Over the past couple of days, I have twice visited a tip which shall remain nameless (which I've also been to on several previous occasions), dropping off "mixed rubbish" from the family home: all kinds of junk, including old toys, old clothes, old boardgames, old plastic cutlery, IKEA furniture no longer in use, other old furniture no longer in use,and so on and so on. This section of the tip - a long, narrow dumping area at the end of a big concrete expanse which also has a station (on the other side) for asbestos drop-offs, and is close by the metal drop-off section and the concrete waste section - where people drop off random, assorted waste of this kind (only stipulation: no "chemicals"), stinks, and has noxious air, even though a guy in a bulldozer comes along regularly to push the junk away, leaving a noxious, plasticky mud in his wake. The soil nearby, and around the place, is probably highly toxic, and I wouldn't be surprised if the employees who stand idly nearby and occasionally look around to monitor the activities of the dumpers get cancer and neurological problems from spending time in the foul miasma. The whole place is disgusting.
Consider how much of your shit will end up in landfill. Probably the vast majority. What a monstrous thing.
Most people do not visit tips. They do not visit landfills. They do not stand there in the stink, acquiring diseases as the minutes go by. They do not inhale the stench; it is buried far away from where they live, somewhere 'safe', where the extreme pollution of the soil and the air won't matter to them. But we can't avoid the stench forever. Day by day, more of the tiny percentage of the earth's soil fit for agriculture is sullied by toxic compounds, or flies away in the wind. It doesn't get replenished. And the waste still piles up. And who is going to stop us? My parents are green-minded, but they still let their house get filled to the fucking brim with endless shit, a lot of which has been dumped in the fashion described.
Nobody thinks green issues are urgent, because they cannot see the carnage right in front of them. We may live in a post-industrial, technological society, but we still rely on the soil and the rain and the air. And they are all being destroyed.
Monday, 2 April 2018
Thursday, 29 March 2018
i keep writing the same shit over and over..
Many educated people are familiar with the classic debate over whether a person's meta-ethical position ought to have a major impact on one's behaviour (even if they are not familiar with the debate in such terms). This debate is most typically played out in the modern day between atheists/agnostics and religious believers (particularly monotheists). Many monotheists are wont to claim that disbelief in God immediately implies that purpose, or good and evil, don't have a fully mind-independent status, and, second, that belief in this doctrine of a universe without divine teleology is highly liable to promote a social collapse into bad behaviour, including criminal behaviour (which seems to imply commitment to a model with the positive prediction that non-monotheists should be less polite, more criminal, etc, unless they think that people who are disbelievers currently are morally special or something (but that seems like an 'epicycle', so to speak)). In doing so, they seem to tacitly come down on the God-as-dictator side of the Euthyphro Dilemma (they deny the possibility of rationally identifying as an irreligious moral realist (this is what they get right!)).
More interesting to me is the fact that a similar debate has also been played out in academic, non-religious meta-ethics. Derek Parfit, the atheist moral realist (believer in eternal "normative truths" which don't require any 'metaphysical grounding'), makes it clear in On What Matters that he thought that the meta-ethical issues are of tremendous importance to humanity. There are several nods to Effective Altruism in Volume I (and maybe a few in Volume II (I read most of both volumes in 2015, and I can't remember it perfectly)), despite the fact that neither volume is actually about practical ethics - I think he thought, with some merit (as I'll shortly discuss), that people without a realist meta-ethical bent are much less likely to want to be Effective Altruists. Famously, he even says (I think he might say it first in the introduction) that, if he is wrong, his entire life would have been "a waste". Obviously, this can't be an 'objective' "waste" if he is wrong, so he is tacitly admitting that his emotional universe wouldn't change much if he convinced himself he were wrong in that very remark. But, as I say, I do at least get the strong impression that he thinks that he may well at least have given up some elements of his self-denying altruism if he were proven wrong. This is especially strong in the section on his good friend Bernard Williams, who was, as Parfit notes, though a decent and virtuous man, not nearly so morally obsessive about distant suffering. 'Why,' Parfit might ask himself were he to give up belief in 'objective reasons', 'do I give so much of my income for people whose emotional reactions don't actually make me suffer in the here and now? I could spend money instead on things that make me happy more directly, while making an effort to remove unpleasant thoughts about starving people in distant countries from my mind!' I think that people like Singer, Pinker, Bloom, Greene, Harris and all other members of the "Effective Altruism" movement, who advocate the view that you can 'do the most good' by trying to think of how to promote "wellbeing" generally, with a decision-theoretic mindset, also quite clearly think that if one does not adopt the doctrine that moral behaviour should be motivated by considerations of consistency between the general normative principles to which we claim to be committed and our specific behaviours, then one is less likely to carry out actions which are "beneficial". So, again, here we have a mild version of the same concern of the monotheist. If you do not try to systematise the logic of your decision-making in the way the above figures do, then you are going to be a much worse person than those who do.
