mind

Against Moral Anti-Realism

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 22 JDN 2460576

Moral anti-realism is more philosophically sophisticated than relativism, but it is equally mistaken. It is what is sounds like, the negation of moral realism. Moral anti-realists hold that moral truths are meaningless because they rest upon presumptions about the world that fail to hold. To an anti-realist, “genocide is wrong” is meaningless because there is no such thing as “wrong”, much as to any sane person “unicorns have purple feathers” is meaningless because there are no such things as unicorns. They aren’t saying that genocide isn’t wrong—they’re saying that wrong itself is a defective concept.

The vast majority of people profess strong beliefs in moral truth, and indeed strong beliefs about particular moral issues, such as abortion, capital punishment, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, contraception, civil liberties, and war. There is at the very least a troubling tension here between academia and daily life.

This does not by itself prove that moral truths exist. Ordinary people could be simply wrong about these core beliefs. Indeed, I must acknowledge that most ordinary people clearly are deeply ignorant about certain things, as only 55\% of Americans believe that the theory of evolution is true, and only 66\% of Americans agree that the majority of recent changes in Earth’s climate has been caused by human activity, when in reality these are scientific facts, empirically demonstrable through multiple lines of evidence, verified beyond all reasonable doubt, and both evolution and climate change are universally accepted within the scientific community. In scientific terms there is no more doubt about evolution or climate change than there is about the shape of the Earth or the structure of the atom.

If there were similarly compelling reasons to be moral anti-realists, then the fact that most people believe in morality would be little different: Perhaps most ordinary people are simply wrong about these issues. But when asked to provide similarly compelling evidence for why they reject the moral views of ordinary people, moral anti-realists have little to offer.

Many anti-realists will note the diversity of moral opinions in the world, as John Burgess did, which would be rather like noting the diversity of beliefs about the soul as an argument against neuroscience, or noting the diversity of beliefs about the history of life as an argument against evolution. Many people are wrong about many things that science has shown to be the case; this is worrisome for various reasons, but it is not an argument against the validity of scientific knowledge. Similarly, a diversity of opinions about morality is worrisome, but hardly evidence against the validity of morality.

In fact, when they talk about such fundamental disagreements in morality, anti-realists don’t have very compelling examples. It’s easy to find fundamental disagreements about biology—ask an evolutionary biologist and a Creationist whether humans share an ancestor with chimpanzees. It’s easy to find fundamental disagreements about cosmology—ask a physicist and an evangelical Christian how the Earth began. It’s easy to find fundamental disagreements about climate—ask a climatologist and an oil company executive whether human beings are causing global warming. But where are these fundamental disagreements in morality? Sure, on specific matters there is some disagreement. There are differences between cultures regarding what animals it is acceptable to eat, and differences between cultures about what constitutes acceptable clothing, and differences on specific political issues. But in what society is it acceptable to kill people arbitrarily? Where is it all right to steal whatever you want? Where is lying viewed as a good thing? Where is it obligatory to eat only dirt? In what culture has wearing clothes been a crime? Moral realists are by no means committed to saying that everyone agrees about everything—but it does support our case to point out that most people agree on most things most of the time.

There are a few compelling cases of moral disagreement, but they hardly threaten moral realism. How might we show one culture’s norms to be better than another’s? Compare homicide rates. Compare levels of poverty. Compare overall happiness, perhaps using surveys—or even brain scans. This kind of data exists, and it has a fairly clear pattern: people living in social democratic societies (such as Sweden and Norway) are wealthier, safer, longer-lived, and overall happier than people in other societies. Moreover, using the same publicly-available data, democratic societies in general do much better than authoritarian societies, by almost any measure. This is an empirical fact. It doesn’t necessarily mean that such societies are doing everything right—but they are clearly doing something right. And it really isn’t so implausible to say that what they are doing right is enforcing a good system of moral, political, and cultural norms.

Then again, perhaps some people would accept these empirical facts but still insist that their culture is superior; suppose the disagreement really is radical and intractable. This still leaves two possibilities for moral realism.

The most obvious answer would be to say that one group is wrong—that, objectively, one culture is better than another.

But even if that doesn’t work, there is another way: Perhaps both are right, or more precisely, perhaps these two cultural systems are equally good but incompatible. Is this relativism? Some might call it that, but if it is, it’s relativism of a very narrow kind. I am emphatically not saying that all existing cultures are equal, much less that all possible cultures are equal. Instead, I am saying that it is entirely possible to have two independent moral systems which prescribe different behaviors yet nonetheless result in equally-good overall outcomes.

