brain

Are eliminativists zombies?

PNRJ cognitive science , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 19 JDN 2460450

There are lots of little variations, but basically all views on the philosophy of mind boil down to four possibilities:

  1. Dualism: Mind and body are two separate types of thing
  2. Monism: Mind and body are the same type of thing
  3. Idealism: Only mind exists; body isn’t real
  4. Eliminativism: Only body exists; mind isn’t real

Like most philosophers and cognitive scientists, I am a die-hard monist, specifically a physicalist: The mind and the body are the same type of thing. Indeed, they are parts of the same physical system.

I call it the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science, which so many fail to understand at their own peril:

You are your brain.

You are not a product of your brain; you are not an illusion created by your brain; you are not connected to your brain. You are your brain. Your consciousness is generated by the activity of your brain.

Understanding how this works is beyond current human knowledge. I ask only that you understand that it works. Treat it as a brute fact of the universe if you must.

But precisely because understanding this mechanism is so difficult it has been aptly dubbed The Hard Problem, I am at least somewhat sympathetic to dualists, who say that the reason we can’t understand how the mind and brain are the same is that they aren’t, that there is some extra thing, the soul, which somehow makes consciousness and isn’t made of any material substance.

(If you want to get into the weeds a bit more, there are also “property dualists”, who try to bridge the gap between dualism and physicalism, but I think they are trying to have their cake and eat it too. So-called “predicate dualism” is really just physicalism; nobody says that tables or hurricanes are non-physical just because they are multiply-realizable.)

The problem, of course, is that dualism doesn’t actually explain anything. In fact, it adds a bunch of other mysteries that would then need to be explained, because there are clear, direct ways that consciousness interacts with physical matter. Affecting the body affects the mind, and vice-versa.

You don’t need anything as exotic as fMRI or brain injury studies to understand this. All you need to do is take a drug. In fact, all you need to do is get hungry and eat food. Eating food—obviously a physical process—makes you no longer hungry—a change in your conscious state. And the reason you ate food in the first place was because you were hungry—your mental state intervened on your bodily action.

The fact that mind and body are deeply connected is therefore an obvious fact, which should have been apparent to anyone throughout history. It doesn’t require any kind of deep scientific knowledge; all you have to do is pay close enough attention to your ordinary life.

But I can at least understand the temptation to be a dualist. Consciousness is weird and mysterious. It’s tempting to posit some whole new class of substance beyond anything we know in order to explain it.

Then there’s idealism, which theoretically, in principle, could be true—it’s just absurdly, vanishingly unlikely. Technically, all that I experience, qua experience, happens in my mind. So I can’t completely rule out the possibility that everything I think of as physical reality is actually just an illusion, and only my mind exists. It’s just that, well… the whole of my experience points pretty strongly to this not being the case. At the very least, it’s utterly impractical to live your life according to such a remote possibility.

That leaves eliminativism. And this, I confess, is the one I really don’t get.

Idealism, I can’t technically rule out; dualism, I understand the temptation; monism is in fact the truth. But eliminativism? I just can’t grok how anyone can actually believe it.

Then again, I think they sort of admit that.

The weirdest thing about eliminativism is that what they are actually saying is that things like beliefs and knowledge and feelings don’t actually exist.

If you ask an eliminativist if they believe eliminativism is true, they should answer “no”: because their assertion is precisely that nobody believes anything at all.

The more sophisticated eliminativists say that these “folk terms” are rough approximations to deeper concepts that cognitive science will someday understand. That’s not so ridiculous, but it still seems pretty bizarre to me to say that iron doesn’t exist because we now understand that an iron atom has precisely 26 protons. Perhaps indeed we will understand the mechanisms underlying beliefs better than we do now; but why would we need to stop calling them beliefs?

But some eliminativists—particularly behaviorists—seem to think that the these “folk terms” are just stupid, unscientific notions that will be one day discarded the same way that phlogiston and elan vital were discarded. And that I absolutely cannot fathom.

Consciousness isn’t an explanation; it is what we were trying to explain.

You can’t just discardthe phenomenonyou were trying to make sense of! This isn’t giving up on phlogiston; it’s giving up on fire. This isn’t abandoning the notion of elan vital; it’s abandoning the distinction between life and death.

But the more I think about this, the more I wonder:

Maybe eliminativists are right—about themselves?

Maybe the reason they think the rest of us don’t have feelings and beliefs is that they actually don’t. They don’t understand all this talk about the inner light of consciousness, because they just don’t have it.

In other words:

Are eliminativists zombies?

No, not the shambling, “Brains! Brains!” kind of zombie; the philosophical concept of a zombie (sometimes written “p-zombie” to clarify). A zombie is a being that looks human, acts human, is externally indistinguishable from a human, yet has no internal experience. They walk and talk, but they don’t actually think. A zombie acts like us, but lacks the inner light of consciousness.

Of course, what I’d really be saying here is that they are almost indistinguishable, but you can sometimes tell them apart by their babbling about the non-existence of consciousness.

But really, almost indistinguishable makes more sense anyway; if they were literally impossible to tell apart under any conceivable test, it’s difficult to even make sense of what we mean when we say they are different. (I am certainly not the first to point this out, and indeed it’s often used as an argument against the existence of zombies.)

Do I actually think that eliminativists are zombies?

No. I don’t.

But the weird thing is that they seem to, and so I feel some compulsion to let them self-identify that way. It feels wrong to attribute beliefs to someone that they say they don’t actually hold, and eliminativists have said that they don’t hold any beliefs whatsoever.

Yet, somehow, I don’t think they’ll appreciate being called zombies, either.

Love is more than chemicals

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 18 JDN 2460360

One of the biggest problems with the rationalist community is an inability to express sincerity and reverence.

I get it: Religion is the world’s greatest source of sincerity and reverence, and religion is the most widespread and culturally important source of irrationality. So we declare ourselves enemies of religion, and also end up being enemies of sincerity and reverence.

But in doing so, we lose something very important. We cut ourselves off from some of the greatest sources of meaning and joy in human life.

In fact, we may even be undermining our own goals: If we don’t offer people secular, rationalist forms of reverence, they may find they need to turn back to religion in order to fill that niche.

One of the most pernicious forms of this anti-sincerity, anti-reverence attitude (I can’t just say ‘insincere’ or ‘irreverent’, as those have different meanings) is surely this one:

Love is just a chemical reaction.

(I thought it seemed particularly apt to focus on this one during the week of Valentine’s Day.)

On the most casual of searches I could find at least half a dozen pop-sci articles and a YouTube video propounding this notion (though I could also find a few articles trying to debunk the notion as well).

People who say this sort of thing seem to think that they are being wise and worldly while the rest of us are just being childish and naive. They think we are seeing something that isn’t there. In fact, they are being jaded and cynical. They are failing to see something that is there.

(Perhaps the most extreme form of this was from Rick & Morty; and while Rick as a character is clearly intended to be jaded and cynical, far too many people also see him as a role model.)

Part of the problem may also be a failure to truly internalize the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science:

You are your brain.

No, your consciousness is not an illusion. It’s not an “epiphenomenon” (whatever that is—I’ve never encountered one in real life). Your mind is not fake or imaginary. Your mind actually exists—and it is a product of your brain. Both brain and mind exist, and are in fact the same.

It’s so hard for people to understand this that some become dualists, denying the unity of the brain and the mind. That, at least, I can sympathize with, even though we have compelling evidence that it is wrong. But there’s another tack people sometimes take, eliminative materialism, where they try to deny that the mind exists at all. And that I truly do not understand. How can you think that nobody can think? Yet intelligent, respected philosophers have claimed to believe such things.

Love is one of the most important parts of our lives.

This may be more true of humans than of literally any other entity in the known universe.

The only serious competition comes from other mammals: They are really the only other beings we know of that are capable of love. And even they don’t seem to be as good at it as we are; they can love only those closest to them, while we can love entire nations and even abstract concepts.

And once you go beyond that, even to reptiles—let alone fish, or amphibians, or insects, or molluscs—it’s not clear that other animals are really capable of love at all. They seem to be capable of some forms of thought and feeling: They get hungry, or angry, or horny. But do they really love?