I actually think that it makes perfect sense that one's meta-ethical position would affect one's actions at least a little, and that, for the average person, significantly changing one's meta-ethical stance probably does have some effect on one's emotional universe. I recently myself have consciously raised my credence in the view that all forms of systematic consequentialism - and all systematic moral frameworks - are doomed to failure: more specifically, that, whilst not all 'moral reasoning' is mere "rationalisation", since, in a given dialectical context (a situation where one is debating an ethical issue), it will often be the case that both parties are willing to commit themselves to a relevant, very generally phrased "ethical principle" and yet only one party's position on the issue in question is compatible with the logic of that principle (one case study in the essay linked), the idea that there is some 'absolutely true', self-evident, fully consistent, decidable for all moral problems (in the sense of giving a solid verdict for every possible 'moral situation) finite set of such principles that everyone should rationally accept is really quite absurd. It is absurd for too many reasons to count. The first few I already discussed in the essay linked, but I'd like to go over them again, and some more in addition. One is that (even very intelligent) people don't even agree on what the good is, or even what wellbeing is. Another is that we have no way to measure wellbeing (yes we have proxies like life expectancy, spending power and level of education for human populations, but thinking about human wellbeing even in terms of these measures quickly leads you into some very tricky territory, like the Repugnant Conclusion), and it doesn't seem at all impossible (in fact it seems damn likely to me!) that we will never turn general organismal wellbeing into a measurable theoretical construct in some properly formal model (can we quantify grades of emotional complexity among different organisms lol? even adopting an individualist rather than social or Aristotelian perspective on wellbeing, it doesn't become less absurd: given the computational theory of mind, it is in principle silly to think of thinking of happiness as reducible to arrangements of chemicals, so our 'best' bet would presumably be some kind of computational reduction or something ("The total level of wellbeing w for an organism o at time t is, for all currently perceived worldstates si (even if delusionally perceived) and the correspondent desired worldstates dsi, the average degree of match (continuous variable, along the Real interval [0,1]) between dsi and si , formalised in terms of the theory of mathematical isomorphism according to structurally-abstracted, idealised models of the s and the ds") but since my attempt in that preceding parenthetical interjection was a dumb joke, there is no prospect for this. Another is that we have extremely limited ability to predict future social dynamics (notwithstanding the excellent work of my man Peter Turchin!), so, even supposing for a second that the world can be objectively a better or worse place (assuming that there is some measurable quantity in the fully mind-independent world that goes up and down depending on our actions) no-one can actually claim with very much confidence at all, no matter what they are doing, that they are "making the world a better place", nor can we say that about political policies or decisions, including war (the utilitarian may want to say, as I would, that the Vietnam War, or the Iraq War, were evil atrocities, but they always have in the back of their mind the butterfly effect... what about the unintended longer-term consequences? Hmm I can't be too confident that these things were even overall bad can I? (Objection: but do we really have to be that sceptical? Can't we have high credence that even from a long-term perspective the Iraq War was bad? Sure you can, but with no scientific justification whatever - and that's my point, you have no scientific justification (none of us do!)). Perhaps the only thing a utilitarian can have some confidence is the right thing to do, on the basis that they value the "wellbeing" of all organisms in general, or of "reducing suffering" in general, is to devote their life to investigating and trying to raise alarm bells about existential risks, like Nick Bostrom does. But, as always with utilitarian commitments, there is then no way to justify all the time you spend not working on this project, unless it is directly targeted at improving your ability to work at this project (like resting your brain, or trying to make a lot of money), and this means that to take fully seriously this utilitarian logic you would have to become a total fucking loser weirdo with a horrible life. (Even then, given that "good" and "bad" are not fully mind-independent properties - we know this because they don't feature in any scientific models of mind-independent phenomena which make reliable predictions - the claim that "if the world were without life completely/if humans were wiped out/if civilisation was wiped out it would be a worse or less valuable place" is yet another expressive speech act, and gibberish from a scientific standpoint (it is very easy to persuade humans that they should be concerned about existential risk, because it does seem to follow from a lot of the expressive speech acts we make about ethics that existential risks are extremely important, and yet, strangely (or not so strangely), it is impossible to get a human being to behave as if existential risks are the most important thing to deal with at all times (even Bostrom doesn't really act like this; he has a girlfriend and writes poems).) Another, related one is that a lot of 'noble' or 'altruistic' or 'benevolent' things people say they do for utilitarian reasons don't make sense for utilitarian reasons and are instead just complicated deprivation rituals - rituals which have a very ancient legacy in religions in virtually all human societies. For example, people like Peter Singer - people I know - say that they are vegetarian or vegan because of utilitarian logic. But even if you don't press on the claim that they usually use to back up this statement - "If a lot of people became vegetarian or vegan, there would be more wellbeing in the world/less suffering in the world" (a mere expressive speech act, given that the aggregate wellbeing of all organisms on the planet is immeasurable because we don't even know what wellbeing is (same with suffering)) - even if you pretend that this expressive speech act is something more, and just take for granted that there is some quantity "wellbeing" which would go up were more people to become vegetarians or vegans, and a dual quantity "suffering" which would go down were this to happen (which I am usually happy to do, because it is so intuitive and comfortable to think like this) - then there is still no reason why an individual person should never eat meat, because individual consumption decisions in any given situation are totally inconsequential, and the real goal should be to try one's best to persuade as many other people to be vegetarian or vegan independent of your own consumption decisions. Why not, for example, just eat whatever you want when nobody will find out but try to convince other people to go vegetarian or vegan? That way, you will have a chance of having a super-inconsequential impact on the world without even depriving yourself of delicious meat and making it way harder to keep your iron and B12 levels in a healthy range (if you're South Asian, your iron and B12 levels will probably stay in a healthy range even if you go fully vegetarian and don't take any supplements or specialise your diet, but otherwise it can be difficult). In my experience, people who identify as "utilitarians" are, without fail, just pretenders. They act like normal people except they occasionally do random shit like ask people to donate money to charity while they mutilate themselves in some way or some shit. (And then they want praise for giving money to charity, which is absurd, because why are they wasting their time on charity pranks when they should be working on existential risk lol, or at least trying to get into banking or politics lol?)
Anyhow, to get back to the point, I've noticed - and I'm not sure where the causal arrow points in this situation - that my meta-ethical change has coincided with more of a conscious embrace on my part of Machiavellianism. I have decided that I'm happy to cheat, lie and scheme my way through life, do whatever it takes to get on top and enjoy myself. I can suppress guilt and have a good time.