I could make a mathematical argument involving local maxima of nonlinear functions, but instead I think I’ll use an example: Traffic laws.

In the United States, we drive on the right side of the road. In the United Kingdom, they drive on the left side. Which way is correct? Both are—both systems work well, and neither is superior in any discernible way. In fact, there are other systems that would be just as effective, like the system of all one-way roads that prevails in Manhattan.

Yet does this mean that we should abandon reason in our traffic planning, throw up our hands and declare that any traffic system is as good as any other? On the contrary—there are plenty of possible traffic systems that clearly don’t work. Pointing several one-way roads into one another with no exit is clearly not going to result in good traffic flow. Having each driver flip a coin to decide whether to drive on the left or the right would result in endless collisions. Moreover, our own system clearly isn’t perfect. Nearly 40,000 Americans die of car collisions every year; perhaps we can find a better system that will prevent some or all of these deaths. The mere fact that two, or three, or even 400 different systems of laws or morals are equally good does not entail that all systems are equally good. Even if two cultures really are equal, that doesn’t mean we need to abandon moral realism; it merely means that some problems have multiple solutions. “X2 = 4; what is X?” has two perfectly correct answers (2 and -2), but it also has an infinite variety of wrong answers.

In fact, moral disagreement may not be evidence of anti-realism at all. In order to disagree with someone, you must think that there is an objective fact to be decided. If moral statements were seen as arbitrary and subjective, then people wouldn’t argue about them very much. Imagine an argument, “Chocolate is the best flavor of ice cream!” “No, vanilla is the best!”. This sort of argument might happen on occasion between seven-year-olds, but it is definitely not the sort of thing we hear from mature adults. This is because as adults we realize that tastes in ice cream really are largely subjective. An anti-realist can, in theory, account for this, if they can explain why moral values are falsely perceived as objective while values in taste are not; but if all values are all really arbitrary and subjective, why is it that this is obvious to everyone in the one case and not the other? In fact, there are compelling reasons to think that we couldn’t perceive moral values as arbitrary even if we tried. Some people say “abortion is a right”, others say “abortion is murder”. Even if we were to say that these are purely arbitrary, we would still be left with the task of deciding what laws to make on abortion. Regardless of where the goals come from, some goals are just objectively incompatible.

Another common anti-realist argument rests upon the way that arguments about morality often become emotional and irrational. Charles Stevenson has made this argument; apparently Stevenson has never witnessed an argument about religion, science, or policy, certainly not one outside academia. Many laypeople will insist passionately that the free market is perfect, global warming is a lie, or the Earth is only 6,000 years old. (Often the same people, come to think of it.) People will grow angry and offended if such beliefs are disputed. Yet these are objectively false claims. Unless we want to be anti-realists about GDP, temperature and radiometric dating, emotional and irrational arguments cannot compel us to abandon realism.

Another frequent claim, commonly known as the “argument from queerness”, says that moral facts would need to be something very strange, usually imagined as floating obligations existing somewhere in space; but this is rather like saying that mathematical facts cannot exist because we do not see floating theorems in space and we have never met a perfect triangle. In fact, there is no such thing as a floating speed of light or a floating Schrodinger’s equation either, but no one thinks this is an argument against physics.

A subtler version of this argument, the original “argument from queerness” put forth by J.L. Mackie, says that moral facts are strange because they are intrinsically motivating, something no other kind of facts would be. This is no doubt true; but it seems to me a fairly trivial observation, since part of the definition of “moral fact” is that anything which has this kind of motivational force is a moral (or at least normative) fact. Any well-defined natural kind is subject to the same sort of argument. Spheres are perfectly round three-dimensional objects, something no other object is. Eyes are organs that perceive light, something no other organ does. Moral facts are indeed facts that categorically motivate action, which no other thing does—but so what? All this means is that we have a well-defined notion of what it means to be a moral fact.

Finally, it is often said that moral claims are too often based on religion, and religion is epistemically unfounded, so morality must fall as well. Now, unlike most people, I completely agree that religion is epistemically unfounded. Instead, the premise I take issue with is the idea that moral claims have anything to do with religion. A lot of people seem to think so; but in fact our most important moral values transcend religion and in many cases actually contradict it.

Now, it may well be that the majority of claims people make about morality are to some extent based in their religious beliefs. The majority of governments in history have been tyrannical; does that mean that government is inherently tyrannical, there is no such thing as a just government? The vast majority of human beings have never traveled in outer space; does that mean space travel is impossible? Similarly, I see no reason to say that simply because the majority of moral claims (maybe) are religious, therefore moral claims are inherently religious.