And even the barest emotional capacities of an insect are still categorically beyond what most of the universe is capable of feeling, which is to say: Nothing. The vast, vast majority of the universe feels neither love nor hate, neither joy nor pain.

Yet humans can love, and do love, and it is a large part of what gives our lives meaning.

I don’t just mean romantic love here, though I do think it’s worth noting that people who dismiss the reality of romantic love somehow seem reluctant to do the same for the love parents have for their children—even though it’s made of pretty much the same brain chemicals. Perhaps there is a limit to their cynicism.

Yes, love is made of chemicals—because everything is made of chemicals. We live in a material, chemical universe. Saying that love is made of chemicals is an almost completely vacuous statement; it’s basically tantamount to saying that love exists.

In other contexts, you already understand this.

“That’s not a bridge, it’s just a bunch of iron atoms!” rightfully strikes you as an absurd statement to make. Yes, the bridge is made of steel, and steel is mostly iron, and everything is made of atoms… but clearly there’s a difference between a random pile of iron and a bridge.

“That’s not a computer, it’s just a bunch of silicon atoms!” similarly registers as nonsense: Yes, it is indeed mostly made of silicon, but beach sand and quartz crystals are not computers.

It is in this same sense that joy is made of dopamine and love is made of chemical reactions. Yes, those are in fact the constituent parts—but things are more than just their parts.

I think that on some level, even most rationalists recognize that love is more than some arbitrary chemical reaction. I think “love is just chemicals” is mainly something people turn to for a couple of reasons: Sometimes, they are so insistent on rejecting everything that even resembles religious belief that they end up rejecting all meaning and value in human life. Other times, they have been so heartbroken, that they try to convince themselves love isn’t real—to dull the pain. (But of course if it weren’t, there would be no pain to dull.)

But love is no more (or less) a chemical reaction than any other human experience: The very belief “love is just a chemical reaction” is, itself, made of chemical reactions.

Everything we do is made of chemical reactions, because we are made of chemical reactions.

Part of the problem here—and with the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science in general—is that we really have no idea how this works. For most of what we deal with in daily life, and even an impressive swath of the overall cosmos, we have a fairly good understanding of how things work. We know how cars drive, how wind blows, why rain falls; we even know how cats purr and why birds sing. But when it comes to understanding how the physical matter of the brain generates the subjective experiences of thought, feeling, and belief—of which love is made—we lack even the most basic understanding. The correlation between the two is far too strong to deny; but as far as causal mechanisms, we know absolutely nothing. (Indeed, worse than that: We can scarcely imagine a causal mechanism that would make any sense. We not only don’t know the answer; we don’t know what an answer would look like.)

So, no, I can’t tell you how we get from oxytocin and dopamine to love. I don’t know how that makes any sense. No one does. But we do know it’s true.

And just like everything else, love is more than the chemicals it’s made of.

Compassion and the cosmos

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 24 JDN 2460304

When this post goes live, it will be Christmas Eve, one of the most important holidays around the world.

Ostensibly it celebrates the birth of Jesus, but it doesn’t really.

For one thing, Jesus almost certainly wasn’t born in December. The date of Christmas was largely set by the Council of Tours in AD 567; it was set to coincide with existing celebrations—not only other Christian celebrations such as the Feast of the Epiphany, but also many non-Christian celebrations such as Yuletide, Saturnalia, and others around the Winter Solstice. (People today often say “Yuletide” when they actually mean Christmas, because the syncretization was so absolute.)

For another, an awful lot of the people celebrating Christmas don’t particularly care about Jesus. Countries like Sweden, Belgium, the UK, Australia, Norway, and Denmark are majority atheist but still very serious about Christmas. Maybe we should try to secularize and ecumenize the celebration and call it Solstice or something, but that’s a tall order. For now, it’s Christmas.

Compassion, love, and generosity are central themes of Christmas—and, by all accounts, Jesus did exemplify those traits. Christianity has a very complicated history, much of it quite dark; but this part of it at least seems worth preserving and even cherishing.

It is truly remarkable that we have compassion at all.

Most of this universe has no compassion. Many would like to believe otherwise, and they invent gods and other “higher beings” or attribute some sort of benevolent “universal consciousness” to the cosmos. (Really, most people copy the prior inventions of others.)

This is all wrong.

The universe is mostly empty, and what is here is mostly pitilessly indifferent.

The vast majority of the universe is comprised of cold, dark, empty space—or perhaps of “dark energy“, a phenomenon we really don’t understand at all, which many physicists believe is actually a shockingly powerful form of energy contained within empty space.

Most of the rest is made up of “dark matter“, a substance we still don’t really understand either, but believe to be basically a dense sea of particles that have mass but not much else, which cluster around other mass by gravity but otherwise rarely interact with other matter or even with each other.

Most of the “ordinary matter”, or more properly baryonic matter, (which we think of as ordinary, but actually by far the minority) is contained within stars and nebulae. It is mostly hydrogen and helium. Some of the other lighter elements—like lithium, sodium, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and all the way up to iron—can be made within ordinary stars, but still form a tiny fraction of the mass of the universe. Anything heavier than that—silver, gold, beryllium, uranium—can only be made in exotic, catastrophic cosmic events, mainly supernovae, and as a result these elements are even rarer still.

Most of the universe is mind-bendingly cold: about 3 Kelvin, just barely above absolute zero.

Most of the baryonic matter is mind-bendingly hot, contained within stars that burn with nuclear fires at thousands or even millions of Kelvin.

From a cosmic perspective, we are bizarre.

We live at a weird intermediate temperature and pressure, where matter can take on such exotic states as liquid and solid, rather than the far more common gas and plasma. We do contain a lot of hydrogen—that, at least, is normal by the standards of baryonic matter. But then we’re also made up of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and even little bits of all sorts of other elements that can only be made in supernovae? What kind of nonsense lifeform depends upon something as exotic as iodine to survive?

Most of the universe does not care at all about you.

Most of the universe does not care about anything.

Stars don’t burn because they want to. They burn because that’s what happens when hydrogen slams into other hydrogen hard enough.

Planets don’t orbit because they want to. They orbit because if they didn’t, they’d fly away or crash into their suns—and those that did are long gone now.

Even most living things, which are already nearly as bizarre as we are, don’t actually care much.

Maybe there is a sense in which a C. elegans or an oak tree or even a cyanobacterium wants to live. It certainly seems to try to live; it has behaviors that seem purposeful, which evolved to promote its ability to survive and pass on offspring. Rocks don’t behave. Stars don’t seek. But living things—even tiny, microscopic living things—do.

But we are something very special indeed.

We are animals. Lifeforms with complex, integrated nervous systems—in a word, brains—that allow us to not simply live, but to feel. To hunger. To fear. To think. To choose.

Animals—and to the best of our knowledge, only animals, though I’m having some doubts about AI lately—are capable of making choices and experiencing pleasure and pain, and thereby becoming something more than living beings: moral beings.

Because we alone can choose, we alone have the duty to choose rightly.

Because we alone can be hurt, we alone have the right to demand not to be.

Humans are even very special among animals. We are not just animals but chordates; not just chordates but mammals; not just mammals but primates. And even then, not just primates. We’re special even by those very high standards.

When you count up all the ways that we are strange compared to the rest of the universe, it seems incredibly unlikely that beings like us would come into existence at all.

Yet here we are. And however improbable it may have been for us to emerge as intelligent beings, we had to do so in order to wonder how improbable it was—and so in some sense we shouldn’t be too surprised.

It is a mistake to say that we are “more evolved” than any other lifeform; turtles and cockroaches had just as much time to evolve as we did, and if anything their relative stasis for hundreds of millions of years suggests a more perfected design: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

But we are different than other lifeforms in a very profound way. And I dare say, we are better.

All animals feel pleasure, pain and hunger. (Some believe that even some plants and microscopic lifeforms may too.) Pain when something damages you; hunger when you need something; pleasure when you get what you needed.