...
In all seriousness, if there are no reasons for action but instrumental reasons, then, well, the Humean conclusion is that, insofar as you can take 'control' of your guilt responses (and most people cannot for 'big' wrongs, admittedly), you should scheme and deceive your way through life, if that allows you to get the wanted outcomes in your life, and if you can avoid detection as a knave and blackguard. You should only work to mitigate suffering insofar as you are directly motivated to do so. And you have no reason to care whether you sometimes make expressive speech acts which, if you were to interpret them in a kind of stricter fashion, imply moral commitments that are at odds with the way you are currently spending your time. Because what do such 'inconsistencies' even matter? They don't even matter if you care about logic, because it's not really an issue of logic, unless you choose to make it into one by treating expressive speech acts as if they are more (as, admittedly, I always myself do in ethical debates).
Anyhow, we gotta save the world from climate change I'm telling ya.
More interesting to me is the fact that a similar debate has also been played out in academic, non-religious meta-ethics. Derek Parfit, the atheist moral realist (believer in eternal "normative truths" which don't require any 'metaphysical grounding'), makes it clear in On What Matters that he thought that the meta-ethical issues are of tremendous importance to humanity. There are several nods to Effective Altruism in Volume I (and maybe a few in Volume II (I read most of both volumes in 2015, and I can't remember it perfectly)), despite the fact that neither volume is actually about practical ethics - I think he thought, with some merit (as I'll shortly discuss), that people without a realist meta-ethical bent are much less likely to want to be Effective Altruists. Famously, he even says (I think he might say it first in the introduction) that, if he is wrong, his entire life would have been "a waste". Obviously, this can't be an 'objective' "waste" if he is wrong, so he is tacitly admitting that his emotional universe wouldn't change much if he convinced himself he were wrong in that very remark. But, as I say, I do at least get the strong impression that he thinks that he may well at least have given up some elements of his self-denying altruism if he were proven wrong. This is especially strong in the section on his good friend Bernard Williams, who was, as Parfit notes, though a decent and virtuous man, not nearly so morally obsessive about distant suffering. 'Why,' Parfit might ask himself were he to give up belief in 'objective reasons', 'do I give so much of my income for people whose emotional reactions don't actually make me suffer in the here and now? I could spend money instead on things that make me happy more directly, while making an effort to remove unpleasant thoughts about starving people in distant countries from my mind!' I think that people like Singer, Pinker, Bloom, Greene, Harris and all other members of the "Effective Altruism" movement, who advocate the view that you can 'do the most good' by trying to think of how to promote "wellbeing" generally, with a decision-theoretic mindset, also quite clearly think that if one does not adopt the doctrine that moral behaviour should be motivated by considerations of consistency between the general normative principles to which we claim to be committed and our specific behaviours, then one is less likely to carry out actions which are "beneficial". So, again, here we have a mild version of the same concern of the monotheist. If you do not try to systematise the logic of your decision-making in the way the above figures do, then you are going to be a much worse person than those who do.
I actually think that it makes perfect sense that one's meta-ethical position would affect one's actions at least a little, and that, for the average person, significantly changing one's meta-ethical stance probably does have some effect on one's emotional universe. I recently myself have consciously raised my credence in the view that all forms of systematic consequentialism - and all systematic moral frameworks - are doomed to failure: more specifically, that, whilst not all 'moral reasoning' is mere "rationalisation", since, in a given dialectical context (a situation where one is debating an ethical issue), it will often be the case that both parties are willing to commit themselves to a relevant, very generally phrased "ethical principle" and yet only one party's position on the issue in question is compatible with the logic of that principle (one case study in the essay linked), the idea that there is some 'absolutely true', self-evident, fully consistent, decidable for all moral problems (in the sense of giving a solid verdict for every possible 'moral situation) finite set of such principles that everyone should rationally accept is really quite absurd. It is absurd for too many reasons to count. The first few I already discussed in the essay linked, but I'd like to go over them again, and some more in addition. One is that (even very intelligent) people don't even agree on what the good is, or even what wellbeing is. Another is that we have no way to measure wellbeing (yes we have proxies like life expectancy, spending power and level of education for human populations, but thinking about human wellbeing even in terms of these measures quickly leads you into some very tricky territory, like the Repugnant Conclusion), and it doesn't seem at all impossible (in fact it seems damn likely to me!) that we will never turn general organismal wellbeing into a measurable theoretical construct in some properly formal model (can we quantify grades of emotional complexity among different organisms lol? even adopting an individualist rather than social or Aristotelian perspective on wellbeing, it doesn't become less absurd: given the computational theory of mind, it is in principle silly to think of thinking of happiness as reducible to arrangements of chemicals, so our 'best' bet would presumably be some kind of computational reduction or something ("The total level of wellbeing w for an organism o at time t is, for all currently perceived worldstates si (even if delusionally perceived) and the correspondent desired worldstates dsi, the average degree of match (continuous variable, along the Real interval [0,1]) between dsi and si , formalised in terms of the theory of mathematical isomorphism according to structurally-abstracted, idealised models of the s and the ds") but since my attempt in that preceding parenthetical interjection was a dumb joke, there is no prospect for this. Another is that we have extremely limited ability to predict future social dynamics (notwithstanding the excellent work of my man Peter Turchin!), so, even supposing for a second that the world can be objectively a better or worse place (assuming that there is some measurable quantity in the fully mind-independent world that goes up and down depending on our actions) no-one can actually claim with