Reality Apologetics

Born to the Metaverse: Scream 4 and the Future of Pop Culture

2011-04-19T13:17:00.000-07:00

This is gonna contain some spoilers. Sorry, but it will. I'll try to flag the major ones, but if you really want to be surprised, you should probably stop reading right now. There's really no reason for that, though, because Scream 4 is by no means a good film. It's a slasher movie, and not a terrible one at that, but still just a slasher movie. The interesting aspects of it are entirely cultural: it's a window to the future. If you want to know what the next ten years are going to look like, you should see Scream 4. If you're a fan of the genre you might also want to see it, but I'm not going to talk about that here. I'm not a film critic, nor am I interested in what it did well with regard to film-making--I'm interested in it as a cultural phenomenon, and as a lens into the difference between youth culture 15 years ago (which is mainstream culture now), and youth culture today (which will become mainstream culture over the next 10 years). Scream 4 is one of the first definitive digital-native generation pieces. Here's why.

The original Scream was instrumental in mainstreaming the concept of explicit self-awareness in popular culture: as a friend pointed out to me, it certainly wasn't the first major movie to play around with genre-awareness (Pulp Fiction, at least, beat it by a few years), but it certainly was the first major movie to do it so explicitly: the characters inScream talked about the conventions of the teen slasher genre, and the film was largely predicated on the novelty of such meta-commentary: the characters used their knowledge of genre conventions to survive. It was a slasher film about people who knew something about slasher films. This was prescient: Scream came out in 1996, and it would be precisely that kind of self-referential meta-commentary that would come to define the popular culture contributions of the 2000s--think of the difference between the humor of The Simpsons in the 90s and the humor of Family Guy in the 2000s for another good illustration of this. Scream was a trend-setter in presaging the rise of what technology writers have called "remix culture:" the artistic style of creating novel creative works by recombining the elements of existing works, and feeding popular culture back into itself. Whatever you think of this phenomenon (FUCK OFF JARON LANIER!), there's absolutely no question that it was the definitive cultural innovation of the 2000s; the kind of entertainment that people my age (what I call "young immigrants" to the digital world) grew up on was largely predicated on playing around with self-referentiality.

For most digital natives, though, this isn't anything new or original. Remix culture isn't an innovation--it's just the way things are. The oldest digital natives were only 3 or 4 years old when the original Scream came out; that generation is now starting to graduate from high school, go off to college, and make its own mark on popular culture. Scream 4 is the embodiment of that mark. HERE COME SOME SPOILERS. The movie opens with several rapid "frame shifts." We get a few really bloody kills immediately, but after each one, the movie zooms out to reveal that the scene was actually taken place inside a slasher movie (a thinly-veiled version of the Scream franchise itself called Stab) that other people were watching. The new characters pick apart the genre for a while, and are then killed. This process repeats (if I recall) three or four times. By the last zoom-out, the whole thing is just patently ridiculous--people in the theater were either groaning or (like me) laughing. At this point, it's really unclear where the movie is going; this whole process takes somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes, and I was buckled in for a really awful movie: I thought it was just going to be another sequel recycling the now decades-old trick of genre awareness. But that's not what happened.

This early absurd level of meta-humor is essential for what follows. Like a tasteless sorbet, it cleanses the palate, erasing all traces of what came before, and opening the way for you to appreciate the new flavor of what's going to follow. It gets all the issues about self-awareness and meta-commentary right out in the open immediately, loudly, and exaggeratedly. This is surely deliberate, and the message comes through loud and clear: yes, yes, there's meta commentary going on here. That's obvious, and it's been done. Let's get all of this right out in the open. If Scream was meta, Scream 4 is post-meta: not just self-aware about horror film conventions, but self-aware about self-aware film conventions. This lets the meta aspects of the film fade into the background from that point forward: this isn't the gimmick driving the film anymore, but just a fact of life, and part of the scenery against which the rest of the narrative plays out. Everyone not only knows about the horror film conventions, but everyone knows that they know this: it's just assumed that everyone is constantly analyzing what's going on at a higher level of abstraction (or, at least all the youngcharacters; more on this in a bit).

HERE'S ANOTHER SPOILER

One of the early frames is worth mentioning in particular: it plays out the "Facebook stalker who comes to kill you" sort of plot. The girls being stalked and killed have slightly out-of-date slider phones, adding a weird sense of one-off anachronism; this is exactly the kind of thing that an actual movie would have been about just a few years ago, but now it's passe. After the characters in the frame are slashed by the FB stalker, the "zoom out" commentary remarks about how "it would be a twitter stalker today." This frame in particular has the effect of not only getting meta-commentary out of the focus and into the background, but also of getting technology out of the focus and into the background. Everyone in Scream 4 (or, again, every teen character) has a smartphone that's constantly connected to the Internet, but that fact isn't in the least gimmicky in the way that it would have been just five years ago; social networking is portrayed with perfect versimillitude, and the presence of ubiquitious computing and information is--just like the generalmeta-commentary--presented as just a normal feature of the world. Characters transition seamlessly between real-world interaction and digital interaction, and everyone just takes this as a matter of course. The fact that everyone is constantly connected to everyone else (and the Web) is no longer a novelty to be played with, but rather is just a fact in the same way that everyone's having access to a car is just a fact. Someone who knows more about the history of the genre than I do could probably point to a time when that transition took place--when teengers with automobiles ceased to be a novelty driving (so to speak) a horror film's plot, and just became transparently there. Digital technolgy in Scream 4 is perfectly transparent: ubiquitous and taken for granted.

Or, again, at least for the younger characters. Part of the film's brilliance is the degree to which it nails the weird sort of techno-gulf between the older generation (Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox, the heroines of the first film) and the new generation of high-school aged victims. Neve Campbell was supposed to be a teenager in the first film, which would put her in her very late 20s or early 30s now. She's right on the older edge of the young-immigrant generation, and is by far the most competent of her generation's characters in this film. The rest of the older characters are portrayed as relatively bumbling incompetents who are always a few steps behind (largely in virtue of their reliance on landline phones and radio communication). SPOILER. At one point, Courteney Cox's reporter character, in a vain attempt to remain relevant, sneaks into an underground film festival to plan cameras, which transmit via closed-circuit to her laptop in front of the building (as she sets them up, she congratulates herself on her relevance, saying something like "still got it!"). This would have been the height of technology in the first film, but in light of the fact that the high school's gossip-blog owner spends the entire film wearing (I shit you not) a live-streaming wireless webcam mounted on a headset (a fact which no one ever remarks on), it looks comically archaic. Her cameras are promptly disabled by the killer, and she gets stabbed when she tries to go fix them. This is what you get for using wires, 30-somethings.

The iconic trivia scene from the first film is also replayed, but it seems bizarrely out of place by the time it comes around: we've spent the whole film stewing in the fact that everyone knows everything about everyone all the time (none of the younger-generation characters are ever missing for more than a minute or two at a time, and are consistently tracked down with technology when they disappear for even a second), and so the idea that being able to simply recite a list of facts would possibly have any relevance to anything seems laughable: all that trivia knowledge that was so impressive in 1996 is just a Wikipedia search away for all characters all the time now. That point is hammered home by the single classroom scence in the film, in which a balding history instructor vainly tries to take control of a totally disinterested audience of students, each and every one of which has a smartphone out, and isn't paying attention. Behind the teacher, the phrase NO GOOGLING!! is written on the chalkboard in all capital letters. The irrelevance of normal education in light of the informal education made possible by the devices that all the students are carrying (and the teacher's frantic attempts to maintain the orthodox approach to pedagogy) practically slaps you in the face, and it is awesome.

All of this comes to a final head when the killer is revealed near the end. I'm not going to reveal which of the characters it really is, but MAJOR SPOILER he/she is one of the younger generation, and gives a long tirade about the role of the Internet, at one point yelling "We all live in public now, and to be famous you don't have to do anything great; you just have to do something fucked up. I don't want friends--I want fans." I wish I could find a copy of the film to find this speech again, because there was a lot more to it; I'll come back and revise this once I have a chance to see the movie again, but it makes many of the themes I've been pointing to here at least somewhat explicit, and also reveals the movie's greatest flaw--even though it's aware of these issues, it's ultimately still being directed, written, and produced not by digital natives (or even young immigrants), but by folks from the Old Country. In the end, all of this ubiquitious computing is cast very negatively, and it's suggested that the killer was driven to this in virtue of being immersed in a culture that encourages shallowness, extreme pragmatism ("we are whatever we need to be," says the killer), and amoral narcissism. SPOILER When the killer is finally defeated (by the just-barely-still-relevant Campbell), it is with a set of defibrilation paddles--the ultimate wired, analog technolgy finally triumphing over the digital menace.

If you want to see what the world is going to look like as the next generation starts to assume power, this is the movie to watch. You can see the writing on the wall here; the characters were born in the metaverse, and treat ubiquitous digital technology, social networking, self-referentiality, and remix culture not as novelties, but simply as part of the background against which they operate. These things are moving out of the fringes and being integrated into the mainstream of popular culture; as that move happens, it opens the door for new ways to define genre, and starts to suggest new conventions. This is beyond simple remix; the meta aspect of the 2000s has started to settle down and become just another facet of creative culture as a generation born to the Web starts to define itself in contrast to those who have come before. It's very, very exciting to watch.

UN/UNIS talk

2011-03-04T16:13:00.001-08:00

I had the honor of speaking at the United Nations/United Nations International School global issues conference today. They held it in the UN General Assembly chamber (wow!), and I got to share the stage with such wizardly people as Clay Shirky and Alexis Ohanian. It was a tremendous amount of fun. If you're interested in seeing me--my talk was called "Building a Great Community from Terrible People (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love 4Chan)"--then the direct link is here.

AI and Consciousness

2010-08-09T14:57:00.001-07:00

So I've been at CTY again (as per usual). This time, I was instructor for Human Nature and Technology, for the first session, and then instructor for Philosophy of Mind second session. Yes, I am moving up in the world. As is normal at CTY, I was thinking about philosophy a lot. So today, when a friend of mine asked me to share my thoughts on the AI debate, I decided to finally try to put pen to paper and express the nascent argument I've been developing for a while now. This is how it turned out:

I think one of the most important things to press on here is the distinction between simulation and duplication. A lot of the disagreements about artificial intelligence, it seems to me, come down to disagreements about whether or not AI is supposed to be simulating a (human) mind or duplicating a (human) mind. This point is widely applicable, but one of the most salient ways that it comes up here is as a distinction between consciousness and intelligence. Let me say what I mean.

Some (many) properties of systems are functional properties: they're properties that are interesting, that is, just in virtue of what function they discharge in the system, not in virtue of HOW they discharge that function. For most purposes, human hearts are like this: an artificial heart is just as good as a normal one, because we don't really care about having a meat heart so much as having something to pump our blood. Functional properties are "medium-independent:" they are what they are irrespective of the kind of stuff the system is made out of. Not all properties are like that, though. Here's a story.

Suppose I've got a few different copies of Moby Dick. Thanks to the wonders of technology, though, all of these copies are in different formats: I've got a regular old leather-bound book, a PDF on my hard drive, and a CD with the audio book (read by...let's say Patrick Stewart). These are all representations with the same content: that is, they're all representations of the events described in Moby Dick. The content of the story is medium-independent. There are, however, facts about each of the representations that don't apply to the other representations: the physical book is (say) 400 pages long, but the audiobook has no page length. The PDF is in a certain file format (PDF), but the book has no file format. The audiobook has a peak frequency and volume level, but the PDF has neither of those. This list could be continued for quite a while; you get the picture--the important thing to emphasize is that while they all have the same content, each of the representations is instantiated in a different physical form, and thus has facts that are unique to that physical form (e.g. page length, format, peak frequency, &c.). That's all true (once again) in spite of their identical content.

Now, let's add another representation to the mix. Suppose I, like the fellows at the end of Fahrenheit 451, have decided to memorize Moby Dick. It takes quite some time, but eventually I commit the entire book to memory, and can recite it at will. This is a fourth kind of representation--a representation instantiated in the complex interconnection of neurons in my brain. Paul Churchland (2007) has developed a very nice account of how to think about neural representation, and he talks about a semantic state space (SSS)--that is, a complicated, high-dimensional vector space that represents the state of each of my neurons over time. This SSS--the changing state of my brain as I run through the story in my head--then, represents Moby Dick just as surely as the book, audiobook, or PDF does, and remains a totally physical system.

Ok, so we can ask ourselves, then, what unique things we can say about the SSS representing Moby Dick that we can't say about the other representations. It has no page length, no file format, and no peak volume. What it does have, though, is a qualitative character--what Thomas Nagel calls a "what-it-is-like-ness." It has (that is) a certain kind of feeling associated with it. That seems very strange. Why should a certain kind of representation have this unique quality? Asking this question, though, just shows a certain kind of representational chauvinism on our part: we might as well ask why it is that a book has a certain number of pages, or why a PDF has a file format (but not vice-versa). The answer to all of the questions is precisely the same: this representation has that feature just in virtue of how the physical system in which it is instantiated is arranged. The qualitative nature of the memorized book is no more mysterious than the page count of the leatherbound book, but (like page length) it isn't medium-independent either, and that's the point that cuts to the heart of the AI debate, I think. Here's why.

Think about Turing and Searle as occupying opposite sides of the divide here. Turing says something like this: when we want AI, we want to create something that's capable of acting intelligently--something that can pass the Imitation Game. Searle points out, though, this approach still leaves something out--it leaves out the semantic content that our minds enjoy. Something could pass the Imitation Game and still not have a mind like ours, in the sense that it wouldn't be conscious. This whole argument, I suggest, is just a fight about whether we should be going after the medium-independent or medium-dependent features of our minds when we're building thinking systems. That is, should we be trying to duplicate the mind (complete with features that depend on how systems like our brains are put together), or should we be trying to simulate (or functionalize) the mind and settle for something that discharges all the functions, even if it discharges those functions in a very different way? There's no right or wrong answer, of course: these are just very different projects.

Searle's point is that digital computers won't have minds like ours no matter what kind of program they run, or how quickly they run it. This makes sense--in the language of the book analogy from above, it's like asserting that no matter how much fidelity we give to the audiobook recording, it's never going to have a page length. Of course that's true. That's the sense in which Searle is correct. Turing has a point too, though: for many applications, we care a lot more about the content of the story than we do about the format in which we get it. Moreover, it looks like duplicating our sort of minds--building a conscious system--is going to be a lot harder than just building a functionally intelligent system. Ignoring the medium-dependent features of mentality and focusing on the medium-independent ones lets us build systems that behave intelligently, but gives us the freedom to play around with different materials and approaches when building the systems.

So in some sense, the question "can digital computers think" is ambiguous, and that's why there's so much disagreement about it. If we interpret the question as meaning "can digital computers behave intelligently?" then the answer is clearly "yes," in just the same sense that the answer to the question "can you write a story in the sand?" is clearly yes, even though sand is nothing like a book. If we interpret the question as meaning "can digital computers think in precisely the way that humans with brains think?" then the answer is clearly "no," in just the same sense that the answer to the question "will a story written in the sand have a page count?" is clearly "no," no matter what kind of sand you use. Searle is right to say that consciousness is special, and isn't just a functional notion (even though, as he says, it is a totally physical phenomenon). It's a function of the way our brains are put together. Turing is right to say that what we're usually after when we're trying to make intelligent machines, though, is a certain kind of behavior, and that our brains' way of solving the intelligent behavior problem isn't the only solution out there.

I'm not sure if any of that is helpful, but I've been meaning to write this idea down for a while, so it's a win either way.

On the Future of Philosophy and Science

2010-06-07T14:24:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine asked me for my opinion about the future of philosophy. There's a popular perception that, in light of the tremendous advances science has made in the last century or so, philosophy is a dying discipline. As most of you know, I disagree with this assessment, but I do think that philosophy needs to adapt if it is to survive. Here are my brief thoughts on the future of my discipline, and its relationship to the scientific project.

Philosophy as an isolated discipline is certainly in decline--the number of questions that are purely "philosophical" (and worth answering) is shrinking. That's less a reflection on philosophy, though, and more a reflection of the state of academia in general: disciplinary lines are blurring. Physics is (at least in parts) informed by biology, information theory, and other special sciences. The special sciences themselves are (and have been for a while) mutually supportive and reinforcing; there's no clear line between a question for (say) sociology and a question for economics. None of that is to say that physics, biology, information theory, sociology, or economics is in decline, though--it just means that academia is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary.

On the face of it, this shift looks to have hit philosophy particularly hard: we've fallen quite far from our position as the queen of the Aristotelean sciences to where we are today, and there's a pervasive attitude both among other academics and among lay-people, I think, that philosophy is basically obsolete today, having been replaced by more reputable scientific investigation. There's a perception, that is, that metaphysics has been supplanted by mathematical physics, ethics has been rendered obsolete by sociobiology and evolutionary game theory, and that questions about the nature of the mind have been reduced to questions about neurobiology (or maybe computation theory). All of this is, I think, more or less true: the days of philosophy pursued as a stand-alone competitor to science are over, or at least they ought to be. This is emphatically not the same thing as saying that philosophy is dead or dying, though--it just needs to undergo the same kind of shift that other sciences have had to go through as they've entered the modern era. Philosophy needs to be incorporated into the unified structure of science generally.

It's not immediately obvious how to do this, but there are some clues. We should start by looking at the areas of science where philosophers--that is, people trained in or employed by philosophy departments using methods that are marked by careful attention to argument, critical examination of underlying assumptions, and concern with big-picture issues--are still making useful contributions to the scientific enterprise. There are, I think, two pretty clear paradigm cases here: quantum mechanics and cognitive science. In both of these fields, philosophers have made contributions that, far from consisting in idle navel-gazing and linguistic trickery, have made a real impact on scientific understanding. In QM, philosophers like David Albert, Hilary Greaves, David Deutsch, David Wallace, Barry Loewer, Tim Maudlin, Frank Arntzenius, and others have helped tremendously in clarifying foundational issues and resolving (or at least explicating) some of the trickier conceptual problems lurking behind dense mathematical formalism. Similarly, philosophers like Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Andy Clark, Ken Aizawa, and others have been instrumental in actually getting the field of cognitive science off the ground; just as in QM, these philosophers are responsible both for clarifying foundational concepts and for designing ingenious experiments to test hypotheses developed in the field.

What does the work these people are doing have in common in virtue of which it is philosophical? Again, the answer isn't clear, but this just reinforces the point that I'm making: there's no longer a clear division between philosophy and the rest of the scientific project to which philosophers ought to be contributing. If anything, the line between philosophy qua philosophy and science (insofar as there's a line at all) seems more and more to be amethodological line rather than a topical one; a philosopher differs from a "normal" scientist not in virtue of the subject matter he investigates, but in virtue of the way he approaches that subject matter. Scientists, by and large, are trained as specialists: by the time a physicist or biologist reaches the later stages of his PhD, his work is usually sharpened to a very fine point, and his area of expertise is narrow, but very deep: many (but not all) practicing scientists know a tremendous amount about their own fields, but are content to leave thinking about other fields to other specialists. Philosophers, on the other hand, are often generalists (at least when compared to physicists). In virtue of our general training in logic, argumentation, critical thinking, and, well, philosophy we're often better equipped than most to see the bigger picture--to see the way the whole scientific enterprise fits together, and to notice problems that are only apparent from a sufficiently high level of abstraction. Training in philosophy means sacrificing a certain amount of depth of knowledge--I'll never know as much about particle physics as Brian Greene--for a certain amount of breadth and flexibility; by the time my training is done, I'll know a bit about particle physics, a bit about evolutionary theory, a bit about computer science, a bit about cognitive neurobiology, a bit about statistical mechanics, a bit about climate science, a bit about the foundations of mathematics, and so on. That kind of breadth certainly has its drawbacks--a philosopher is unlikely to make the kind of experimental breakthroughs that a scientist dedicating his life to a single problem might achieve--but it also has its benefits; philosophers are in a unique position to (as it were) care for the whole forest rather than just a few trees.

Philosophers are uniquely situated, that is, to engage in the project of "bridge-building" between the individual sciences--uniquely situated to facilitate the continuing break-down of disciplinary barriers that threatened philosophy's existence to begin with. Philosophy's tool-kit is sufficiently general to be applied to any of the special sciences, given a little bit of study and localization. This isn't to suggest that philosophers should (or even can) make pronouncements about scientific issues from the armchair; that's the model of philosophy that's dying, and I'm not the only one to have said "good riddance" to it. Doing philosophy of physics means learning physics, and doing philosophy of biology means learning biology. We need to engage with the disciplines to which we contribute; the edges of the bridges need to be anchored on solid ground before they can help us cross the interdisciplinary gaps. The "big picture" questions that have been the hallmark of philosophy for millennia--questions like "what is humanity's place in the universe?" and "what do our best theories of the structure of the world mean for who we are?" and even "what's special about consciousness?" still have a place in contemporary science. Science has room for both specialists and generalists, and questions like "what's the right way to think about a real physical system's being in a state that's represented by a linear combination of eigenvectors?" have an important place in science. The scientific enterprise takes all kinds, and there's room for philosophers to contribute, if we can just get our collective head out of our collective ass and come back to the empirical party with the rest of science.

Bertrand Russell: Leaping Tall Proofs in a Single Bound Variable

2009-09-03T09:54:00.000-07:00

Back when I was a human larva, Bertrand Russell was one of the first philosophers I ever discovered, let alone read in any depth. I was raised moderately Catholic, but by the time I was 11 or 12, I was wrestling with nascent feelins that Catholicism--and indeed, all of religion--might be terribly inadequate. One day, while hanging out in a bookstore (yeah, I was that kind of 12 year old), I happened on a book called Why I'm Not a Christian. I read the titular essay right then and there and, after buying the book, soon devoured the rest of them. Russell's clear, lucid, humorous prose expressed all the doubts I'd been unable to put into words (and then some!) and exposed me to serious philosophy for the first time. I was hooked, and before long I was plowing through Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and every other piece of philosophy I could get my hands on. Though I'm not a logician--and though Russell's work on religion was only a very, very small part of his mostly logic-oriented corpus--I still have a soft-spot in my heart for him: he was my first doorway into what eventually would become a career.

That's why I'm so delighted to discover that two gentlemen (one of them a computer science professor at Berkeley!) are publishing a graphic novel--that's what you call you comic book if you want it to be taken seriously--about Russell's struggles with life, mathematics, philosophy, and his own tenuous sanity. Snip from the article about it in The Independent:

Through GE Moore at Cambridge, he discovered Leibniz and Boole, and became a logician. Through Alfred Whitehead's influence, he travelled to Europe and met Gottlob Frege, who believed in a wholly logical language (and was borderline insane) and Georg Cantor, the inventor of "set theory" (who was locked up in an asylum) and a mass of French and German mathematicians in varying stages of mental disarray. Back home he and Whitehead wrestled with their co-authored Principles of Mathematics for years, endlessly disputing the foundations of their every intellectual certainty, constantly harassed by Russell's brilliant pupil Wittgenstein.
If the subject matter seems a little arid, with its theories of types, paradoxes and abstruse language (calculus ratiocinator?), and if its recurring theme of how logic and madness are psychologically intertwined seems a touch gloomy, don't let that put you off. Logicomix tells its saga of human argumentation with such drama and vivid colour that it leaves the graphic novel 300 (Frank Miller's take on the Battle of Thermopylae) looking like something from Eagle Annual.

This sounds great--something like Wittgenstein's Poker with pictures. It looks like the book itself isn't available for preorder on Amazon (it's going to be released in Europe on September 7, and sometime after that in the United States), but you can sign up to be notified when it is available. This is certainly something that I'll be making room in my schedule to read!

Quicklink: Ben Bradley and Roy Sorensen on Death

2009-08-09T13:02:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about death lately--there's no particular reason, I just find some of the questions surrounding the philosophy of death fascinating. Perhaps primarily, I'm intrigued by the intuition that some people (apparently) have that either (1) death is not an evil--that is, it isn't something that we should fear for ourselves--or that (2) indefinite life isn't something to be desired. I suspect that both of these intuitions come to more or less the same thing, but they don't seem to be universally correlated: some people will hold (1) without holding (2). When I first started talking to friends and colleagues about this issue, I was rather shocked to find out that anyone holds (1) or (2) at all--they seem so obviously false to me that I have a hard time fathoming how anyone could hold them. Still, apparently this issue is non-controversial; I've got a paper floating around in my head attacking (1) and (2), but until it manifests (maybe later this semester?), I'll have to settle for just pondering. In the mean time, here are Ben Bradley (Syracuse University) and Roy Sorensen (Washington University-Saint Louis) discussing some of these issues. The discussion is a little slow (and Ben Bradley is--ugh--a hedonist), but BloggingHeads lets you watch the whole thing at 1.4x speed. I recommend that option. They touch on some of the fundamental questions in the field, including (1) and (2)--Roy Sorensen and Ben Bradley both seem to share my shock about the fact that someone might hold (2). Enjoy!

Thanks, Leiter!

Having Your Qualia and Eating Your Physics Too

2009-07-29T18:53:00.001-07:00

Can we coherently acknowledge the existence of qualia without being forced into a non-physicalist stance about the contents of the world? I'm back at CTY--as I am every summer--and today our philosophy of mind class got to Jackson's "Epiphenomenal Qualia." I was somewhat surprised, having not read the article since last year, to find that my own views on it seem to have changed considerably. Specifically, while I still agree with the main thrust of Jackson's argument (that is, that qualia exist), I'm much less impressed with the quality of his argumentation and the route by which he arrives at his conclusion; more specifically still, I'm incredibly skeptical that his "what Mary didn't know" argument shows anything like what it is purported to show. Qualia certainly deserve to be included in our ontology, but that emphatically doesn't imply that we ought to reject the physicalist picture of the world. Let me try and show how I think these two statements can be reconciled.

First, I suppose a bit of background is in order. Readers may already be somewhat familiar with the Mary case--Jackson's version of the knowledge argument against physicalism--so I won't waste a whole lot of time detailing the moves. Still, it's worth laying out exactly how the argument is supposed to proceed; as we shall see, the precise wording of one of the premises can make all the difference between soundness and total incoherence. Let's start with the informal presentation. Briefly, the standard presentation goes something like this.

Mary is a gifted neuroscientist who has dedicated her life to studying human color perception. She's learned everything there is to know about the physical process of seeing color: she knows everything about how the surface spectral reflectance of various objects interacts with environmental variables to produce changes in the photoreceptors of the eye, how those changes produce neural excitations, how those excitations are processed in the brain, and so on. She knows all the physical facts about how humans perceive color. Somewhat ironically, Mary herself has never perceived color. Her eyes (say) have been surgically altered so that she is only able to view the world in shades of grey. Nevertheless, her studies have proceeded beautifully, and she is now in a position of perfect physical knowledge. With this complete knowledge in hand, Mary undergoes an operation to reverse her perceptual idiosyncrasy; the procedure to keep her from being able to see color is reversed, and Mary's biology is returned to normal. When Mary awakens from the operation, she is presented with a red rose, and actually sees red for the first time. Does Mary learn something new?

On the standard interpretation, we're now presented with two horns of a dilemma: we're either forced to say that no, Mary has learned nothing new when she first sees color--an ostensibly counter-intuitive position to hold--or we're forced to say that yes, Mary learns something new when she sees the rose. If we take this second horn, though (so the argument goes), we must also admit that there are facts about color experience that are not physical; after all, ex hypothesi Mary knows all the physical facts about color vision--if she learns something new by actually seeing color, that new fact must be a non-physical fact. Therefore, the physicalist picture of the world is, while perhaps not strictly false, incomplete in an important way: it is incapable of accounting for the qualitative character of conscious experience. Thus, we must appeal to more than physics when describing a world that contains conscious creatures.

Here's a more formal presentation of the argument (taken from the SEP):

Premise P1	Mary has complete physical knowledge about human color vision before her release. Therefore
Consequence C1	Mary knows all the physical facts about human color vision before her release.
Premise P2	There is some (kind of) knowledge concerning facts about human color vision that Mary does not have before her release. Therefore (from (P2)):
Consequence C2	There are some facts about human color vision that Mary does not know before her release. Therefore (from (C1) and (C2)):
Consequence C3	There are non-physical facts about human color vision.

This is, at first glance, a very plausible argument. Jackson's own conclusion was a version of epiphenomenalism: at the time of the article's publication, he held that whatever non-physical knowledge Mary acquired must lack any kind of causal efficacy, thus maintaining the causal closure of the physical universe. That seems to me to be a pretty desperate move, though, and apparently Jackson eventually agreed--he's since recanted this position, and now holds that there must be something wrong with the Mary case. I'm not sure if he's put any work into figuring out what it is, but other people certainly have. I'm going to more or less ignore all of them, as is my wont.

Here's what struck me when I was reading this argument today while preparing to lecture to the class on it: Jackson is deeply ambiguous, confused, or otherwise mistaken about what he means in (P1). The argument never even gets off the ground just because he's wrong about the kinds of things that Mary would be able to know from her particular position in her gray scale world. Let's tease this apart a little more.

What does it mean to say that Mary knows all physical facts about color perception? Presumably, just this: for every predicate, relation, or process P that relates to human color vision, if P is constrained by the laws of physics, then Mary knows P. This should be relatively non-controversial--"physical facts" are those (and only those) facts that are about the behavior of physical systems (and nothing else). The physicalist position is that the set of these facts is identical with the set of all facts that are necessary to explain the workings of the universe; that is, the physicalist position is the position that knowing all the physical facts amounts to knowing everything worth knowing. More narrowly, the physicalist position vis-a-vis color perception is just that knowing all the physical facts about color perception is both necessary and sufficient to give a complete account of how color perception works.