But somewhere along the way, new emotions were added: Fear. Lust. Anger. Sadness. Disgust. Pride. To the best of our knowledge, these are largely chordate emotions, often believed to have emerged around the same time as reptiles. (Does this mean that cephalopods never get angry? Or did they evolve anger independently? Surely worms don’t get angry, right? Our common ancestor with cephalopods was probably something like a worm, perhaps a nematode. Does C. elegans get angry?)

And then, much later, still newer emotions evolved. These ones seem to be largely limited to mammals. They emerged from the need for mothers to care for their few and helpless young. (Consider how a bear or a cat fiercely protects her babies from harm—versus how a turtle leaves her many, many offspring to fend for themselves.)

One emotion formed the core of this constellation:

Love.

Caring, trust, affection, and compassion—and also rejection, betrayal, hatred, and bigotry—all came from this one fundamental capacity to love. To care about the well-being of others as well as our own. To see our purpose in the world as extending beyond the borders of our own bodies.

This is what makes humans different, most of all. We are the beings most capable of love.

We are of course by no means perfect at it. Some would say that we are not even very good at loving.

Certainly there are some humans, such as psychopaths, who seem virtually incapable of love. But they are rare.

We often wish that we were better at love. We wish that there were more compassion in the world, and fear that humanity will destroy itself because we cannot find enough compassion to compensate for our increasing destructive power.

Yet if we are bad at love, compared to what?

Compared to the unthinking emptiness of space, the hellish nuclear fires of stars, or even the pitiless selfishness of a worm or a turtle, we are absolute paragons of love.

We somehow find a way to love millions of others who we have never even met—maybe just a tiny bit, and maybe even in a way that becomes harmful, as solidarity fades into nationalism fades into bigotry—but we do find a way. Through institutions of culture and government, we find a way to trust and cooperate on a scale that would be utterly unfathomable even to the most wise and open-minded bonobo, let alone a nematode.

There are no other experts on compassion here. It’s just us.

Maybe that’s why so many people long for the existence of gods. They feel as ignorant as children, and crave the knowledge and support of a wise adult. But there aren’t any. We’re the adults. For all the vast expanses of what we do not know, we actually know more than anyone else. And most of the universe doesn’t know a thing.

If we are not as good at loving as we’d like, the answer is for us to learn to get better at it.

And we know that we can get better at it, because we have. Humanity is more peaceful and cooperative now than we have ever been in our history. The process is slow, and sometimes there is backsliding, but overall, life is getting better for most people in most of the world most of the time.

As a species, as a civilization, we are slowly learning how to love ourselves, one another, and the rest of the world around us.

No one else will learn to love for us. We must do it ourselves.

But we can.

And I believe we will.

Lamentations of a temporary kludge

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles , , , , , , , ,

Dec 17 JDN 2460297

Most things in the universe are just that—things. They consist of inanimate matter, blindly following the trajectories the laws of physics have set them on. (Actually, most of the universe may not even be matter—at our current best guess, most of the universe is mysterious “dark matter” and even more mysterious “dark energy”).

Then there are the laws: The fundamental truths of physics and mathematics are omnipresent and eternal. They could even be called omniscient, in the sense that all knowledge which could ever be conveyed must itself be possible to encode in physics and mathematics. (Could, in some metaphysical sense, knowledge exist that cannot be conveyed this way? Perhaps, but if so, we’ll never know nor even be able to express it.)

The reason physics and mathematics cannot simply be called God is twofold: One, they have no minds of their own; they do not think. Two, they do not care. They have no capacity for concern whatsoever, no desires, no goals. Mathematics seeks neither your fealty nor your worship, and physics will as readily destroy you as reward you. If the eternal law is a god, it is a mindless, pitilessly indifferent god—a Blind Idiot God.

But we are something special, something in between. We are matter, yes; but we are also pattern. Indeed, what makes me me and makes you you has far more to do with the arrangement of trillions of parts than it does with any particular material. The atoms in your body are being continually replaced, and you barely notice. But should the pattern ever be erased, you would be no more.

In fact, we are not simply one pattern, but many. We are a kludge: Billions of years of random tinkering has assembled us from components that each emerged millions of years apart. We could move before we could see; we could see before we could think; we could think before we could speak. All this evolution was mind-bogglingly gradual: In most cases it would be impossible to tell the difference one generation—or even one century—to the next. Yet as raindrops wear away mountains, one by one, we were wrought from mindless fragments of chemicals into beings of thought, feeling, reason—beings with hopes, fears, and dreams.

Much of what makes our lives difficult ultimately comes from these facts.

Our different parts were not designed to work together. Indeed, they were not really designed at all. Each component survived because it worked well enough to stay alive in the environment in which our ancestors lived. We often find ourselves in conflict with our own desires, in part because those desires evolved for very different environments than the ones we now find ourselves—and in part because there is no particular reason for evolution to avoid conflict, so long as survival is achieved.

As patterns, we can experience the law. We can write down equations that express small pieces of the fundamental truths that exist throughout the universe beyond space and time. From “2+2=4” to “Gμν + Λgμν = κTμν“, through mathematics, we glimpse eternity.

But as matter, we are doomed to suffer, degrade, and ultimately die. Our pattern cannot persist forever. Perhaps one day we will find a way to change this—and if that day comes, it will be a glorious day; I will make no excuses for the dragon. For now, at least, it is a truth that we must face: We, all we love, and all we build must one day perish.

That is, we are not simply a kludge; we are a temporary one. Sooner or later, our bodies will fail and our pattern will be erased. What we were made of may persist, but in a form that will no longer be us, and in time, may become indistinguishable from all the rest of the universe.

We are flawed, for the same reason that a crystal is flawed. A theoretical crystal can be flawless and perfect; but a real, physical one must exist in an actual world where it will suffer impurities and disturbances that keep it from ever truly achieving perfect unity and symmetry. We can imagine ourselves as perfect beings, but our reality will always fall short.

We lament that are not perfect, eternal beings. Yet I am not sure it could have been any other way: Perhaps one must be a temporary kludge in order to be a being at all.

Hypocrisy is underrated

PNRJ cognitive science, ethics, heuristics and biases, politics , , , , , , ,

Sep 12 JDN 2459470

Hypocrisy isn’t a good thing, but it isn’t nearly as bad as most people seem to think. Often accusing someone of hypocrisy is taken as a knock-down argument for everything they are saying, and this is just utterly wrong. Someone can be a hypocrite and still be mostly right.

Often people are accused of hypocrisy when they are not being hypocritical; for instance the right wing seems to think that “They want higher taxes on the rich, but they are rich!” is hypocrisy, when in fact it’s simply altruism. (If they had wanted the rich guillotined, that would be hypocrisy. Maybe the problem is that the right wing can’t tell the difference?) Even worse, “They live under capitalism but they want to overthrow capitalism!” is not even close to hypocrisy—let alone why, how would someone overthrow a system they weren’t living under? (There are many things wrong with Marxists, but that is not one of them.)

But in fact I intend something stronger: Hypocrisy itself just isn’t that bad.


There are currently two classes of Republican politicians with regard to the COVID vaccines: Those who are consistent in their principles and don’t get the vaccines, and those who are hypocrites and get the vaccines while telling their constituents not to. Of the two, who is better? The hypocrites. At least they are doing the right thing even as they say things that are very, very wrong.

There are really four cases to consider. The principles you believe in could be right, or they could be wrong. And you could follow those principles, or you could be a hypocrite. Each of these two factors is independent.

If your principles are right and you are consistent, that’s the best case; if your principles are right and you are a hypocrite, that’s worse.

But if your principles are wrong and you are consistent, that’s the worst case; if your principles are wrong and you are a hypocrite, that’s better.

In fact I think for most things the ordering goes like this: Consistent Right > Hypocritical Wrong > Hypocritical Right > Consistent Wrong. Your behavior counts for more than your principles—so if you’re going to be a hypocrite, it’s better for your good actions to not match your bad principles.

Obviously if we could get people to believe good moral principles and then follow them, that would be best. And we should in fact be working to achieve that.