very much confidence at all, no matter what they are doing, that they are "making the world a better place", nor can we say that about political policies or decisions, including war (the utilitarian may want to say, as I would, that the Vietnam War, or the Iraq War, were evil atrocities, but they always have in the back of their mind the butterfly effect... what about the unintended longer-term consequences? Hmm I can't be too confident that these things were even overall bad can I? (Objection: but do we really have to be that sceptical? Can't we have high credence that even from a long-term perspective the Iraq War was bad? Sure you can, but with no scientific justification whatever - and that's my point, you have no scientific justification (none of us do!)). Perhaps the only thing a utilitarian can have some confidence is the right thing to do, on the basis that they value the "wellbeing" of all organisms in general, or of "reducing suffering" in general, is to devote their life to investigating and trying to raise alarm bells about existential risks, like Nick Bostrom does. But, as always with utilitarian commitments, there is then no way to justify all the time you spend not working on this project, unless it is directly targeted at improving your ability to work at this project (like resting your brain, or trying to make a lot of money), and this means that to take fully seriously this utilitarian logic you would have to become a total fucking loser weirdo with a horrible life. (Even then, given that "good" and "bad" are not fully mind-independent properties - we know this because they don't feature in any scientific models of mind-independent phenomena which make reliable predictions - the claim that "if the world were without life completely/if humans were wiped out/if civilisation was wiped out it would be a worse or less valuable place" is yet another expressive speech act, and gibberish from a scientific standpoint (it is very easy to persuade humans that they should be concerned about existential risk, because it does seem to follow from a lot of the expressive speech acts we make about ethics that existential risks are extremely important, and yet, strangely (or not so strangely), it is impossible to get a human being to behave as if existential risks are the most important thing to deal with at all times (even Bostrom doesn't really act like this; he has a girlfriend and writes poems).) Another, related one is that a lot of 'noble' or 'altruistic' or 'benevolent' things people say they do for utilitarian reasons don't make sense for utilitarian reasons and are instead just complicated deprivation rituals - rituals which have a very ancient legacy in religions in virtually all human societies. For example, people like Peter Singer - people I know - say that they are vegetarian or vegan because of utilitarian logic. But even if you don't press on the claim that they usually use to back up this statement - "If a lot of people became vegetarian or vegan, there would be more wellbeing in the world/less suffering in the world" (a mere expressive speech act, given that the aggregate wellbeing of all organisms on the planet is immeasurable because we don't even know what wellbeing is (same with suffering)) - even if you pretend that this expressive speech act is something more, and just take for granted that there is some quantity "wellbeing" which would go up were more people to become vegetarians or vegans, and a dual quantity "suffering" which would go down were this to happen (which I am usually happy to do, because it is so intuitive and comfortable to think like this) - then there is still no reason why an individual person should never eat meat, because individual consumption decisions in any given situation are totally inconsequential, and the real goal should be to try one's best to persuade as many other people to be vegetarian or vegan independent of your own consumption decisions. Why not, for example, just eat whatever you want when nobody will find out but try to convince other people to go vegetarian or vegan? That way, you will have a chance of having a super-inconsequential impact on the world without even depriving yourself of delicious meat and making it way harder to keep your iron and B12 levels in a healthy range (if you're South Asian, your iron and B12 levels will probably stay in a healthy range even if you go fully vegetarian and don't take any supplements or specialise your diet, but otherwise it can be difficult). In my experience, people who identify as "utilitarians" are, without fail, just pretenders. They act like normal people except they occasionally do random shit like ask people to donate money to charity while they mutilate themselves in some way or some shit. (And then they want praise for giving money to charity, which is absurd, because why are they wasting their time on charity pranks when they should be working on existential risk lol, or at least trying to get into banking or politics lol?)
Anyhow, to get back to the point, I've noticed - and I'm not sure where the causal arrow points in this situation - that my meta-ethical change has coincided with more of a conscious embrace on my part of Machiavellianism. I have decided that I'm happy to cheat, lie and scheme my way through life, do whatever it takes to get on top and enjoy myself. I can suppress guilt and have a good time.
...
In all seriousness, if there are no reasons for action but instrumental reasons, then, well, the Humean conclusion is that, insofar as you can take 'control' of your guilt responses (and most people cannot for 'big' wrongs, admittedly), you should scheme and deceive your way through life, if that allows you to get the wanted outcomes in your life, and if you can avoid detection as a knave and blackguard. You should only work to mitigate suffering insofar as you are directly motivated to do so. And you have no reason to care whether you sometimes make expressive speech acts which, if you were to interpret them in a kind of stricter fashion, imply moral commitments that are at odds with the way you are currently spending your time. Because what do such 'inconsistencies' even matter? They don't even matter if you care about logic, because it's not really an issue of logic, unless you choose to make it into one by treating expressive speech acts as if they are more (as, admittedly, I always myself do in ethical debates).
Anyhow, we gotta save the world from climate change I'm telling ya.
the extended intelligence theory
Try to develop a complete and correct algorithm for a complicated programming problem in your head. Try to do a complete mathematical proof in your head for an important theorem you haven't proved before (in a branch of mathematics whose axioms you understand well). Try to seriously think through complicated philosophical territory in the philosophy of language in your head.
Try to solve any major intellectual problem in your head. Just in your head, with no paper at all. It shouldn't be so challenging...
It's impossible. Working memory gets overloaded so quickly.