Good. We're homing in on the problem. The next question that we need to answer is this one: how do we go about learning physical facts? The physicalist "bite the bullet" style response to Jackson's argument just denies that Mary learns anything new when she's exposed to color for the first time--it asserts that if she knew all the physical facts, then she'd know what the experience was like. This is not very intuitive; we have a deep intuition that no matter how much I study some subject (via books, laboratory experiments, and so on), there are just some facts--like what it's like to see color--that just won't be accessible to me. That is, we have an intuition that there are some relevant facts that either can't be written down, or can't be discerned through objective experimentation: the what-it-is-likeness of color experience is, presumably, counted among these facts. This is the intuition that Jackson's argument exploits.

It's worth proceeding carefully here, though. Is saying that some particular fact F can't be written down or accessed through objective, third-person experimentation--that is, can't be described from a "view from nowhere"--equivalent to saying that F isn't a physical fact? Can all physical facts (to put it another way) be written down and accessed from a third-person viewpoint? Recall our definition of 'physical fact' above:

"Physical facts" are those (and only those) facts that are about the behavior of physical systems (and nothing else)

Let's rephrase the question, then: can all the behavior of every physical system be represented in third-person accessible formats? If we answer this question in the affirmative, we've adopted the position that Flannagan, in Consciousness Reconsidered, terms "linguistic physicalism," and there seems to be good reason to think that we've made a mistake somewhere in our reasoning. If we answer the question in the affirmative (that is), we've committed ourselves to the following position.

(LP) What it means for some fact F to be a physical fact is for F to be representable in some observer-neutral, third-person accessible form (e.g. public language).

That's a problem, though. If we adopt (LP), then Jackson's argument collapses into something that's trivially true (if not question-begging!).

(1a) Mary knows all linguistic (i.e. third-person accessible) facts about color perception.

(2a) Mary learns something new about color perception when she sees the rose.

(3a) Therefore, there are some facts about color perception that are not representable linguistically.

Of course this is true: it's part of what it means for something to be qualitative (that is, to be a conscious experience) that it's essentially private--that it's essentially accessible only from the first-person perspective. The question, then, becomes whether or not we are justified in adopting (LP); can we give an account of what's going on that doesn't require us to adopt it? Sure: we just have to allow that there might be some physical facts--facts about the behavior of some physical systems--that aren't capturable in third-person accessible representations. If we make this concession, then explaining what's going on in the Mary case becomes very easy: while black-and-white Mary has learned all the linguistically representable physical facts about color perception, this set of facts is not identical to the set of all physical facts about color perception--that is, there are aspects of the behavior of some relevant physical systems that cannot be captured from the third-person "view from nowhere." These facts, of course, are facts about what it is like to be in a certain physical state. To put it another way, there are facts about the state of Mary's own brain--which is, of course, a physical system--that can't be known from a third person perspective: she actually has to be in that state in order to know everything about it. When she's exposed to red for the first time, then, she's adding another bit of physical knowledge--which just is, recall, knowledge about the behavior of physical systems, which includes her brain--to her knowledge-base: that bit of knowledge, though, is one that is only accessible from the first-person standpoint.

Let me try to put this point as simply as I can. The problem with this thought-experiment is that Jackson is mistaken when he says that black-and-white Mary knows all the physical facts. What he means to say is that she knows all the linguistic physical facts--all the physical facts that can be accessed from the "view from nowhere." What Mary doesn't know is the set of physical facts--facts about the physical system that is her brain--that can only be accessed from the first-person viewpoint; she doesn't know what it's like to be in a particular physical state. That's what she learns when she leaves her black-and-white operating room.

To put it one more way, let me just say this. "Physical facts" is a term that refers not to a set of facts that is defined by a mode of access--that have in common something about how they can be known--but to a set of facts that is defined by the sort of system they deal with--that have in common a subject matter, not a kind of access. Physical facts are facts about the behavior of systems for which that behavior is totally describable in terms of the laws of physics, and it makes absolutely no difference (at least as far as we're concerned here) what the mode of access to those facts is. Some (many!) of the facts are expressable in observer-neutral language. Some are not. What matters is not this mode of access, but rather whether or not what is accessed is information about the behavior of a physical system.

Addendum: Please read the comment thread for more on this. Both Mark and Eripsa have given very insightful criticism and show that this argument needs refining. I've done my best to refine it below, and I might post an updated version later on. For now, though, the discussion in the comments is definitely worth following. Thanks to Lally, too, for providing vehement (and helpful) critiques off-thread.

Musings on Embedded Epistemology

2009-01-12T12:42:00.000-08:00

I took a course in epistemology last semester, and (surprise) it made me think about epistemology. What follows is an attempt to summarize my random musings and conversations I've had over the last few weeks into something that begins to approach a coherent theory. It is, as I cannot emphasize enough, very prelimary so far, and very much a work in progress. Still, I find these considerations very interesting, and I hope you do as well.

Belief justification is like a progress bar on a download--it can be filled or emptied to various degrees by things that we encounter out in the world. For instance, if I trust some individual a great deal, his words will tend to fill my "truth bar" a great deal; this weighing is based (among other things) on my past interactions with him, my knowledge of his epistemic state, &c.--certain; contextual variables about our relationship lead me to weigh his words highly when making (or contemplating making) epistemic actions like belief revision. The degree to which my truth bar is filled is also going to depend on the nature of the proposition this hypothetical interlocutor is informing me about: even from a trusted friend, I'm going to more readily assent to the proposition 'there is a brown dog around the corner' than I am to the proposition 'there is a child-eating clown around the corner.' Again, this reflects the contextually-influenced nature of epistemic action: based on other beliefs I have about how the world works, I'm going to be more or less likely to assent to a new belief (or to change an old one).

It's important to emphasize that the truth-bar is almost never entirely full, except in some very special cases (e.g. conscious states to which you have immediate, incorrigible access). Take the case of a proposition based on basic sensory information--e.g. 'there is an apple on my desk.' In normal circumstances--good lighting, I can feel and see the apple, other people see the apple too, &c.--I; have very good reason to suspect that there really is an apply on my desk; the truth-bar for that proposition is (say) 99% full. Still, there are potential defeaters here: it might be the case that I am actually in some kind of Matrix scenario, and therefore it might be the case that there is no desk or apple at all. Still, based on other (fairly strongly justified) beliefs I have about the world, this Matrix scenario seems rather unlikely--that is, the truth-bar for 'I am in the Matrix' is very, very close to empty (though not entirely empty, as the proposition is still a logical possibility). Because this defeating proposition ('I am in the Matrix') has a very weak truth-bar, it doesn't weigh very heavily in my epistemic considerations--it's enough to keep the bar for 'there is an apple on my desk' from being 100% full, but that's about it.

This goes sharply against established epistemic tradition, according to which the primary goal of epistemology is truth. If we define truth as a 100% full bar, there are going to be very few propositions (aside from tautologies like 'all black things are black') that will enjoy an entirely full bar. Instead, the right way to think about epistemology--and about our epistemic responsibilities--is as a quest for justified belief, a quest for a reasonably full bar. What counts as 'reasonably full' is, again, going to vary based on contextual variables: when the stakes are rather low, I might assent to a proposition when (say) the truth bar is over 50% full. This might be the case when, for example, a friend tells me that there is a brown dog outside my house; I believe him, and if someone asks me 'is there a brown dog outside your house?,' I will be inclined to answer in the affirmative. My friend might be wrong or lying, but the stakes are low and I have very few strong defeater propositions in play--few good reasons to suppose that my friend speaks falsely, in other words. In more important cases (such as when engaged in technical philosophical deliberation, or when designing a passenger jet), I'm going to be inclined to withhold assent from propositions until the bar is almost entirely full: the consequences for assenting to the wrong belief are so potentially dire, that I will demand a higher standard of justification, investigation possible defeaters more thoroughly, &c.;

The emphasis here is on the contextually-dependent nature of epistemic action; rather than doing a lot of complex deliberating for every possible belief change entirely in our heads, we "offload" a certain amount of the work into the existing epistemic environment; that is, we use the existing epistemic landscape to simplify our decision-making by heuristically assigning various "values" to propositions that are related to the one under consideration, and performing a kind of Bayesian calculation to get a rough approximation of truth or falsity. We can make a direct parallel here with other work being done in extended/embedded cognition and extended mind theses--in just the same way that we use external props (e.g. written notes) as props to support certain cognitive processes (e.g. memory), we use our intuitive grasp of the existing epistemic landscape as a prop to support our own decision making. I call this approach "contextually embedded epistemology."

Statisticians or those with a background in math will recognize that I'm describing something very much like a Bayesian network here--I suspect that our beliefs, were they to be mapped, would look much like this. There are multiple links between multiple different beliefs, and one belief might depend on many others for support (or might be partially defeated by many others). The picture is constantly in a state of flux as shifts in one node (i.e. a single belief) influence the certainty (i.e. the fullness of the truth bar) of many other nodes. The Bayesian way of looking at things is far from new, but the emphasis on partial-completeness and environmental support, as far as I know, is. These are just some random thoughts I've had about this in the last few days, so comments and criticisms are encouraged. This needs a lot of tightening up.

Quicklink: How a Computer Works

2008-12-25T21:48:00.000-08:00

BoingBoing recently featured scans of a wonderful 1978 book called How a Computer Works. It's so full of awesome, it's a wonder it doesn't explode; there's even some implicit philosophy! It seems almost too amazing to be real, but it's entertaining either way. Snip:

There is something about computers that is both fascinating and intimidating. They are fascinating when they are used in rocketry and space research, and when they can enable man to get to the moon and back. In this respect, they are like human machines with "super-brains." Some of them can even play music. On the other hand, we are likely to be intimidated by their complex mechanisms and large arrays of blinking lights. You should do what scientists tell you to.

In fact, computers do not have brains like we do. They cannot really think for themselves, except when they are doing complicated arithmetic.

So next time you start using your calculator program remember this: the more complex arithmetic you do, the more sentient They become--other than that, do what scientists tell you to.

Link

Quicklink: Dennett and Clark Smack Substance Dualists Down

2008-12-13T11:28:00.000-08:00

New Scientist recently ran a very short piece in which Dennett and Clark respond to accusations that any talk about mind influencing body (e.g. as when a deliberate shift in attention causes a change in brain states) implies an acceptance of some kind of immaterial soul / Cartesian ego. The rejoinder they offer is short, to the point, and (it seems to be) decisive. Snip:

But this would lend support to the proposition that minds are non-material - in the strong sense of being beyond the natural order - only if we were to accept the assumption that thoughts, attending and mental activity are not realised in material substance.

I've had my differences with both Clark and Dennett with regard to the nature of consciousness, but they're right on here: arguing that the explanatory role of consciousness proves the existence of an immaterial (i.e. essentially non-physical) kind of substance is straightforwardly question-begging--it assumes that consciousness is not itself the result of physical processes. Descartes' legacy haunts us still.

Link.

Andy Rooney Derides Upgrade Culture, Misunderstands Technology

2008-12-09T15:06:00.001-08:00

Here's a delightful little video of Andy Rooney doing his loveable crumudgeon thing, this time with his sights set on Bill Gates, upgrade culture, and the computer's supplantation of typewriters generally. I absolutely adore Andy Rooney, but what he has to say here is a beautiful representation of how people on the other side of the so-called "digital divide" often misunderstand technology. Watch the video first:

Now, leaving aside the issue that Bill Gates doesn't really have anything to do with hardware design (or the trajectory of technology generally, at least not directly), a few of the points that Mr. Rooney makes in this piece are representative of some fundamental confusions regarding technology--confusions that, I think, are shared by many in his generation. I want to say a few words about those confusions here.

Mr. Rooney's central point is that while he wrote on the same Underwood typwriter for decades, he's forced to upgrade his computer every year or two, new computers are seldom compatible with every aspect of their predecessors' functionality--old file types are dropped (try to find a computer that will read .wps documents today), and old programs are no longer supported (my 64 bit Vista machine already complains about running 32 bit programs that are only a year old)--and morphological similarities are rarely preserved. This is all certainly true, but the same is true of technology generally--the time scale is only recently accelerated to the point where such differences become visible.

I've advocated the Vygotsky/Clark/Chalmers position of thinking of technology as cognitive scaffolding before, and I think that metaphor is informative here. Suppose you're using scaffolding (in the traditional sense) to construct a tall building. As the building (and the scaffolding) gets higher and higher, certain problems that didn't exist at ground level will manifest themselves as serious issues--how to keep from plummeting 60 stories to their death, for instance, is a problem that's directly related to working on 60 story tall scaffolding. Still, it would be a mistake to say "Why do we need 60 story high scaffolding? We didn't have any of these problems when the scaffolding was only 10 feet high, so we should have just stopped then; making higher scaffolding has caused nothing but problems." We need 60 story high scaffolding, a contractor might point out, because it helps us do what we want to do--i.e. construct 60 story buildings. The fact that new problems are created when we start using 60 story high scaffolding isn't a reason to abandon the building construction, but only a reason to encourage innovation and problem-solving to surmount those newly emergent issues.

Precisely the same is true, I think, of technology. Mr. Rooney speaks as if the upgrade culture exists just to line Bill Gates' pocketbook--as if the constant foisting of new software and hardware is the result of a pernicious conspiracy to deprive poor rubes of their hard-earned money without giving them anything except a headache in return; this is simply false. It's true that the average life expectancy of a computer is far less than the average life expectancy of its ancestral technology (e.g. the typewriter), but Mr. Rooney doesn't seem to realize that each technological iteration comes with consumate functional advancement--the computers on the shelf today aren't just dressed up typewriters, but solve new problems, and solve old problems in better ways with each generation. Rather than just being a vehicle for word processing, computers today are word processors, communication devices, entertainment centers, encyclopedias, and a myriad of other devices all rolled into one. We pay a price for this advancement--computer viruses weren't a problem before the Internet made it easy to transfer and share information with many people quickly--but, like the problem of keeping construction workers from plummeting to their deaths, the new issues raised by evolving technology are worth solving.

Mr. Rooney's typewriter probably wasn't radically different from the one his father might have used, and if we go back to further generations we'll see even less of a difference--Mr. Rooney's grandfather, greatgrandfather, and great-greatgrandfather probably wrote (if they wrote at all) with more or less precisely the same kind of technology: pen and ink. By contrast, the kind of computer I'm using right now will almost certainly bear little or no resemblance to the computers my children or grandchildren will be using 50 years down the line; the pace of technological innovation is increasing. Still, this increasing tempo represents more than just a commercial scam--it represents the increasing productivity, cognition, and innovation that is made possible with each succeeding generation of technology: as the tools improve, they are in turn used to design even better tools. I think this makes an occasionally moving power button a small price, and one worth paying.

Brief Musing on Philosophy and Professionalism

2008-11-29T13:55:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, a former student of mine sent me a link to a conversation she'd been having over a Facebook message board. The topic had to do with whether or not philosophers are born or made (through education, not in labs), but it had devolved into a disagreement about the role lay-people should take in philosophical discourse--my former student was basically arguing that anyone with a good mind can be a philosopher, and others were attacking her by claiming that being a philosopher requires specialized training (i.e. a doctorate), and non-professionals can't lay claim to the title. I think that's crap, so I posted a quick response, which I have reproduced here for those that might be interested. It's relatively self-contained, except for one reference to my student by name ("Katelin"). Enjoy.

There's a popular confusion, I think, between 'professional philosopher' and 'person who thinks in logical and rigorous ways.' It's certainly true that any individual cannot simply decide to declare himself a philosopher in the Leiterrific sense of the term--that takes years of specialized training and a good measure of talent to achieve. However, this should not be taken to imply that only those who have been anointed by the right people can honestly call themselves philosophers, or claim to be engaged in a philosophical project. In this respect, I think Katelin is absolutely right, and I think that the pernicious elitism is doing damage to the intellectual discourse that is essentially at the heart of the profession.

Remember that the idea of a 'professional philosopher' is a relatively new one (at least on a wide scale)--The Academy didn't really start to flourish as the center for philosophical discourse until the 19th century. Before that, philosophy was primarily done by people who likely wouldn't have considered themselves 'professional philosophers;' clergy, scientists, mathematicians, and intelligent lay-people were all part of the philosophical discourse. The shift away from philosophy as a matter of public interest and concern and toward an insular and increasingly obscure clique of professionals has not been hailed by all as a positive change; many of us who consider ourselves part of the profession still hold to Russell's maxim that philosophy essentially concerns matters of interest to the general public, and much value is lost when only a few professionals can understand what is said. Excluding people from the discourse because they lack the proper credentials or pedigree is not going to make philosophy better, but only cut it off from what should be its essential grounding: the every day reality in which we all live. Remember that even Peirce--widely regarded as a giant of American Pragmatism--couldn't hold down an academic job; his contribution to the field of philosophy is not lessened by this fact.

There are still people today who are doing substantive (and interesting) philosophical work, but who are not tenure track philosophers at research universities--Quee Nelson comes to mind immediately as an exemplar, but there are certainly others as well. If philosophy consists just in a dance wherein the participants throw obscure technical terms back and forth at each other, then only professionals can be philosophers. If, however, it consists in careful, reasoned, methodical thinking about the nature of reality, then anyone with the drive and intelligence can be a philosopher.

Who, then, should claim the title? I'm inclined to think that like 'hacker,' 'philosopher' is not a title that one should bestow upon oneself, but rather something that should represent some degree of recognition by the others in the field--if you show yourself able to think carefully and analytically about conceptual questions, then you're a philosopher in my book. That doesn't mean I think your answers to those questions are correct, though.

Next Semester's Schedule

2008-11-26T12:25:00.001-08:00

I can hardly believe it, but next week I'll be finished with my first semester here at Columbia. I'm planning on posting a retrospective discussing my initial impressions of graduate school then--I'm still writing final papers right now--but in the meantime, here are the courses I'll be taking in the Spring, for any who are interested.

PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

The logic of inquiry in natural sciences: substantive as well as methodological concepts such as cause, determination, measurement, error, prediction, and reduction. The roles of theory and experiment.

This should be fun. It's being taught by a professor that I've gotten to know reasonably well this semester, and have enjoyed working with immensely (Jeff Helzner). I'm very interested in the philosophy of science, but have never had an opportunity to take a formal course on the subject. I'm looking forward to rectifying that.

DIRECTION OF TIME

A survey of the various attempts to reconcile the macroscopic directionality of time with the time-reversibility of the fundamental laws of physics. The second law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy, statistical mechanics, cosmological problems, the problems of memory, the possibility of multiple time direction.

This course is being taught by David Albert, who achieved minor celebrity status a few years back because of his participation in the rapturously terrible "pop metaphysics" film What The Bleep Do We Know?! , which was, in Prof. Albert's words, "wildly and irresponsibly wrong." The film purported to explore the connection between quantum mechanics, spirituality, and free will, but more-or-less just ended up as propaganda for J.Z. Knight's cult. I've been toying with the idea of trying to pick up an MA in the Philosophical Foundations of Physics (which Columbia offers) while I'm here, and this class will hopefully give me an idea as to whether or not that's a good idea.

FORMAL ONTOLOGY

Parts, wholes, and part-whole relations; extensional vs. intensional mereology; the boundary with topology; essential parts and mereological essentialism; identity and material constitution; four-dimensionalism; ontological dependence; holes, boundaries, and other entia minora; the problem of the many; vagueness.

This one's taught by quite possibly one of the coolest professional philosophers I've ever met: Achille Varzi. He's got a great sense of humor and seems sharp as a tack. This will probably be the toughest class I'll take this semester, but it sounds interesting. Basically, it seems like we'll be covering how parts of things relate to wholes; it's usually the courses with descriptions that I don't understand that I end up getting the most out of.

PROSEMINAR

The course aims to promote weekly writing by each student. A paper, or section of a book, wioth which every philosopher ought to be familiar, will be selected each week, adn one student will make a presentation on that target paper, while the others will hand in a brief essay about it. Essays will be returned, with comments, before the next meeting of the seminar. Each week a different member of the faculty, in addition to Professor Rovane, will participate in the discussion.

And, of course, the Proseminar. It sounds mundane, but I actually got quite a lot out of the first half this semester. It's great to get to meet the various members of the faculty, and the individualized attention and constant feedback on my writing were helpful. Also, my cohort pretty much rocks.

Internal and External Language

2008-11-21T12:58:00.001-08:00

As I start putting together my formal paper about ethics as a social technology, I've been researching the relationship between language and cognition. A few researchers have called the "inner monologue" phenomenon essential to (or even constitutive of) cognition--we talk to ourselves (either out loud or in our heads) as a way of working out problems. This seems right to me: as most people who have done any kind of deep thinking know, it helps tremendously to have an interlocutor (real or imaginary) off which to bounce ideas. This point has led me to consider something related (albeit tangential), though, about which I'd love to get some input.

I'm certain that everyone has had the "inner monologue" experience of speaking to oneself silently--you might rehearse a speech in your mind before you give it, silently repeat the list of things you need to pick up at the grocery store, or try to work out a philosophical problem by talking to yourself in your head. While it's certain that this sort of process is linked to language--it's hard to see how a pre-linguistic animal could think linguistically--I wonder how close this relationship is. Jerry Fodor (among others) holds the position that mental representation happens in a meta-linguistic form that he terms "Mentalese"--while thinking in Mentalese might feel like thinking in (say) English, it differs in slight but important ways. If this theory is correct, it would seem that different brain processes would have to govern true language and Mentalese language (or inner monologues); we should expect, then, to see the two occasionally come apart.

Here's my question, then: when a person suffers a stroke (or some other kind of brain injury) that interrupts speech functions (as damage to certain parts of the left hemisphere often does), is the inner monologue similarly interrupted? If so, is this always the case, or is it possible to lose the ability to express our thoughts symbolically (either through speech or writing) but still be able to represent thoughts to ourselves in Mentalese? If the latter is correct, that would seem to bolster the Fodorian position that inner speech is fundamentally different from linguistic representation; if the two faculties are inseparable, though, that would seem to cast doubt on the principled distinction between inner monologue and public language.

I'm researching this question as we speak, but I'm interested in seeing if anyone out there has any first-hand experience with this--have you ever suffered a stroke, or known someone who has? If you lost language, did you also lose the ability to form thoughts with propositional content? Did one faculty return before the other, or are they mutually supportive? Any input is appreciated.

Quicklink: What Makes the Human Mind?

2008-11-15T10:00:00.001-08:00

Harvard Magazine ran a short but interesting piece this week about what makes the human mind unique. The article's not terribly in-depth, but at least they point out the complexity of the human/animal cognition problem. Too often, we simply see the claim that human intelligence isn't unique superficially substantiated by pointing out chimpanzee tool use or bee dances--Harvard's piece points out that the issue isn't nearly that simple. If you're interested in exploring this topic further, I'd recommend Michael Gazzaniga's newest book, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique. It's written in reasonably accessible language, but still has enough hard science to interest those with more technical backgrounds.

A Kripkean Limerick

2008-11-13T17:00:00.001-08:00

I got bored this evening:

There once was a man named Saul Kripke
Who said I will force you to pick me
I designate rigidly
Yet you look at me frigidly
So come on, dear girl, and just lick me.

Oh come now, my dear Mr. Kripke
I know not what you mean by 'just lick me.'
For the word 'me,' you see
Is indexed to thee
And your theory of reference can't trick me

"Ah ha!" then said old Mr. Saul
I can tell that you're trying to stall
But with a theory so long
How can I be wrong?
By my side those descriptivists pall

I don't care about size, Mr. Kripke
And I know you're still trying to trick me
Proper names still refer
As descriptions I'm sure
And your rigid old theory shan't stick me

It's likely that no one will find this funny without some background in the philosophy of language (and even then it's still pretty likely, probably). For reference: rigid designation, Saul Kripke, descriptivism, indexicals.

Quicklink: Neurons and the Universe

2008-11-12T18:48:00.000-08:00

This is just unspeakably awesome. A side-by-side shot of a neuron and a mock-up of the visible universe show the remarkable similarities between the two:

Badass.

DNA and Representation

2008-11-09T21:44:00.000-08:00

A few different conversations today have gotten me thinking about a topic that bothers me from time to time: the idea that DNA in some sense is a code, language, design, blueprint, representation, or other word that implies some degree of intentionality (in the technical sense). I see this claim made very frequently--most notoriously and nefariously by more clever Intelligent Design theorists as part of an argument for God's existence, but also by well-meaning philosophers of biology and language both--but rarely see it challenged. I would like to at least briefly meet this challenge here; as is sometimes the case, I intend to likely turn this post into a more formal paper sometime in the future, so many of the ideas I present here are not fully fleshed out or argued for. Comments and criticisms are, of course, always welcome. I'm going to focus here on why this sort of approach doesn't work as a means to prove the existence of God, but I'm going to say quite a lot that's more broadly interesting along the way, I expect.

First let me try to state the argument as clearly and charitably as I can. DNA is a design simply because it is a code for us! That is, because every single cell in my body has a complete genome, and because that complete genome carries all the necessary information to build my body, DNA must be a design. Prima facie, it meets all the criteria of information: it is medium independent (I can change the DNA molecule into a string of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs and it will still retain its information-carrying capacity), and it stands for something more than itself (i.e. my body). DNA, put simply, is a language--a code for me--and that means that it is a design. DNA has semantic content in the same way that the English language does: all those chemicals have a meaning, and that meaning is me. Any design implies a designer, and thus DNA had a designer. Humans didn't design themselves, so something else must have done the job. God is the most likely culprit.

I trust a design theorist would find this formulation acceptable--now I'm going to tell you why it's not. A common extension of this metaphor is to refer to DNA as a "blueprint for you;" I think this metaphor is pedagogically useful, so let's adopt it for the purposes of this discussion. A blueprint, to be sure, represents a building, but before we're going to decide if my DNA represents me in the same way, we're going to have to be clear about what precisely we mean by 'represent' here; it seems that there are at least two primary senses in which we might be using the term, so let's consider DNA in light of each of them.

First, by 'blueprint B represents building X' we might mean something like what we mean when we say that a map represents a nation: that is, that the blueprint corresponds to a building in that each line can be matched with a wall, door, or similar structure in reality. But wait, this does not seem entirely adequate: to adapt Hilary Putnam's famous example, we can imagine an ant crawling in the sand which, by pure chance, traces with its tracks a perfect duplicate of the original blueprint for the Eiffel Tower. It does not seem right here to assert that the ant has created a blueprint for the Eiffel Tower (for a more detailed argument for this, see Putnam's Reason, Truth, and History, pages 1-29). Representation in this sense--in the sense of a map of New York or a painting of Winston Churchill--requires more than mere correspondence: it has to come about in the right kind of way. How exactly to define "the right kind of way" is a deep question, and it is not one that I intend to pursue here. Suffice it to say that the right kind of way involves agentive production by beings with minds at least something like ours (minds that are themselves capable of semantic representation); other methods might produce things that look very much like representation, but this resemblance is not sufficient.

Here, then, is the problem for the the intelligent design advocate attempting to endorse the first horn of this dilemma: using it to demonstrate God's existence is straightforwardly question-begging, as we saw above. Arguing that DNA represents in the same sense that a map represents terrain or a portrait represents a person requires the assumption that DNA was produced agentively by a being with minds like ours; this assumption is precisely what the design-theorist wants to prove, making this line of argumentation invalid. As I said, though, there is a second horn of the dilemma that the design-theorist might instead endorse--let us return now to our blueprint metaphor and see if DNA fares any better here.

The second way we might intend to use 'blueprint B represents building X' is what we might call "the instructive sense." This is the case if building X has not yet been constructed: blueprint B represents not because it corresponds to anything in reality, but because it contains instructions for how one should proceed when constructing building X. What does it mean, though, for one thing to contain instructions for the creation of another? Consider computer programming: when I type something like the following into a compiler:

#include
main()
cout << "Hello World!"; return 0;

am I writing instructions for the creation of something? Prima facie, this looks just like the blueprint case, but there's an important (and relevant) difference here: in typing the code into a compiler, I'm not making instructions for the program's creation, but rather creating the program itself. That is, the "code" for the program just is the program looked at in a certain way (e.g. through a decompiler); to watch someone write a computer program and then say "Well yes, I've seen you write the instructions for the program, but when are you going to make the program itself?" would make you guilty of a category mistake, it seems--again, writing the program just is writing the code. Program and code are identical. This case, I think, is instructive. We'll see how in just a moment.

Let's set aside the philosophical struggle with this second horn for a moment and remind ourselves what DNA actually is and how it works. DNA consists of two long polymers composed of phosphate groups and sugar groups conjoined by organic esters. Attached to this scaffolding, four "bases"--adenosine, ctyosine, thymine, and guanine--do the real "work" of DNA: adenosine always attaches to thymine, and cytosine to guanine, meaning that the entire sequence of both sides can be deduced from just one given half. DNA's primary function in the body is to regulate the creation of proteins, which in turn regulate virtually all of the body's functions. DNA does this by creating strands of RNA through the process alluded to above; units of three base pairs at a time on the relevant portions of the RNA (there are huge parts of our DNA that seem to play no active role in anything) then interact with cellular objects called ribosomes, which produce corresponding proteins. This is obviously a very basic account of how the protein creation process happens, but it should suffice for our purposes here.