But if you know that someone’s moral principles are wrong, it doesn’t accomplish anything to accuse them of being a hypocrite. If it’s true, that’s a good thing.

Here’s a pretty clear example for you: Anyone who says that the Bible is infallible but doesn’t want gay people stoned to death is a hypocrite. The Bible is quite clear on this matter; Leviticus 20:13 really doesn’t leave much room for interpretation. By this standard, most Christians are hypocrites—and thank goodness for that. I owe my life to the hypocrisy of millions.

Of course if I could convince them that the Bible isn’t infallible—perhaps by pointing out all the things it says that contradict their most deeply-held moral and factual beliefs—that would be even better. But the last thing I want to do is make their behavior more consistent with their belief that the Bible is infallible; that would turn them into fanatical monsters. The Spanish Inquisition was very consistent in behaving according to the belief that the Bible is infallible.

Here’s another example: Anyone who thinks that cruelty to cats and dogs is wrong but is willing to buy factory-farmed beef and ham is a hypocrite. Any principle that would tell you that it’s wrong to kick a dog or cat would tell you that the way cows and pigs are treated in CAFOs is utterly unconscionable. But if you are really unwilling to give up eating meat and you can’t find or afford free-range beef, it still would be bad for you to start kicking dogs in a display of your moral consistency.

And one more example for good measure: The leaders of any country who resist human rights violations abroad but tolerate them at home are hypocrites. Obviously the best thing to do would be to fight human rights violations everywhere. But perhaps for whatever reason you are unwilling or unable to do this—one disturbing truth is that many human rights violations at home (such as draconian border policies) are often popular with your local constituents. Human-rights violations abroad are also often more severe—detaining children at the border is one thing, a full-scale genocide is quite another. So, for good reasons or bad, you may decide to focus your efforts on resisting human rights violations abroad rather than at home; this would make you a hypocrite. But it would still make you much better than a more consistent leader who simply ignores all human rights violations wherever they may occur.

In fact, there are cases in which it may be optimal for you to knowingly be a hypocrite. If you have two sets of competing moral beliefs, and you don’t know which is true but you know that as a whole they are inconsistent, your best option is to apply each set of beliefs in the domain for which you are most confident that it is correct, while searching for more information that might allow you to correct your beliefs and reconcile the inconsistency. If you are self-aware about this, you will know that you are behaving in a hypocritical way—but you will still behave better than you would if you picked the wrong beliefs and stuck to them dogmatically. In fact, given a reasonable level of risk aversion, you’ll be better off being a hypocrite than you would by picking one set of beliefs arbitrarily (say, at the flip of a coin). At least then you avoid the worst-case scenario of being the most wrong.

There is yet another factor to take into consideration. Sometimes following your own principles is hard.

Considerable ink has been spilled on the concept of akrasia, or “weakness of will”, in which we judge that A is better than B yet still find ourselves doing B. Philosophers continue to debate to this day whether this really happens. As a behavioral economist, I observe it routinely, perhaps even daily. In fact, I observe it in myself.

I think the philosophers’ mistake is to presume that there is one simple, well-defined “you” that makes all observations and judgments and takes actions. Our brains are much more complicated than that. There are many “you”s inside your brain, each with its own capacities, desires, and judgments. Yes, there is some important sense in which they are all somehow unified into a single consciousness—by a mechanism which still eludes our understanding. But it doesn’t take esoteric cognitive science to see that there are many minds inside you: Haven’t you ever felt an urge to do something you knew you shouldn’t do? Haven’t you ever succumbed to such an urge—drank the drink, eaten the dessert, bought the shoes, slept with the stranger—when it seemed so enticing but you knew it wasn’t really the right choice?

We even speak of being “of two minds” when we are ambivalent about something, and I think there is literal truth in this. The neural networks in your brain are forming coalitions, and arguing between them over which course of action you ought to take. Eventually one coalition will prevail, and your action will be taken; but afterward your reflective mind need not always agree that the coalition which won the vote was the one that deserved to.

The evolutionary reason for this is simple: We’re a kludge. We weren’t designed from the top down for optimal efficiency. We were the product of hundreds of millions of years of subtle tinkering, adding a bit here, removing a bit there, layering the mammalian, reflective cerebral cortex over the reptilian, emotional limbic system over the ancient, involuntary autonomic system. Combine this with the fact that we are built in pairs, with left and right halves of each kind of brain (and yes, they are independently functional when their connection is severed), and the wonder is that we ever agree with our own decisions.

Thus, there is a kind of hypocrisy that is not a moral indictment at all: You may genuinely and honestly agree that it is morally better to do something and still not be able to bring yourself to do it. You may know full well that it would be better to donate that money to malaria treatment rather than buy yourself that tub of ice cream—you may be on a diet and full well know that the ice cream won’t even benefit you in the long run—and still not be able to stop yourself from buying the ice cream.

Sometimes your feeling of hesitation at an altruistic act may be a useful insight; I certainly don’t think we should feel obliged to give all our income, or even all of our discretionary income, to high-impact charities. (For most people I encourage 5%. I personally try to aim for 10%. If all the middle-class and above in the First World gave even 1% we could definitely end world hunger.) But other times it may lead you astray, make you unable to resist the temptation of a delicious treat or a shiny new toy when even you know the world would be better off if you did otherwise.

Yet when following our own principles is so difficult, it’s not really much of a criticism to point out that someone has failed to do so, particularly when they themselves already recognize that they failed. The inconsistency between behavior and belief indicates that something is wrong, but it may not be any dishonesty or even anything wrong with their beliefs.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say you should stop ever calling out hypocrisy. Sometimes it is clearly useful to do so. But while hypocrisy is often the sign of a moral failing, it isn’t always—and even when it is, often as not the problem is the bad principles, not the behavior inconsistent with them.

Mental illness is different from physical illness.

PNRJ cognitive science, personal , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Post 311 Oct 13 JDN 2458770

There’s something I have heard a lot of people say about mental illness that is obviously well-intentioned, but ultimately misguided: “Mental illness is just like physical illness.”

Sometimes they say it explicitly in those terms. Other times they make analogies, like “If you wouldn’t shame someone with diabetes for using insulin, why shame someone with depression for using SSRIs?”

Yet I don’t think this line of argument will ever meaningfully reduce the stigma surrounding mental illness, because, well, it’s obviously not true.

There are some characteristics of mental illness that are analogous to physical illness—but there are some that really are quite different. And these are not just superficial differences, the way that pancreatic disease is different from liver disease. No one would say that liver cancer is exactly the same as pancreatic cancer; but they’re both obviously of the same basic category. There are differences between physical and mental illness which are both obvious, and fundamental.

Here’s the biggest one: Talk therapy works on mental illness.

You can’t talk yourself out of diabetes. You can’t talk yourself out of myocardial infarct. You can’t even talk yourself out of migraine (though I’ll get back to that one in a little bit). But you can, in a very important sense, talk yourself out of depression.

In fact, talk therapy is one of the most effective treatments for most mental disorders. Cognitive behavioral therapy for depression is on its own as effective as most antidepressants (with far fewer harmful side effects), and the two combined are clearly more effective than either alone. Talk therapy is as effective as medication on bipolar disorder, and considerably better on social anxiety disorder.

To be clear: Talk therapy is not just people telling you to cheer up, or saying it’s “all in your head”, or suggesting that you get more exercise or eat some chocolate. Nor does it consist of you ruminating by yourself and trying to talk yourself out of your disorder. Cognitive behavioral therapy is a very complex, sophisticated series of techniques that require years of expert training to master. Yet, at its core, cognitive therapy really is just a very sophisticated form of talking.

The fact that mental disorders can be so strongly affected by talk therapy shows that there really is an important sense in which mental disorders are “all in your head”, and not just the trivial way that an axe wound or even a migraine is all in your head. It isn’t just the fact that it is physically located in your brain that makes a mental disorder different; it’s something deeper than that.

Here’s the best analogy I can come up with: Physical illness is hardware. Mental illness is software.

If a computer breaks after being dropped on the floor, that’s like an axe wound: An obvious, traumatic source of physical damage that is an unambiguous cause of the failure.