Not sure to what extent people realise, as F. Chollet does (https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/the-impossibility-of-intelligence-explosion-5be4a9eda6ec), that it is technology and culture that has raised us far above our fellow organisms cognitively, not the cognitive endowment itself (except insofar as it allowed for the possibility of complex culture to begin with). Racist people from history or today who mock and disdain the primitive technology of hunter-gatherers (a group that includes great philosophers like Hume and Kant) fail to realise that, if a person with their genetic recipe were raised in such an environment (if 'they' were raised in that environment), they would just be yet another hunter-gatherer armed with a bow and arrow, bawdy jokes, a fanatical attachment to bizarre and traumatic initiation rituals, and a very rich botanical and ethological knowledge of their local environment (i.e. they wouldn't fucking invent a slingshot, let alone writing, let alone prove one of Euclid's theorems, let alone...). People do not sufficiently appreciate the fact that the 20th and 21st Century intellectual giants we recognise in the natural and mathematical sciences - Einstein, Curie, Turing, von Neumann etc - who made astonishing advances unprecedented in history, did not have a kind of brain-wiring or processing speed unprecedented in humans in history. This should be obvious, but I get the impression many people don't reflect on it deeply. Our intelligence as humans is so culture-dependent, even if this doesn't show up so much on IQ tests (except it does a bit in any case, says the Flynn Effect).
Try to solve any major intellectual problem in your head. Just in your head, with no paper at all. It shouldn't be so challenging...
It's impossible. Working memory gets overloaded so quickly.
Not sure to what extent people realise, as F. Chollet does (https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/the-impossibility-of-intelligence-explosion-5be4a9eda6ec), that it is technology and culture that has raised us far above our fellow organisms cognitively, not the cognitive endowment itself (except insofar as it allowed for the possibility of complex culture to begin with). Racist people from history or today who mock and disdain the primitive technology of hunter-gatherers (a group that includes great philosophers like Hume and Kant) fail to realise that, if a person with their genetic recipe were raised in such an environment (if 'they' were raised in that environment), they would just be yet another hunter-gatherer armed with a bow and arrow, bawdy jokes, a fanatical attachment to bizarre and traumatic initiation rituals, and a very rich botanical and ethological knowledge of their local environment (i.e. they wouldn't fucking invent a slingshot, let alone writing, let alone prove one of Euclid's theorems, let alone...). People do not sufficiently appreciate the fact that the 20th and 21st Century intellectual giants we recognise in the natural and mathematical sciences - Einstein, Curie, Turing, von Neumann etc - who made astonishing advances unprecedented in history, did not have a kind of brain-wiring or processing speed unprecedented in humans in history. This should be obvious, but I get the impression many people don't reflect on it deeply. Our intelligence as humans is so culture-dependent, even if this doesn't show up so much on IQ tests (except it does a bit in any case, says the Flynn Effect).
Monday, 19 March 2018
Peter Godfrey-Smith on the Evolution of Consciousness in Other Minds
Peter Godfrey-Smith, of the City University of New York and the University of Sydney, is one of my favourite philosophers. His work in the philosophy of biology, particularly on the problem of biological individuality and on the evolution of consciousness, is very interesting and, I think, important. I got into his work while doing a unit at university on exactly that subject, and reading his take on the first of the two problems mentioned above. I found myself experiencing tremendous admiration for his bipartite schema for the determination of biological individuality and his ingenious cubic diagram (https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2017/06/the-problem-of-individuals-and-species.html). Anyhow, I just finished his book Other Minds, a meditation on the cognitive faculties of octopus and cuttlefish species, particularly as they illuminate issues generally in the evolution of intelligence and consciousness (but also because this stuff is damn fascinating in its own right). It's a very elegantly written and very compelling and insightful book. I'm not going to properly review it, because I don't properly review books (I loathe summarising things). I just want to highlight a couple of his observations and thoughts from the section on "consciousness", which, incidentally, is a very good section, with some genuinely original thoughts raised in defence of a 'gradualist' position on the evolution of consciousness, and, by extension, a 'continuous' position on consciousness itself (as opposed to boring David Chalmers-type 'consciousness-is-a-special-mystery-essence' BS.)
The first observation I want to mention is a rather simple evolutionary insight but, I think, extremely important, and highly underappreciated. It goes as follows: since mobile animals (as opposed to plants, or microscopic creatures, or most insects) affect the world they interact with in a very salient way - at the very least, by moving their body, significantly alter the scene coming in through their perceptual systems - they absolutely 100% need to somehow model what 'they' are doing to change things around them, as opposed to what other creatures are doing, or what is happening due to non-organismal forces like currents in the ocean, the wind, etc. This attribute of having some kind of model of the self, or at least some kind of 'awareness' of actions taken, must, therefore, be very ancient. The nervous systems of fish in the Cambrian explosion probably included some mechanisms that transmitted motor information to other parts of the system. Another interesting thought Godfrey-Smith raises is that acting abnormally in response to negative stimulus - like tightening up or moving rapidly in a certain direction, or producing a sound - and avoiding sources of pain, is a definite sign of this ability, and a definite sign of feeling pain or experiencing suffering of some kind. And, in this connection, he points out that ants do not act any different when they are severely damaged; ants still try to drag themselves around even when their abdomens are squished, as if nothing has happened at all.
A more subtle theory he proposes on this topic is that organisms that have evolved to be curious in the sense that they have evolved to be versatile foragers, looking for different food at different times or in different places, and to take advantage of resources (e.g. both habitation and food resources),in new environments - a category which does seem to encompass both us and the octopi, along perhaps with our chimp cousins and definitely our hominin ancestors - may possess a greater degree of consciousness because such creatures have to rely heavily on highly integrated thinking, having to really take in all aspects of their environment and solve problems using knowledge from different areas of the brain. It's hard to connect this directly to 'subjectivity', but of course the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness is a very popular one, and something seems right about it (more on this in a second).