The most salient part of the above, it seems, is the emphasis on causation. The entire process of protein synthesis can be done without involving an agent at all. In this way, DNA stands in sharp contrast to the blueprint from our earlier discussion--the sense in which we're using 'instruction' when we're discussing blueprints (at least in the second horn of the dilemma) necessarily includes a concept of conscious builders; to put it more generally, instructions must be instructions for someone to follow. DNA, then, is somewhat more like a computer program than it is like a blueprint in the second sense: rather than being instructions for something's creation, it _just is_ that something viewed from a lower level. Still, though, there is an important element of disanalogy here--to assert that DNA is just like a computer program would be to assert that it represents in the first sense we discussed. This assumption, we saw, leads to a fallaciously circular line of reasoning, and thus is unacceptable. As with a blueprint, if we make the comparison between a computer program and DNA, we must be careful to remember that it is just a metaphor. This, I think, is the central point that I am making: while the blueprint metaphor is apt in many ways, we must take care to remember when we use it that it is just a metaphor--while DNA and blueprints share things in common, there are important difference that prevent the two from being completely equated, no matter which sense of 'represent' we're using.

We've said a great deal here about why thinking of DNA as representing organism is incorrect, so let's take a moment to sketch a positive argument and suggest what the correct way to think about DNA might be. Let's begin by remembering that DNA causes protein synthesis, which causes other necessary organic functions. If we keep this observation squarely in mind, DNA's metaphysics aren't all that difficult to articulate: DNA, mediated by other chemicals and environmental considerations, regulates the causal chain that leads to the occurrence of all the various functions we mean by the cluster-concept 'life.' These include, but are not limited to, metabolism, reproduction, cell growth, cell regeneration, gas exchange, and many, many others. DNA is just one link--albeit a very important link--in the naturalistic chain that both causes and is constitutive of life.

As I said, I'm aware that there are a great many holes here that need to be plugged before this theory is really solid, but I think the rough outlines are clear. Thoughts?

Ethics as a Social Technology

2008-10-22T14:04:00.000-07:00

One of my classes this semester consists in evaluating my advisor's manuscript for his upcoming book. The book is on a naturalistic account of ethics, and while I can't say too much about it specifically (it's still a work in progress), I can at least say that I'm finding it rather compelling. He's concerned with showing how our evolutionary history--specifically, the development of altruism in our hominid ancestors--led to the creation/development of ethics as we know them today. In one passage for this week's reading, he made a parallel between ethics and technology, saying that ethics (like any artifact) exists to fulfill a function--that is, it was created for a purpose. I find this idea incredibly compelling--it seems to me that thinking about ethics as a social technology is precisely the right way to frame the issue--and so I'm taking it upon myself to develop this part of his account further. I've only been thinking about it for a few hours now, so my formulation is still in its preliminary stages, but here's my thought-process thus far.

First, let me say a bit about what I mean by a piece of "social technology." The paradigm case for this, I think, is language, so that's the extended metaphor I'm going to use in my discussion here. All pieces of technology have (at least) two features in common: (1) they are the products of intelligent design (no technology exists as a mind-independent part of the world--artifacts don't grow on trees), and (2) they are created to fulfill some specific function. Before we progress, let's say a bit more about how these conditions tend to be expressed.

Generally, (2) is realized by extending our natural capabilities; in their simplest forms, tools are just pieces of the environment that we use to interact with other parts of the environment in ways that our unmodified bodies could not--the most intuitive example of this is something like the use of a smooth stick to reach something (say, honey) that is inaccessible to our human hands. More sophisticated tools, of course, fulfill more sophisticated functions; the most complex tools that we've created to date actually aid us not in direct physical interaction with the world, but in cognition--computers are reliable mechanisms which, while not directly doing any "information processing," let us take shortcuts with our cognition. In short, tools are environmental changes that accomplish some function.

(1) is a bit more obvious, but I should still say a bit about it. I've argued before that there is no such thing as "natural function"--I follow Searle in saying that function is only definable relative to the beliefs and desires of some intentional agent. I'm not going to rehash this argument here (though I will have to when I do a more formal presentation of this idea), so just bear with me on this point for now. All tools have functions, functions imply users/designers, and so all tools are the products of design and/or use (I'm still not sure if these two can be made equivalent). Now on to the meat of my point here.

Language, on this definition, seems to count as a tool. Proponents of the extended mind thesis (especially Andy Clark and David Chalmers) have been counting language as a tool for quite some time, and despite other disagreements I might have with extended mind philosophy, I think they're spot-on with this point. Language consists in changing the environment (usually--but not always--through the production of compression waves with the vocal chords) in such a way as to communicate one's own mental states to another person. This allows for all sorts of developments that might not have been possible--it opened the way to collaboration, information sharing, and socialization--but that's not what I want to focus on here. Like any tool, language has a function--in fact, it seems to have two distinct functions: expression and communication.

By 'expression,' I mean something akin to what's happening in poetry generally (or metaphors specifically): the conveyance of emotion, tone, mood, and other non-conceptual mental states. In this respect, language can be considered something like music--a series of sounds put together to convey not so much a concrete message per se, but more to communicate a set of abstract ideas. Shakespearean language is paradigmatically expressive, it seems to me: it is flowery, beautiful, complex, metaphorical, and often designed to do more than simply express propositions.

On the other hand, language is also used for communication in a more mundane sense--that is, it is to convey propositional attitudes about the world. This is the use with which most of us will likely be more familiar: it is the way we are using the linguistic tool when we give directions, express philosophical ideas, make requests, describe things, and generally use symbols to represent the world as being a certain way. The constructed language Lojban is probably as close to a purely communicative langauge as we can get--it is designed to totally exclude the possibility of any ambiguity of expression by being as syntactically precise as possible. It was formulated by logicians and mathematicians to express ideas about the world in the most clear and precise way possible. Of course, this precision means that it is more difficult to formulate purely expressive sentiments in Lojban--metaphor and other poetic devices, while not impossible to use, are much more difficult to construct.

Clearly, most languages are used for both these purposes--it would be possible to do science, philosophy, and logic in Shakespearean English, and it would be possible to write poetry in Lojban--still, there are cases (as we've seen) in which a particular language is better at one and worse at another; relative to each purpose, all languages are not created equal. Still, most do passably well at both--it seems strange to say that English is a "better" language than Chinese. There are, however, cases where these sorts of evaluative judgments seem not only possible, but reasonable. One notable case is that of the Piraha tribe in South America. Their language, which has been extensively studied and debated, seems relatively unique among modern languages in lacking common features like recursion (the ability to say embed smaller clauses in larger ones, e.g. 'Jon, who is the author of this blog, went to class, which was at Columbia University, which is on 116th street, today'), discrete numerical terms, discrete kinship words, and other common features. Many of the concepts we express on a regular basis could not be formulated in the Piraha language. If language is indeed a tool--in that it was created to fulfill a function--it seems like we can say that Piraha is, at the very least, less effective in the communication sense. In a relevant sense, English is better than Piraha just because it does the job of language better.

I think we can make a similar case for ethics. If we look at the history of our ethical practices, it seems clear that they arose as a result of our ancestors' increasingly social lifestyles--ethical rules and norms were created to let us live together in larger groups, and they accomplished this goal by artificially extending our naturally altruistic tendencies to more and more people. Ethics, then, like language, has two distinct functions: to maintain group cohesion, and to remedy altruism failures. Like language, it is a human-created tool that arose to accomplish socially oriented goals.

With this picture, we can have our pluralist cake and eat our relativism too--just as with language, it is perfectly coherent on this picture to see different ethical systems as competing but not superior or inferior to each other. There might be many ways to solve these two problems that wouldn't be compatible with one another, but that still solve the problems equally well. To draw another tool-related analogy, we can compare two competing ethical systems to two competing operating systems: neither Windows nor OSX is inherently superior to the other, they both simply approach the computation problem differently. Still, as with language, there are cases where one is clearly better than another--both Windows XP and OSX are better than their predecessors of 15 years ago just because they discharge their fuctions (i.e. solve the releveant problems) better and more efficiently.

Similarly, we can say unequivocally that our ethical system is better than that of the Nazis--a Nazi ethical system just doesn't solve the social cohesion and altruism failure problems in an effective way. A dictatorship might well keep society together cohesively, but it does so without solving the altruism failure effectively. Since an ethical theory's function is to solve both these problems, we can say that Naziism is an objectively worse ethical system. Ethics, if understood as a tool, lets us make these value judgments at a meta-theoretical level--we can call two ethical systems competing but comperable if they both discharge their functions equally well but in different ways, or we can call one better than another one if it discharges its function more efficiently and effectively.

This seems to me to be precisely the right way to think about ethics and morality. I'm going to develop this further as the semester progresses, culminating in a formal presentation in my final paper for the course. I'll update this account as I solidify things more, but for now I would welcome comments and thoughts.

Oh Right, I Have a Blog!

2008-10-22T13:59:00.001-07:00

So here I am. When we last met, it was the close of summer and I was getting ready to go from Lancaster, PA to New York City to start grad school. I made it--despite what you might have deduced from my sudden cessation of posting--and I'm now just about half way through my first semester. I couldn't possibly be happier. The downside to this, though, is that I've been so busy reading and writing that I basically forgot about this blog until just now; over the last year, it's been my only real outlet for philosophical musing, and now that I'm doing weekly writing (and daily discussion of the issues) it doesn't seem as necessary. Still, I think I'm going to try to keep it up. Now that I remember this place exists, stay tuned for more updates.

Chess, Computers, and Crystal Balls

2008-08-14T20:50:00.000-07:00

I've written before about the significance (or lack thereof) of Deep Blue's now 11 year old victory over Gary Kasparov, but this is a topic that Eripsa and I invariably end up arguing over, so my recent three weeks working with him has made me think about this issue again, and I think I've come up with a few additions to my argument.

Briefly, my position is this. Contrary to what some functionalists would have us believe, Deep Blue's "victory--while undoubtedly a great achievement in design--isn't terribly significant in any deep way. However, I also don't think Dan Dennett is right in saying that the reason the question isn't interesting is that human brains aren't unique in the first place: instead, it seems wrong to me to call what happened "Deep Blue's victory" at all, as it was never in the game to begin with. Playing chess with a computer is no more a competitive affair than a game of tetherball is a competitive game with the pole or a game of solitaire is a competitive game with the cards. To truly participate in a game is an inherently intentional act--that is, an act that requires the ability to understand how one thing can be about or stand for another--and digital computers are fundamentally incapable of intentionality. In other words, ascribing a victory to Deep Blue over Gary Kasparov is to tacitly treat Deep Blue as an independent agent capable of its own successes and defeats, and that doesn't seem like the right way to talk about machines.

Clearly something is happening here--that is, Kasparov is really doing something when he sits down at the chessboard with Deep Blue and its handlers--so if that something is not a game between man and machine, then what is it? While I still find the above argument (at least in its non-brief form) compelling, it occurs to me that it is a strictly negative argument--it contends that Deep Blue is not playing a game at all and so has no real "victory" over Kasparov to speak of--leaving the question of what is actually going on unanswered. It is this question I wish to try to address here.

Suppose you and I are standing in a room with hardwood floors arguing about whether or not the ground is level. To settle the issue, I pull out a flawless crystal ball and set it carefully in the center of the room, knowing that if the floor really isn't level, the ball will roll down the incline, however slight; sure enough, the ball rolls off to the south, and we agree that we really do need to deal with that sinkhole out back. What's happened here? On a strong externalist account like Andy Clark's, I've externalized some of my cognition into a tool, letting it do the information processing for me in a way that just my un-extended meat mind just couldn't: this is the position that lies at the root of the intuition that Deep Blue is an agent in itself capable of playing chess, and it is this position against which I want to argue.

Rather than somehow externalizing my cognition, it seems to me that I'm simply cleverly manipulating my environment in order to make my internal cognition more powerful. When I set the ball in the middle of the room, it is with knowledge that--thanks to the action of some basic physical laws--one sort of result will occur if the floor is level and another sort will occur if it is not level. In short: I don't know if the floor is level, but I know that if the floor is not level, then the ball will roll down hill; thus, I infer that since I can certainly see the ball move, placing it in the middle of the floor is a good way to find out if there is a tilt or not. The ball is not doing any information processing of its own, nor is it some kind of metaphysical receptacle for my own cognition; instead, it is just a reliable indicator that I can use to make a judgment about the environment around me.

Let's extend (so to speak) this argument to computers in general (and Deep Blue in particular), then. A digital computer is a physical system just like a crystal ball--albeit a much more complex one--so it seems that the analogy is preserved here: any apparent "information processing" done by the computer (that is, any native cognition OR extended cognition) is nothing more than a very complicated ball rolling down a very complicated hill; a computer isn't actually doing anything cognitive, it's just a physical system with a reliable enough operation that I can use it to help me make certain judgments about the environment. Given a hill the ball will--just in virtue of what it is--roll, and given certain inputs the digital computer will--just in virtue of what it is--give certain outputs. In both the case of the ball and the case of the computer the tool's interactions with the environment can be informative, but only when interpreted by a mind that is capable of consciously attaching significance to that interaction; that's all a computer is, then: a physical system we use to help us make judgments about the environment.

That still doesn't address the central question, though, of what exactly is going on in the Deep Blue vs. Kasparov game (or of what's going on when anyone plays a computer game, for that matter). Clearly Kasparov at least is doing something cognitive (he's working hard), and clearly that something is at least partially based on the rules of chess, but if he's not playing chess with Deep Blue, then--at the risk of sounding redundant--what is he doing? Perhaps he is, as others have argued, actually playing chess with Deep Blue's programmers (albeit indirectly). I've advanced this argument before, and have largely gotten the following response.

Kasparov can't actually be playing against Deep Blue's programmers, because the programmers--either individually or collectively--wouldn't stand a chance in a match against Kasparov, whereas Deep Blue was able to win the day in the end. If the competition really was between Kasparov and the people behind the design and development of Deep Blue, those people would be expected to (at least as a group) be able to perform at least as well as Deep Blue itself did in the chess match. This is an interesting objection, but one that I do not think ultimately holds water. To see why, I'll beg your pardon for engaging in a bit more thought experimentation.

I'm not much of a chess player. I know the rules, and can win a game or two against someone who is as inexperienced as I am, but those wins are as much a product of luck as anything I've done. Kasparov would undoubtedly mop the floor with me even with a tremendous handicap--say, the handicap of not being able to see the chess board, but rather having to keep a mental model of the game and call out his moves verbally. I have, as I said, no doubt that I would be absolutely annihilated even with this advantage, but we can certainly imagine a player much more skilled than I am: a player that would tax Kasparov more, and one that he would reliably be able to beat in a normal chess match, but might risk losing to were he denied the environmental advantage of being able to use the board as an aid to represent the current state of the game. The board (and who has access to it) is making a real difference in the outcome of the game--are we to say, then, that it is a participant in the game in the same way that Deep Blue is? In the case where our mystery challenger beats Kasparov, does the board deserve to be credited in the victory? It does not seem to me that it does.

Here's another example of the same sort of thing. Suppose I challenge you to an arithmetic competition to see which of us can add a series of large numbers most quickly. There's a catch, though: while I can use a pen and paper in my calculations, you have to do the whole thing in your head. You'd be right to call foul at this, I think--the fact that I can engage in even the rudimentary environmental manipulation of writing down the figures as I progress in my addition gives me an enormous advantage, and might allow me to win the contest when I otherwise would have lost--this is true in just the same way that it's true that Kasparov might lose a chess game to an "inferior" opponent if that opponent was able to manipulate the environment to aid him in a way that Kasparov was not (say, but using a chess board to help keep track of piece position).

I suspect that most of you can now see where I'm going with this, but let me make my point explicit: Deep Blue is nothing more than a very complicated example of its programmers' ability to manipulate the environment to give themselves an advantage. Contending that Kasparov couldn't have been matching wits against those programmers just because he could have mopped the floor with them if they'd been without Deep Blue is akin to saying that because Kasparov might lose to certain players that had access to the board when he did not (even if he'd beat them handily in a "fair fight"), the board is the important participant in the game, or that I'm simply better at arithmetic than you are because I can win the competition when I have access to pen and paper and you do not.

Deep Blue is its programmers pen and paper--the product of their careful environmental manipulation (and no one manipulates the environment like a computer programmer does) designed to help them perform certain cognitive tasks (e.g. chess) better and more quickly. So whom was Kasparov playing chess with? On this view, the answer is simple and (it seems to me) clearly correct--he was playing against the programmers in the same sense that he would have been if they'd been sitting across the board from him directly--he just had a disadvantage: they were a hell of a lot better at using the environment to enhance their cognition than he was.

Hey Look, Irony!

2008-08-05T16:31:00.000-07:00

Shortly after finishing that last post about how awesome technology is, my laptop descended into its watery grave--that is, I spilled rum-laced Vitamin Water all over it. It is, needless to say, currently nonfunctional. I'm only at CTY for another few days (I'm posting this from Eripsa's laptop), but don't expect to see anything new until at least next week, when I will be gloriously reunited with my desktop. If anyone wants to contribute to the dirt-poor-philosophy-grad-student-laptop-repair-fund, feel free!

100th Post - An Ode to Technology

2008-08-01T16:20:00.000-07:00

This is the 100th post on this blog, and I'm pretty happy about it. As I said in the very first post, I've tried keeping a blog before, and it's never really worked out as well as it has here. I think it is a fitting celebration, then, to talk a little bit about technology.

I'm 2/3 of the way through my second CTY session, and this time I'm teaching philosophy of mind with Eripsa, who, despite being dreadfully wrong about consciousness, is an all-around awesome dude. He works primarily on the philosophy of technology, a disappointingly underrepresented field that deals with questions like "what is the ontological status of a tool," "what is necessary to create an artificial mind," and "how does technology influence human thought?" He does a lot of really interesting work (particularly on robots), so I encourage you to go check out his blog.

Anyway, being around him inevitably gets me thinking even more about technology than I usually do (which is saying something)--I'm particularly interested in that last question I posed above, though: how does technology influence human thought? Eripsa wants to follow Andy Clark and David Chalmers in endorsing the strong-externalist extended mind thesis, which claims that there is a relevant sense in which my cognition and mental states (including beliefs) spend a lot of time in the external world. Their paradigm case for this is that of Otto, a hypothetical Alzheimer's patient who, in lieu of using his deteriorating biological memory, writes down facts in a notebook, which he carries with him at all times. Clark claims that when Otto consults his notebook for a fact (e.g. the location of a restaurant he wants to go to), the notebook is serving as a repository for his beliefs about the world in just the same way that my (or your) biological memory does; that is, his belief about the location of the restaurant is literally stored in the external world.

This thesis seems fraught with problems to me, but that's not the point I want to make (at least not in this post). While I think that Clark (and by extension Eripsa) is wrong about the ontology of technology (Otto's notebook is supposed to stand for a whole host of technological "extensions" of our biological minds into the world), I think he's precisely right about its importance in a cognitive sense. Human beings are, by their very nature, tool users; it's a big part of what makes us human. Of course other primates (and even some birds) can use--or even manufacture--tools to accomplish certain tasks, but nothing else in the known natural world comes even close to doing it as well as humans do. Technology use is a part of who we are, and always has been; we created language as a tool to manipulate our environment, learning to create compression waves in the air for the purpose of communicating our ideas to each other, and in the process beginning the long, slow march toward the incredibly sophisticated tools we have today--tools like the one you're using right now.

Language might have been our first tool--and perhaps even still our best--but in recent years, the computer (and more specifically the Internet) has proven to be one of our most important in terms of cognition. I've argued before that the advent of the information age should herald a radical change in educational strategy, but I want to reiterate that point here. Today's kids are growing up in a world where virtually any fact that want is immediately and reliably accessible at any time. I'd say that at least 1/3 of the kids I'm teaching at CTY--and these are 12-15 year olds--have Internet-enabled cell phones that they keep on their person at all times; this is a very, very big deal, and our educational strategy should reflect it.

100 years ago, a good education was an education of facts. Students memorized times-tables, theorems, names and dates, literary styles, and an endless list of other factual statements about the world, because that's what it took to be an "educated citizen." Information was available, but it was cumbersome (physical books), difficult to access (most areas didn't have high quality libraries), and generally hard to come by for the average citizen--even an educated one. The exact opposite is true today--students don't need to memorize (say) George Washington's birthday, because they can pull that information up within seconds. This frees up an enormous "cognitive surplus" (to borrow Clay Shirkey's term) that can be used to learn _how to analyze and work with facts_ rather than memorize the facts themselves.

I've postulated before that the so-called "Flynn Effect"--that is, the steadily increasing IQ of every generation since the close of the 19th century--might be due to the increasing availability of information, and thus the increasingly analysis and abstraction oriented brain of the average citizen. If I'm right, we're going to see a huge leap in the IQ of this generation, but only if we start to educate them appropriately. We need a radical emphasis shift as early as in the kindergarten classroom; students need to be taught that it's not what you know, but how well you can work with the almost infinite array of facts that are available to you. The spotlight should be taken off memorizing names and dates, facts and figures, and focused squarely on approaches to thinking about those facts and figures. Today's child is growing up in a world where he is not a passive consumer of information, but rather an active participant in the process of working with information in a way that humans have never been before.

This leads me to my final point, which is that you should all go read this speech by Clay Shirky, author of the book Here Comes Everyone. It's very, very well articulated, and makes exactly the kind of point I'm driving at here. Snip:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing--and when I say "we" I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that's what I'm going to tell them: We're looking for the mouse. We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes.

I'm betting the same. Thanks for reading, and here's to the next 100 posts.

Potential Course List

2008-07-20T14:51:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to get my affairs ready to start at Columbia this Fall, and have assembled the following class list. I haven't registered yet, but I have the (perhaps wildly incorrect) perception that grad students are rarely unable to get into classes of their choice. In any case, here's my dream schedule (a long with course descriptions and some commentary) for Fall 2008:

EVOLUTION, ALTRUISM, AND ETHICS
Day/Time: W 11:00am-12:50pm
This seminar will elaborate and examine a naturalistic approach to ethics, one that views contemporary ethical practices as products of a long and complex history. I am currently writing a book presenting this form of naturalism, and chapters will be assigned for each meeting after the first. Using brief readings from other ethical perspectives, both historical and contemporary, we shall try to evaluate the prospects of ethical naturalism.
Open to juniors, seniors, and graduate students.

I'm particularly excited about this one. In my early undergraduate days, I specialized in ethical issues, but I found all of the existent ethical theories dreadfully unsatisfying, and came to suspect that if we were going to get a plausible naturalistic account of ethics, we needed a more thorough understanding of how the mind and brain worked--hence the switch to mind. This class sounds right up my alley, though, and I'm always excited to hear naturalistic defenses of philosophical concepts.

1st YEAR PROSEMINAR IN PHILOSOPHY
Day/Time: W 6:10pm-8:00pm
This course, which meets only for the first seven weeks of term, is restricted to, and required for, first-year Columbia Ph.D. students. The course aims to promote weekly writing by each student. A paper, or section of a book, with which every philosopher ought to be familiar, will be selected each week, and one student will make a presentation on that target paper, while the others will hand in a brief essay about it. Essays will be returned, with comments, before the next meeting of the seminar. Each week a different member of the faculty, in addition to Professor Peacocke, will participate in the discussions. A second seven-week segment of the ProSeminar will be held in the Spring Semester of 2009.

What can I say? It's the Pro-Seminar, so I have to take it. Still, it could be really good--the single most productive (in terms of bettering me as a philosopher) course I took at Berkeley was the "Introduction to Philosophical Methodology" class--just like this one, it was aimed at getting students writing every week. My hope is that this class will be a more rigorous and intense version of that one, and that I'll really have a chance to sharpen my writing considerably.

ADVANCED TOPICS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
Day/Time: W 2:10pm-4:00pm
This seminar will be concerned with the interactions between the theory of intentional content and thought on the one hand, and metaphysics on the other. We will first discuss the role of truth and reference in the individuation of intentional content. We will then draw on that role in discussing the following issues: the nature of rule-following and objectivity in thought; transcendental arguments and objective content in thought and in perception; the general phenomenon of relation-based thought, and its extent, nature and significance; the nature of subjects of consciousness, self-representation and first person thought.

Mind is my specialty, so this was an easy choice. I'm not entirely clear on what exactly this course description is talking about (which is a good thing), other than that the class seems to deal with intentional content and how it relates to external objects, which is a topic I'm very much interested in.

Serendipitously, all these classes are on Wednesday, so I'd be in class only one day per week, which would be pretty nice. I'm sure I'm going to have a lot of writing to do outside of class (and Fallout 3 is coming out soon, too...), so not having to make the commute to campus every day will be nice.

Some Normative Epistemology

2008-07-19T18:20:00.000-07:00

If you ask most philosophers, they'll tell you that there are (roughly) four main branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and logic. These (again, roughly) correspond to the questions: "What's out there?" "How do you know?" "What should I do about it?" and "Can you prove it to a math major?" Tongue-in-cheek definitions aside, metaphysics deals with questions relating to the nature of reality, the existence of various entities, properties of those entities, and the ways in which those entities interact. "Does God exist?" and "How do the mind and brain relate?" are both metaphysical questions. Epistemology deals with knowledge claims and how humans go about knowing things in the first place--"What is an appropriate level of evidence to require before changing a belief?" and "How can we be sure that our senses are reliable?" are both epistemic questions. Ethics deals with questions of right and wrong (metaethics) and how we ought to live our lives (normative ethics). "What moral obligations do we have to our fellow man?" is the canonical ethical question. Logic sort of flits in and out the other disciplines, popping its head in to be used as a tool (or to confound erstwhile plausible theories) in any and all of the above, but it also has some questions of its own. Modal logic deals with necessity and contingency, and asks questions like "What does it mean for some truth to be true necessarily rather than by chance, or contingently?"

This blog deals mostly with metaphysical questions, but I had a very interesting discussion about epistemology with a colleague the other day, and I want to relate some of the highlights here and (hopefully) get some comments.

The discussion revolved mostly around what counts as a good reason for believing some proposition, but I want to specifically focus on an epistemic maxim of my own invention: "we ought to be more skeptical of propositions we wish to be true." Let me give a brief summary of the thought process that led me to adopt this maxim.

First, I take it as axiomatic (that is, not requiring proof of its own) that holding true beliefs about the world is a good thing, and that holding false beliefs a bad thing--I don't mean 'good' and 'bad' in any kind of moral sense here, only that, in general, the accumulation of true beliefs and the expunging of false beliefs (i.e. the search for truth) is a goal that can be valued in itself, and not necessarily for any pragmatic results it might deliver (though it certainly might deliver many). If you don't agree on that, feel free to shoot me an argument in the comments, and I'll do my best to address it.

With that axiom in place, then, it seems reasonable that we should do whatever we can to avoid taking on new false beliefs, as well as strive to take on as many true beliefs as we can. That last part is important, as it saves us from going too far down the path of Radical Skepticism. If we were to adopt something like Descartes' method of doubt in his Meditations--that is, adopt the maxim "we should withhold assent from any proposition that is not indubitable just as we would any proposition that is clearly false"--we would certainly minimize the number of false beliefs we would take on, but at the expense of likely rejecting a large number of true ones. Radical Skepticism results in too many "false epistemic negatives," or "avoids Scylla by steering into Charybdis," as another colleague said. To continue the metaphor, it also seems to dangerous to stray toward Scylla, lest I simply believe every proposition that seems prima facie pluasible--too far in the direction of naive realism, in other words. While I certainly consider myself a naive realist in the context of perception--I think that the way our senses present the world to us is more-or-less accurate, and that when I (say) perceive a chair or a tomato, I really am perceiving a chair or a tomato, and not my "sense datum," "impression" or any other purely mental construct that is assembled by my mind--I think we ought to be somewhat more skeptical when it comes to epistemology in general.

My colleague pressed me for the exact formulation of my response to the question at hand ("what counts as a good reason for forming or changing a belief?"), but I demurred, and on further reflection--both then and now--I'm not sure I can give a single answer. Rather, it seems to me, that there are (or at least ought to be) a variety of heuristics in our "epistemic toolbox" that either raise or lower "the bar of belief" in various circumstances. "Naive realism" is a cluster shorthand for a bundle of these heuristics, it seems to me, including (for instance) "We should be more skeptical of propositions that would have the world operating in a way that is radically different from how it seems¹." I'm most interested right now in the general heuristic mentioned above, though: "we should be more skeptical of propositions we wish to be true." So let's continue with our justification of it.

I'm not a perfect reasoner; unlike, say, Laplace's Demon, it is possible for me to make a mistake in my reasoning--indeed, it happens with alarming frequency. These errors can take many forms, but they can include assenting to arguments which, though they might seem sound to me, in reality either lack true premises or are somehow invalid. If I strongly desire some proposition p to be true--if, for example, a close family member is in a coma and I hear about an experimental new treatment that might allow him to awaken with full cognitive faculties--I am more likely to make these errors of judgment, as I will not necessarily apply my critical faculties with the same force as I would to another proposition p₁ on which such strong hopes were not resting. My colleague objected that I would, given enough care, certainly be aware of when this was happening, and could take more care in my reasoning to ensure that this result did not occur, but I am not so certain: a corollary of the fact that I am a fallible reasoner seems to be that I might not always know when my reasoning is being faulty. It is no solution, therefore, to say "we need not universally require a higher standard of proof for propositions we wish to be true, we just need to be sure that our reasoning is not being influenced by our desires," as it is possible--in just the same sense that it is possible for me to make a mistake in my reasoning--that I might make a mistake in evaluating that reason itself, no matter how much care I take to be certain that my desires not influence my judgment.