If a computer’s CPU starts overheating, that’s like a physical illness, like diabetes: There may be no particular traumatic cause, or even any clear cause at all, but there is obviously something physically wrong that needs physical intervention to correct.

But if a computer is suffering glitches and showing error messages when it tries to run particular programs, that is like mental illness: Something is wrong not on the low-level hardware, but on the high-level software.

These different types of problem require different types of solutions. If your CPU is overheating, you might want to see about replacing your cooling fan or your heat sink. But if your software is glitching while your CPU is otherwise running fine, there’s no point in replacing your fan or heat sink. You need to get a programmer in there to look at the code and find out where it’s going wrong. A talk therapist is like a programmer: The words they say to you are like code scripts they’re trying to get your processor to run correctly.

Of course, our understanding of computers is vastly better than our understanding of human brains, and as a result, programmers tend to get a lot better results than psychotherapists. (Interestingly they do actually get paid about the same, though! Programmers make about 10% more on average than psychotherapists, and both are solidly within the realm of average upper-middle-class service jobs.) But the basic process is the same: Using your expert knowledge of the system, find the right set of inputs that will fix the underlying code and solve the problem. At no point do you physically intervene on the system; you could do it remotely without ever touching it—and indeed, remote talk therapy is a thing.

What about other neurological illnesses, like migraine or fibromyalgia? Well, I think these are somewhere in between. They’re definitely more physical in some sense than a mental disorder like depression. There isn’t any cognitive content to a migraine the way there is to a depressive episode. When I feel depressed or anxious, I feel depressed or anxious about something. But there’s nothing a migraine is about. To use the technical term in cognitive science, neurological disorders lack the intentionality that mental disorders generally have. “What are you depressed about?” is a question you usually can answer. “What are you migrained about?” generally isn’t.

But like mental disorders, neurological disorders are directly linked to the functioning of the brain, and often seem to operate at a higher level of functional abstraction. The brain doesn’t have pain receptors on itself the way most of your body does; getting a migraine behind your left eye doesn’t actually mean that that specific lobe of your brain is what’s malfunctioning. It’s more like a general alert your brain is sending out that something is wrong, somewhere. And fibromyalgia often feels like it’s taking place in your entire body at once. Moreover, most neurological disorders are strongly correlated with mental disorders—indeed, the comorbidity of depression with migraine and fibromyalgia in particular is extremely high.

Which disorder causes the other? That’s a surprisingly difficult question. Intuitively we might expect the “more physical” disorder to be the primary cause, but that’s not always clear. Successful treatment for depression often improves symptoms of migraine and fibromyalgia as well (though the converse is also true). They seem to be mutually reinforcing one another, and it’s not at all clear which came first. I suppose if I had to venture a guess, I’d say the pain disorders probably have causal precedence over the mood disorders, but I don’t actually know that for a fact.

To stretch my analogy a little, it may be like a software problem that ends up causing a hardware problem, or a hardware problem that ends up causing a software problem. There actually have been a few examples of this, like games with graphics so demanding that they caused GPUs to overheat.

The human brain is a lot more complicated than a computer, and the distinction between software and hardware is fuzzier; we don’t actually have “code” that runs on a “processor”. We have synapses that continually fire on and off and rewire each other. The closest thing we have to code that gets processed in sequence would be our genome, and that is several orders of magnitude less complex than the structure of our brains. Aside from simply physically copying the entire brain down to every synapse, it’s not clear that you could ever “download” a mind, science fiction notwithstanding.

Indeed, anything that changes your mind necessarily also changes your brain; the effects of talking are generally subtler than the effects of a drug (and certainly subtler than the effects of an axe wound!), but they are nevertheless real, physical changes. (This is why it is so idiotic whenever the popular science press comes out with: “New study finds that X actually changes your brain!” where X might be anything from drinking coffee to reading romance novels. Of course it does! If it has an effect on your mind, it did so by having an effect on your brain. That’s the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science.) This is not so different from computers, however: Any change in software is also a physical change, in the form of some sequence of electrical charges that were moved from one place to another. Actual physical electrons are a few microns away from where they otherwise would have been because of what was typed into that code.

Of course I want to reduce the stigma surrounding mental illness. (For both selfish and altruistic reasons, really.) But blatantly false assertions don’t seem terribly productive toward that goal. Mental illness is different from physical illness; we can’t treat it the same.

There is no problem of free will, just a lot of really confused people

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 15, JDN 2457769

I was hoping for some sort of news item to use as a segue, but none in particular emerged, so I decided to go on with it anyway. I haven’t done any cognitive science posts in awhile, and this is one I’ve been meaning to write for a long time—actually it’s the sort of thing that even a remarkable number of cognitive scientists frequently get wrong, perhaps because the structure of human personality makes cognitive science inherently difficult.

Do we have free will?

The question has been asked so many times by so many people it is now a whole topic in philosophy. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an entire article on free will. The Information Philosopher has a gateway page “The Problem of Free Will” linking to a variety of subpages. There are even YouTube videos about “the problem of free will”.

The constant arguing back and forth about this would be problematic enough, but what really grates me are the many, many people who write “bold” articles and books about how “free will does not exist”. Examples include Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne, and have been published in everything from Psychology Today to the Chronicle of Higher Education. There’s even a TED talk.

The worst ones are those that follow with “but you should believe in it anyway”. In The Atlantic we have “Free will does not exist. But we’re better off believing in it anyway.” Scientific American offers a similar view, “Scientists say free will probably doesn’t exist, but urge: “Don’t stop believing!””

This is a mind-bogglingly stupid approach. First of all, if you want someone to believe in something, you don’t tell them it doesn’t exist. Second, if something doesn’t exist, that is generally considered a pretty compelling reason not to believe in it. You’d need a really compelling counter-argument, and frankly I’m not even sure the whole idea is logically coherent. How can I believe in something if I know it doesn’t exist? Am I supposed to delude myself somehow?

But the really sad part is that it’s totally unnecessary. There is no problem of free will. There are just an awful lot of really, really confused people. (Fortunately not everyone is confused; there are those, such as Daniel Dennett, who actually understand what’s going on.)

The most important confusion is over what you mean by the phrase “free will”. There are really two core meanings here, and the conflation of them is about 90% of the problem.

1. Moral responsibility: We have “free will” if and only if we are morally responsible for our actions.

2. Noncausality: We have “free will” if and only if our actions are not caused by the laws of nature.

Basically, every debate over “free will” boils down to someone pointing out that noncausality doesn’t exist, and then arguing that this means that moral responsibility doesn’t exist. Then someone comes back and says that moral responsibility does exist, and then infers that this means noncausality must exist. Or someone points out that noncausality doesn’t exist, and then they realize how horrible it would be if moral responsibility didn’t exist, and then tells people they should go on believing in noncausality so that they don’t have to give up moral responsibility.

Let me be absolutely clear here: Noncausality could not possibly exist.

Noncausality isn’t even a coherent concept. Actions, insofar as they are actions, must, necessarily, by definition, be caused by the laws of nature.

I can sort of imagine an event not being caused; perhaps virtual electron-positron pairs can really pop into existence without ever being caused. (Even then I’m not entirely convinced; I think quantum mechanics might actually be deterministic at the most fundamental level.)

But an action isn’t just a particle popping into existence. It requires the coordinated behavior of some 10^26 or more particles, all in a precisely organized, unified way, structured so as to move some other similarly large quantity of particles through space in a precise way so as to change the universe from one state to another state according to some system of objectives. Typically, it involves human muscles intervening on human beings or inanimate objects. (Recently it has come to mean specifically human fingers on computer keyboards a rather large segment of the time!) If what you do is an action—not a muscle spasm, not a seizure, not a slip or a trip, but something you did on purpose—then it must be caused. And if something is caused, it must be caused according to the laws of nature, because the laws of nature are the laws underlying all causality in the universe!

And once you realize that, the “problem of free will” should strike you as one of the stupidest “problems” ever proposed. Of course our actions are caused by the laws of nature! Why in the world would you think otherwise?