He also suggests - extremely plausibly, as I see it - that humans may have a uniquely strong sense of subjectivity because of internal language, and the ability it probably enables for meta-thinking, thinking about one's thoughts and reflecting on one's mental states. In his nod to the integrated information/workspace theory of consciousness, he hypothesises that language may also be a major tool in helping the mind bring together information coming from different modules (strangely enough, he and I share this theory (https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/an-essay-on-mysteries-of-mind.html (I want to be clear that I have been convinced since I wrote this that the Chomsky-Berwick hypothesis on the origin of language is very likely quite significantly wrong)) and we both think that there may be evidence for this from child psychology research by the likes of Elizabeth Spelke (actually, I can't remember if he cites Spelke but he mentions some child psychology research)). Fascinatingly, he hypothesises that it might be reasonable to think of Kahneman and Tversky's category of "System 2 Thinking" as linguistic thinking, thinking which brings all our knowledge to one 'workspace' and allows us to slow down and process things symbolically. And he suggests also that it is when that internal language is more muted that one is less conscious, i.e. one is less conscious when that 'voice' is switched off. This last bit does accord with my own experience, I think, when I reflect. And surely it is no coincidence that meditation-boosters talk of the feeling of being 'freed of the self' by eliminating that incessant interior monologue.
So pain and some kind of monitoring of oneself as an agent comes inevitably with being a certain-sized creature acting in the world (Godfrey-Smith namedrops Dewey in relation to this stuff, which I like, because Dewey is super cool), but maybe only humans have that real special sort of awareness, because that comes with language. Cool stuff.
Also I agree with Godfrey-Smith's claim in this book that intelligence isn't one thing, and that there is no such thing as General Intelligence with a capital G and I (https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2017/12/a-rambling-essay-called-notion-of.html).
Also I agree with Godfrey-Smith's claim in this book that intelligence isn't one thing, and that there is no such thing as General Intelligence with a capital G and I (https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2017/12/a-rambling-essay-called-notion-of.html).
Thursday, 15 March 2018
A Great Essay on Sexual Politics
At times, this article from LRB hints at a robust blank-slatism (does the author know, as Pinker discusses in the mostly terrific book How the Mind Works, that low-status young men going "amok" is a social phenomenon attested to cross-culturally? And I am concerned that this is someone who dismisses evolutionary psychology/sexual selection-theory-applied-to-humans wholesale, when the correct take on evo psych is only that most of it is garbage, whereas figures like Pinker do a pretty respectable job of cleaving to the evo psych hypotheses for which there is solid evidence, or which are testable in principle)... but it's a very good discussion of these issues overall. I, too, think we should try to "dwell in that ambivalent place" of which the author speaks.
And I obviously love that the author echoes exactly many of my own thoughts and observations, including noting the strange, disturbing fact that angry incel MRA-types can almost invariably trace most of their externally imposed suffering to fellow men, and yet respond by joining male solidarity movements... https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2018/01/curious-social-fact.html
And I obviously love that the author echoes exactly many of my own thoughts and observations, including noting the strange, disturbing fact that angry incel MRA-types can almost invariably trace most of their externally imposed suffering to fellow men, and yet respond by joining male solidarity movements... https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2018/01/curious-social-fact.html
Wednesday, 7 March 2018
monbiot vs pinker
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/07/environmental-calamity-facts-steven-pinker
lol finally monbiot himself wrote the thing i've been writing
reminds me of monbiot's savage takedowns in 2010 of matt ridley's shitty environmental research:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/may/31/state-market-nothern-rock-ridley
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jun/18/matt-ridley-rational-optimist-errors
economic libertarianism is literally incompatible with a good understanding of environmental issues... it doesn't survive
lol finally monbiot himself wrote the thing i've been writing
reminds me of monbiot's savage takedowns in 2010 of matt ridley's shitty environmental research:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/may/31/state-market-nothern-rock-ridley
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jun/18/matt-ridley-rational-optimist-errors
economic libertarianism is literally incompatible with a good understanding of environmental issues... it doesn't survive
Wednesday, 14 February 2018
One More Post on Pinker, Centrism and Climate Change
"I realize that most intellectuals and journalists think it is serious and responsible to sound the alarm on everything that’s going wrong, and frivolous or panglossian or whiggish or Polyannish to point out what’s going right, but I argue that this is mistaken. If people are constantly told that their society is a flaming dumpster, they’ll be receptive to demagogues and firebrands who say that reform is futile and that the institutions of liberal democracy and applied expertise must be wrecked. They will be complacent about the rollback of measures that have—the data show—done tremendous good, such as ones that have combated poverty, pollution, and workplace accidents. And they’ll be cynical about the very possibility of improving life, and fatalistic about looming threats. If poverty, war, pollution, and crime are permanent and intractable problems, why even bother trying to solve them?"
Pinker, here... https://www.amazonbookreview.com/post/866e8865-5672-4b52-939a-635d63472d7f/talking-to-stephen-pinker
This ethical claim of Pinker's definitely makes a certain kind of sense.... I am one of those of the view that intellectuals who claimed or claim that there's no morally important difference between Clinton and Trump are very irresponsible! I think that those academics who say stuff like "Capitalism is intolerable, and we should rise up in revolution!" are also kind of irresponsible - or they would be, if they had major influence. I think that the intellectuals who encourage political violence are definitely irresponsible, even if they have limited influence (I think encouraging Anti-fa is a pretty silly idea, because, so far as I can tell, the only effect of Anti-fa demonstrations is to increase political violence). Although Chomsky still encourages people to vote for Democrats, it's not impossible that his very passionate rhetoric about, e.g., Obama's drone campaign, reinforces for a nontrivial portion of his audience the idea that there is no point voting for mainstream parties - which would definitely be a bad thing if it is the case (even on Chomsky's own lights). And it seems pretty plausible that Pinker plays a positive activist role himself (even from a lefty-type perspective) in converting some number of extremist libertarians to a more moderate neoliberalism which sees a role for a strong welfare state and environmental regulations.