What do I mean by "skeptical," then, if not for a more careful logical rigor, one might ask. It seems to me that whenever I am thinking clearly (i.e. I am not drunk, asleep, distracted, etc.) and applying my logical faculties to the best of my ability (i.e. critically questioning my beliefs or trying as hard as I can to puzzle out a problem)--as I should be when I am seriously considering adopting a new belief or changing an existing one--I am already being as rigorous as I possibly can be; unless, for some reason, I have already lowered the "bar of belief" in a specific instance (e.g. suspending disbelief while watching an action movie) I should normally be as logically rigorous as I can be. If I'm critically examining adopting some belief that I greatly wish to be true, then, I should not only be as logically rigorous as I can be--that is, I should set the bar of belief where I normally do--and then also factor in the possibility that my belief might be affecting my logical reasoning--might be lowering the bar without my knowledge--and so I ought to require more evidence than I otherwise would: that is, I ought to be more stubborn about changing my position. By "skeptical" here, then, I just mean "requiring of more evidence," in the same way that if I'm skeptical of a student's claim that her computer crashed and destroyed her paper I will require more evidence attesting to the truth of it (a repair bill, maybe) than I normally would; her claim to the effect counts as at least some evidence, which might be enough if I had no reason to be skeptical.

Let me make my point briefly and clearly. In making desire-related decisions--particularly when deciding to assent to a proposition you wish to be true--the possibility that my desire might negatively affect my reason, combined with the fact that I might not be aware of this negative effect means that I ought to apply my normal reasoning faculties with my full ability and require more evidence in favor of the proposition than I normally would.

Even more succinctly: we ought to be more skeptical of propositions we wish to be true.

Thoughts? Does this make sense? What standards do you apply when trying to make up your mind about your beliefs in general?

^1. This is not to say that propositions which say that the world operates in radically different ways than it seems to use are always (or even usually) going to be false--the atomistic theory of matter, relativity, and quantum mechanics are all theories which seem to be at least mostly true, and which describe the world as being in fact much different than it seems. My point is that we should hold claims like this to a higher epistemic bar before assenting to them than we would claims like (say) there is a tree outside my window, which correspond with reality as it seems to us.

Edit: Because this discussion took place in class with my co-instructor, and because the kids all have cameras all the time, we get a picture of me thinking about this point and a picture of me arguing it with him. Enjoy.

Searle on Derrida and Desconstruction

2008-07-18T20:09:00.001-07:00

Frequent readers will undoubtedly know that I have an ongoing cold war with postmodernism, poststructuralism, deconstructionism, or whatever you want to call the very confusing (and often very nonsensical) "philosophical" position that seeks to "deconstruct" philosophy, science, and rationality in general, revealing them as "social constructs" or--even worse--"mere texualities." The claims espoused by proponents of these positions include such gems as "reality is a text," "truth is a kind of fiction," and (my personal favorite), ""what we think of as the innermost spaces and places of the body—vagina, stomach, intestine—are in fact pockets of externality folded in."

This philosophical style (and I use the term loosely) is exemplified by Jacques Derrida, a French "philosopher" who is commonly credited with having founded the field. His writing, as far as I've seen, is spectacularly confused and cloaked in so much obfuscation and deliberately obscure language as to be almost unreadable, either in French or in translation. He, like most other proponents of his field, is fond of masking his almost universally ridiculous claims in language that makes them seem profound--he could have been the very subject that Nietzsche (no bastion of clarity himself) had in mind when he said "Those who know they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound strive for obscurity." Here's an example from Writing and Difference, just to give you a taste of his style:

The entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the centre receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix [...] is the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the centre have always designated an invariable presence - eidos, arche, telos, energia, ouisa(essence, existence, substance, subject), transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth.

If you find yourself thinking "well that doesn't really say anything at all!" congratulations: you're sane. The central thrust of my objection to the entire deconstructionist thesis is (briefly) just this: is isn't accurate to portray all of reality as a "text" to be interpreted it, as a "social construct" or as a relative phenomenon. There is, in fact, a difference between referent and thing referenced, between subjectivity and objectivity, and between truth and fiction. When I make a statement like "there is a tree outside my window," I'm making a claim about how the world really is that, depending on various facts about the real world is either going to be true or false. It isn't a matter of interpretation, opinion, or "textual construction" (whatever that even means), and cloaking these sorts of inanities in sophisticated (or deep sounding) language isn't going to change that basic fact.

I'm not going to continue with my critique here, because John Searle did a much better job than I ever could. The depth and ferocity of his attack on Derrida, his disciples, and deconstructionist ideology in general is breathtaking in its effectiveness. Snip:

What are the results of deconstruction supposed to be? Characteristically the deconstructionist does not attempt to prove or refute, to establish or confirm, and he is certainly not seeking the truth. On the contrary, this whole family of concepts is part of the logocentrism he wants to overcome; rather he seeks to undermine, or call in question, or overcome, or breach, or disclose complicities. And the target is not just a set of philosophical and literary texts, but the Western conception of rationality and the set of presuppositions that underlie our conceptions of language, science, and common sense, such as the distinction between reality and appearance, and between truth and fiction. According to Culler, "The effect of deconstructive analyses, as numerous readers can attest, is knowledge and feelings of mastery" (p. 225).

The trouble with this claim is that it requires us to have some way of distinguishing genuine knowledge from its counterfeits, and justified feelings of mastery from mere enthusiasms generated by a lot of pretentious verbosity. And the examples that Culler and Derrida provide are, to say the least, not very convincing. In Culler's book, we get the following examples of knowledge and mastery: speech is a form of writing (passim), presence is a certain type of absence (p. 106), the marginal is in fact central (p. 140), the literal is metaphorical (p. 148), truth is a kind of fiction (p. 181), reading is a form of misreading (p. 176), understanding is a form of misunderstanding (p. 176), sanity is a kind of neurosis (p. 160), and man is a form of woman (p. 171). Some readers may feel that such a list generates not so much feelings of mastery as of monotony. There is in deconstructive writing a constant straining of the prose to attain something that sounds profound by giving it the air of a paradox, e.g., "truths are fictions whose fictionality has been forgotten" (p. 181).

The direct target of his attack is a book by Derrida's disciple Jonathan Culler, but the criticisms hold true for Derrida himself, as well as for much of the deconstructionist movement in general. If you are--like me--inclined to view academia in general (and philosophy in particular) as a project that aims to get at clear and rational truth about an objective world, I urge to you read Searle's criticisms: they are spot on.

Link.

Escaping the Amish

2008-07-17T13:18:00.001-07:00

I'm currently in Lancaster, PA, teaching CTY at Franklin & Marshall College. Lancaster, for those who aren't from around here, is the heart of Amish country--you can't really go out in public without encountering at least a few of them wandering around, even in the mall (which seems kind of strange to me). As both an atheist and somewhat of a Server Monk, the Amish have always kind of baffled me--they're more or less the opposite of everything I stand for--but I've always considered them one of the more tolerable (if odd) religious sects; at the very least, they seem peaceful, and choose to eschew those they disagree with rather than clash with them violently.

This perception, widespread as it may be, is apparently not entirely accurate. I came across an interview today with Torah Bontranger, a 28 year old woman (and recent Columbia graduate!) who "escaped" from the Amish when she was 15. The picture she paints of Amish life contradicts the gentle, tolerant, pastoral image we're usually presented with. Snip:

For as long as I can remember, I had always envisioned a life such that wouldn’t be compatible with the Amish religion and lifestyle.

I loved learning, and cried when I couldn’t go back to school the fall after graduating from Amish 8th grade. The Amish do not send their children to formal schooling past 8th grade. A Supreme Court case prevented forcing Amish children into high school on grounds of religious freedom. I knew that, by US law, I wasn’t considered an adult until eighteen. I didn’t want to wait until then to go to high school.
[...]

The Amish take the Bible verse “spare the rod and spoil the child” in a literal sense. Parents routinely beat their children with anything from fly swatters, to leather straps (the most typical weapon), to whips (those are the most excruciating of), to pieces of wood.

[...]
One of my acquaintances stuttered when he was little and his dad would make him put his toe under the rocking chair, and then his dad would sit in the chair and rock over the toe and tell him that’s what he gets for stuttering.

Even little babies get abused for crying too much during church or otherwise “misbehaving.” I’ve heard women beat their babies — under a year old — so much that I cringed in pain.

Neat, eh? Though Torah is careful to stress that she was raised in what's called an "Old Order Amish" community (apparently the anabaptist equivalent of Hasidim ), I suspect that this implies that "normal" Amish life isn't all sunshine and horse drawn buggies either. In any case, it's a compelling story, and she tells it with an intense, religious fervor that is almost certainly a by-product of her first 15 years. She's apparently got a book forthcoming--I look forward to it.

Part 1
Part 2

Philosophical Army

2008-07-16T13:43:00.000-07:00

As some of you know, I'm currently teaching Philosophy of Mind with Johns Hopkins' Center for Talented Youth. Between classes today, I spotted a group of my students marching in formation with one in the lead shouting "SUPER SPARTANS, WHAT IS YOUR PROFESSION?" and the rest calling out (in perfect unison) "DISPROVING BEHAVIORISM! AH OOO! AH OOO! AH OOO!" It was delightfully geeky, and I thought some of you out there might appreciate it.

Biological Naturalism vs. Functionalism

2008-07-10T19:02:00.000-07:00

Derek asks:

Can you please clearly distinguish between Biological Naturalism and Functionalism? I don't get the difference. I thought a Functionalist basically said that the mind was what the brain did, like digestion is what a stomach does. So how are the schools of thought different?

I certainly can. In order to really get clear what we're talking about, though, I think I need to say a little bit about the history of philosophy of mind. In the early-mid 20th century, the "in vogue" idea about how the mind and the body related was logical behaviorism. The logical behaviorist thesis, briefly stated, argued that any talk about mental states (e.g. pains, tickles, beliefs, desires, etc.) is really reducible to talk about behaviors and dispositions to behave--if Jon believes that it is raining, that just means that Jon is disposed to behave in a certain way (to carry an umbrella if he wants to stay dry, to close the windows of his car, to turn off his sprinklers, etc.), and if Jon is in pain, that just means that Jon is disposed to behave in another certain way (to retreat from the stimulus causing the pain, to say 'ouch,' to writhe around on the floor, etc.).

There are obvious problems with this--Hillary Putnam, for one, raises the logical possibility of a race who had pain-experiences without any disposition to pain behavior as evidence that mental statements are not logically identical to behavioral statements--but the one I find most telling is that it seems impossible to reduce intentional (in the technical sense) language into behavioral disposition language without simultaneously introducing another intentional term. To carry on with the above example, while it might be right to say that "if Jon believes it is raining he will carry an umbrella," that statement only seems true if Jon also has a desire to stay dry; similarly, Jon's desire to stay dry can only be translated into a behavioral disposition to wear goulashes if he believes that it is wet outside. This problem doesn't arise for all mental terms, but the fact that it arises for even one is enough to destroy the behaviorist thesis--the notion that all mental states are logically reducible to statements about actual or potential behaviors is false.

In the death of logical behaviorism, a new doctrine--Functionalism--arose to captivate the philosophic profession, this one based on a simple idea: what if the brain just is a digital computer, and our minds just are certain software programs? Whereas behaviorism is concerned only with the system's (i.e. your) inputs and outputs, Functionalism is concerned with the functional states that combine with inputs to produce given outputs. On this view, mental states are really just certain functional states in the complex Turing Machine that is our brain, and those mental states (including consciousness as a whole) are defined strictly in terms of function--there's nothing special about my mind, and (given the right programming and sufficiently powerful hardware), there's nothing stopping me from creating a functional equivalent of it implemented in silicon rather than in "meat."

To put it more precisely, Functionalism defines everything in terms of its place in the complex causal structure that is my brain; rather than ignoring what's going on in the "black box" of the brain (as a behaviorist would want to), a functionalist will admit that mental processes are essential for the system to function as it does, but will deny that there is anything essentially "mental" about those processes; a computer program with the same set of causal states, inputs, and outputs as my brain would, on this view, have a mind by definition, as all it means to have a mind is to have a system that functions in a certain way; how that system is implemented doesn't matter.

This point is easier to see in simpler cases, so let's take the case of an adding machine. There are many different possible ways that we could "realize" (that is, implement) a machine to add numbers: my pocket calculator, MatLab, this awesome device, and an abacus will all get the job done. Functionally, all these devices are equivalent--though they're instantiated in different forms, they have internal states that are directly analogous and, in the long run, produce the same functionality across the board. The brain, on this view, is just one implementation of "having a mind," and anything (say, a digital computer running a very complex program) could, given the right functional states, also be said to have a mind.

Biological Naturalism (BN) rejects this last point. Those of us who endorse BN (or something like it), point out that defining the mind purely in terms of functional states seems to leave something vital out--the qualitative character of consciousness, as well as its capacity to represent (that is, to have intentionality). Searle's Chinese Room argument is supposed to show exactly where Functionalism goes wrong: though the behavior of the Chinese Room system as a whole is functionally identical to a human who speaks Chinese, there seems to be something important missing from the Room--understanding, or semantics. Our minds, then, have to be defined by something other than their functional roles, as a system with functionally identical states seems to be missing both intentionality and subjective character of experience, both of which are defining characteristics of minds like ours.

BN proposes a simple, intuitive, and (it seems to me) correct answer to the mind/body problem: consciousness exists as an ontologically irreducible feature of the world--it can't be eliminated away in the same way that rainbows can be eliminated away as illusory--yet it is entirely caused by and realized in neuronal processes. Statements about mental events--beliefs, desires, pains, tickles--say something true and irreducible about the organism and can't be reduced to talk of brain states without the loss of something essential: the qualitative character of consciousness. The analogy with digestion--while not exact, as there's no essentially subjective character to digestion--is instructive here: consciousness is just something the brain does, in much the same way that digestion is just something the stomach and intestines do.

That's a rather brief characterization, and if you want a more detailed account, I urge you to read Searle's latest formulation here. It's not without problems, and I'm working on a modified account that I think is better able to deal with certain objections, but it's great place to start. I hope that answers your question, Derek!

Damn You, Obama

2008-07-09T20:04:00.000-07:00

I'm pissed, so I'm going to rant a little bit. Obama voted today to continue the warrantless wiretapping without FISA oversight, and to give telecom companies legal immunity for helping in this Constitutional violation. It seems that as soon as he landed the nomination, all pretense of being "different" was gone. "Change we can believe in" my ass.

He preyed on peoples' desire to believe that things could be different and better; it doesn't get any lower than that. This is going to have wide-ranging implications for our democratic system, too--a lot of young people rallied behind Obama as the first real candidate they could believe in; now that he's turned out to be just another politician, many of them will be a lot less likely to participate in the political process in the future. If someone actually comes along who REALLY DOES represent change, the fact that this shyster sold us a line of bullshit is going to make it harder for him to make his case. In case you can't tell, I'm monumentally angry about this--he fooled me, and if that costs the Democrats this election, that's something I won't easily forgive.

He's also alienating his base. I was 100% behind him during the primaries--I donated money to the campaign, talked other people into supporting him, and generally held him up as a candidate who really might have a shot at fixing our broken system. I'm not sure if he realizes this, but the grassroots (mostly online) far-left progressives are the ones who really created his momentum in the first place. At the outset of the race, Hillary was the presumptive nominee--both from the party's perspective, and from the mass media's. Obama's message of hope and change resonated with those of us who are sick to death of the status quo, of the backstabbing "compromises" made in the name of getting votes and getting power, and of the general "play the game" sentiment that most politicians have. Obama presented himself as a fresh, young, idealistic and--most of all--truly progressive candidate who would remain above the sordid "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" world of Washington politics, and for a time it really seemed like he was. As soon as he became the presumptive nominee, though, all that vanished--he shifted radically toward the center, and started to pander to various groups just in the name of getting votes. His chance to win this election for the Democrats rested squarely on his image of REAL change in the White House--not just a switch from Right-Center to Left-Center, but a fresh vision; he represented a message of hope that not every election had to be a psuedo-choice between the puppet on the right and the puppet on the left. He's now working steadily to destroy that image, and whether it's because he never was the candidate he purported to be or because he's getting (and following) some very bad advice about "what he needs to do to win," turning into just another politician might well lose this for the Democrats, which is something we cannot afford.

So much for hope. Damn you, Barack Obama.

Implicit Biological Naturalism

2008-07-09T15:40:00.001-07:00

My view on the mind-body problem--a species of John Searle's Biological Naturalism--goes something like this. Brains cause minds--that is, if you knew everything about the physical structure of my brain, you could see how I couldn't but be in the mental state that I'm in--but minds are not eliminatively reducible to brain states. When I say "I believe George Bush is President," I'm saying something literally true, and I'm not just making a disguised (or confused) reference to my neuronal states. Similarly, when I (truly) say "I am in pain," I'm making a statement about a phenomenal sensation that is most certainly not true of my neurons yet most certainly is true of the system as a whole; the behavior of my neurons is the causal force directly behind my experience of pain, but that experience is not itself reducible to the neurons themselves. Consciousness, in short, is an emergent property of physical objects; it is something that the brain does in just the same way that digestion is something that the stomach does, and while we can say that my neuronal structure is causally sufficient for consciousness, it is not itself conscious.

That's a fairly brief characterization, and I'm working on cleaning it up a bit; there are problems with Searle's original formulation--mostly due to confused terminology and an unwillingness to accept certain things (like emergentism)--but I think he's basically got the right idea. Still, this isn't a position that's widely accepted in the philosophical community--most people still cling to one form of Functionalism or another.

There is, however, mounting evidence that Biological Naturalism (or something very like it) is starting to catch on in the scientific community. Today's issue of Nature contains a fascinating article about the difficulty of linking specific genotypes--that is, specific genes or specific kinds of damage to specific genes--to individual mental orders (e.g. schizophrenia or autism). The authors suggest that this might be because many psychiatric disorders might be cluster phenomena--in other words, constellations of related disorders that have radically different causes but share similar effects. A gene that sometimes seems to increase the risk factor for schizophrenia might be subtly altering some aspect of brain structure, and this alteration might in turn predispose one toward a certain behavior that might, in combination with another genetic accident, lead to psychosis; the system, in short, must be considered holistically in order to say anything meaningful about higher level features (such as thought disorders).

Vaughn over at Mind Hacks puts the issue even more explicitly in biological naturalist terms:

Genetics is a complex business, but psychiatric genetics even more so, because it attempts to find links between two completely different levels of description.

Genes are defined on the neurobiological level, while psychiatric diagnoses are defined on the phenomenological level - in other words, verbal descriptions of behaviour, or verbal descriptions of what it is like to have certain mental states.

There is no guarantee, and in many people's opinion, probably no likelihood, that these 'what it is like' descriptions actually clearly demarcate distinct processes at the biological level.

I couldn't have said it better myself. Mental illness, like conscious states in general, seems to me to me to be an emergent phenomenon: it can't be reduced to any one gene, neuronal process, or even type of brain activity, because the same phenomenal state can, given variations in the environment (in my broad sense, 'environment' includes neurobiological facts about the subject), be produced by very different physical phenomena. That's precisely why I think intentional (in the technical sense) language can't be eliminated from our "mental" vocabulary--statements about beliefs, desires, hopes, thoughts, and ideas are not reducible to statements about neurobiology, neither in a token/token sense nor in a type/type sense.

Link.

Contact Juggling

2008-07-08T18:50:00.000-07:00

Contrary to popular belief (including mine, sometimes), I do have hobbies other than philosophy. One of them is contact juggling; if you're like me before I started doing it, though, you have no idea what that is, so here's a short routine I put together showing off a few simple isolations I've been working on lately. I think it looks pretty cool, but I'm always rather impressed with myself, so that might not be saying much.

Experimental Philosophy

2008-07-05T21:03:00.001-07:00

I know you all want to help out with the world of experimental philosophy, so head on over and take an anonymous survey designed to probe your moral intuitions and beliefs. Unlike most studies of its type, this one is specifically recruiting philosophers and people with a background in moral psychology, so anyone should be able to participate. Enjoy!

Brain Scratchingly Awesome

2008-07-05T15:37:00.000-07:00

The New Yorker recently ran an installment of its "Annals of Medicine" series describing the neuroscience and philosophy behind the itch sensation. The first half of the article (roughly) deals with how the itch sensation is generated, using a case study of a woman they call "M." as an example. M., apparently, suffered from shingles as a result of an active HIV infection, and after they subsided, began experiencing a persistent and maddening itch in the scalp. One passage is particularly grisly, so (of course) I'm including it here. Snip:

For M., certainly, it did: the itching was so torturous, and the area so numb, that her scratching began to go through the skin. At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab. M. tried bandaging her head, wearing caps to bed. But her fingernails would always find a way to her flesh, especially while she slept.
One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.

The second half of the article discusses the philosophical implications of M.'s case (and of itching in general), discussing naive realism, Berkeley's idealism, active perception, and phantom limb cases. It's well written (as one might expect in the New Yorker), and very, very interesting.

EDIT: Some of you might be wondering, as I was, how it is possible to scratch through one's own skull over the course of a single night. It turns out that, because of her HIV, M.'s wound became infected, and that turned into osteomyelitis, which softened the bone to the point that this was possible. The more you know.

An Inventory of My Recent Life

2008-07-05T15:32:00.000-07:00

At last, things begin to settle down and I find that I have a chance to blog again. Some of you may know that I'm about to start grad school, and that said grad school is on the opposite side of the USA from where I had been located. For the last three weeks or so, I've been packing, saying goodbye to friends and family, and generally getting ready to depart the West Coast on a more-or-less permanent basis. I'm now at the halfway point of my journey--Lancaster, PA--where I'm teaching Philosophy of Mind for CTY again. I'll be here for another five weeks or so, and then I'll be continuing on to New York City and starting at Columbia.

Anywho, I hope that explains the recent absence; I've been psychotically busy, and haven't even had a chance to read (much less write) blog posts, but that should be changing now. I am (for the moment at least) settled and stable, so look for more posts to be forthcoming!

Boom de ya da - A Naturalist Anthem

2008-06-11T22:33:00.001-07:00

A few months ago, The Discovery Channel ran this commercial on TV. I loved it then, and I love it now; it perfectly illustrates why I just don't understand the common theistic claim that "naturalism takes the wonder out of the world." Reality is just awesome.

Interdisciplinary Woes

2008-05-28T19:59:00.000-07:00

I'm a pretty interdisciplinary person. I've always been the type who would rather know a little bit about a lot of topics than a lot about a few topics--jack of all trades and master of none, if you will. Obviously I've had to focus somewhat as I've gotten more involved in academia, but philosophy is still an incredibly interdisciplinary field of study. It always has been--'philosophers,' traditionally, have played the roles of scientist, literary critic, playwright, mathematician, and a whole host of others--and though recently (i.e. within the last 200 or so years) our province has shrunk a bit, philosophers still commonly call on knowledge from several different areas of academia in the course of their work. This is particularly true in philosophy of mind, I think, which is increasingly overlapping with cognitive neuroscience, a rather new interdisciplinary program at many universities. Still, even if you're working in Medieval philosophy, the ability to synthesize across disciplines is vital. There are, however, some pretty troubling issues in various interdisciplinary programs, as an email I got today from a friend of mine pointed out.

When I was at Berkeley, I double-majored in philosophy and Peace & Conflict Studies (PACS). I've always been pretty interested in human rights, social justice, nonviolence, and similar issues, and this relatively unique program at Berkeley seemed to be a perfect fit when I enrolled as a Freshman. I quickly discovered, though, that the department was fraught with problems--the most severe of which, I think, was a general resistance to critical examinations of foundational assumptions (e.g. that violence is wrong), and an almost religious fervor in defending those assumptions. I'm not saying that everyone in the program was like this--I met some really great people in the PACS program, and was greatly impressed with at least some of the professors--but it was enough of a problem that I noticed, and apparently I'm not alone. I got an email today from a friend in the program saying that one of the more popular courses ended in "crying and a shouting match," as two contingents of the course (one of whom apparently thought that the professor was acting as a western apologist) clashed over how the material was being presented.

I definitely have my suspicions as to whom this altercation involved--I suspect it was the same group I repeatedly clashed with while I was there--but that's not really my point here. I think these kinds of clashes are going to become increasingly common in interdisciplinary programs like PACS, and I think that they're necessary growing pains that departments like this are going to have to go through before they'll be taken seriously by other academics.

The last twenty years or so have seen the emergence of a plethora of "new" academic programs, most of which end in the word 'studies.' Peace & Conflict Studies, Gender Studies, and African-American Studies (to name a few), have all arisen and/or started to become more popular in the last two or three decades. In the beginning, programs of this sort were occupied primarily by "true believers"--that is, people who had a strong (and often orthodox) view on the discipline--and were often pretty homogeneous as a result. PACS-style programs, for instance, have been traditionally attended by far-left leaning individuals interested primarily in activism and working for social justice.

This homogeneity, I think, is one of the reasons that other academics have a hard time taking (for example) PACS seriously. I was talking to John Searle once during his office hours, and mentioned offhand that I was double-majoring in PACS along with philosophy; he was agast. I can't remember his exact words, but they were something like "I always thought majors ending in the word 'studies' did anything but that." He was willing to listen to what I had to say, and I think he accepted some of the points I made about the legitimacy of studying war and violence specifically, but that kind of perception is very wide-spread in academia--as I said, I think that the traditional homogeneity of these disciplines is at least partially to blame. Academia is based, at least in large part, self-criticism and peer review--physics, philosophy, and other "traditionally" academic disciplines have advanced primarily through reasoned criticism from within: the fact that astrophysics has come as far as it has is directly related to the fact that not everyone accepted the belief that the Sun revolved around the Earth as dogma. Similarly, the fact that philosophers, on the whole, no longer accept Logical Behaviorism is related to the sustained and reasoned criticism of the doctrine that other philosophers made throughout the 60s and 70s. In short, a diversity of opinions within a single department is a good thing.

A lot of academics, I think, see the traditional insularity of departments like PACS and think to themselves "They all think more or less the same thing, so why should I listen to them;" philosophers in particular tend to eschew dogmatism. Because of this, I think we should welcome the current trend of breaking up the monotony of "-studies" programs. Even in my four years in PACS at Berkeley, I saw a truly enormous influx of students to the major, which naturally meant a huge influx of opinions. A lot of the people in my classes disliked me because I was unwilling to take assumptions as unquestioned axioms, but toward the end there was a small (but growing) minority of people who shared my desire to make the PACS major a bit more rigorous.

As this trend continues--and as "true believers" are replaced by people who are interested in but critical of the subject--I think we can expect majors like "Peace Studies" to begin to gain respectability, but not without growing pains. The incident my friend alluded to in his email is a manifestation of these growing pains, it seems to me--people who are in the program only to hear their own opinions repeated back to them are naturally going to resent those who seek to bring serious discourse into the classroom; dogmatic people don't like to question their dogma. Still, though, I think in the end the rewards will be worth it: interdisciplinary departments will, at last, begin to have the same recognition and respect shown to them that philosophy, English, biology, and physics do. All we need to do is keep arguing with ourselves.

Quicklink: More Evidence That Everything is Connected

2008-05-16T22:54:00.000-07:00

A recent study apparently demonstrates that the perceived flavor of a glass of wine can be significantly impacted by ambient music playing while drinking. Snip:

Four types of music were played - Carmina Burana by Orff ("powerful and heavy"), Waltz of the Flowers from The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky ("subtle and refined"), Just Can't Get Enough by Nouvelle Vague ("zingy and refreshing") and Slow Breakdown by Michael Brook ("mellow and soft")

The white wine was rated 40% more zingy and refreshing when that music was played, but only 26% more mellow and soft when music in that category was heard.

The red was altered 25% by mellow and fresh music, yet 60% by powerful and heavy music.

The results were put down to "cognitive priming theory", where the music sets up the brain to respond to the wine in a certain way.

Priming, the phenomenon whereby antecedent mental states affect perception, recall, or other cognitive functions, could indeed be responsible for this effect. Still, I think there's a deeper message here: namely, that we need to stop considering brain functions in isolation from one another and start looking at the big picture; let's get holistic!

On Pain

2008-05-01T18:57:00.000-07:00

I got into a discussion on SoapBoxxer this morning about whether or not one can have rape fantasies. I've actually gotten a lot of flack on this subject before, as I got into a similar argument during my Philosophy of Social Science course at Berkeley--I was (in both instances) one of the few who argued that you can't desire to be raped. For some reason, this seems to be kind of a hot button topic--I suppose that's rape for you, though.

In any case, the discussion on SB this morning got me thinking about something that (I think) is a bit more philosophically interesting--whether or not anyone can truly be said to "enjoy pain." My initial position was similar to that on "desiring rape"--that is, that it's a contradiction in terms. 'Pain,' it seems to me, refers to an unpleasant sensation; if someone is enjoying a particular sensation, that seems to necessarily imply that what he is experiencing is not pain, but something else. I've discussed this with a few people throughout the day today, and my System Idle Process has been working on it as well; a few people have given me some pretty compelling arguments that I think need to be addressed--I haven't changed my position, but I have added some more nuance.

The first, and perhaps most obvious, counterexample to the claim "no one can enjoy pain" is the masochist case. Some people (I haven't been able to find a reliable estimate as to how many; if anyone knows, please comment!) claim to "enjoy" pain in the context of sexual activity. The medical term for this is algolagnia. This can take a variety of forms and occur in a variety of severities ranging from liking spankings to being unable to get sexually aroused without a bed of nails to lie on. People who suffer (no pun intended) from this condition claim to legitimately "enjoy" the painful sensations in the context of sexuality. It seems to me that there's something deeply incorrect about that claim, but in order to see what it is, we need to define pain a bit more clearly, I think.

