I can use a hammer, but nobody thinks there’s hammers in my brain.
Caledonian,
But computer programmers don’t need to understand the hardware, either. Do you think they crack open metallurgy, electronics, and applied physics textbooks to accomplish their goals?
Computers are specifically designed so that we don’t have to understand the hardware. That’s why I said it’s spurious to call anything but an artifact a computer. You don’t need to understand the underlying physics because engineers have carefully designed the system that way. You don’t have to understand how your washing machine or your VCR works either.
If you don’t need to understand every level of hardware to manipulate electronic computational devices, why do you think anyone would need to understand the physics all the way down to deal with the mind?
I don’t think we need to understand the physics all the way down in a practical sense. We’ve already built our way up from physics through chemistry to molecular biology and the behavior of the cell. We can talk about the behavior of networks of cells too. The difference is that it’s the underlying physical properties that make this abstraction possible whereas, in a computer, the system has been specifically designed to have implementation layers with reference to a set of conventions. In a loose sense, it’s accurate to say we understand the physics all the way down in a biological system, because the fact of abstraction is a part of the system (i.e., the molecules interact in a way that allows us to treat them statistically).
Douglas Knight, I’m not sure what predictions you’re referring to. Statistical methods have a good pedigree. I take a correlation to be a correlation and try not to overinterpret it.