All this said, I think Pinker takes this attitude significantly too far. My major gripe is that I think climate change is a far too fast-moving problem for the technocratic, neoliberal, centrist establishment to deal with effectively, mired as it is in the wet concrete of Capital, with its 'thought-leaders' in possession of a linear and gradualist mindset much like Pinker's. I strongly believe that Pinker's linear mindset is a big flaw in his thinking, and that, at least on the issue of climate change, intellectuals probably do have a responsibility to be quite alarmist. Allow me to explain, in slightly more detail than I have done before on this blog.
A lot of the stuff Pinker writes and claims seems to betray a pretty naive understanding of both complex systems and how to interpret statistics. I've written about this before, but it never fails to annoy me that he says in The Better Angels of our Nature and (in an extract I saw in The Guardian from) Enlightenment Now (and in many of his interviews) that he is not in the business of prophecy and can't say with high confidence that things will keep on improving, and yet simultaneously loves to trumpet the idea not just that things have gotten better but that things are "getting better" and that we need to remind ourselves of "what's working". This strongly suggests (unless he is literally just contradicting himself) that he does think that, if we maintain the institutions of liberal democracy (by which I suppose he means roughly, 'Keep voting for the centrists!') then he does think that there is very good reason to think that all the happy trends he identifies will either continue or level off in a non-destructive way. But this is pretty dumb! It's a very naive kind of induction, which makes it sound as if he's never read an ecology or biology textbook. Yes, human ingenuity and technological improvements have helped us get this far while growing the global economic pie at a very fast rate. Yes, we have so far been able to 'deal with' pollution, soil erosion, climate change and all the rest to the extent that we have not really seen a growing food or health crisis in most places of the world. Yes, we are improving our recycling methods and consumption habits across the developed world. And yes, many doomsayers have been wrong - sometimes very wrong - in predictions of overshoot (though, contra libertarian myth, reality has not at all falsified the modelling framework of those involved in the Limits to Growth project (http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf) (given that we are in a pessimistic scenario in terms of how much action we've taken on climate change and waste, if we make it through the next twenty years without growing problems with food production, declining lifespans and weaker economic growth, then the framework will have been shown to be in error)).
But none of this should even reduce your credence more than a fraction in the idea that we, as a civilisation, are heading for a fall, once you realise that we are living on a planet with a carrying capacity, that pollution is far easier to create than to remove (that, e.g. plastic pollution, has been on its own dramatic upward trend for several decades), that problems like soil erosion and salinisation and pesticide-pollution have only been getting worse for decades and cannot be remediated by any existing technology, that insect populations may well be collapsing (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/14/a-different-dimension-of-loss-great-insect-die-off-sixth-extinction), and that climate breakdown is a rapidly accelerating juggernaut, with very worrying feedback loops starting to kick in (see my Wadhams extracts for how the Arctic albedo is dramatically diminishing while we are probably experiencing the beginning of a major methane leak).
To be clear, I do still lean towards the view that our only hope for dealing with climate change to the extent that we don't cause a dramatic reduction in health outcomes, wealth and living standards for tens of millions of people comes from doing it 'within existing institutions' (roughly speaking). As I remarked to H, saying that we need to "destroy capitalism" to deal with the impending climate crisis is like a surfer responding to the massive 5m wave about to crash on top of him not by trying his best to duck-dive and swim under the swell, but by deciding to try to ascend the crest with superhuman, gravity-defying paddling even as the wave is foaming at the top, then, once he reaches the top, doing an ollie and triple backflip, to finally glide smoothly back down to the safety of flat ocean while doing a handstand.
But, to my way of thinking, that still means that it is absolutely the right thing (probably) to vote for the hardline greenies among mainstream politicians, like the Sanders and Corbyns, and support the hardline lefy factions, over the centrists still beholden to corporate interests and not radical about environmental problems. Pinker clearly doesn't agree with this! In fact, I suspect that he may well think that Sanders counts as a "demagogue". I personally really don't think Sanders counts as a demagogue (you can't say "Oh, but what about the cult of personality around the guy", unless you also want to indict Clinton or Obama as demagogues, or most politicians (it's certainly wrong to say that Sanders has tried to cultivate a cult of personality around himself (his advertising campaigns barely focus on him at all))), nor is Corbyn much of a demagogue: Corbyn's rhetorical style is very quiet and understated (yes, his rhetoric can be passionate, but it is not highly rousing and dramatic), and he has not campaigned in a way that is self-focussed (I concede that many of his supporters have focussed on him in a cultish way). My strong worry is that if we fail to support the lefty factions of 'social democratic' parties in the developed world, that will be like responding to the 5m wave by simply swimming towards it as if it is not there at all. Which is to say, it will turn out very badly indeed. If this is our course, we will realise just as we are being pushed beneath the water that we didn't do enough, but, by that point, there will be nothing we can do to avoid the impending washing machine experience. In a situation of massive overshoot, there is no stopping the disaster.