There's a temptation, I think, to define pain causally--e.g. "pain is the sort of sensation that happens when you hit your thumb with a hammer"--a temptation that needs to be resisted, it seems, if we're going to give a coherent account of what pain is. We know that different neurobiological structures can cause individuals to qualitatively experience the same stimulus differently: differences in the structure of the eyes and/or brain can cause one individual to have the same sensation when presented with grass and when presented with a ripe tomato, and I learned today that my own mother is unable to qualitatively tell the difference between sweet and sour tastes. Pain, it seems, works much the same way--differences in neurological structure can cause an individual to develop algolagnia and begin to "enjoy" stimuli that he previously regarded as painful. A causal definition, then, won't work--we can't name any one stimulus that will reliably produce any single sensation in all individuals.

Similarly, we can't define pain behaviorally (i.e. in terms of what actions or dispositions to action it is likely to elicit), for reasons best outlined in Hilary Putnam's discussion of "super-Spartans" in his article "Brains and Behavior." Briefly, the argument goes something like this. Let's suppose that pain is defined behaviorally--that is, a sensation counts as a pain if and only if it disposes the person experiencing it to say ouch, wince, try to get away, etc. Now, let's imagine a community of people who value stoicism above all else; they consider it a terrible display of character weakness to give any sign that one is in pain, even if one is in excruciating agony. Let's call them "super-Spartans." They've disciplined themselves to the point that, though they still experience pain normally, they no longer have even the impulse to act in any of the ways that we would generally consider "pain-behavior" when they feel pain, no matter how great it is. If you were to ask a super-Spartan how it feels to (say) have his arm chopped off with a rusty axe, he would readily admit that it feels absolutely awful, and that the pain is tremendous; however, he would do so with the same nonchalance that he would show when discussing the weather or the price of tomatoes. Behaviorism, it seems, would make this sort of society impossible, but we can clearly conceive of it as a real possibility; behaviorism thus seems to be false. This is a rather quick treatment of a very nuanced issue, so I encourage you to read Putnam's original article.

What's left, then? One obvious choice, I think, is to define pain both qualitatively and indexically (i.e. in the same way that words like 'mine' or 'above' are defined)--in other words, to define it in an observer relative and epistemically subjective way. On this sort of definition, what counts as causing pain (as well as how one behaves when subjected to pain) will vary from person to person (that's the indexical part), but the essential character of the experience remains unchanged. In short, while experience x might be painful to you and not me (and vice-versa with experience y), both experiences share a common (and unpleasant) qualitative character; it is that common qualitative character that we're really referring to when we say 'pain.'

So what does this mean for people who claim to enjoy pain? Why is it the case that my muscle pain after a satisfying workout has an element of pleasure, whereas the same muscle pain, unprecipitated by exercise, would be experienced as significantly more painful? Why can some people claim to enjoy being whipped during sex, while others find the thought horrifying? My view here is akin to my view on color perception--that is, the environment (broadly construed) counts for a lot more in determining the character of an experience than we give it credit for. Apropos, then, a color analogy:

Suppose you cannot stand the color blue, and that your favorite color is green. If I were to ask you "What is your favorite color?" you certainly wouldn't respond with "Well, I really hate blue unless you mix it with yellow, and then I really enjoy it; my favorite color, then, is blue when mixed with yellow." Instead, you'd say "My favorite color is green." When the pigments for blue and yellow (each of which causes a specific qualitative experience in you) are combined, the result is an entirely new substance, which causes an entirely new qualitative experience--that of green. I think something similar is going on in the case of "enjoyed pain."

Obviously the analogy is not perfect--instead of mixing pigments that react with the environment to produce particular sensations in various individuals, we're directly mixing sensations (e.g. pain and sexual arousal). Still, I think the analogy makes an important point: two different things can be less than enjoyable separately, but can be combined to produce a third product that is itself more enjoyable. While it's true that both the pain and the sexual pleasure may be present still in themselves, it seems likely to me that--given the fact that for many people pain is enjoyed only in certain contexts--they combine to produce a third "metaqualia"--or second order qualia--that is itself enjoyable.

So can pain be enjoyable? The simple answer is 'no,' but the complex answer is a bit longer: in certain environments ('environments,' again, construed broadly so as to include facts about individual neurobiology), pain can contribute to pleasurable sensations, but pain itself is still not pleasurable.

Quicklink: Philosophy Students Increasing in Number

2008-04-25T02:15:00.000-07:00

Recently, the New York Times ran an article discussing the increasing number of undergraduates who are choosing to major in philosophy. It's always nice when the discipline gets some positive publicity--the article speaks highly of the worth of a major in philosophy--so I thought I would share it.

Best paragraph in the article:

Jenna Schaal-O’Connor, a 20-year-old sophomore who is majoring in cognitive science and linguistics, said philosophy had other perks. She said she found many male philosophy majors interesting and sensitive.
“That whole deep existential torment,” she said. “It’s good for getting girlfriends.”

Link.

SoapBoxxes, Quantum Plants, and Free Will

2008-04-21T21:44:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody! It's been a while since I last posted here, so before I get to the meat of this post, I'd like to explain myself. About two weeks ago, I discovered SoapBoxxer, an Internet forum (ish thing), and it immediately proceeded to swallow my life whole and digest it in a warm broth of argumentative goodness. The basic premise of the site is that anyone can create an "Opinion," which consists of a binary statement (i.e. something with a Yes/No or Agree/Disagree answer), and other people vote on it. After you vote, you can comment on, argue about, or discuss the original topic and/or other comments on it. The site is new, relatively small, and full of pretty intelligent people. If you enjoy Internet argument even one fifth as much as I do, I'd recommend joining up right away. I am (of course) RealityApologist over there.

I was convinced that something good would come of my newfound addiction, and yesterday something did. Someone from SoapBoxxer pointed me toward this study about the newly discovered relationship between photosynthesis and quantum mechanics. It seems that researchers at Berkeley (yay!) have discovered a possible reason for plants' uncannily efficient use of sunlight (they're able to convert upwards of 90% of absorbed light into energy, whereas most solar panels haven't even come close to 50% efficiency yet). For a long time, how exactly they managed this was a mystery, but it seems like we've got a possible explanation now.

"We have obtained the first direct evidence that remarkably long-lived wavelike electronic quantum coherence plays an important part in energy transfer processes during photosynthesis,” said Graham Fleming, the principal investigator for the study. “This wavelike characteristic can explain the extreme efficiency of the energy transfer because it enables the system to simultaneously sample all the potential energy pathways and choose the most efficient one."

I can't stress enough how cool this is. Apparently the pigment molecules that are responsible for making the initial conversion of light energy to usable energy have a unique (so far--more on that in a bit) ability to momentarily "pause" the energy in a superposition and simultaneously explore all the possible ways the energy can be utilized. When it finds the most efficient way to utilize it, the wave function collapses into that state, and the energy gets passed on. The researchers on the project are careful to stress

For this reason, the transfer of electronic coherence between excitons during relaxation has usually been ignored. By demonstrating that the energy transfer process does involve electronic coherence and that this coherence is much stronger than we would ever have expected, we have shown that the process can be much more efficient than the classical view could explain. However, we still don’t know to what degree photosynthesis benefits from these quantum effects.

Obviously, I'm not a physicist (though reading about this stuff makes Columbia's MA in the Philosophical Foundations of Physics look mighty tempting), but it seems pretty clear that this adaptation is at least partially responsible for the very high efficiency of photosynthetic plants. Now, I'd like to take this idea a step further. What follows is PURE speculation on my part--I know there is at least one physicist in the audience, so PLEASE correct me if anything I say makes no sense.

I've discussed free will at some length on this blog, but I've spent very little time on Libertarianism (basically the view that we have free will in the traditional, robust, alternative possibilities sense). I've been dismissive of it as a viable philosophical position mostly because I haven't been able to see any scientifically plausible way that it could be true--most people who argue for it these days do so through an appeal to quantum mechanics, but are unable to describe how the brain might inherit the indeterminacy inherent in QM without also inheriting the randomness. This is a problem, of course, because random actions are no freer than determined ones--in order for us to really be "free" in a Libertarian sense, we have to be able to choose from multiple different paths without that choice being a random one.

Now the speculation: if chlorophyll can do this, why not the brain? If these researchers are correct, plants have evolved a mechanism to explore multiple quantum states at the same time before collapsing into the most beneficial one--what if our brains are doing something similar? Obviously, the mechanism would need to be far more complex than that involved in photosynthesis (making a rational choice doesn't seem to be just a matter of collapsing into the lowest energy state), but still: this research seems to lay some exciting groundwork for further exploration of the biological utilization of quantum mechanics. If our brains were somehow able to do something similar to this, it could potentially allow for quantum indeterminacy without quantum randomness--all possible quantum states would be open to us (indeterminacy), but which state we "collapsed" into would be dictated by something other than chance (not randomness). I'm very excited to see where this goes.

Charlton Heston

2008-04-09T01:12:00.001-07:00

So Charlton Heston's dead. I'm sure someone else has already suggested this, but can we give his corpse a gun just for the fun of prying it from his cold dead hands?

Sorry--I couldn't resist.

Dogmatism Bites Man

2008-04-08T20:25:00.000-07:00

Dogmatism in any form is dangerous. I think religion--as well as supernaturalism in general--is dangerous (in that it promotes false beliefs, etc.), but I would never argue that we shouldn't talk about religion or supernaturalism. As someone concerned primarily with truth, I don't think that suppressing the expression of any idea--no matter how absurd it might seem--is a good thing to do. That's why the recent exchange between secular activist Rob Sherman and Illinois State Representative Monique Davis (D-Chicago) is so appalling to me.

Rob Sherman is (apparently) rather well known in Illinois as the man who singlehandedly (well, pretty much) put a stop to the mandatory moment of ~~prayer~~ silence nonsense that the State Legislature tried to push on public schools last year. Well, he's back and rightfully pissed off once again. This time, he was testifying before the House State Government Administration Committee against Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich's attempt to give a $1 million grant to Pilgrim Baptist Church (for "reconstruction of the historical landmark"). Unwilling to let things like Constitutionality and good sense get in the way of her beliefs, Rep. Davis had the following exchange with Mr. Sherman (emphasis mine):

Davis: I don’t know what you have against God, but some of us don’t have much against him. We look forward to him and his blessings. And it’s really a tragedy -- it’s tragic -- when a person who is engaged in anything related to God, they want to fight. They want to fight prayer in school.
I don’t see you (Sherman) fighting guns in school. You know?
I’m trying to understand the philosophy that you want to spread in the state of Illinois. This is the Land of Lincoln. This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God, where people believe in protecting their children.… What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous, it’s dangerous--
Sherman: What’s dangerous, ma’am?
Davis: It’s dangerous to the progression of this state. And it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! Now you will go to court to fight kids to have the opportunity to be quiet for a minute. But damn if you’ll go to [court] to fight for them to keep guns out of their hands. I am fed up! Get out of that seat!
Sherman: Thank you for sharing your perspective with me, and I’m sure that if this matter does go to court---
Davis: You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.

And this from a Democrat! Some people (though not many) have called for Rep. Davis to publicly apologize, but I'm with Alonzo Fyfe in thinking that this isn't really enough; she needs to resign. She obviously has no regard for the separation of church and state--a fundamental part of our democracy--and, perhaps more fundamentally, she seems to hold the idea that those who disagree with her are dangerous and that their opinions need to be silenced. I'm all for disagreement, and I even suppose I might be OK with politicians saying things like "All atheists are immoral;" let the electorate see how ignorant they are, and they may not get reelected. It is, however, too much to tolerate when politicians begin to use their positions to bully people into silence.

The statement "it's dangerous for our children to even know your philosophy exists" shows not only a deep seated penchant for superstition, but also a pathological fear of putting the issue up for public debate--a fear that is fundamentally antithetical to her position as a democratic representative. If Ms. Davis believes her position to be the correct one, what could possibly be dangerous about giving kids all the facts?

Have you heard about this story before? I doubt it--though it happened over a week ago, it is only now being picked up (and pretty much only by blogs). Suppose, just for a moment, that the roles had been reversed here: suppose that it had been an atheist Representative browbeating and berating a Christian citizen in a public hearing. Do you think you would have heard about that? Is there something wrong with this picture?

The Sokal Affair

2008-04-01T20:57:00.000-07:00

In honor of the holiday today, I want to talk a bit about my favorite academic hoax of all time: the Sokal Affair. In 1996, Professor Alan Sokal (a professor of physics at NYU) submitted an article titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" to the prominent postmodernist/literary criticism journal Social Text. His goal was to see if a well respected (at least within its own field) academic journal would publish an article whose point was total nonsense simply because it used pretty rhetoric and supported the ideological stance of the editorial board. "Transgressing the Boundaries" is delightfully absurd, containing such gems as:

It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical "reality'', no less than social "reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific "knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.

and

Thirdly, the postmodern sciences overthrow the static ontological categories and hierarchies characteristic of modernist science. In place of atomism and reductionism, the new sciences stress the dynamic web of relationships between the whole and the part; in place of fixed individual essences (e.g. Newtonian particles), they conceptualize interactions and flows (e.g. quantum fields). Intriguingly, these homologous features arise in numerous seemingly disparate areas of science, from quantum gravity to chaos theory to the biophysics of self-organizing systems. In this way, the postmodern sciences appear to be converging on a new epistemological paradigm, one that may be termed an ecological perspective, broadly understood as "recogniz[ing] the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the embeddedness of individuals and societies in the cyclical patterns of nature.'

and

Just as liberal feminists are frequently content with a minimal agenda of legal and social equality for women and 'pro-choice', so liberal (and even some socialist) mathematicians are often content to work within the hegemonic Zermelo-Fraenkel framework (which, reflecting its nineteenth-century liberal origins, already incorporates the axiom of equality) supplemented only by the axiom of choice.

In short, he argued that quantum mechanics have broadly progressive political implications, implications which favor radical feminism and and end to the "caste system in the sciences."

Of course one does not need to be a physicist to recognize that virtually everything in the paper (exemplified by my quotations above) is pure nonsense--Sokal himself thought it so obviously absurd that he was amazed when it was accepted for publication in Social Text's "Science Wars" issue; the idea that quantum mechanics is in some way "a progressive feminist science," for instance, is so bizarre as to boarder on total gibberish. In fact, Sokal even contacted the editorial board of Social Text repeatedly and asked them to read his article carefully and offer any suggestions for improvement or clarification (he said that he was, after all, a scientist writing in a humanities journal, and thus needed all the help he could get). The editors offered no suggestions and no criticism.

On the day the article was to be published, Sokal published another paper, this one in Lingua Franca detailing his hoax and discussing why he perpetrated it. Snip from that article:

The fundamental silliness of my article lies, however, not in its numerous solecisms but in the dubiousness of its central thesis and of the ``reasoning'' adduced to support it. Basically, I claim that quantum gravity -- the still-speculative theory of space and time on scales of a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter -- has profound political implications (which, of course, are ``progressive''). In support of this improbable proposition, I proceed as follows: First, I quote some controversial philosophical pronouncements of Heisenberg and Bohr, and assert (without argument) that quantum physics is profoundly consonant with ``postmodernist epistemology.'' Next, I assemble a pastiche -- Derrida and general relativity, Lacan and topology, Irigaray and quantum gravity -- held together by vague rhetoric about ``nonlinearity'', ``flux'' and ``interconnectedness.'' Finally, I jump (again without argument) to the assertion that ``postmodern science'' has abolished the concept of objective reality. Nowhere in all of this is there anything resembling a logical sequence of thought; one finds only citations of authority, plays on words, strained analogies, and bald assertions.

Why did I do it? While my method was satirical, my motivation is utterly serious. What concerns me is the proliferation, not just of nonsense and sloppy thinking per se, but of a particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective realities, or (when challenged) admits their existence but downplays their practical relevance. At its best, a journal like Social Text raises important questions that no scientist should ignore -- questions, for example, about how corporate and government funding influence scientific work. Unfortunately, epistemic relativism does little to further the discussion of these matters.
In short, my concern over the spread of subjectivist thinking is both intellectual and political. Intellectually, the problem with such doctrines is that they are false (when not simply meaningless). There is a real world; its properties are not merely social constructions; facts and evidence do matter. What sane person would contend otherwise? And yet, much contemporary academic theorizing consists precisely of attempts to blur these obvious truths -- the utter absurdity of it all being concealed through obscure and pretentious language.

Regular readers will know that I have an ongoing Cold War with proponents of postmodernism and poststructuralism for more or less the same reasons Sokal outlines above: I think that there is a dangerous lack of critical academic standards within the field as a whole and that, as a result, it is far too easy to pass off utter nonsense as serious "philosophy" simply by draping that nonsense in literary allusion and obfuscating rhetoric; because of this, it warms my heart to see an actual academic catch these jokers with their pants down (even if said pantsing happened 10 years ago).

Predictably, there was some backlash to the so-called "Sokal Affair." The editorial board of Social Text complained that their publication (which was not peer-reviewed at the time) was based on a relationship of trust between editors and authors--a relationship which Sokal violated when he submitted an intentionally spurious article. Sokal contended (and rightfully so, I think) that this was precisely his point: the whole business of getting at the truth about reality isn't something that should be based on trust, but rather on careful consideration of the facts. He pointed out that:

My article is a theoretical essay based entirely on publicly available sources, all of which I have meticulously footnoted. All works cited are real, and all quotations are rigorously accurate; none are invented. Now, it's true that the author doesn't believe his own argument. But why should that matter? The editors' duty as scholars is to judge the validity and interest of ideas, without regard for their provenance. (That is why many scholarly journals practice blind refereeing.) If the Social Text editors find my arguments convincing, then why should they be disconcerted simply because I don't? Or are they more deferent to the so-called ``cultural authority of technoscience'' than they would care to admit?
In the end, I resorted to parody for a simple pragmatic reason. The targets of my critique have by now become a self-perpetuating academic subculture that typically ignores (or disdains) reasoned criticism from the outside. In such a situation, a more direct demonstration of the subculture's intellectual standards was required. But how can one show that the emperor has no clothes? Satire is by far the best weapon; and the blow that can't be brushed off is the one that's self-inflicted. I offered the Social Text editors an opportunity to demonstrate their intellectual rigor. Did they meet the test? I don't think so.
I say this not in glee but in sadness. After all, I'm a leftist too (under the Sandinista government I taught mathematics at the National University of Nicaragua). On nearly all practical political issues -- including many concerning science and technology -- I'm on the same side as the Social Text editors. But I'm a leftist (and feminist) because of evidence and logic, not in spite of it. Why should the right wing be allowed to monopolize the intellectual high ground?
And why should self-indulgent nonsense -- whatever its professed political orientation -- be lauded as the height of scholarly achievement?

So, in honor of April Fool's Day, thank you Alan Sokal for using a prank to make the world a slightly more rational place.

Quicklink: US Army Using 'Spirtual Healing' To Combat PTSD

2008-03-26T22:43:00.000-07:00

Today's Quicklink comes from the Wired blog. Noah Schactman reports that:

The Army just unveiled a $4 million program to investigate everything from "spiritual ministry, transcendental meditation, [and] yoga" to "bioenergies such as Qi gong, Reiki, [and] distant healing" to mend the psyches of wounded troops.

Sure, we could try Reiki and acupuncture or we could, you know, not send people to kill other people for no good reason. I bet that's pretty reliable in reducing incidence of PTSD.

Quicklink: How is a Brain Not Like a Computer?

2008-03-25T18:06:00.000-07:00

I'm going to try to start posting at least one "quicklink" every day--something cool (and relevant) that I found on the internet with a minimum of commentary. Today's comes from Developing Intelligence, and covers some reasons why the brain is really not very much like today's digital computers; this topic is important, as there are a lot of people out there who actually think that we're right on the brink of using computers to create beings with minds like ours. Snip:

It's easy to think that neurons are essentially binary, given that they fire an action potential if they reach a certain threshold, and otherwise do not fire. This superficial similarity to digital "1's and 0's" belies a wide variety of continuous and non-linear processes that directly influence neuronal processing.

For example, one of the primary mechanisms of information transmission appears to be the rate at which neurons fire - an essentially continuous variable. Similarly, networks of neurons can fire in relative synchrony or in relative disarray; this coherence affects the strength of the signals received by downstream neurons. Finally, inside each and every neuron is a leaky integrator circuit, composed of a variety of ion channels and continuously fluctuating membrane potentials.

The Great Tanta Challenge

2008-03-25T17:38:00.000-07:00

Things like this make me smile a big happy smile of naturalistic joy. Earlier this month Sanal Edamaruku, president of Rationalist International challenged India's most prominent practitioner of Tantrik--a prominent superstition in India--to put his magic where his mouth is. Pandit Surinder Sharma, who claims to give magical advice and aid to top Indian politicians, claimed on national television that he could kill any man "in under three minutes" with his black magic. Sanal, also present on the program, invited him to give it a try. After nearly two hours of chanting and ritual (including pressing on Sanal's temples, sprinkling him with water, and waving a knife at him), the show's producers declared the attempt a failure, prompting the following:

The tantrik, unwilling to admit defeat, tried the excuse that a very strong god whom Sanal might be worshipping obviously protected him. “No, I am an atheist,” said Sanal Edamaruku. Finally, the disgraced tantrik tried to save his face by claiming that there was a never-failing special black magic for ultimate destruction, which could, however, only been done at night. Bad luck again, he did not get away with this, but was challenged to prove his claim this very night in another “breaking news” live program.

Anyone want to guess how the super-double-secret magic ritual went? From the Rationalist International website:

Now the tantrik wrote Sanal’s name on a sheet of paper, tore it into small pieces, dipped them into a pot with boiling butter oil and threw them dramatically into the flames. Nothing happened. Singing and singing, he sprinkled water on Sanal, mopped a bunch of peacock feathers over his head, threw mustard seed into the fire and other outlandish things more. Sanal smiled, nothing happened, and time was running out. Only seven more minutes before midnight, the tantrik decided to use his ultimate weapon: the clod of wheat flour dough. He kneaded it and powdered it with mysterious ingredients, then asked Sanal to touch it. Sanal did so, and the grand magic finale begun. The tantrik pierced blunt nails on the dough, then cut it wildly with a knife and threw them into the fire. That moment, Sanal should have broken down. But he did not. He laughed. Forty more seconds, counted the anchor, twenty, ten, five… it’s over!

Pure, unadulterated awesome. Millions of people watched this happen live on India TV, and we can only hope that, for some at least, the spell of supernaturalism and religion was broken (or at least weakened) when the "most powerful wizard" in India failed to so much as give his compliant target a headache. It is these sorts of consciousness raising events that, ever so gradually, push the world toward a new age of reason.

Philosophy, Teaching, and the Hoi Polloi

2008-03-18T20:21:00.000-07:00

Commentor Mike recently said the following in a comment (that statement seems vaguely tautalogical):

Pardon my cyncicism, but you may suffer a little from being too interested in communicating with the hoi polloi, the civilians, the canaille. Your blog is readable and interesting. You may assume that obviously all philosophers would like to be broadly be understood, but I invite you to check your experiences to see if they hypothesis that they don't has some viability. Searle is likely a brilliant exception, and I hope you find whoever the brilliant exceptions at Columbia and attach yourself to them.

It IS important to keep in mind that your life goals are NOT the same as the department's or your advisor's.

Having checked my experiences carefully, I'm pretty sure he's right: most philosophers care very little about being understood by anyone who doesn't have a PhD, and far too many philosophers (read: Continental Philosophers) don't really care if they're not understood by even that relatively small subset of the population. This is, I think, a Very Bad Thing.

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned in the past that one of the reasons that I very much admire John Searle and his work is that he really makes an effort--or at least is naturally very good at--writing with a very high degree of clarity; a relatively educated person (i.e. someone with a high school diploma and a curious mind) can pick up many of Searle's books and, though he might not understand all of it, will at least understand enough to be able to converse intelligently about its contents. By contrast, I read a lot of philosophers as an undergraduate (Saul Kripke springs to mind) who, while brilliant, are almost indecipherable to those without savant-like abilities in analytic philosophy (again, Kripke springs to mind). While I like to take snide pot-shots at Continental Philosophers (Kant, Hegel) and Postmodernists (Derrida, Foucault), this is even more of a serious criticism of them--in some cases (e.g. Derrida), it's not even clear if the author knows what the hell he's talking about.

I think a lot of this stems from / mirrors the trend in philosophical education--if you do graduate work at a top tier (top 20 or so) school, you're expected to want (and maybe even get) a job at a major research university, where you'll have a 2/2 teaching load and spend the majority of your time cranking out journal articles and books. By contrast, teaching seems to be something that is thought of as best left to the "second rate" philosophers; people who go to lower ranked institutions are expected to get hired by small liberal arts colleges, teach 4/5 or even 5/5, and spend very little time doing research. It's sort of a meritocracy-meets-division-of-labor approach. The end result of all of this, I think, is that the people with the most "academic talent," (i.e. those coming out of NYU/Princeton/Rutgers/etc.) will, by the end of their PhD, have developed the habit of writing only for other philosophers; they'll be told explicitly and implicitly that the "academic dream job" is one with little to no teaching responsibility and lots of time for research. I don't buy this model, but I do think there's room for nuance.

Philosophy is a very broad discipline, covering everything from "Does God exist?" to "How do I know other people have minds?" to "Is it ok to clone humans?" and much more. While the answers to all of these questions do impact Average Joe somehow, obviously some are going to have more relevance to every day life (questions of normative ethics are particularly relevant), and some will have less relevance (nit-picky ontology questions about the nature of color, maybe). Given this, it seems reasonable to assert that philosophers ought to be able to write at two levels: a very precise, technical, academic level that is designed to deal with very small technical issues (is consciousness an emergent or supervenient property?), and a broader, less technical, more accessible level to communicate important philosophical ideas to the general public. My major objection to the system as it stands is that there is not enough overlap here--if an author is skillful, many questions can be dealt with simultaneously on both levels. Searle is great at doing this--most of his books and articles could easily be written for the layperson, but also give careful and skillful consideration to important philosophical questions. This balance should be the rule rather than the exception, I think.

Similarly, I think universities (even, or perhaps especially, the top tier) should focus on a balance between research and teaching, ensuring that graduates from prestigious philosophy programs are capable of teaching quality philosophy classes, a task that is significantly harder than those without teaching experience tend to think it is. I can honestly say that many--if not most--of my theoretical developments have come as the result of discussing the issues while teaching (either formally or informally), and I think this is a fact that is under recognized: by being a better teacher, you will become a better researcher, as your ideas will (must) be made clearer as you explain them and are challenged by those who disagree.

Philosophy, broadly, is concerned with the same task that science is concerned with: figuring out what's true about reality. Whereas science deals with specifics and facts, philosophy deals with generalities and concepts; both are essential if we really want to get at an accurate description of the world around us, and it's important for both to be understood by the majority of people if we want to have an educated population.

Stroke of Insight

2008-03-17T22:27:00.000-07:00

In this video from this year's Ted Talks, neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor discusses the experience of having an ischemic stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain, and what it taught her about consciousness and the human condition. It's an incredibly moving video, and one of the best TED Talks I've ever seen; that says quite a lot.

It's a Crapshoot

2008-03-17T19:08:00.001-07:00

Those blessed with peripheral vision will notice that I've recently been admitted to graduate school in philosophy. Now that the application process is over and I can breathe again, I'd like to share a few of my thoughts on the experience of applying to graduate school. I'm not sure if what I have to say is necessarily relevant to those applying non-philosophy PhD programs (or even if it's relevant to them!) but, as a blogger, I'm inclined to share those thoughts anyway. I suspect that a fair percentage of my readership (if there is such a thing) is enrolled in graduate school already (that's just the kind of person this subject matter attracts), so this will be particularly irrelevant to them. Again, though, I'm going to write this post anyway; hopefully it will at least be cathartic for me--and really, what's the point of having a blog if you can't occasionally use it to vent?

First, I want to say a little bit about my particular background, as I think it's at least tangentially relevant to the topic at hand. I did my undergraduate at UC Berkeley, and graduated with a respectable (if not stellar) GPA of 3.55 (3.7 in philosophy). I double majored in philosophy and peace & conflict studies--a hand-wavy sounding major, I know, but think of it mostly as international relations with an emphasis on studying war. Most of my low grades were in lower division classes (I did poorly if I thought the class was boring) which, though not as good as having no low grades at all, is apparently preferable. I didn't work terribly hard in college, and mostly got by on good writing skills and an affinity for making clever arguments. I'm not terribly proud of this, but apparently feeling that, on the whole, the whole undergrad thing could have gone better is not uncommon for recent graduates; as one of my friends said, "When I finished college, I sort of just wanted to ask 'So....can I get a do-over on that whole thing or something?'" Again, I suspect this is a rather common sentiment--students often don't begin to really focus until near the end of college, which can hurt GPAs somewhat. I had good letters (perhaps most notably one from John Searle), and a really solid writing sample. I did well on the GRE, especially on the verbal and analytic writing sections.

My overall point here is that I was a pretty strong applicant (decent grades, good undergrad institution, good letters, good writing sample), though by no means stellar; I expected to be rejected from most schools, and admitted to a few. Because of this expectation, I applied to ten schools (shotgun method!), 8 of which were in the top 10 (as ranked by Leiter), and 9 of which were in the top 15. Assuming that NYU doesn't miraculously decide to accept me--I'm still waiting to hear from them, but I'm not holding my breath--I got accepted to exactly one of those ten: Columbia.