If you think that noncausality is necessary—or even useful—for free will, what kind of universe do you think you live in? What kind of universe could someone live in, that would fit your idea of what free will is supposed to be?

It’s like I said in that much earlier post about The Basic Fact of Cognitive Science (we are our brains): If you don’t think a mind can be made of matter, what do you think minds are made of? What sort of magical invisible fairy dust would satisfy you? If you can’t even imagine something that would satisfy the constraints you’ve imposed, did it maybe occur to you that your constraints are too strong?

Noncausality isn’t worth fretting over for the same reason that you shouldn’t fret over the fact that pi is irrational and you can’t make a square circle. There is no possible universe in which that isn’t true. So if it bothers you, it’s not that there’s something wrong with the universe—it’s clearly that there’s something wrong with you. Your thinking on the matter must be too confused, too dependent on unquestioned intuitions, if you think that murder can’t be wrong unless 2+2=5.

In philosophical jargon I am called a “compatibilist” because I maintain that free will and determinism are “compatible”. But this is much too weak a term. I much prefer Eleizer Yudkowsky’s “requiredism”, which he explains in one of the greatest blog posts of all time (seriously, read it immediately if you haven’t before—I’m okay with you cutting off my blog post here and reading his instead, because it truly is that brilliant), entitled simply “Thou Art Physics”. This quote sums it up briefly:

My position might perhaps be called “Requiredism.” When agency, choice, control, and moral responsibility are cashed out in a sensible way, they require determinism—at least some patches of determinism within the universe. If you choose, and plan, and act, and bring some future into being, in accordance with your desire, then all this requires a lawful sort of reality; you cannot do it amid utter chaos. There must be order over at least over those parts of reality that are being controlled by you. You are within physics, and so you/physics have determined the future. If it were not determined by physics, it could not be determined by you.

Free will requires a certain minimum level of determinism in the universe, because the universe must be orderly enough that actions make sense and there isn’t simply an endless succession of random events. Call me a “requiredist” if you need to call me something. I’d prefer you just realize the whole debate is silly because moral responsibility exists and noncausality couldn’t possibly.

We could of course use different terms besides “free will”. “Moral responsibility” is certainly a good one, but it is missing one key piece, which is the issue of why we can assign moral responsibility to human beings and a few other entities (animals, perhaps robots) and not to the vast majority of entities (trees, rocks, planets, tables), and why we are sometimes willing to say that even a human being does not have moral responsibility (infancy, duress, impairment).

This is why my favored term is actually “rational volition”. The characteristic that human beings have (at least most of us, most of the time), which also many animals and possibly some robots share (if not now, then soon enough), which justifies our moral responsibility is precisely our capacity to reason. Things don’t just happen to us the way they do to some 99.999,999,999% of the universe; we do things. We experience the world through our senses, have goals we want to achieve, and act in ways that are planned to make the world move closer to achieving those goals. We have causes, sure enough; but not just any causes. We have a specific class of causes, which are related to our desires and intentions—we call these causes reasons.

So if you want to say that we don’t have “free will” because that implies some mysterious nonsensical noncausality, sure; that’s fine. But then don’t go telling us that this means we don’t have moral responsibility, or that we should somehow try to delude ourselves into believing otherwise in order to preserve moral responsibility. Just recognize that we do have rational volition.

How do I know we have rational volition? That’s the best part, really: Experiments. While you’re off in la-la land imagining fanciful universes where somehow causes aren’t really causes even though they are, I can point to not only centuries of human experience but decades of direct, controlled experiments in operant conditioning. Human beings and most other animals behave quite differently in behavioral experiments than, say, plants or coffee tables. Indeed, it is precisely because of this radical difference that it seems foolish to even speak of a “behavioral experiment” about coffee tables—because coffee tables don’t behave, they just are. Coffee tables don’t learn. They don’t decide. They don’t plan or consider or hope or seek.

Japanese, as it turns out, may be a uniquely good language for cognitive science, because it has two fundamentally different verbs for “to be” depending on whether an entity is sentient. Humans and animals imasu, while inanimate objects merely arimasu. We have free will because and insofar as we imasu.

Once you get past that most basic confusion of moral responsibility with noncausality, there are a few other confusions you might run into as well. Another one is two senses of “reductionism”, which Dennett refers to as “ordinary” and “greedy”:

1. Ordinary reductionism: All systems in the universe are ultimately made up of components that always and everywhere obey the laws of nature.

2. Greedy reductionism: All systems in the universe just are their components, and have no existence, structure, or meaning aside from those components.

I actually had trouble formulating greedy reductionism as a coherent statement, because it’s such a nonsensical notion. Does anyone really think that a pile of two-by-fours is the same thing as a house? But people do speak as though they think this about human brains, when they say that “love is just dopamine” or “happiness is just serotonin”. But dopamine in a petri dish isn’t love, any more than a pile of two-by-fours is a house; and what I really can’t quite grok is why anyone would think otherwise.

Maybe they’re simply too baffled by the fact that love is made of dopamine (among other things)? They can’t quite visualize how that would work (nor can I, nor, I think, can anyone in the world at this level of scientific knowledge). You can see how the two-by-fours get nailed together and assembled into the house, but you can’t see how dopamine and action potentials would somehow combine into love.

But isn’t that a reason to say that love isn’t the same thing as dopamine, rather than that it is? I can understand why some people are still dualists who think that consciousness is somehow separate from the functioning of the brain. That’s wrong—totally, utterly, ridiculously wrong—but I can at least appreciate the intuition that underlies it. What I can’t quite grasp is why someone would go so far the other way and say that the consciousness they are currently experiencing does not exist.

Another thing that might confuse people is the fact that minds, as far as we know, are platform independent—that is, your mind could most likely be created out of a variety of different materials, from the gelatinous brain it currently is to some sort of silicon supercomputer, to perhaps something even more exotic. This independence follows from the widely-believed Church-Turing thesis, which essentially says that all computation is computation, regardless of how it is done. This may not actually be right, but I see many reasons to think that it is, and if so, this means that minds aren’t really what they are made of at all—they could be made of lots of things. What makes a mind a mind is how it is structured and above all what it does.

If this is baffling to you, let me show you how platform-independence works on a much simpler concept: Tables. Tables are also in fact platform-independent. You can make a table out of wood, or steel, or plastic, or ice, or bone. You could take out literally every single atom of a table and replace it will a completely different atom of a completely different element—carbon for iron, for example—and still end up with a table. You could conceivably even do so without changing the table’s weight, strength, size, etc., though that would be considerably more difficult.
Does this mean that tables somehow exist “beyond” their constituent matter? In some very basic sense, I suppose so—they are, again, platform-independent. But not in any deep, mysterious sense. Start with a wooden table, take away all the wood, and you no longer have a table. Take apart the table and you have a bunch of wood, which you could use to build something else. There is no “essence” comprising the table. There is no “table soul” that would persist when the table is deconstructed.

And—now for the hard part—so it is with minds. Your mind is your brain. The constituent atoms of your brain are gradually being replaced, day by day, but your mind is the same, because it exists in the arrangement and behavior, not the atoms themselves. Yet there is nothing “extra” or “beyond” that makes up your mind. You have no “soul” that lies beyond your brain. If your brain is destroyed, your mind will also be destroyed. If your brain could be copied, your mind would also be copied. And one day it may even be possible to construct your mind in some other medium—some complex computer made of silicon and tantalum, most likely—and it would still be a mind, and in all its thoughts, feelings and behaviors your mind, if not numerically identical to you.

Thus, when we engage in rational volition—when we use our “free will” if you like that term—there is no special “extra” process beyond what’s going on in our brains, but there doesn’t have to be. Those particular configurations of action potentials and neurotransmitters are our thoughts, desires, plans, intentions, hopes, fears, goals, beliefs. These mental concepts are not in addition to the physical material; they are made of that physical material. Your soul is made of gelatin.

Again, this is not some deep mystery. There is no “paradox” here. We don’t actually know the details of how it works, but that makes this no different from a Homo erectus who doesn’t know how fire works. Maybe he thinks there needs to be some extra “fire soul” that makes it burn, but we know better; and in far fewer centuries than separate that Homo erectus from us, our descendants will know precisely how the brain creates the mind.