Pinker, here... https://www.amazonbookreview.com/post/866e8865-5672-4b52-939a-635d63472d7f/talking-to-stephen-pinker
This ethical claim of Pinker's definitely makes a certain kind of sense.... I am one of those of the view that intellectuals who claimed or claim that there's no morally important difference between Clinton and Trump are very irresponsible! I think that those academics who say stuff like "Capitalism is intolerable, and we should rise up in revolution!" are also kind of irresponsible - or they would be, if they had major influence. I think that the intellectuals who encourage political violence are definitely irresponsible, even if they have limited influence (I think encouraging Anti-fa is a pretty silly idea, because, so far as I can tell, the only effect of Anti-fa demonstrations is to increase political violence). Although Chomsky still encourages people to vote for Democrats, it's not impossible that his very passionate rhetoric about, e.g., Obama's drone campaign, reinforces for a nontrivial portion of his audience the idea that there is no point voting for mainstream parties - which would definitely be a bad thing if it is the case (even on Chomsky's own lights). And it seems pretty plausible that Pinker plays a positive activist role himself (even from a lefty-type perspective) in converting some number of extremist libertarians to a more moderate neoliberalism which sees a role for a strong welfare state and environmental regulations.
All this said, I think Pinker takes this attitude significantly too far. My major gripe is that I think climate change is a far too fast-moving problem for the technocratic, neoliberal, centrist establishment to deal with effectively, mired as it is in the wet concrete of Capital, with its 'thought-leaders' in possession of a linear and gradualist mindset much like Pinker's. I strongly believe that Pinker's linear mindset is a big flaw in his thinking, and that, at least on the issue of climate change, intellectuals probably do have a responsibility to be quite alarmist. Allow me to explain, in slightly more detail than I have done before on this blog.
A lot of the stuff Pinker writes and claims seems to betray a pretty naive understanding of both complex systems and how to interpret statistics. I've written about this before, but it never fails to annoy me that he says in The Better Angels of our Nature and (in an extract I saw in The Guardian from) Enlightenment Now (and in many of his interviews) that he is not in the business of prophecy and can't say with high confidence that things will keep on improving, and yet simultaneously loves to trumpet the idea not just that things have gotten better but that things are "getting better" and that we need to remind ourselves of "what's working". This strongly suggests (unless he is literally just contradicting himself) that he does think that, if we maintain the institutions of liberal democracy (by which I suppose he means roughly, 'Keep voting for the centrists!') then he does think that there is very good reason to think that all the happy trends he identifies will either continue or level off in a non-destructive way. But this is pretty dumb! It's a very naive kind of induction, which makes it sound as if he's never read an ecology or biology textbook. Yes, human ingenuity and technological improvements have helped us get this far while growing the global economic pie at a very fast rate. Yes, we have so far been able to 'deal with' pollution, soil erosion, climate change and all the rest to the extent that we have not really seen a growing food or health crisis in most places of the world. Yes, we are improving our recycling methods and consumption habits across the developed world. And yes, many doomsayers have been wrong - sometimes very wrong - in predictions of overshoot (though, contra libertarian myth, reality has not at all falsified the modelling framework of those involved in the Limits to Growth project (http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf) (given that we are in a pessimistic scenario in terms of how much action we've taken on climate change and waste, if we make it through the next twenty years without growing problems with food production, declining lifespans and weaker economic growth, then the framework will have been shown to be in error)).
But none of this should even reduce your credence more than a fraction in the idea that we, as a civilisation, are heading for a fall, once you realise that we are living on a planet with a carrying capacity, that pollution is far easier to create than to remove (that, e.g. plastic pollution, has been on its own dramatic upward trend for several decades), that problems like soil erosion and salinisation and pesticide-pollution have only been getting worse for decades and cannot be remediated by any existing technology, that insect populations may well be collapsing (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/14/a-different-dimension-of-loss-great-insect-die-off-sixth-extinction), and that climate breakdown is a rapidly accelerating juggernaut, with very worrying feedback loops starting to kick in (see my Wadhams extracts for how the Arctic albedo is dramatically diminishing while we are probably experiencing the beginning of a major methane leak).
To be clear, I do still lean towards the view that our only hope for dealing with climate change to the extent that we don't cause a dramatic reduction in health outcomes, wealth and living standards for tens of millions of people comes from doing it 'within existing institutions' (roughly speaking). As I remarked to H, saying that we need to "destroy capitalism" to deal with the impending climate crisis is like a surfer responding to the massive 5m wave about to crash on top of him not by trying his best to duck-dive and swim under the swell, but by deciding to try to ascend the crest with superhuman, gravity-defying paddling even as the wave is foaming at the top, then, once he reaches the top, doing an ollie and triple backflip, to finally glide smoothly back down to the safety of flat ocean while doing a handstand.
But, to my way of thinking, that still means that it is absolutely the right thing (probably) to vote for the hardline greenies among mainstream politicians, like the Sanders and Corbyns, and support the hardline lefy factions, over the centrists still beholden to corporate interests and not radical about environmental problems. Pinker clearly doesn't agree with this! In fact, I suspect that he may well think that Sanders counts as a "demagogue". I personally really don't think Sanders counts as a demagogue (you can't say "Oh, but what about the cult of personality around the guy", unless you also want to indict Clinton or Obama as demagogues, or most politicians (it's certainly wrong to say that Sanders has tried to cultivate a cult of personality around himself (his advertising campaigns barely focus on him at all))), nor is Corbyn much of a demagogue: Corbyn's rhetorical style is very quiet and understated (yes, his rhetoric can be passionate, but it is not highly rousing and dramatic), and he has not campaigned in a way that is self-focussed (I concede that many of his supporters have focussed on him in a cultish way). My strong worry is that if we fail to support the lefty factions of 'social democratic' parties in the developed world, that will be like responding to the 5m wave by simply swimming towards it as if it is not there at all. Which is to say, it will turn out very badly indeed. If this is our course, we will realise just as we are being pushed beneath the water that we didn't do enough, but, by that point, there will be nothing we can do to avoid the impending washing machine experience. In a situation of massive overshoot, there is no stopping the disaster.
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