Generally speaking, moral anti-realists make a harsh distinction between morality and other domains of knowledge. They agree that there are such things as trucks and comets and atoms, but do not agree that there are such things as obligations and rights. Indeed, a typical moral anti-realist speaks as if they are being very rigorous and scientific while we moral realists are being foolish, romantic, even superstitious. Moral anti-realism has an attitude of superciliousness not seen in a scientific faction since behaviorism.

But in fact, I think moral anti-realism is the result of a narrow understanding of fundamental physics and cognitive science. It is a failure to drink deep enough of the Pierian springs. This is not surprising, since fundamental physics and cognitive science are so mind-bogglingly difficult that even the geniuses of the world barely grasp them. Quoth Feynman: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” This was of course a bit overstated—Feynman surely knew that there are things we do understand about quantum physics, for he was among those who best understood them. Still, even the brightest minds in the world face total bafflement before problems like dark energy, quantum gravity, the binding problem, and the Hard Problem. It is no moral failing to have a narrow understanding of fundamental physics and cognitive science, for the world’s greatest minds have a scarcely broader understanding.

The failing comes from trying to apply this narrow understanding of fundamental science to moral problems without the humility to admit that the answers are never so simple. “Neuroscience proves we have no free will.” No it doesn’t! It proves we don’t have the kind of free will you thought we did. “We are all made of atoms, therefore there can be no such thing as right and wrong.” And what do you suppose we would have been made of if there were such things as right and wrong? Magical fairy dust?

Here is what I think moral anti-realists get wrong: They hear only part of what scientists say. Neuroscientists explain to them that the mind is a function of matter, and they hear it as if we had said there is only mindless matter. Physicists explain to them that we have much more precise models of atomic phenomena than we do of human behavior, and they hear it as if we had said that scientific models of human behavior are fundamentally impossible. They trust that we know very well what atoms are made of and very poorly what is right and wrong—when quite the opposite is the case.

In fact, the more we learn about physics and cognitive science, the more similar the two fields seem. There was a time when Newtonian mechanics ruled, when everyone thought that physical objects are made of tiny billiard balls bouncing around according to precise laws, while consciousness was some magical, “higher” spiritual substance that defied explanation. But now we understand that quantum physics is all chaos and probability, while cognitive processes can be mathematically modeled and brain waves can be measured in the laboratory. Something as apparently simple as a proton—let alone an extended, complex object, like a table or a comet—is fundamentally a functional entity, a unit of structure rather than substance. To be a proton is to be organized the way protons are and to do what protons do; and so to be human is to be organized the way humans are and to do what humans do. The eternal search for “stuff” of which everything is made has come up largely empty; eventually we may find the ultimate “stuff”, but when we do, it will already have long been apparent that substance is nowhere near as important as structure. Reductionism isn’t so much wrong as beside the point—when we want to understand what makes a table a table or what makes a man a man, it simply doesn’t matter what stuff they are made of. The table could be wood, glass, plastic, or metal; the man could be carbon, nitrogen and water like us, or else silicon and tantalum like Lieutenant Commander Data on Star Trek. Yes, structure must be made of something, and the substance does affect the structures that can be made out of it, but the structure is what really matters, not the substance.

Hence, I think it is deeply misguided to suggest that because human beings are made of molecules, this means that we are just the same thing as our molecules. Love is indeed made of oxytocin (among other things), but only in the sense that a table is made of wood. To know that love is made of oxytocin really doesn’t tell us very much about love; we need also to understand how oxytocin interacts with the bafflingly complex system that is a human brain—and indeed how groups of brains get together in relationships and societies. This is because love, like so much else, is not substance but function—something you do, not something you are made of.

It is not hard, rigorous science that says love is just oxytocin and happiness is just dopamine; it is naive, simplistic science. It is the sort of “science” that comes from overlaying old prejudices (like “matter is solid, thoughts are ethereal”) with a thin veneer of knowledge. To be a realist about protons but not about obligations is to be a realist about some functional relations and not others. It is to hear “mind is matter”, and fail to understand the is—the identity between them—instead acting as if we had said “there is no mind; there is only matter”. You may find it hard to believe that mind can be made of matter, as do we all; yet the universe cares not about our incredulity. The perfect correlation between neurochemical activity and cognitive activity has been verified in far too many experiments to doubt. Somehow, that kilogram of wet, sparking gelatin in your head is actually thinking and feeling—it is actually you.

And once we realize this, I do not think it is a great leap to realize that the vast collection of complex, interacting bodies moving along particular trajectories through space that was the Holocaust was actually wrong, really, objectively wrong.

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.

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.

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.