Until then, simply remember that any mystery here lies in us—in our ignorance—and not in the universe. And take heart that the kind of “free will” that matters—moral responsibility—has absolutely no need for the kind of “free will” that doesn’t exist—noncausality. They’re totally different things.

The power of exponential growth

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, statistics , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457390

There’s a famous riddle: If the water in a lakebed doubles in volume every day, and the lakebed started filling on January 1, and is half full on June 17, when will it be full?

The answer is of course June 18—if it doubles every day, it will go from half full to full in a single day.

But most people assume that half the work takes about half the time, so they usually give answers in December. Others try to correct, but don’t go far enough, and say something like October.

Human brains are programmed to understand linear processes. We expect things to come in direct proportion: If you work twice as hard, you expect to get twice as much done. If you study twice as long, you expect to learn twice as much. If you pay twice as much, you expect to get twice as much stuff.

We tend to apply this same intuition to situations where it does not belong, processes that are not actually linear but exponential. As a result, when we extrapolate the slow growth early in the process, we wildly underestimate the total growth in the long run.

For example, suppose we have two countries. Arcadia has a GDP of $100 billion per year, and they grow at 4% per year. Berkland has a GDP of $200 billion, and they grow at 2% per year. Assuming that they maintain these growth rates, how long will it take for Arcadia’s GDP to exceed Berkland’s?

If we do this intuitively, we might sort of guess that at 4% you’d add 100% in 25 years, and at 2% you’d add 100% in 50 years; so it should be something like 75 years, because then Arcadia will have added $300 million while Berkland added $200 million. You might even just fudge the numbers in your head and say “about a century”.

In fact, it is only 35 years. You could solve this exactly by setting (100)(1.04^x) = (200)(1.02^x); but I have an intuitive method that I think may help you to estimate exponential processes in the future.

Divide the percentage into 69. (For some numbers it’s easier to use 70 or 72; remember, these are just to be approximate. The exact figure is 100*ln(2) = 69.3147… and then it wouldn’t be the percentage p but 100*ln(1+p/100); try plotting those and you’ll see why using p works.) This is the time it will take to double.

So at 4%, Arcadia will double in about 17.5 years, quadrupling in 35 years. At 2%, Berkland will double in about 35 years. Thus, in 35 years, Arcadia will quadruple and Berkland will double, so their GDPs will be equal.

Economics is full of exponential processes: Compound interest is exponential, and over moderately long periods GDP and population both tend to grow exponentially. (In fact they grow logistically, which is similar to exponential until it gets very large and begins to slow down. If you smooth out our recessions, you can get a sense that since the 1940s, US GDP growth has slowed down from about 4% per year to about 2% per year.) It is therefore quite important to understand how exponential growth works.

Let’s try another one. If one account has $1 million, growing at 5% per year, and another has $1,000, growing at 10% per year, how long will it take for the second account to have more money in it?

69/5 is about 14, so the first account doubles in 14 years. 69/10 is about 7, so the second account doubles in 7 years. A factor of 1000 is about 10 doublings (2^10 = 1024), so the second account needs to have doubled 10 times more than the first account. Since it doubles twice as often, this means that it must have doubled 20 times while the other doubled 10 times. Therefore, it will take about 140 years.

In fact, it takes 141—so our quick approximation is actually remarkably good.

This example is instructive in another way; 141 years is a pretty long time, isn’t it? You can’t just assume that exponential growth is “as fast as you want it to be”. Once people realize that exponential growth is very fast, they often overcorrect, assuming that exponential growth automatically means growth that is absurdly—or arbitrarily—fast. (XKCD made a similar point in this comic.)

I think the worst examples of this mistake are among Singularitarians. They—correctly—note that computing power has become exponentially greater and cheaper over time, doubling about every 18 months, which has been dubbed Moore’s Law. They assume that this will continue into the indefinite future (this is already problematic; the growth rate seems to be already slowing down). And therefore they conclude there will be a sudden moment, a technological singularity, at which computers will suddenly outstrip humans in every way and bring about a new world order of artificial intelligence basically overnight. They call it a “hard takeoff”; here’s a direct quote:

But many thinkers in this field including Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky worry that AI won’t work like this at all. Instead there could be a “hard takeoff”, a huge subjective discontinuity in the function mapping AI research progress to intelligence as measured in ability-to-get-things-done. If on January 1 you have a toy AI as smart as a cow, one which can identify certain objects in pictures and navigate a complex environment, and on February 1 it’s proved the Riemann hypothesis and started building a ring around the sun, that was a hard takeoff.

Wait… what? For someone like me who understands exponential growth, the last part is a baffling non sequitur. If computers start half as smart as us and double every 18 months, in 18 months, they will be as smart as us. In 36 months, they will be twice as smart as us. Twice as smart as us literally means that two people working together perfectly can match them—certainly a few dozen working realistically can. We’re not in danger of total AI domination from that. With millions of people working against the AI, we should be able to keep up with it for at least another 30 years. So are you assuming that this trend is continuing or not? (Oh, and by the way, we’ve had AIs that can identify objects and navigate complex environments for a couple years now, and so far, no ringworld around the Sun.)

That same essay make a biological argument, which misunderstands human evolution in a way that is surprisingly subtle yet ultimately fundamental:

If you were to come up with a sort of objective zoological IQ based on amount of evolutionary work required to reach a certain level, complexity of brain structures, etc, you might put nematodes at 1, cows at 90, chimps at 99, homo erectus at 99.9, and modern humans at 100. The difference between 99.9 and 100 is the difference between “frequently eaten by lions” and “has to pass anti-poaching laws to prevent all lions from being wiped out”.

No, actually, what makes humans what we are is not that we are 1% smarter than chimpanzees.

First of all, we’re actually more like 200% smarter than chimpanzees, measured by encephalization quotient; they clock in at 2.49 while we hit 7.44. If you simply measure by raw volume, they have about 400 mL to our 1300 mL, so again roughly 3 times as big. But that’s relatively unimportant; with Moore’s Law, tripling only takes about 2.5 years.

But even having triple the brain power is not what makes humans different. It was a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. Indeed, it was so insufficient that for about 200,000 years we had brains just as powerful as we do now and yet we did basically nothing in technological or economic terms—total, complete stagnation on a global scale. This is a conservative estimate of when we had brains of the same size and structure as we do today.

What makes humans what we are? Cooperation. We are what we are because we are together.
The capacity of human intelligence today is not 1300 mL of brain. It’s more like 1.3 gigaliters of brain, where a gigaliter, a billion liters, is about the volume of the Empire State Building. We have the intellectual capacity we do not because we are individually geniuses, but because we have built institutions of research and education that combine, synthesize, and share the knowledge of billions of people who came before us. Isaac Newton didn’t understand the world as well as the average third-grader in the 21st century does today. Does the third-grader have more brain? Of course not. But they absolutely do have more knowledge.

(I recently finished my first playthrough of Legacy of the Void, in which a central point concerns whether the Protoss should detach themselves from the Khala, a psychic union which combines all their knowledge and experience into one. I won’t spoil the ending, but let me say this: I can understand their hesitation, for it is basically our equivalent of the Khala—first literacy, and now the Internet—that has made us what we are. It would no doubt be the Khala that made them what they are as well.)

Is AI still dangerous? Absolutely. There are all sorts of damaging effects AI could have, culturally, economically, militarily—and some of them are already beginning to happen. I even agree with the basic conclusion of that essay that OpenAI is a bad idea because the cost of making AI available to people who will abuse it or create one that is dangerous is higher than the benefit of making AI available to everyone. But exponential growth not only isn’t the same thing as instantaneous takeoff, it isn’t even compatible with it.

The next time you encounter an example of exponential growth, try this. Don’t just fudge it in your head, don’t overcorrect and assume everything will be fast—just divide the percentage into 69 to see how long it will take to double.

The Cognitive Science of Morality Part II: Molly Crockett

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JDN 2457140 EDT 20:16.