I'm certainly not complaining; I'm glad I got in anywhere, quite frankly--and Columbia is a great school--but the whole experience I've had with applying and whatnot has left me with the overwhelming feeling that the whole process is so damn arbitrary as to actually reflect very little on me or my abilities. For one thing, I got accepted to Columbia (ranked 10 on Leiter), and rejected from the University of Washington (ranked 38 on Leiter). I can't think of any possible explanation for this other than that student admissions/rejections are strongly tied to something much more than student merit; what that something might be I do not know. I know that graduate student admissions (especially for PhD students) are significantly more complicated than undergraduate admissions--for one thing, a university taking a PhD student is, usually, making a significant financial commitment (in the form of a grant or fellowship), rather than receiving a significant financial commitment (in the form of tuition), so an admission committee needs to be damn sure an applicant is worth the investment. Additionally, graduate students are going to be working closely with professors, so individual interests and personality come into play a lot more than when the only professor/student interaction is for 10 minutes per week during office hours. I understand all that, but my mind is stuck on that "accepted to #10 with full funding and summarily rejected from #38" thing. I don't know--it just seems strange.

All in all, I think the best phrase to describe the experience of applying to graduate school is "cluster fuck" or maybe "cluster skullfuck." Yeah, it's that bad. I thought applying to undergraduate was nerve wracking, but this was 100 times worse; the pressure is higher, the competition is tougher, the applications are more expensive and longer, and the writing samples need to be much more polished. I lost a lot of sleep, spent way too much money, and nearly had a nervous breakdown on at least two separate occasions. There are no words to describe the absolutely soul-crushing humiliation of working your ass off on applications, then getting seven generic rejection letters in a row. It's just kind of a bad scene all around, and I'm very glad it's over.

I suppose my advice for current undergraduates thinking about applying would be this: start early, and I don't just mean on the applications. Numerous sources I've read advise thinking about grad school as the start of your career, and not just "Undergraduate Redux." Though I haven't actually started attending yet, this seems like pretty sound advice, and I wish I'd encountered it earlier. By the time the end of your Sophomore year in college rolls around, you should have a pretty clear idea about what you want to do if/when you graduate--at least in a general "grad school/law school/get a job" sense. If grad school is even on the table, take it seriously from that early on. Take the idea of getting in as seriously as your business major buddy takes landing that awesome entry level job at the prestigious accounting firm, because that's exactly what you're doing: landing your entry level job. Go after those letters of recommendation--I suspect that having letters from non-philosophers hurt me significantly, even though all my writers are well respected in their fields, so go after philosophy professors with particular gusto--take the GRE early enough to retake it if you're dissatisfied, and try to shine as much as possible in your philosophy classes.

Even if you do all that, though, you'll probably still get rejected from most of the places you apply. It's a crapshoot.

Accepted at Last

2008-03-12T18:25:00.000-07:00

I've just been informed (via email) that I've been offered a "Faculty Fellowship" for five years to study at Columbia University in New York. This (apparently) means that they'll be paying my tuition, providing a living stipend, and giving me a teaching job while I study for my PhD. Columbia wasn't my first choice, but it's a great school, a great program, and I'm very excited to start.

Slow

2008-03-11T00:04:00.001-07:00

Sorry for the lack of recent posts; I'm right in the middle of hearing about grad school, and I've been too freaked out to focus on much of anything else. There'll be an update as soon as I know if/where I'm going.

Gender Neutrality and Language

2008-02-26T22:36:00.000-08:00

I'm politically liberal. I'd probably even go so far as to classify myself as very liberal--I'm a registered member of the Green Party, I give money to the ACLU, and support a whole slew of liberal social causes (e.g. gay marriage, drug policy reform, gun regulation, etc.). I do, however, consider my identity as a philosopher to supersede my identity as a liberal, so I'm careful to critically examine even the issues I support, and never blindly endorse a position just because it's the "liberal" thing to do; this often results in shock and/or outrage from friends and acquaintances when I refuse to support traditionally liberal causes that make no logical sense--affirmative action and militant feminism being two that come to mind. It's the latter that I want to talk about today.

A good friend of mine linked me (indirectly) to a story on Feministing (a feminist blog, in case you can't tell) criticizing another article published by a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. AEI is a very well known conservative think-tank specializing in policy papers decrying all sorts of progressive ideas; I'm loath to agree with an AEI fellow on anything, but this guy is correct, at least in part.

His position, basically, is that the huge feminist campaign to remove 'he' and 'him' as gender-neutral pronouns is, not to put too fine a point on it, idiotic. His reasoning is that it breaks down the elegance of the English language, making it difficult to teach students to write without sounding hopelessly awkward, which including 'one' or 'he/she' in a sentence almost invariably does. See--even that sentence was awkward. Most of his argument revolves around the historical roots of the language and, in typical conservative fashion, his desire that things stay Just The Way They Are; I don't agree with that part, but I think his point is valid nontheless. Here's why.

The crux of the feminist argument is that words like 'mankind' (which apparently conveys the idea that male is the "default" human) and 'woman' (which apparently conveys the idea that women are just afterthoughts to men) perpetuate "The Patriarchy" (which presumably is some kind of ruling cabal of giant penises ruling the world from a smoke filled bunker somewhere) by...well, somehow. They're not too clear on that, but they are clear on the fact that The Patriarchy is a very bad thing, and that it's responsible for most (if not all) of the trouble in the world. This irritates me for much the same reason that Communism irritates me--it blames incredibly complex social problems on a single issue, which is disturbingly myopic--but that's a post for another day.

Several comments on the original Femisting post point to the fact that 'werman' and 'wifman' were the original words for 'woman' and 'man,' and that the suffix -man simply meant 'human.' Eventually, as the language evolved, the prefix was dropped from one and changed on the other; nothing more insidious than that, and only a paranoid mind could think that there was some kind of male conspiracy behind it. As I said, though, I find these historical arguments more or less irrelevant, as language certainly is alive and constantly evolving; it's a symbolic means of expression, and the symbols have meanings only because we, as speakers of the language, think they do. There's nothing inherent to 'man' that means 'male,' and we can only legitimately say that it means (and only means) 'male' if most of the English speakers think it does.

Suppose I say 'The citizen approached the monarch with a deep bow.' You understand just what I mean--that is, that the supplicant bent over a the waist when approaching the monarch. There's no confusion about whether I was talking about the bending action (a bow), the weapon used to fire an arrow (a bow), or the front of a sailing ship (a bow). Why is this? Clearly, it's because English is a context-dependent language; the meaning of words is determined (in part) by the other words around them. That's why we can have so many referents represented by the symbol 'bow' without being confused; when you add in spoken English, things can get even more complicated (as in the bough of a tree). We call these sorts of words (the first set anyway) homonyms--words that are spelled (and often pronounced) the same, but have different meanings in different contexts--and I'd like to submit that words like 'man,' 'his,' and 'he' function similarly in our language.

I can say 'men have beards' and you will understand that I am using 'men' in such a way as to refer specifically to males--you get it based on context. However, I can also say 'all men are created equal,' and you similarly understand that I'm using 'men' in such a way that I mean 'all people.' The two words function differently in different contexts in just the same way that 'bow' functions differently when I say 'Bow before me, mortals!' and 'Hand me my bow so that I might shoot the apple from his head.' Homonyms. The idea that there's some kind of latent sexism in this seems absolutely ludicrous to me; no matter how the language evolved, the most pertinent fact of the matter is how words are used now, and most people don't think for a minute that I'm talking about the males in the group only when I say 'I'll see you guys at 6 for dinner.'

My friend pointed out that, as a philosopher, I should be concerned with getting the most precision in language that I possibly can. I agree that absolute precision is needed when talking about complex philosophical issues, which is why the specialized philosophical vocabulary has evolved (just ask a philosopher of action what 'freedom' means sometime to see what I'm talking about). However, I don't think that every day conversation requires this level of precision, simply because absolutely crystal-clear definitions with NO ambiguity at all aren't necessary for day-to-day communication; I can rely on your knowledge of English grammatical and linguistic conventions and your ability to deduce what I'm talking about from context to get my meaning across without a specialized vocabulary.

For any academic inquiry, we should ask ourselves "what does it add?" See my Pithy Mission Statement over to the right side of your screen for more on this. One of the reasons many academics in other fields (myself included) have difficulty taking disciplines like "Women and Gender Studies" seriously, I think, is that so many of the issues championed by those fields are utterly specious--this is a prime example. The struggle to rid the English language of 'gendered' words (which, if I'm right, aren't gendered at all) doesn't seem to add anything to the academic discourse, and doesn't seem to advance human (oh no! even 'human' has the word 'man' in it!) knowledge at all. Instead, it seems that the only thing it does accomplish is the creation of a problem that wasn't there in the fist place: no one was thinking about 'mankind' in terms of gender until feminist 'academics' made it an issue.

For the record, I'm all in favor of gender equality. I know it's a virtual certainty that if this post gets seen by the right people, I'll be called a "chauvinist pig" and/or an "agent of Patriarchal oppression." I'm not. There are lots of great women, and there are lots of sucky women, just like there are lots of great men and lots of sucky men. We're all people. Get over it. If that's not feminism, I don't know what is.

CTY

2008-02-23T00:35:00.000-08:00

I just got my formal job offer from the Center for Talented Youth for this summer, and it looks like I'll be teaching Philosophy of Mind once again both sessions at Franklin & Marshall in Lancaster, PA. I'm a little bit disappointed, as I was hoping to teach Philosophy of Technology with Eripsa during the first session, but I'm still pretty excited. CTY, for those who are unfamiliar, is an absolutely amazing summer camp for gifted high school students featuring classes on subjects ranging from Greek to computer science to the history of disease (along with a very interesting non-academic culture). I taught philosophy of mind last year, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience--the kids are beyond brilliant, and the atmosphere is fantastic--so I'm returning again. If any of you have children of the ages between 12 and 17, I highly suggest you look into sending them--I'll be sure to instruct them in the ways of biological naturalism.

Immoral Technology (Or: Another Reason to Embrace Natrualism)

2008-02-21T22:30:00.000-08:00

According to a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 66% of Americans think that nanotechnology is "morally unacceptable." Nanotechnology, of course, is the (very broad) field of science dedicated to manipulating matter at very small scales--we're talking machines that can build molecules like assembly line robots build cars, repair organic cells from the inside, and generally do all sorts of things that, as Arthur C. Clarke might have predicted, seem to border on magical. The fact that more than half of all Americans think that this technology is unacceptable on moral grounds troubles me, and should probably trouble you too; the approval rate in Europe is much higher, with 71% of French respondents agreeing that nanotechnology research is just fine. The authors of the study conjecture that one plausible explanation for this cognitive gap between the United States and nations with similar education and technology levels is (surprise) the strong role that religion plays in the lives of most Americans; it seems that the problem isn't that Americans don't understand nanotechnology, but that they reject it on purely religious grounds.

We've seen the rather unfortunate results that religious based decision making can play (2000 and 2004 elections, anyone?), but this seems to be a new low, even for the United States. It seems that most respondents who called nanotech "morally unacceptable" did so because "In short, researchers are viewed as "playing God" when they create materials that do not occur in nature, especially where nanotechnology and biotechnology intertwine."

Only a worldview fundamentally based in irrationality and superstition could look at a promising technology like this, a technology with the potential to cure countless diseases, create incredibly fast computers, build materials with the strength of carbon steel and the weight of aluminum, and generally benefit the human condition immensely and say "Nah, I think we'll pass." Just add one more reason to the list of why we need a major paradigm shift in this country, or we're going to be technologically left behind.

A little comic relief...

2008-02-16T14:10:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of talk going around about The Singularity these days. Here's a grim reminder of the potentially disastrous consequences of letting the robots win.

Brights, Naturalism, and My Own Rebranding

2008-02-13T02:14:00.001-08:00

I've recently become officially affiliated with the Brights movement, and as I was browsing through their site, and came upon the following in the FAQ:

Each person deciding whether to self-identify by the shared characteristic—a naturalistic worldview—has employed a personal understanding of the terminology (including supernatural and mystical) and of any brief elucidation elsewhere on the site. We see little need to reach a common understanding of these terms, or to explicate beyond what is provided on the home page. We anticipate that those individuals who joined the constituency employed for all these terms some understanding in general use that they personally find apt.

I joined the Brights in order to network with others who share my dedication to the (rather loose) ontological position of naturalism, which regular readers will know pervades much of my work. However, as a philosopher, their explicit disinterest in defining 'naturalism' makes my skin itch. I'd like, therefore, to make a post trying to (briefly) give a sketch of what 'naturalism' is, and what a 'naturalistic worldview' consists of. This is not an easy task; I've actually been trying to write this post for a few days now, and have discovered that naturalism, like pornography, suffers from the "I can't define it but I know it when I see it" syndrome. I suspect that it is for precisely this reason that the Brights are reluctant to try to pin a concrete definition on 'naturalism;' as authors of a relatively new movement, the Bright powers-that-be most likely want to avoid alienating any potential supporters with overly restrictive definitions. While I sympathize with this, it does seem to me that at least a solid working definition of a term so central to the movement should be sought.

It seems to me that the best way to define 'naturalism' is to contrast it to (the woefully more common) 'supernaturalism.' A supernaturalistic worldview is one which incorporates forces, entities, or concepts that are fundamentally (that is, by definition) outside the scope of natural science; any sort of theism obviously falls into this category. A God that is all-seeing and all-powerful, an immaterial soul that survives after bodily death, or a natural spirit that pervades the world and unites all living things are all examples of supernaturalistic constructs. The key here, again, is that each of them is by definition inaccessible to science; they're specifically and enthusiastically endorsed as things that fall outside the realm of physics.

Many people find these ideas--of Gods, souls, and spirits--appealing (even comforting), and are more than willing to hold onto them while cheerfully admitting that there is no scientific basis for accepting the truth of them. Brights (and others who hold naturalistic worldviews) do not. Naturalism, then, is perhaps best understood in opposition to supernaturalism: a Bright (or other naturalist) believes that we live in one and only one world (as opposed to a supernaturalist, who might believe that we've existed before in a 'spiritual dimension'), and that that world is composed entirely of physical particles (not physical particles plus souls).

Still, I'm not sure this definition is satisfactory. On the face of it, there are two characteristics about it that bother me: as presented here, it is defined negatively (which is part of the reason why I want to move away from the label 'atheist' in the first place...more on that later), and as presented here it seems to presume much about the world, and to leave little room for future ontological revolutions. I think both these problems can be addressed; let's start with the latter.

When I say "we live in one and only one world and that world is composed entirely (and only) of physical particles," it might be easy to misconstrue my statement as arrogant, if not hypocritical. Regular readers will no doubt be aware that I myself do not subscribe to any species of eliminative materialsim when it comes to consciousness--that is, I don't believe the common physicalist assertion that beliefs, desires, tickles, pains, and all the other mental states you and I experience every day are somehow illusory or don't exist: mental states are not ontologically reducible to brain states. My view on the mind/body problem is nuanced, and this isn't really the place to elucidate it fully, but I'd like to address the apparent contradiction here before I move on; I hope that in doing so, I can show that it is possible to be a Bright without being an eliminative materialist, and thus that the label "naturalistic" is sufficiently broad to accommodate major theoretical revolutions in the sciences.

When I say "mental states are not ontologically reducible to brain states," I don't mean to say that there is some "mental stuff" floating around in our heads, or that beliefs, desires, tickles, pains, and all those sorts of things have any kind of totally independent ontology--they don't exist as any kind of separate substance, and they certainly don't exist independently of the body. What I mean to say, rather, is that there are certain facts about reality that can only be intelligibly understood as higher level processes that result from low-level physical behavior. See emergentism. Again, this is not to say that these higher level processes exist independently from the lower level physical particles that cause them, only that one cannot understand the whole system by only looking at the low-level behavior of its constituent parts; properties of the system as a whole must be taken into account, and some of these properties may manifest behaviors that cannot be deduced from looking at the behavior of the individual particles. It is worth reiterating, though, that consciousness (as the prime example of an emergent property) is still causally reducible to physics and, though it has certain properties that its constituent particles do not have, is still essentially part of the physical world.

I'd like to move on now, though the above explanation will undoubtedly strike some as less than satisfactory; to them I can only advise patience, and suggest that they read some of the back posts on this blog, as this is a topic I've discussed more than once. For now, though, I'd like to address the other problem I had with the definition of 'naturalism' we came up with above: that it is essentially negative, and makes sense only in opposition to another term ('supernaturalism,' in this case). This isn't really a technical problem per se I suppose--the definition qua definition is at least adequate, but I think there are a few compelling reasons to try to frame it differently.

I've self-identified as an atheist roughly since I was 15 years old. I was raised Catholic-ish (my immediate family wasn't terribly devout, but my grandmother was hardcore Irish Catholic, and made sure we went to church at least intermittently, and insisted I get my Fist Communion), so I most certainly did buy into the whole supernaturalism thing at one point. However, in late middle school I developed an interest in analytic philosophy, which eventually lead me to Bertrand Russell's seminal essay "Why I am Not a Christian." He raises issues that I found myself unable to ignore, and over the period of a few years I drifted from Catholic to agnostic to committed atheist, the position which I maintained henceforth. However, it always bothered me that 'atheist' is, by its very etymology, a negative term. By this I do not mean that it has "bad" connotations, or that it is "negative" in the sense that your really pessimistic friend is a "negative person;" instead, I just mean that the word 'atheist' literally means "non-theist"--it is a definition by opposition. I didn't like identifying my own worldview in this fashion, and searched for some time for a positive term that I liked--eventually, I found Bright, which satisfies me.

I most certainly still consider myself an atheist--I don't believe that God (in virtually any common sense of the word) exists--but I think the term 'Bright' more accurately captures my broader metaphysical position. Though our discussion thus far has focused on defining 'Bright' in opposition to 'Super' (the Bright-invented neologism for someone who endorses supernaturalism), I think it is the wide-ranging positive metaphysical claims of the Bright movement that really attracted me to it, and so I'd like to take a moment to discuss them.

'Atheist' implies a rather narrow set of beliefs; Alonzo Fyfe over at The Atheist Ethicist is fond of comparing being an atheist to being a heliocentrist--it is simply a claim about a single aspect of the nature of the universe, and is not necessarily incompatible with a wide range of other beliefs; it is quite possible to be an atheist, yet still believe in ghosts, souls, reincarnation, and all sorts of other supernaturalism. 'Bright,' I think, covers more ground and makes a much stronger metaphysical claim than does 'atheist.' 'Bright' represents a rejection of supernaturalism broadly--that is, not just when it comes to deities--and, moreover, represents an acceptance of a set of positive beliefs.

If naturalism is true, then the universe is inherently comprehensible by humans. It operates according to a set of natural laws, laws which are (in principle) discoverable, knowable, and understandable by us. If naturalism is true, then we are responsible to no one but each other for our actions--there is no cosmic force waiting to reward us or punish us (either with Heaven/Hell, reincarnation, or anything else), so we better learn to get along all on our own. If naturalism is true, then the pursuit of concrete truth--through science and philosophy--is perhaps the highest calling a human can strive for. If naturalism is true, then even awe-inspiringly complex processes--such as consciousness--are legitimate targets of this investigation, and will likely one day be understood by humans. Perhaps most importantly, if naturalism is true then we as individuals and as a species cannot count on intervention--help or hindrance--from occult powers; we are our own ultimate authorities, and we must face our problems, passing or failing, succumbing or surviving, all on our own merits.

I find this rather inspiring.

You Down With the NCC? No, Not Me.

2008-01-30T17:39:00.000-08:00

Seed Magazine, the really entertaining science-themed webzine, posted an article called "Questioning Consciousness" today. It's very thoughtful and well written, and makes an argument quite close to my heart--that we are, for the most part, looking at consciousness in radically incorrect terms, and this conceptual confusion is hindering scientific investigation. However, the author--a philosopher from the London School of Economics by the name of Nicholas Humphrey--proposes several radical ideas about consciousness that, it seems to me, take the discourse in the wrong direction entirely.

The predominant theme of the article is that consciousness is an illusion of sorts, akin to the sort of trickery that goes on when a Penrose Triangle is viewed from certain angles--that is, the "problem" of consciousness is only a problem at all because we're trapped in our subjective first-person jail cells. Snip:

Since the qualia are indeed so up-front and remarkable, and since no one knows why this is, we are all, most probably, going to start off by asking what may be a bad question: "How can we explain the existence of these qualia as we experience them?" So here, again, it will only be if we undergo a radical shift in perspective and realize that the "qualia as we experience them" could be a mental fantasy, that we shall move on to asking what may be the good question: "How can we explain why we have the impression that such fantastic qualia exist even if they do not?" But, here is why it is likely to be so difficult to make this move: In the case of consciousness, we cannot simply change our perspective to see the solution. We are all stuck with the first-person point of view. So, the result is we persist with questing for the qualia as such.
Yet if consciousness is a trick, then of course this quest is a fool's errand. It will make no more sense to try to explain the existence of qualia than it would to explain the existence of the impossible triangle. What we should be doing instead is trying to explain just how we have been set up—and why.

I'm immediately suspicious of accounts that try to eliminatively reduce away consciousness as "illusory" or "not really there." Dan Dennett is notorious for this (he's another one who maintains that qualia don't really exist), as is Paul Churchland. It seems to me that trying to deny that we really are conscious is an exercise in futility, somewhat like Wile E. Coyote thinking that he can keep running off the edge of the cliff so long as he doesn't look down. Indeed, if there's one thing that's defining of humanity, it is the elaborately woven tapestry of conscious states that are open to us. I've read Humphrey's article several times through now, and I still can't even begin to fathom what he could even mean by asserting that consciousness in general--and qualia in particular--is just a "trick of the brain."

I really hate to appeal to Descartes since he was so catastrophically wrong about so many things, but this really does seem to go back to his cogito--if I can be sure of one thing in this universe, it is that I am a conscious and thinking thing. That's what's so unique about cognition, thought, and conscious experience: if it seems to me that I am conscious, then by definition I am conscious of something. The trick is all in the seeming, and that's what Dennett, Churchland, and (apparently) Humphrey seem to miss: even if we're spectacularly wrong about what consciousness is, the fact that we've formed an opinion that can even be right or wrong necessarily entails that we're the sorts of things that can have beliefs, desires, ideas, and opinions--in short, that we are conscious creatures.

Humphrey goes on to pose a few questions about the nature of consciousness that he thinks are only answerable (or at least much more likely to be answerable) if we adopt this position that consciousness is really "nothing special." I'd like to take a moment now to pose a few answers of my own to these questions, answers that don't require us to take the phenomenally (pun fully intended) counter-intuitive step of supposing that my experience when I look at a ripe tomato is nothing more than an illusion (again, whatever that means).

1. What exactly is the real-world brain activity that we are engaging with when we say a sensation is like something?

Who knows, but I would bet dollars to donuts that there isn't just one token activity (or even type of activity) that meets this description; this should be a reflection of how much I believe this to be the case, as I don't even eat donuts (and while I don't eat dollars either, many more merchants accept them as payment). Humphrey (along with many others, Searle included) seems to think that we will one day find the "NCC," or neuronal correlate of consciousness. I'm skeptical that we ever will, but for rather atypical reasons (go figure). I'm not a Mysterian, nor am I any breed of Dualist--that is, I think that we will one day be able to give a scientific account of how consciousness happens, and I think that we live in one and only one world that is composed of and only composed of physical particles. I do, however, reject the computationalist notion that the mind is "modular."

Briefly, this theory says something like the following: the best way to understand the mind is to think of it in terms of modules. We have an "arithmetic module" that lets us add and subtract, a "balance module" that lets us stand upright, and a "consciousness module" that's responsible for our subjective and unitary experience of the world. If we "popped out" the consciousness module, we'd be left with p-zombies, creatures that behave as if they are conscious in every way, but actually lack any sort of subjective experience. As I said, this idea does not ring true to me.

Why not? Before I answer that, I'd like to at least take a stab at answering the other questions posed by Professor Humphrey--in the process of posing these answers, I think I'll probably end up addressing this question as well.

2. Why does this activity have the (tricky) properties it has, such that our experience of it is seemingly something so strangely private, not of this world, and indescribable in common terms?

Once again, who knows! That's an empirical question, and needs to be sorted out by science. We can make a few general statements, though. First, it seems that we can be pretty sure that our consciousness (and thus our qualia) is caused by activity in the brain; I take this to be relatively non-controversial. While some still cling to Dualistic theories of mind we, as modern people of science, can set those theories aside with little chance of error, I think. We can also, I think, safely assert that there is no token/token identity between "mental states" (for lack of better vocabulary) and "brain states"--that is, the brain states causally responsible for my experience of red will not be token identical with the brain states causally responsible for your experience of red, even if we're looking at the same object. This is a very important point, and one that we will come back to.

Additionally, I do object to the notion that our qualia are somehow "otherworldly." What could be more "of this world" than the 'what it is like' quality that conscious experience has? I presume that Humphreys means to say something about the peculiarly subjective nature of qualia, but I don't really see why this nature requires any peculiar explanation--if they didn't have that nature, they wouldn't be qualia at all! In other words, consciousness (at least as we define it) is by definition private, subjective, and "other worldly." No further explanation necessary; once we understand what causes consciousness in general, I suspect that we'll see why it can't be anything but "other worldly."

3. What makes this trick work? How is it done?

A similar answer to the above question--its done through the peculiar arrangement of our neurobiology. If you want a more specific answer, give me a few more PhDs and a few more decades and then ask me again.

4. What is the point? Why was it designed like this? What might have been the evolutionary advantage of our having these marvelous experiences?

John Searle likes to compare consciousness (as a process of the brain) to digestion (as a process of the stomach), and I think this fairly apt analogy can aid us in answering this final question. In the stomach, digestion is a high level process that consists in many lower level processes working toward a common "goal." In light of this, it seems rather silly to say something like "I don't see what the evolutionary advantage of digestion is! It seems that we'd be just as well off with only hydrochloric acid to break food down, bacteria to help us absorb nutrients, saliva to act as an enzyme to begin the process, etc." The reason this statement is silly, of course, is just this: what we've just described is digestion, simply seen from a lower level of description! When we say "stomach acid, intestinal bacteria, saliva, etc.," we aren't enumerating components that are operating independently of digestion, but rather components that constitute digestion. Humphrey writes:

The final challenge will be explaining the biological purpose of all this. We can surely assume that the kind of development I have sketched above will not have happened accidentally. It must be the result of natural selection favoring genes that underwrite the specialized neural circuits—whatever they turn out to be—that do indeed sustain the illusion of qualia, giving rise to the magical mystery show observed by the first-person. And it is axiomatic that this will only have happened if those lucky enough to be spectators of this show have somehow been at an advantage in terms of biological survival. Yet, how can this be if, as is widely assumed by theorists, the phenomenal richness of consciousness is of no practical value whatsoever?
Fodor has stated this aspect of the problem bluntly: "There are several reasons why consciousness is so baffling. For one thing, it seems to be among the chronically unemployed. What mental processes can be performed only because the mind is conscious, and what does consciousness contribute to their performance? As far as anybody knows, anything that our conscious minds can do they could do just as well if they weren't conscious.

Humphrey proposes that the solution to this problem lies in recognizing that:

the role of phenomenal consciousness may not be like this at all. Its role may not be to enable us to do something we could not do otherwise, but rather to encourage us to do something we would not do otherwise: to make us take an interest in things that otherwise would not interest us, or to mind things we otherwise would not mind, or to set ourselves goals we otherwise would not set.

But I don't think this is satisfactory either--the behavior he is speaking of could just as easily manifest in p-zombies; that is, there's no functional difference between a creature that takes interest in and does all the activities Humphrey has in mind because it is conscious, and a creature that still performs the activities, but does so without any sense of a subjective experience. Evolution is the ultimate behaviorist, and doesn't care how (or whether) the behavior is being processed internally--as long as the organism survives to reproduce, it is a success from an evolutionary standpoint.

Instead, I'd like to propose that we have consciousness simply because it is a necessary "add on" that comes for free (loosely speaking) with all the other cognitive machinery we rely on; it is the very fact that we are capable of advanced reasoning, representation, and communication that explains why we have consciousness, and it is the fact that we have consciousness that explains why we are capable of reasoning, representation, and communication. Once again, this view is a rejection of the "modular theory" of the mind--in short, we can't consider consciousness as a faculty in isolation from all the other cognitive faculties we enjoy; while consciousness qua consciousness might not provide any specific evolutionary advantages, our other brain-based abilities most certainly do, and the brain structures responsible for these abilities also are causally responsible for consciousness. I consider this view to be a breed of holism and emergentism both.

A careful reader will no doubt notice that the view I'm articulating here has certain leanings toward epiphenomenalism, and I would like to take a moment to assuage these fears. Epiphenomenalism, you may or may not recall, is a broad family of views claiming that the mind cannot possibly have any causal effect on the body. All mental states are epiphenomena, according to this view, and have an existence something like froth on the tops of waves--the froth (mind) is caused by the waves (body), but doesn't really have any effect on them. I'll admit that my view shares certain aspects with epiphenomenalism (specifically that consciousness is a necessary result of brain chemistry), but there is one vital point on which my view differs. Epiphenomenalism carries within it an implicit endorsement of Dualism: it only makes sense to talk about a causal relationship (or lack thereof) between 'mind' and 'body' if those are two very different things. On my view the mind (consciousness, etc.), like digestion in the stomach, is the necessary, routine, and expected result of the human brain working the way it does; there is a causal relationship between mind and body in just the same sense that there is a causal relationship between stomach acid and digestion--digestion simply describes what it is that the stomach acid is doing.

So, why am I not down with the NCC? Individual minds operate differently. A recent study done at MIT illustrates this point quite well: researchers found that individuals with different cultural backgrounds used their brains radically differently to accomplish the same tasks, with totally different areas of the brain being active and yielding the same functional result. There's no reason to suppose that consciousness, which is the result of the complex interplay between the traits measured in this study, would work any differently--in other words, my 'NCC' might be totally different from your 'NCC,' which effectively means that there is no NCC at all.