This weekend has been very busy for me, so this post is going to be shorter than most—which is probably a good thing anyway, since my posts tend to run a bit long.

In an earlier post I discussed the Weinberg Cognitive Science Conference and my favorite speaker in the lineup, Joshua Greene. After a brief interlude from Capybara Day, it’s now time to talk about my second-favorite speaker, Molly Crockett. (Is it just me, or does the name “Molly” somehow seem incongruous with a person of such prestige?)

Molly Crockett is a neuroeconomist, though you’d never hear her say that. She doesn’t think of herself as an economist at all, but purely as a neuroscientist. I suspect this is because when she hears the word “economist” she thinks of only mainstream neoclassical economists, and she doesn’t want to be associated with such things.

Still, what she studies is clearly neuroeconomics—I in fact first learned of her work by reading the textbook Neuroeconomics, though I really got interested in her work after watching her TED Talk. It’s one of the better TED talks (they put out so many of them now that the quality is mixed at best); she talks about news reporting on neuroscience, how it is invariably ridiculous and sensationalist. This is particularly frustrating because of how amazing and important neuroscience actually is.

I could almost forgive the sensationalism if they were talking about something that’s actually fantastically boring, like, say, tax codes, or financial regulations. Of course, even then there is the Oliver Effect: You can hide a lot of evil by putting it in something boring. But Dodd-Frank is 2300 pages long; I read an earlier draft that was only (“only”) 600 pages, and it literally contained a three-page section explaining how to define the word “bank”. (Assuming direct proportionality, I would infer that there is now a twelve-page section defining the word “bank”. Hopefully not?) It doesn’t get a whole lot more snoozeworthy than that. So if you must be a bit sensationalist in order to get people to see why eliminating margin requirements and the swaps pushout rule are terrible, terrible ideas, so be it.

But neuroscience is not boring, and so sensationalism only means that news outlets are making up exciting things that aren’t true instead of saying the actually true things that are incredibly exciting.

Here, let me express without sensationalism what Molly Crockett does for a living: Molly Crockett experimentally determines how psychoactive drugs modulate moral judgments. The effects she observes are small, but they are real; and since these experiments are done using small doses for a short period of time, if these effects scale up they could be profound. This is the basic research component—when it comes to technological fruition it will be literally A Clockwork Orange. But it may be A Clockwork Orange in the best possible way: It could be, at last, a medical cure for psychopathy, a pill to make us not just happier or healthier, but better. We are not there yet by any means, but this is clearly the first step: Molly Crockett is to A Clockwork Orange roughly as Michael Faraday is to the Internet.

In one of the experiments she talked about at the conference, Crockett found that serotonin reuptake inhibitors enhance harm aversion. Serotonin reuptake inhibitors are very commonly used drugs—you are likely familiar with one called Prozac. So basically what this study means is that Prozac makes people more averse to causing pain in themselves or others. It doesn’t necessarily make them more altruistic, let alone more ethical; but it does make them more averse to causing pain. (To see the difference, imagine a 19th-century field surgeon dealing with a wounded soldier; there is no anesthetic, but an amputation must be made. Sometimes being ethical requires causing pain.)

The experiment is actually what Crockett calls “the honest Milgram Experiment“; under Milgram, the experimenters told their subjects they would be causing shocks, but no actual shocks were administered. Under Crockett, the shocks are absolutely 100% real (though they are restricted to a much lower voltage of course). People are given competing offers that contain an amount of money and a number of shocks to be delivered, either to you or to the other subject. They decide how much it’s worth to them to bear the shocks—or to make someone else bear them. It’s a classic willingness-to-pay paradigm, applied to the Milgram Experiment.

What Crockett found did not surprise me, nor do I expect it will surprise you if you imagine yourself in the same place; but it would totally knock the socks off of any neoclassical economist. People are much more willing to bear shocks for money than they are to give shocks for money. They are what Crockett terms hyper-altruistic; I would say that they are exhibiting an apparent solidarity coefficient greater than 1. They seem to be valuing others more than they value themselves.

Normally I’d say that this makes no sense at all—why would you value some random stranger more than yourself? Equally perhaps, and obviously only a psychopath would value them not at all; but more? And there’s no way you can actually live this way in your daily life; you’d give away all your possessions and perhaps even starve yourself to death. (I guess maybe Jesus lived that way.) But Crockett came up with a model that explains it pretty well: We are morally risk-averse. If we knew we were dealing with someone very strong who had no trouble dealing with shocks, we’d be willing to shock them a fairly large amount. But we might actually be dealing with someone very vulnerable who would suffer greatly; and we don’t want to take that chance.

I think there’s some truth to that. But her model leaves something else out that I think is quite important: We are also averse to unfairness. We don’t like the idea of raising one person while lowering another. (Obviously not so averse as to never do it—we do it all the time—but without a compelling reason we consider it morally unjustified.) So if the two subjects are in roughly the same condition (being two undergrads at Oxford, they probably are), then helping one while hurting the other is likely to create inequality where none previously existed. But if you hurt yourself in order to help yourself, no such inequality is created; all you do is raise yourself up, provided that you do believe that the money is good enough to be worth the shocks. It’s actually quite Rawslian; lifting one person up while not affecting the other is exactly the sort of inequality you’re allowed to create according to the Difference Principle.

There’s also the fact that the subjects can’t communicate; I think if I could make a deal to share the money afterward, I’d feel better about shocking someone more in order to get us both more money. So perhaps with communication people would actually be willing to shock others more. (And the sensation headline would of course be: “Talking makes people hurt each other.”)

But all of these ideas are things that could be tested in future experiments! And maybe I’ll do those experiments someday, or Crockett, or one of her students. And with clever experimental paradigms we might find out all sorts of things about how the human mind works, how moral intuitions are structured, and ultimately how chemical interventions can actually change human moral behavior. The potential for both good and evil is so huge, it’s both wondrous and terrifying—but can you deny that it is exciting?

And that’s not even getting into the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science, which undermines all concepts of afterlife and theistic religion. I already talked about it before—as the sort of thing that I sort of wish I could say when I introduce myself as a cognitive scientist—but I think it bears repeating.

As Patricia Churchland said on the Colbert Report: Colbert asked, “Are you saying I have no soul?” and she answered, “Yes.” I actually prefer Daniel Dennett’s formulation: “Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.”

We don’t have a magical, supernatural soul (whatever that means); we don’t have an immortal soul that will rise into Heaven or be reincarnated in someone else. But we do have something worth preserving: We have minds that are capable of consciousness. We love and hate, exalt and suffer, remember and imagine, understand and wonder. And yes, we are born and we die. Once the unique electrochemical pattern that defines your consciousness is sufficiently degraded, you are gone. Nothing remains of what you were—except perhaps the memories of others, or things you have created. But even this legacy is unlikely to last forever. One day it is likely that all of us—and everything we know, and everything we have built, from the Great Pyramids to Hamlet to Beethoven’s Ninth to Principia Mathematica to the US Interstate Highway System—will be gone. I don’t have any consolation to offer you on that point; I can’t promise you that anything will survive a thousand years, much less a million. There is a chance—even a chance that at some point in the distant future, whatever humanity has become will find a way to reverse the entropic decay of the universe itself—but nothing remotely like a guarantee. In all probability you, and I, and all of this will be gone someday, and that is absolutely terrifying.

But it is also undeniably true. The fundamental link between the mind and the brain is one of the basic facts of cognitive science; indeed I like to call it The Basic Fact of Cognitive Science. We know specifically which kinds of brain damage will make you unable to form memories, comprehend language, speak language (a totally different area), see, hear, smell, feel anger, integrate emotions with logic… do I need to go on? Everything that you are is done by your brain—because you are your brain.

Now why can’t the science journalists write about that? Instead we get “The Simple Trick That Can Boost Your Confidence Immediately” and “When it Comes to Picking Art, Men & Women Just Don’t See Eye to Eye.” HuffPo is particularly awful of course; the New York Times is better, but still hardly as good as one might like. They keep trying to find ways to make it exciting—but so rarely seem to grasp how exciting it already is.