This is all a very rough sketch, and the result of a good deal of on-the-fly musing on my part. I fully expect and intend to tighten this down over time. In fact, it seems to me that I've got the makings of a pretty good formal philosophy paper here. Hmm....

One Small Step for Yeast...

2008-01-29T17:55:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, I wrote a post about the transhumanist movement, and its ideas about extending the human lifespan indefinitely. As I said then, I'm skeptical of this sort of thing--the future course of technology (especially biotechnology) is notoriously difficult to predict, and one of my guiding maxims is "We ought be most skeptical of ideas that we wish to be true;" since never dying (until I want to) sounds pretty damn good, I'm doing my best to be as skeptical as possible about the whole anti-aging research out there. However, I found some new research done by geneticists at USC today that gave me just a little bit of pause.

It's reasonably well known that calorie restriction does indeed seem to increase maximum lifespan in most mammals (as well as other species). However, by combining a calorie restricted diet with a little genetic tinkering (with two genes--RAS2 and SCH9, to be precise), researchers have now increased the lifespan of yeast bacteria by tenfold. Apparently, yeast's aging is controlled by genes that operate in much the same way as genes that control human aging, so the scientists are optimistic about being able to translate this discovery--which could theoretically increase the lifespan of humans to about 800 years--into usable anti-aging treatment in the near future. Snip from the press release:

Researchers have created baker's yeast capable of living to 800 in yeast years without apparent side effects. The basic but important discovery, achieved through a combination of dietary and genetic changes, brings scientists closer to controlling the survival and health of the unit of all living systems: the cell. "We're setting the foundation for reprogramming healthy life," says study leader Valter Longo of the University of Southern California.

Longo's group put baker's yeast on a calorie-restricted diet and knocked out two genes - RAS2 and SCH9 - that promote aging in yeast and cancer in humans.

"We got a 10-fold life span extension that is, I think, the longest one that has ever been achieved in any organism," Longo says. Normal yeast organisms live about a week.

"I would say 10-fold is pretty significant," says Anna McCormick, chief of the genetics and cell biology branch at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and Longo's program officer. The NIA funds such research in the hope of extending healthy life span in humans through the development of drugs that mimic the life-prolonging techniques used by Longo and others, McCormick adds.

It shall be interesting to see where this goes...

This is Your Brain on the Internet

2008-01-29T15:01:00.000-08:00

National Geographic is running a nice little feature on the brain covering neural anatomy in basic, layman friendly terms:

The diencephalon is located in the core of the brain. A complex of structures roughly the size of an apricot, the two major sections are the thalamus and hypothalamus. The thalamus acts as a relay station for incoming nerve impulses from around the body that are then forwarded to the appropriate brain region for processing. The hypothalamus controls hormone secretions from the nearby pituitary gland. These hormones govern growth and instinctual behavior such as eating, drinking, sex, anger, and reproduction. The hypothalamus, for instance, controls when a new mother starts to lactate.
The brain stem, at the organ's base, controls reflexes and crucial, basic life functions such as heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure. It also regulates when you feel sleepy or awake.
The brain is extremely sensitive and delicate, and so requires maximum protection. This is provided by the surrounding skull and three tough membranes called meninges. The spaces between these membranes are filled with fluid that cushions the brain and keeps it from being damaged by contact with the inside of the skull.

They've even got a little interactive do-dad that shows what parts of the brain are primarily stimulated by various activities (e.g. getting tickled, smelling garlic, falling in love). We need more of this sort of thing--the average person knows woefully little about that most vital organ.

Link

Searle Profiled in The Times

2008-01-21T16:13:00.001-08:00

It's been a while since I posted here. I've started three or four posts in the interim, but haven't been able to get the momentum going to finish them. I suspect I will eventually. In the mean time, though, today's London Times features a profile of John Searle, one of my teachers at Berkeley and probably my biggest philosophical influence. The author, fellow philosopher Dave Papineau, is pretty balanced in his discussion, both praising Searle for his accessible writing style and devotion to common sense, and criticizing him for some of his more controversial theories (like biological naturalism). Overall, it's a very good article about one of the most celebrated (and controversial) philosophers of the 20th century (or so). The last paragraph is especially good, and neatly summarizes what I like most about Searle:

Still, perhaps Searle’s loyalty to everyday thinking is a price worth paying for his undoubted virtues. During the course of his intellectual lifetime, philosophy has become a dry and technical business. Most philosophers today write only for other philosophers about issues that can accurately be termed scholastic. Against this background, Searle is a beacon of accessible expertise, a throwback to a time when philosophy was part of public debate. His work is devoted to some of the most fundamental questions in philosophy, yet he never gets bogged down in the kind of esoteric disputation that forgets why the issues matter in the first place. If he does this by sticking closely to the firm ground of common sense, this has not prevented him from producing a constant stream of challenging views across a large range of topics. Fortunately, there is no sign of his stopping yet.

Searle, like me, is more or less a proponent of naive realism, which (broadly) dictates that the world in general really is the way it appears to us--think of it as radical anti-skepticism. This common sense defense of reality and the world around us is, I think, what makes Searle such a great thinker.

Link

Congrats to Obama

2008-01-04T15:40:00.000-08:00

It seems that Obama swept the Iowan caucus last night, beating Edwards and Clinton rather soundly. Go Barack!

Language and Mental Representation

2008-01-02T23:50:00.000-08:00

I'm a really big fan of Jeopardy!. I think it's unique among game shows for rewarding quick thinking and verbal cleverness as much (if not more) as brute fact knowledge, but that's not what this post is about. I was watching Jeopardy! last night, and one of the categories was called "Tip of My Tongue." The clues were things like this:

Oh man, this guy...was director of Scientific Studies at the Ecole Normal in 1857....him-"ization"....help me out here..

This reminded me of a conversation I had a week or two ago with a friend of mine (the answer is Louis Pasteur, by the way); we were discussing theories of representation (i.e. how it comes to be the case that 'cat' refers to something furry and hungry in the real world), and I put forward the idea that perhaps we cannot put forward any truly "universal" theory of reference, because how words (and other symbols) come to refer might vary based on individual neurological idiosyncrasies. She agreed, pointing out that when a name or word is on the "tip of her tongue," she tries to remember it by thinking about what the word feels like to write or say, whereas I think about the concepts connected to that name or word (much like the clue above).

While this certainly isn't indicative itself about how words refer to each of us, I think it does speak to an often overlooked fact--namely, that while our brains end up getting the job done, they often do the job in radically different ways. Just looking at the simple (and common) "tip of the tongue" phenomenon shows how differently we humans can process the world; it seems at least plausible to me that given these variations, fundamental cognitive activities (like reference and the creation of meaning) might happen in very different ways for different individuals.

What do you think of this? What is the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon like for you?

So You Want to Study Philosophy: A Reading List

2007-12-28T19:58:00.000-08:00

In the last post, I promised to provide a list of solid introductory books for someone starting an investigation into the free will problem. I got to thinking a bit, and decided that I might as well take the time to give a reading list for someone starting to get into philosophy on a wide variety of topics. These books are, for the most part, what I'd classify as "advanced introductory" texts. In other words, they presume minimal prior philosophical knowledge, but also that the reader is intelligent and at least somewhat academically minded. Reading philosophy is very different than reading most other texts, including other academic texts; you'll see what I mean when you begin. In general, these are texts that would be likely to be included in the reading lists of advanced undergraduate courses. I'm only going to deal with a few fields (those in which I feel most confident in recommending books) at first, though I might add more subject areas to the list later. Without further ado, here's the list:

Philosophy of Mind

Philosophy of mind encompasses a wide variety of topics, including the mind-body problem (what's the relationship between the brain and the mind?), questions about the nature of consciousness, artificial intelligence, representation, and a myriad of other questions. Here are a few good texts to get you going (I'll warn you right now that I'm heavily biased toward John Searle, as I studied under him at Berkeley):

Mind: A Brief Introduction by John Searle. ISBN 978-0195157345. This is a great introductory text. Searle writes with an accessible, conversational tone, and covers many of the major ideas in the field before presenting his own.
Philosophy of Mind, Classical and Contemporary Readings, an anthology edited by David Chalmers. ISBN 978-0195145816. Great anthology that covers most aspects of the field from the Greeks onward. Some of the articles are a little dense (Kripke shows up more than once), but this is perfect anthology to get you started
How the Mind Works by Stephen Pinker. ISBN 978-0140244915. Like Searle, Pinker writes in a very accessible tone, and can easily be understood by the uninitiated. Unlike Searle, Pinker embraces the computational theory of mind, which is the dominant theory today. Worth it to understand where many philosophers and cognitive scientists are coming from today. This was published in 1999, so it's a bit dated now, but good nonetheless.
Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind by John Searle. ISBN 978-0521273022. This one's a bit more academic, but still benefits from Searle's characteristically clear and clean style. Intentionality is absolutely central to philosophy of mind, and this is a wonderful text discussing it.

Free Will and Action Theory

Questions about whether or not we are free tend to get lumped together with questions about how our actions come to be executed, or what it means to act rationally. The whole field is called "free will and action theory."

Four Views on Free Will by John Fischer, Derek Pereboom, Manuel Vargas, and Robert Kane. ISBN 978-1405134866. I had the opportunity to review an early copy of this book when I took an undergraduate action theory class with Manuel Vargas. I was impressed with it then, and I imagine that it's only gotten better. Each author advocates for one of the four major positions within the field (Kane for libertarianism, Pereboom for hard incompatibilism, Fischer for [semi]compatibilism, and Vargas for revisionism). This volume contains the essay My Compatibilism by Fischer, which is the article I referenced in the series of free will themed posts.
The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control by John Fischer. ISBN 978-1557868572. This is a more detailed exploration of John Fischer's ideas about free will and moral responsibility, including his account of the distinction between guidance and regulative control. A great text on his brand of compatibilism.
The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, an anthology edited by Robert Kane. ISBN 978-0195178548. The Oxford Handbook series are predictably excellent, and this is no exception. As with any anthology, the content runs the gamut from the reasonably accessible to the very dense and technical. Still, a round coverage of most of the classical and contemporary ideas in the field.
Free Will (Blackwell Readings in Philosophy), another anthology edited by Robert Kane. ISBN 978-0631221029. The Blackwell series are also very good overall. This anthology focuses much more on the current debate than the Oxford anthology, and is perhaps a bit more accessible to the layman, though somewhat less comprehensive.
Rationality in Action by John Searle. ISBN 978-0262692823. Searle's a die-hard libertarian about free will, one of the few positions he holds with which I disagree. In this book, he outlines the traditional philosophical concept of "acting rationally"--the orthodox view is basically that a 'rational' action is an action--motivated purely by the actor's own beliefs and desires--then, in predictable Searle fashion, turns the debate on its head and argues for exactly the opposite point. Even if you disagree with his conclusions, this book is worth reading for its clear treatment of difficult technical issues, and for the sake of appreciating Searle's gift for ingenious arguments against orthodoxy.

Ethics and Morality

Ethics is one of the five major fields of philosophy (the others are metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, and logic), and deals with questions of how we ought to live our lives. Here are some good places to start:

Consequentialism (Blackwell Readings in Philosophy), an anthology edited by Stephen Darwell. ISBN 978-0631231080. Another Blackwell entry here. Consequentialism is the idea that the relevant moral facts of the matter (i.e. the facts that determines the moral status of an action) are facts about that action's consequences, not facts about the actor's intentions. It is one of the most popular (if not the most popular) constellation of views on ethics today, and Darwell's anthology offers a broad introduction to arguments for and against it.
Virtue Ethics (Oxford Readings in Philosophy), an anthology edited by Slote and Crisp. ISBN 978-0198751885. Virtue ethics originated with Aristotle, and are based around the idea that being moral consists in having one or more virtues (e.g. courage, temperance, etc.). I'm not a big fan of this theory, but it's an important one in the ethics debate, and this is as good an anthology as any.
Groundwork Concerning the Metaphysics of Morals, by Immanual Kant. ISBN 978-0521626958. Ah, the Groundwork, how I love/hate thee. Kant advocates the idea that acting morally has nothing to do with bringing about the best consequences, but rather depends entirely on acting in accord with an overarching moral theory called the "Categorical Imperative." The essay is short, brilliant, and very, very difficult. Read it, read it again, read it again, and then maybe you'll have some idea what he's saying. Then maybe you can explain it to me. This is a tough one, but well worth the effort--when you finally finish it, you'll feel like you've just run a mental marathon, and you'll understand why Kant is widely considered to be one of the most brilliant humans to have ever lived (even if his theories might not be correct).
The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas by Michael Gazzaniga. ISBN 978-0060884734. While perhaps not a philosophy book per se (Gazzaniga is a neuroscientist, not a philosopher), this is still an excellent book for anyone interested in the field of ethics. I've got a soft spot for anyone who attempts to resolve seemingly intractable philosophical problems with an appeal to neuroscience (if I had to sum up my overarching academic project in one sentence, that would be it), which is precisely what Gazzaniga does in this book. He considers various aspects of morality and various ethical dilemmas, then explains how they can be explained by/resolved by a detailed structure of neuroscience. This is a "pop science" book--i.e. written for mass consumption-- so it is very readable and interesting, though those with a significant background in philosophy, neuroscience, or cognitive science will probably find it lacking in detail.

Philosophy of Perception

I'm fascinated with issues surrounding perception, particularly color perception. This is a very diverse field, with contributions from philosophers, biologists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, and others; a lot of philosophy really intersects here. I consider it to be a subset of philosophy of mind, but it's worth its own list here.

Action in Perception by Alva Noe. ISBN 978-0262640633. Noe begins the book by laying out his central thesis: "Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us; it is something we do." From this thought provoking beginning, Noe goes on to discuss various aspects of perception (focusing primarily on vision, though touching on other modalities) with a clear, lucid style and judicious use of science and philosophy. This is philosophy at its best, in my opinion: Noe presents a concise and well thought out exploration of the problems in the field, and presents what he thinks is a plausible solution to them, all designed to help cognitive scientists untangle the conceptual confusion that he thinks surrounds this topic. Noe's a rising star in philosophy, and this is a great example of why.
Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception, an anthology edited by Alva Noe and Evan Thompson. ISBN 978-0262640473. Another very good anthology, which focuses mostly on modern (i.e. last 50 years or so) explorations of perception in all its forms. Some of the articles are a little dense, but that's to be expected.
Readings on Color, Volume One: The Philosophy of Color, an anthology edited by Byrne and Hilbert. ISBN 978-0262522304. Within perception, I have a particular interest on color perception. My senior thesis as an undergraduate / writing sample for graduate school admissions was on color perception, and this anthology helped me a lot as I was writing. I could probably include an entire section just on color, but we'll leave it at two books. The second one being...
The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Color, by Barry Stroud. ISBN 978-0195151886. This is a detailed and rigorous examination of what we mean when we say "Tomatoes are red." Barry Stroud writes with a lucid style (though not so clear as Searle's) that is very easy to follow. His eventual argument (that colors aren't really objective or subjective at all, but something in between) also resonates strongly with me, as it is very much in line with my own idea (though Stroud appeals less directly to contemporary neuroscience).

I think that'll do to start with. Perhaps more to come later...

More Free Will Stuff: Comments From the Studio Audience

2007-12-28T17:20:00.000-08:00

Michael, a physicist in the studio audience, had a lot to say about the last two posts on free will. His comments were well thought out and substantive (who says scientists don't know how to write?), so I thought I'd post them here for all to see, and for me to respond to.

My reaction is 180 degrees from yours. What possible point does moral responsibility have if I have no free will? What possible benefit is it to the world or to myself or to you if you assign moral responsibility to actions over which I had not choice, because I choose not to flagellate myself about those actions? Such a thing would seem to be a sort of moral version of an untestable hypothesis. Absolutely nothing in the world is changed by your decision to assign moral responsibility to me for my actions, then if you didn't assign any responsibility.

That's an interesting point. The push you're making here has vague shades of American Pragmatism--you're asking, in a nutshell, why this is even a question worth considering if we agree from the start that nothing substantive will change in the universe one way or the other. I share that concern, which is why I'm reluctant to embrace anything but semi-compatibilism. As you said, much of the free will discussion is, at this point, made up of almost entirely untestable hypotheses (e.g. that quantum level indeterminacy is enough to make us free). The advantage about embracing semicompatibilism, it seems to me, is that it doesn't have anything to say one way or the other about the tension between freedom and causal determinism. What semicompatibilism offers, then, is an explanation of how we can intelligibly assign moral responsibility (whether or not this assignment itself is a free action is irrelevant--we only care whether or not it is intelligible) while at the same time remaining neutral about genuine alternative possibilities.

The only positive purpose I can think of for assigning moral responsibility for actions is if my doing so might change my future actions in a future similar situation. But you have hypothesized that this is impossible. So why would you or I ever choose to assign moral responsibility for actions I cannot control?

I'm not hypothesizing one way or another about whether or not your actions are free (though if pressed I'd say it's more likely that they're not than that they are)--again, that's the point of semicompatibilism, as far as I'm concerned. Fischer would say that you're suffering from a conceptual confusion when you ask "So why would you or I ever choose to assign moral responsibility for actions I cannot control," because you can control your actions in the relevant sense. Remember, he wants to make a distinction between regulative control (which you may or may not have), and guidance control (which you certainly do have). The whole point of the stories about the locked room, the evil neuroscientist, and your drive to work is to show that there is some real sense in which you can be said to have control over your actions, even if at no point did you have robust alternative possibilities.

I am really enjoying your blog and checking it every few days. If I am missing something important about this, please let me know. Also, if there are any reasonably accessible books on this topic I could read, I would love a recommendation.

So glad to hear it! Sometimes I wonder if anyone is actually reading this thing; glad to know that at least one person is. I'll throw up a book list in a separate post when I'm done here.

If you have any good things to read on the libertarian point of view I would appreciate those. I am a PhD physicist who has worked a lot on quantum effects in superconductivity, and on quantum noise. When you write I've yet to see a libertarian account that impresses me as much of anything except wishful thinking (they also tend to make pseudoscientific style appeals to quantum mechanics) I have to tell you that it does seem possible that the loophole in determinism is in quantum mechanics.

I think it is important to realize that the "billiard ball" determinism of classical newtonian physics does not extend to QM. I believe it is at worst an open question, and at best clear enough, that QM is NOT deterministic. So if the physical universe is NOT deterministic, then free will creates no conflict with physics.

Ok, good. I've always wanted to ask a real live physicist about this (you people are so tough to find): is QM indeterministic in the sense that we can't predict the actions of the particles (i.e. their behavior really is a necessary product of the past plus the laws of nature, but in such a way that we are unable to predict it), or in the sense that the behavior really is indeterministic? Do we even know?

In any case, I'm not convinced that any amount of quantum indeterminacy is sufficient for freedom in any relevant sense of the term. This intuition has two primary sources. First, it seems (at least from what we know so far) that quantum indeterminacy "cancels out" when we get to macro-level structures; that is, while it might be the case that the behavior of particles at the very, very, very small level cannot be reliably predicted, this has no impact when you get a large group of particles together, as for every particle that randomly "swerves left," another randomly "swerves right." By way of analogy, we might picture a large office building dedicated to producing 'widgets;' while we might not be able to predict with absolute certainty what any individual worker in the office is doing at any given time, we know that the company as a whole (i.e. at the macro scale) is doing some particular activity (i.e. producing widgets). Is this or is this not the case? I'll admit that I haven't had much formal instruction in quantum mechanics, and most of what I know is the result of having lived with a physics major for four years in college, and having done a fair bit of reading on the 'net.

Let's suppose for the sake of argument, though, that indeterminacy doesn't really cancel out at the low level--a typical libertarian line would be something about how the brain is a sufficiently complex system that it is affected by minute variations in quantum structure that simply don't affect less complex systems--and that there really is a degree of randomness at the macro level. Even if this is the case, I'm still not convinced that we can get from there to a robust kind of freedom. After all, it doesn't seem to me that the fact that my brain is influenced by random events in its microstructure gets me any closer to being "free" than the fact that my brain is just a big deterministic electro-chemical machine. In order to get real freedom out of randomness, we'd have to explain just how it is that randomness at the quantum level somehow ceases to be truly "random" at the macro level, yet still retains enough indeterminacy for some aspect of my consciousness to influence it. I'm not saying that this won't happen, but there are a whole lot of "ifs" in there.

I don't understand the appeal of a theory that gives us free will in determining what we think of some actions, but no free will over any actual actions. First it is puzzling, if I ask you what you think, it is deterministic what you will tell me, since that is an action. Then it seems random whether your conversation about such a thing has any meaning at all. If you tend to be honest, then it is an amazing coincidence that your beliefs (over which you have free will) just happen to align over your predetermined statements about your beliefs.

I'm with Searle on this one (not that I know anything about him beyond what you said.) If you ask me if I have free will, I choose to say yes. It is hard to even parse what is going on if I "choose" to say no.

To me it seems clunky to separate free will about what I believe from determinism about what I do. And especially if the motivation to do so is what is at best an unproven and at worst a mistaken idea that physics, as far as we know, is deterministic. As far as I know, QM theories in which a wave function collapses on observation are NOT deterministic. Attempts to make them deterministic (for example, hidden variable theories) have failed.

Anyway, great stuff! Thanks!

Mike

Again, the appeal is in reconciling our intuitions that A) the universe is deterministic and B) we are free and/or morally responsible for our actions. It [semicompatibilism] is not a separation of beliefs from actions per se, but a separation of alternative possibilities / could have done otherwise kind of control from the kind of control necessary for us to feel that we'd be justified in attributing responsibility.

Thanks for the comments, Mike! Keep 'em coming!

Happy Holidays

2007-12-25T21:27:00.001-08:00

Happy Holidays, blogosphere.

Some More Musings on Free Will

2007-12-19T15:08:00.000-08:00

Someone once famously asked John Searle "If determinism were scientifically shown to be 100% true, would you accept it?" His response was "Think about what you're asking me: if it were scientifically proven that there are no free and deliberate actions, would you freely and deliberately accept that?" His response, while somewhat arrogantly dismissive (he's great like that), is pretty telling: no matter what we learn, we're never going to be able to escape the illusion (if it is an illusion) that our actions are free. In some sense, then, the problem of free will isn't really a problem at all--no matter what the answer is, nothing will change in our practical experience.

It's worth asking, then, why we even care about the problem in the first place, given the fact that even if we learn beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are not free, we will be unable to stop experiencing the world as if we are. One good reason to still care about free will, it seems to me, lies with moral responsibility. We have a powerful intuition that we cannot be held praiseworthy or blameworthy for anything we don't do of our own free will; if you put a gun to my head and demand that I rob a bank, it doesn't seem fair to blame me for robbing the bank. Similarly, if you put a mind control chip in my brain and force me to run around town fighting crime, it doesn't seem that I deserve to be praised for my law enforcement efforts. It seems that we need freedom to get responsibility.

This is the jumping off point for semicompatibilism, a view proposed by John Martin Fischer in his essay "My Compatibilism;" it is this idea that I want to explore today. The first question we should ask is "what sort of freedom do we think we need in order to get moral responsibility?" Our intuition, I think, is that we need alternative possibilities--if we fail to praise or blame someone for actions taken while under the effect of mind control, it is precisely because we see that the person had no alternative possibilities; in other words, it only makes sense to praise or blame someone for actions he takes when he could have done otherwise. The idea is that without alternative possibilities, we can't have moral responsibility; the two notions are stuck together in a fundamental way (this is called the Principle of Alternative Possibilites, or PAP). Let's see if we can pry them apart.

Let's suppose I kidnap you while you're asleep, and bring you to a locked room. When you wake up, you find yourself in strange, unfamiliar surroundings. On closer inspection, though, it turns out that the room you're in is full of all sorts of interesting things to explore and interact with (populate the room with whatever appeals to you). While you notice the closed door, it doesn't occur to you to try to open it, so taken are you with the diversions in the room. Let's suppose that you stay there for 45 minutes playing around before you try to leave the room, only to discover the locked door. You can't leave the room, nor could you have during the past 45 minutes.

Now, it seems to me that during the 45 minutes in which you were playing around in the room, you were staying there freely--that is, you chose to stay in the room, and any adverse consequences (say, if you forgot to pick up your kid from school) from your stay would be your moral responsibility. However, it turns out that you actually didn't have any alternative possibilities during your stay there--you couldn't have left the room even if you wanted to (think about this in relation to the conditional analysis discussed last time). It looks like we're getting somewhere here in our attempt to pry apart responsibility and alternative possibilities.

That last thought experiment was originally penned by John Locke, but critics quite reasonably pointed out that in that situation, you would have at least two distinct alternative possibilities--namely, to try to leave the room or not to try to leave the room. In response to this, philosophy Harry Frankfurt proposed moving Locke's Locked Room inside the head, giving rise to what are now called "Frankfurt cases." Here's a typical Frankfurt case.

Suppose that I, an evil neuroscientist, have implanted a control chip in your brain. This control chip is designed to let you take your actions normally when I'm not in control, but gives me the option to override at any time and take control of you. It also lets me know what your intentions are a moment before you actually take the action, so I have a chance to countermand you if I'm quick. Suppose further that in addition to being an evil neuroscientist, I'm also a devout Republican, and that I decide to test my chip in the upcoming election by forcing you to vote Republican. Election day rolls around, and you step into the booth, totally unaware that I'm watching my chip's readout with my finger on the button to make you vote Republican. After some time considering your options, you decide that the Republican candidate best represents your beliefs, and cast your vote for him. I take my finger off the button, satisfied (though perhaps a bit disappointed at not being able to test my invention).

Here we can see how Locke's room has been moved inside your head, and once again the results of this thought experiment are interesting. In the case I just described, it seems that it would be very reasonable to assign moral responsibility to you for voting Republican, even though you really had no alternative possibilities (even if you'd wanted to vote Democrat, you wouldn't have). It looks like we've succeeded in prying those two notions apart.

Fischer talks about two different kinds of control that we might have over our actions: guidance control and regulative control. The kind that we tend to think we have is regulative control--that is, regulative control implies true freedom, and the ability to do otherwise at any juncture. Guidance control, though, is the kind of control being exercised in the stories presented above. Here's another example that will let you see the difference more clearly.

Suppose I secretly install a computerized guidance system in your car before you go to work. I've been researching your route for a few days now, so I know that you always proceed to work in exactly the same way. I program the guidance computer to kick in as soon as you get ready to back out of your driveway, and to quit as soon as you park. The computer guides your car to work just as if you had driven it there; in fact, it is so convincing and well designed that you never even notice that anything is amiss--you simply feel like you're driving as normal, as the car responds appropriately when you brake, turn the wheel, or change gears.

In this case, Fischer (and I) would argue that though you lack regulative control (if you tried to diverge from the normal path to work, the computer wouldn't let you), but you do have guidance control. Just as in Locke's room and other Frankfurt-style cases, you can be said to have had a certain degree of control over your circumstances, even though you lacked regulative control (and alternative possibilities). Fischer contends that it is only this lesser notion of control that is necessary for moral responsibility, leaving the question of whether or not we actually have regulative control open.

I like this doctrine. It has problems, but I think it is parsimonious enough that a careful formulation will avoid many of them, particularly in light of the fact that it has nothing to say one way or the other about regulative control and alternative possibilities. It does seem to me that the major reason to care about the free will problem is for the sake of moral responsibility, and semicompatibilism shows us that we can be responsible without being truly free.

Some Musings About Free Will

2007-12-18T15:08:00.000-08:00

When I was on my way to work today, I saw a car being pulled by a pickup truck with an attached tow-rope. To keep the car from careening off course, someone was sitting in the driver's seat and turning the steering wheel to keep the wheels aligned with the truck's. Being me, this got me thinking about free will--specifically, about the relationship between freedom and the ability to have done otherwise in any given situation.

Here's the free will problem briefly. As modern humans, we have two competing intuitions that seem to contradict each other. On one hand, we feel as if our actions are free; I feel like I freely chose to sit down and write this blog post, and that I could just as easily have chosen to do something else (my job, for instance). On the other hand, I also know enough modern physics to know that (at least at the level of cars and cats and computers and people), things don't work that way--I know that the behavior of everything is governed by deterministic physical laws, and see no reason to suppose that I, who am really just a complex physical system, should be any more exempt from those laws than (say) a bouncing ball. This idea--that the current state of any physical system is in principle knowable if you know the state immediately preceding it plus the rules affecting it--is known as causal determinism.

So, at least prima facie, it looks like we've got a contradiction here: it seems to us that our actions are totally free, but as good educated society members in the 21st century, we have a hard time seeing how this can be in light of causal determinism. What's the solution to this puzzle? Philosophers, predictably enough, are divided on the answer. Roughly speaking, there are three camps that philosophers tend to fall into: libertarianism, incompatibilism, and compatibilism.

Libertarianism (not to be confused with the equally crazy political ideology) holds that causal determinism is false, and that we (humans) do indeed have free will. I've yet to see a libertarian account that impresses me as much of anything except wishful thinking (they also tend to make pseudoscientific style appeals to quantum mechanics), so I'm not going to give it much consideration here. It could well turn out that libertarianism is the right position, but to know for certain we're going to need to advance physics, biology, and the rest of the natural sciences a lot more.

Incompatibilism (sometimes called "hard incompatibilism" to distinguish it from libertarianism, which is also technically an incompatibilist position) takes the position that freedom of the will and causal determinism are incompatible and that causal determinism is true. To put that symbolically:

~(D & F)
or
(D --> ~F) & (F --> ~D)

Incompatibilism seems significantly more plausible to me than does libertarianism, but it too involves giving up a strongly held intuition--that our actions are free. This certainly doesn't necessarily mean that incompatibilism is wrong (lots of theories with radically counterintuitive implications turn out to be true; see relativity), but the idea that we are free agents is so strongly held (and seems so obviously true from our subjective frame of reference) that I think it warrants some serious investigation before we abandon it.

Some philosophers, investigating this problem, have endorsed a third view--called compatibilism--which dictates that freedom of the will and causal determinism are not contradictory, as they first appear, but can actually coexist. There are almost as many flavors of compatibilism as there are compatibilists (it's probably safe to call this the dominant view among professional philosophers today), so I'm going to be as brief as I can in characterizing the view as a whole. Compatibilists, in general, reject the traditional analysis of freedom (we'll get there in a moment), and instead embrace what's called the "conditional analysis of 'can.'" Briefly, the conditional analysis (CA) goes something like this.

Suppose we have a man--let's call him Bill--who is trying to decide if he should go to work or stay home and watch TV all day. Under the traditionally compatibilist (i.e. CA) account of freedom, it is accurate to say that Bill can go to work, and it is accurate to say that he can stay home all day. So far so good. What compatibilists mean by 'can,' though, is something very specific, namely: "Some agent x can do y iff it is the case that 'If x wanted to y, x would y' is true." That seems complex at first, but the idea is actually fairly intuitive: for any action (say, going to work), it is fair to say "Bill can go to work" if and only if (there's the 'conditional' part of the 'conditional analysis) it is the case that the proposition "If Bill wanted to go to work, Bill would go to work" is true. This maps out fairly nicely onto our colloquial usage of 'can:' I can get up and dance right now (if I wanted to get up and dance right now, I would), but I can't fly to the moon right now (if I wanted to fly to the moon right now, I still wouldn't). This view is compatible with causal determinism because it is entirely possible that my (and Bill's) desires might be the result of a deterministic system, but that does not matter (according to the compatibilists)--even if my desires are deterministic, as long as I act in accord with them (i.e. I am not being coerced, controlled, etc.), then I am acting freely.

There are, of course, problems with this, and I don't think it's entirely satisfactory. I have to leave work now, though, so more tomorrow on my favorite view: semicompatibilism.

Applications Done!

2007-12-17T19:58:00.000-08:00

My graduate school applications for philosophy PhD programs are complete as of today. I applied to (in no particular order):

Berkeley
MIT
NYU
Princeton
Columbia
Chapel Hill
Ann Arbor
Rutgers
Chicago
Washington

Wish me luck...

Kant Attack Ad

2007-12-12T20:42:00.000-08:00

Hat tip to Show-Me the Argument.

A for Atheism

2007-12-09T14:23:00.000-08:00

Written without a dictionary or thesaurus:

Ah ha! Allies and enemies alike: attend with all acumen as an ardent and altogether alethiometric activist for all things accurate and actual allows access to astoundingly allterative advice about appearance and reality. Anxiously, we animals await an awakening explanation according to which our adamant acceptance of an astonishingly inaccurate attitude about all things--an attitude altogether absurd according to which all are made for us--is accepted as accurate and argentine. Apropos, as anti-realism attacks the annals of human achievement, we, as able defenders of actuality, must arise and arrest acidic erosion of our agentive minds! Again, far from ancillary, we must attend to this aggrevating and egregious addition of atrocious abandonment of reality in all active education with able acumen. Accordingly, the only allowance is atheism, an appropriate acceptance of attitudes a bit more attached to actuality, and antipodean to allegiance to a God--there is no acceptable alternative. Alas, as an ardent (albeit allterative) atheist, our activist allows his tongue all astonishing freedom, so let me just add that it is my amazingly good honor to meet you, and you may address me as 'A.'

That is all.

Keeping Half an Eye on Behe

2007-12-04T17:39:00.001-08:00

Decidedly unintelligent intelligent-design proponent Michael Behe has long been one of the loudest voices in the shouting match that the attempt to get supernaturalism into public schools often becomes. Behe, a biochemist at the Lehigh University, is the man responsible for first coining the term "irreducible complexity," which refers to the supposed property of some biological features (both on a micro and macro level) which, Behe thinks, are far too complicated to have evolved by natural selection. Ignoring for the moment that this is a piss-poor argument that amounts to little more than "Well I can't imagine how it could have happened; therefore, God did it!", I'm happy to report that Behe's been dealt a bit of a blow today.

One of Behe's favorite macro examples of an irreducibly complex feature is the human eye which, he claims, is such a marvel of adaptation that it couldn't possibly have come about over time (he likes to point to a quote attributed to Darwin, in which the scientist laments "the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection"); after all, Behe asks, "what good is half an eye?" Now, it seems that scientists have answer that question, and the answer is "better than no eye at all." Researchers at Australian National University, the University of Queensland, and the University of Pennsylvania have, through a cooperative effort, proposed a way in which the vertebrate "camera eye" could plausibly have evolved.

Their research paper is long and full of biological jargon (it's here if you want to read it anyway), but the first paragraph more or less sums up their point:

More than 600 million years ago (Mya), early organisms evolved photoreceptors that were capable of signalling light, and that presumably mediated phototaxis, predator evasion by shadow detection or vertical migration, and the entrainment of circadian rhythms. However, it was not until the Cambrian explosion, beginning around 540 Mya, that animal body plans began evolving very rapidly^2,^3,⁴ and image-forming eyes and visual systems emerged. The possession of advantageous capabilities or attributes, such as sight, rapid movement and armour, might have become crucial to survival, and might have led to an 'arms race' in the development of defensive and offensive mechanisms⁵. In the various phyla eyes evolved with diverse forms, but apparently based on certain common underlying features of patterning and development, as exemplified by genes such as PAX6 and RAX (also known as RX), which have critical roles during neurulation and brain regionalization.

So what good is half an eye? Well, just having a light-sensitive organ (as opposed to the camera-like eye of modern vertebrates) could let you avoid predators (fast moving shadow approaching? Better scoot back under cover!), navigate (Remember, the sun and moon are up!), or know when to go out and feed (No more light outside the shelter? Time to party!).

There's a lot more to this discovery that, while interesting, is beyond the scope (and readership) of this blog. If you want to read more about it, check the study itself! For now, though, suck it, IDers.

Project Prevarication, Part One: Portents of a Perniciously Potent Problem

2007-11-25T19:35:00.000-08:00

I do love alliteration. Last night, a friend of mine and I were drinking and talking, and the subject of relationships came up. Perhaps understandably, the conversation turned from there to talk of lying. My friend told me two stories in which he...let's say "miscommunicated"...information either to someone with whom he was in a relationship or about someone with whom he was in a relationship (we'll get to the stories in a second). My philosopher sense started tickling with both the stories, and we discussed them in relation to the definition of a lie for a while. For much of last night and virtually all of today, I've been preoccupied with the issues we raised last night, and it seems that the more I think about them the stickier the problems become.

In this first post, I just want to lay out the problem as I see it--I want to show that it is sufficiently complex to warrant further investigation. Once that's done, I'll start exploring some of the potential solutions in more depth, and see if I can find a solution that seems satisfactory. For now, though, an introduction to the problem.

Those verbally inclined readers who saw the title will no doubt have deduced that the problem at hand has to do with the lying. Specifically, I'm concerned with doing a conceptual analysis of the notion of a "lie" to see what exactly we mean by that term; I want to investigate what counts as a lie (and what doesn't), and see what those things that count as lies have in common--if we succeed at this task, we'll be in a position to give a tight definition of the concept of a "lie."

Let me start by laying out the two cases my friend told me about. I'm going to call them Case 1 and Case 2.

1. My friend was involved in a long term relationship, but had recently cheated on his partner. His partner became suspicious, and asked him if there was something going on between him and the mistress. My friend responded with a sarcastic tone of voice, saying "Oh yeah, I'm totally sleeping with X." His partner, assuming that the sarcasm indicated that he hadn't really slept with X, was mollified.

2. In another instance, this same friend (this time single) was involved in a relationship that, for various reasons, he wanted to keep under wraps, preferring to give the public impression of a platonic relationship. The girl was coming to stay with him for a weekend, and a third party asked where she planned on sleeping. My friend replied "Well, my couch folds out into a bed, and I have a spare set of sheets." The third party, assuming that his question had been answered, dropped the inquiry.

My question, then, is a relatively simple one: did my friend lie in either case (or in both)? (1) in particular is problematic I think--his literal words were truthful, but their intended purpose was (by his own admission) to give a false impression to his interlocutor. What are we to make of cases like this? Is a lie tied to the actual symbolized semantic content (i.e. words), or to the intention of the speaker? Can one lie with body language? What about (arguably) non-symbolic things like voice inflection or tone?

A few answers to these questions spring to mind, but the more I think about them, the less satisfactory they appear to be. I'm still thinking about this, and will be posting more in the near future. In the meantime, I'd love to hear your thoughts, dear reader.

Signs That the New "Breakthrough" You Read About Might Be Pseudoscience

2007-11-21T01:09:00.000-08:00

My last post got me thinking that it might be useful to come up with a list of signs that the new invention/breakthrough/idea you heard about might be pseudoscience. As I said in the last post, in many instances pseudoscience is coming to take the place of spirituality or mysticism as the leading purveyor of crap. This is not to say that spirituality and mysticism aren't still crap (they most definitely are), just that there's a new kid on the scam artist block, and he's wearing a lab coat that looks suspiciously big on him.

Suppose you turn on the morning news, and see that the world is all atwitter because someone has apparently invented....let's say a cloaking device. Like any normal human being, you're excited about the prospect of invisibility. Before you start planning your grand bank heist, though, you might want to stop and ask yourself if this is for real. There are a few warning signs that you should look for that might point to the conclusion that said cloaking device is (unfortunately) bogus. Here they are:

1. The inventor announced his discovery in the press (or advertisements) before the journals.

This is a good early warning sign, as real scientists will virtually always present a legitimate discovery to the peer-reviewed community before touting that discovery in the public sphere (or trying to sell it). There's good reason for this: if the inventor made a mistake in his measurements, forgot to carry the one in his calculations, or has simply created something that is not reproducible, the peer-review process will catch the mistake before everyone gets all excited about something like free energy. That's one of the reasons the scientific process works so well--new discoveries get scrutinized from every angle before they go into production. Scammers know this--and also know that they've got nothing legitimate to offer--so they will announce their "amazing new product" to the much more credulous mainstream media first.

2. You've never heard of the guy pitching it (and neither has anyone else)

Is the inventor the night janitor at McDonald's? Be skeptical. Of course, there really are unrecognized prodigies out there, and it is within the realm of possibility that some undiscovered genius tinkering in his garage might give the world the flying car, but it is highly unlikely. Perhaps unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that someone without a scientific background is most likely not knowledgeable enough in physics, electrical engineering, chemistry, and other disciplines that would integral in the creation of our cloaking device. Most big discoveries come from people who have dedicated their lives to their discipline, and who have access to the resources (e.g. grad students) necessary to develop groundbreaking new technology.

3. It seems like too big a leap

Would it surprise you to learn that the very first computer had 2 gigs of RAM and a 3.0 GHz CPU? It should, because it's false. The first computer (depending on how you define the term) was either the abacus (~2500 BCE) or Babbage's Analytical Engine (1837) which, though never constructed, paved the way for modern computing in terms of design. The important point is that the modern computer was not invented from scratch overnight, but rather evolved slowly as small improvements on previous designs accrued. Issac Newton famously said of his advancements (e.g. the invention of calculus and the revolution of physics) "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." Newton recognized that his own work built upon centuries of work by others, and most other legitimate inventors recognize the same; be skeptical if someone claims to have invented a cloaking device if you've not seen any prototypes/earlier work he might have built on. Giant steps don't just happen over night.

4. The Inventor won't explain how it work, and won't demonstrate it in public

When asked to explain how his cloaking device works, does Mr. Inventor demur, dodge the question, or simply refuse to explain? That should be another warning sign. Someone with an actual amazing invention to share is going to want to tell everyone about it, describe how it works in detail, and give as many transparent demonstrations as possible--the more people who know about it, the better! If Mr. Inventor really has created a cloaking device, he should be shouting it from the rooftops and showing it off everywhere (the better to win a Nobel Prize). Be wary too of scheduled demonstrations that are called off at the last second because of "technical difficulties," or if Mr. Inventor claims that how his device works is "a secret."

5. The Inventor is willing to explain how it works, but the explanation is full of buzzwords and empty of substance.

This one's a little trickier, and really only applies to those with at least a modicum of scientific understanding (which likely means you, if you're reading this blog). Watch out for inventions whose inner workings are explained with hand-wavy appeals to "quantum mechanics," "electromagnetism" and the like. Just as with Number 1, this has to do with the fact that the average person doesn't know much about science (and knows it), and thus is easily wowed by lots of buzz words. If you're a computer person, you already know this is true: next time someone asks you to fix his computer, try explaining the problem in totally nonsensical (but impressive sounding) terms (e.g. "Well, it looks like your fiber optics are overclocked, which is causing problems in your heat sink. I'll have to defragment your RAM and remagnetize your transistors. This might take a while"). He'll accept it, in just the same way that many people will accept an explanation of a cloaking device along the lines of "It creates quantum electromagnetic inference, which blocks light in the visible spectrum." It does what? That doesn't really make any sense, but if you didn't know that, you might accept it as an explanation. Do a little research, and see if the buzzword heavy statement you saw in TV goes any deeper--if it doesn't, you've probably got a fraud on your hands.

It is worth mentioning that though these signs should make you skeptical, the presence of one (or even more) doesn't necessarily indicate a scam, and a clever scammer might find a way to hawk his product without triggering these warning signs. Be critical, be skeptical, and make up your own mind.

Some Reality Apologetics

2007-11-20T20:22:00.000-08:00

The ostensible purpose of this blog (if you believe the title) is to present a cogent and entertaining defense of reality. In practice, that means that when I see evidence of egregious supernaturalism or magical thinking in the mainstream (Fox News doesn't count), I like to point it out as the poppycock it is. This is particularly important when the hucksters peddling the poppycock in question are using it to prey on the hopes and dreams of the innocent, which brings us to today's post.

Most of the time, supernaturalism of the sort that irritates me (so really any sort) comes in the guise of religion or spirituality. See this post for an example of this. I suppose it can only be expected, though, that given the more scientific and technical nature of modern society, supernaturalism has arisen in another guise--science as magic. This is not terribly new, I guess, as it dates back at least to the proverbial "snake oil" that's been around for centuries, but the level of sophistication has certainly risen; instead of potions and elixirs, now we get quantum entanglement and DNA.

Our lesson for tonight comes in the form of an "invention" built by one Mr. Danie Krugel, an ex-cop from South Africa. This "invention" (and I use the term loosely) is (wait for it) a "quantum DNA-GPS box" that can supposedly locate anyone anywhere in the world if it is fed a strand of hair or a bit of dead skin. Seeing the word "quantum" in an invention's title should immediately set off alarm bells, because it's a beloved moniker of the modern-day shyster; there's so much we don't understand about quantum mechanics (and the average lay-person understands only a fraction of that) that an unscrupulous salesman can explain just about any seemingly magical effect by an appeal to quantum mechanics. Little-understood science, here, has taken the place of little-understood magic.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of how an ex-cop has the know-how to create ANYTHING harnessing quantum mechanics or DNA, let's have a look at how Mr. Krugel's device (supposedly) works. According to him, you insert a sample of the subject's DNA into a little box, it does "something" and then (somehow) uses quantum mechanics to spit out the subject's location in GPS coordinates. Useful? Hell yes. Plausible? Less so. Mr. Krugel has been less than forthcoming about how his device works, which should be another immediate warning sign--if he could really do what he claims, he's be first in line for a Nobel Prize (among many other awards), and so we're forced to ask why he isn't publishing in scientific journals, distributing the device for other scientists to look at, and generally doing all the things that a legitimate inventor with a legitimate (and totally amazing!) invention would be doing.

Thus far, it seems that we've got nothing more than a run-of-the-mill crank on our hands--guy claims to invent something spectacular and revolutionary, demurs when asked to explain how it works, announces a big test of the device, fails to deliver on this promise, and then makes up excuses about why he failed to deliver. This is nothing new (Steorn's free energy machine, anyone?), but what Mr. Krugel is doing with his "technology" is disgustingly novel: he's claiming to be able to find abducted children, then leading their parents on months long treks through Africa, only to have his quarry (who, he assured the parents, was "alive and on the move") discovered very dead in the forest, victim of a snake bite, then reporting the finding as a successful demonstration of his invention. This is, I think it goes without saying, absolutely despicable. Even if Mr. Krugel does not have malicious intent, does he really think that the best place to refine his prototype is in such a high-stakes arena? What about the countless man-hours that might be wasted looking in the wrong place if he is incorrect (as it seems he often is)? Does this man have no conscience?

Questions of morality aside, this device seems to "operate" on some very sketchy science. How does it pinpoint the location of the sample's "sister" DNA? How is it not fooled by the myriad of skin cells and hairs each of us sheds every day? How does a little tiny box extract DNA from a strand of hair, something that generally takes a forensic laboratory and copious amounts of time? Why would DNA exhibit any kind of special quantum interaction? It's just a molecule like any other, and it seems akin to saying "put some salt in this box, and I'll locate all other salt in the universe." Why does it seem to only work once in a while?

Here are a few easy things Mr. Krugel could do to demonstrate that his product is real:

1. Publish. Get a paper in a peer-reviewed journal about how the device works, and let other scientists critique it.

2. Give a public, open, clear demonstration of the device's function. Let's get a random sample of people, have them donate some DNA, and see how close Mr. Krugel's device comes to pinpointing their location. I'd be impressed by a 30% success rate (especially if he could get a location narrowed down to a half-mile radius or less), which is far less than his claimed 90% success rate.

3. Explain to the public how it works. No mystical appeals to mysterious physics, no jargon--just a simple, clear explanation about a new technology. People do it all the time, even with very complex equipment.

Do these three things, Mr. Krugel, and you'll at least have me listening. Until then, I'm pretty sure you're a liar, and quite possibly a horrible human being as well.

Edit: One additionally disappointing thing about this story is the degree to which the media has jumped on the Daine Krugel bandwagon, reporting the story about his working "helping" to find a missing girl with the same dry earnestness you'd expect them to employ when discussing, you know, actual forensic techniques. This, more than anything else, is why shysters like Mr. Krugel pitch their "inventions" to the media rather than the scientific community; normal media is much easier to fool, and much easier to wow with terms like "quantum entanglement."

Hobo Names

2007-11-16T19:53:00.000-08:00

Because it's Friday night, and I'm bored and alone at work, here's some comic relief.

Most of you are undoubtedly familiar with John Hodgman, Daily Show correspondent and "PC" in the "Mac vs. PC" ad campaign. For those not familiar, he's very, very funny and has an amazing gift for timing (which is 90% of comedy). I stumbled today on an hour long MP3 of him reciting (in his usual deadpan) 700 hobo names he made up, while someone else plays a meandering rendition of "Big Rock Candy Mountain" on the guitar in the background. If you, like me, have an hour to kill, I'd highly suggest a listen: some of the names are absolutely hilarious. To whet your appetite, a sampling of some of my favorites:

Stingo the Bandana Origami Prodigy
Thermos H. Christ
Lord Winston Two Monacles
Abraham the Secret Collector of Decorative China
Linny, the Lint Collector
Pa Churchill
The Young Churchill
The Young Curchill's Hated Bride
Gooseberry Johnson, Head Brain of the Hobosphere
Blind Buck, and Woozy the Invisible Seeing Eye Dog
Fake Cockney Accent Allan Strip
Sir Francis Drank
Mariah Duck Face, the Beaked Woman
Shape-shifting Demon
Irving Alva Edison, Inventor of the Hobophone
Pring, Ultra-Lord of the Hobo Jungle
Fourty Nine State Frank, the Alaskaphobe
Panzo the Spiral Cut Ham
Sanford Who Lacks Fingerprints
Hando Whatever That Lizard Is That Walks on Water
El Caballo, The Spanish Steed
Father Christian Irish, the Deep Fat Friar
Bum Hating Virgil Hatebum
Thor the Bum Hammer
Most Agree It's Killpatrick
Myron Biscuit Spear, the Dumpster Archaeologist
Shagrat, Orc of the Ozarks
Unger and his Dust Storm Bride
Rocky Shit Stained Mankowitz
Rocky Shit Stained Mankowitz Part II: The Quickening
Experimental Hobo Infiltration Droid 61-K

I especially like "Sir Francis Drank."

Link.

Philosophy for Kids

2007-11-16T17:41:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of the British Psychological Society's Research Digest Blog comes confirmation of something I've been saying for a long time: philosophy (i.e. advanced conceptual critical thinking skills) ought to be included in any school's curriculum in just the same way that training in math, reading, social studies is. Snip from the digest:

One hundred and five children in the penultimate year of primary school (aged approximately ten years) were given one hour per week of philosophical-inquiry based lessons for 16 months. Compared with 72 control children, the philosophy children showed significant improvements on tests of their verbal, numerical and spatial abilities at the end of the 16-month period relative to their baseline performance before the study.

Now Topping and Trickey [the study authors] have tested the cognitive abilities of the children two years after that earlier study finished, by which time the children were nearly at the end of their second year of secondary school. The children hadn't had any further philosophy-based lessons but the benefits of their early experience of philosophy persisted. The 71 philosophy-taught children who the researchers were able to track down showed the same cognitive test scores as they had done two years earlier.

These ten year olds got one hour per week of philosophical training for a year and a half, and are still seeing "significant gains" (I don't know what that means, because I don't want to pay $18 to read the study--anyone at a university, feel free to look it up and comment). This is even more interesting when you consider that the study also found that, two years later, the control group (those without any philosophical training) had actually declined cognitively, while the study group had continued to gain. Those are rather impressive results.

Critical thinking--the ability to objectively and critically evaluate the statements and arguments of others, form reasoned opinions, and express those opinions clearly and precisely--is an absolutely vital skill these days (even if you're not going to dedicate your life to philosophy), and this is definitely something we should be training our kids in. Who knows--maybe we'll even get a better President out of the deal some day...

Some More Extended Mind Stuff: External Memory

2007-11-15T21:50:00.001-08:00

National Geographic recently ran a feature on memory, highlighting two well-known case studies: "EM" (who has both retrograde and anterograde amenesia as the result of a viral infection that destroyed most of his hippocamus, the part of the brain responsible, among other things, for turning experiences into long-term memories, leaving him in a "spotlight" of consciousness, aware only of his sensations from moment to moment), and "AJ" (who has a hyper-accurate memory, and can recall in detail every day of her life since seventh grade). Additionally, they discuss memory in general, saying the following about the effect of technology on memory:

But over the past millennium, many of us have undergone a profound shift. We've gradually replaced our internal memory with what psychologists refer to as external memory, a vast superstructure of technological crutches that we've invented so that we don't have to store information in our brains. We've gone, you might say, from remembering everything to remembering awfully little. We have photographs to record our experiences, calendars to keep track of our schedules, books (and now the Internet) to store our collective knowledge, and Post-it notes for our scribbles. What have the implications of this outsourcing of memory been for ourselves and for our society? Has something been lost?

My disagreement with the extended mind thesis is documented, but that ontological dispute aside, I'm certainly willing to admit that the average person--even the average educated person--must remember many fewer facts today than 50 or 100 years ago in order to function. This is, as the National Geographic indicates, because the average person has immediate access to much more reliable information than the average person 50 or 100 years ago. Does the fact that the access to information is immediate and trustworthy (with the aid of the appropriate technology) make it memory in anything like the sense of biological memory? No--but that's not my point here. I want to discuss the question raised in the last two sentences of the National Geographic snip above: has something been lost in switch from storing information toward skill at accessing information? Again, I think the answer is a resounding 'no.'

It seems, actually, that something has been gained. The October/November issue of "Scientific American: Mind" magazine includes an article by James R. Flynn about the 'Flynn Effect'--the enormous increase in IQ in the last 100 years. The article notes that "Gains in Full Scale IQ and Raven's [IQ test score] suggest that our parents are some nine to 15 points duller than we are, and that our children [i.e. me and, more than likely, you] are some 9 to 15 points brighter." That would imply that our (i.e. post-baby-boomers') grandparents' generation had an average IQ of around 75--that's mildly mentally retarded by today's standards. I think most people will agree that their grandparents were not mentally handicapped, so it seems that something odd is going on here.

The Scientific American article argues (convincingly, I think) that this paradox is explained by the fact that people today are, from a very young age, trained much more for analysis and data processing than ever before. The obvious question, which I don't think the article satisfactorily addresses, is "why is this the case?". The answer, I think, should be relatively obvious: the fact that I have very easy access to vast information--more information that my grandparents could have dreamed--so long as I know how to access it means that much, much more of my brain is dedicated to skill at accessing and processing data compared to my grandparents, who had to dedicate substantial portions of their brains to storage of data.

Again, I think the question of whether or not my skill at using Google constitutes memory (it doesn't) is irrelevant to this discussion: the point is that the fact that I know I can access virtually any fact virtually whenever I want means that I don't have to remember, say, the formula for the area of a pyramid. Instead, I can spend the effort that I might have spent to memorize all those facts toward increasing my critical thinking skills--again, which is what IQ tests primarily measure.

Access to information has increased at an amazing rate even within my (relatively short) lifetime, and I suspect that it will continue to increase as technology advances. It is interesting to consider how human intelligence will advance in kind.

Freerice.com

2007-11-13T18:41:00.001-08:00

I'm a big fan of vocabulary use, and I'm a big fan of people not starving to death. Thus, I'm a very big fan of http://www.freerice.com. The project, run by the same folks that run http://www.poverty.com is the sort of thing that makes you wonder "why didn't I think of this?"

The crux of the site is a multiple choice vocabulary quiz--you'll be given a word and four choices for the definition, then asked to pick the correct one. For every word you correctly define, FreeRice will donate 10 grains of rice to the UN's End World Hunger campaign. Ten grains may not seem like much, but it adds up rather quickly; correctly define ten words, and you've donated a bowl of rice that will feed one person.

The game has 50 "levels," and dynamically scales as you progress; when you miss a few questions in a row, it dials itself back a difficulty level, and when you get a few questions right in a row, it bumps the difficulty up. According to the website, it is "very rare" for people to get past level 48. My current record stands at 46 47, so I urge you to go to the website and try to beat me (oh, and feed some people while you're at it).

New Look

2007-11-12T23:15:00.000-08:00

How do you like the new look? Thanks to my kick-ass friend Brian (who, sadly, has no blog to link to) for making the header graphic!

No Really, Democrats Are Different (Somehow...Maybe)

2007-11-12T17:59:00.000-08:00

I hope everyone's getting excited for the approaching National Bible Week (November 18th--one week from today!). Congress certainly is, as evidenced by this gut-wrenching parade of Democrats taking up actual Congressional time to talk about how awesome a 2000+ year old piece of poorly written fiction is. Watch the video (care of Shakesville), but maybe take an anti-emetic first:

The Democrats like to talk about being the party of reason and intellect (opposing themselves to those dirty irrational Republicans), but every now and then something like this comes along to expose that for the egregious lie it is. How is it possible that in the 21st century, with all the problems of war, terrorism, global climate change, unemployment, and more war, these leaders of the Democratic party think that it's acceptable to take up any Congressional time to praise this garbage?

PZ Meyers over at Pharyngula takes this opportunity to ask "Can We Form a Rationalist Party Now?", a dream that I certainly share. However, Alonzo Fyfe, the Atheist Ethicist, points out that this might not be the best idea. Snip:

Assume, for the sake of argument, that rationalists tend to support Democrats over Republicans. If a Rationalist Party removes the rationalist vote from the Democratic Party, the Democratic candidates are going to have to make up those votes somehow. The only option is to embrace theocracy even more strongly than it has in the past, in order to seduce a larger percentage of theocratic voters out of the Republican Party. The result is to drive both major parties (the only parties capable of fielding viable candidates) even closer to theocracy.

This is a real danger, as we saw in the 2000 election with the Green Party--in a two party system, mobilizing any relatively large minority group (as rationalist voters would be) always runs the risk of simply making them not count. As Alonzo points out, the magic number in the American system is 51%; anything lower than that and you might as well not exist. This, of course, isn't true across the board, but at a national scale it is more or less the case. Our system, in contrast to other democracies (e.g. the UK) is a winner-take-all two party system: it doesn't matter who came in second or third--only the winning party counts. Unfortunately, that means that even if the Green Party (or the Rationalist Party) makes a very good showing, they don't win anything.

So what's the answer? In the long run, election reform; the system in the United States is outdated and in need of several serious overhauls. In the short term, I suspect that Alonzo is correct in that Rationalist Voters should focus on establishing a "Rationalist Caucus" within the Democratic party rather than a "Rationalist Party" itself. In other words, the best option is to try to steer the Democrats away from blindly endorsing superstition (as they are on that video) and toward recognizing that a substantial number of their constituents are not impressed when they profess to blindly accept the false beliefs of people long dead.

Oh, and how about a "National Constitution Week" to go with that National Bible Week?

Slow...

2007-11-06T22:56:00.001-08:00

I haven't abandoned this blog, there just haven't really been any items I've felt like commenting on recently. Things will pick up again--they always do...

Brain Bag

2007-11-01T18:59:00.001-07:00

Every now and then, I wish it were socially acceptable for me to carry a purse. Now is one of those times, given the design of Jun Takashi's new handbag:

Kick. Ass.

Linky.

(Hat-tip to BoingBoing)