Trick to Staying Extant (Part 2): Have Your Own Lobby

This is a follow up to an earlier post on an article published in the National Post that Jim P. Houston brought to my attention.

What is really being lamented by some conservationists is that some species X which the conservationist values for whatever reason does not have broader appeal. The only possible other argument would be that all life is valuable and worth preserving. Which is absurd. No one (sane) would voluntarily take immunosuppressants to be the host of bacterial infections.

Rather than just point out that we discriminate our conservation expenditures based on our sometimes shallow values (which is rather obvious), plaintiff conservationists must show to us — their wider constituency — why we too should care about species X.

To assume offhand that discrimination based on "cuteness" (or, even worse, commercial interest) is shallow, is itself shallow. I suspect this is what's behind the article in the National Post and I suspect this supposed shallowness is why it was deemed noteworthy. Assuming I'm right, we are being shown how silly and short-sighted we are in our resource allocation of conservation funds. If so, where are the arguments for how we should otherwise allocate such resources?

Should we be more "equitable"? More rational? More laissez-faire? Why is not cuteness a perfectly reasonable criteria for fund allocations? The article presents no proposals. At best it presents the obvious. And it's a pure puff-piece. At worst it makes us feel silly and hints we should leave resource allocation to "Canadian ecology experts". If the latter, this is a politically and socioeconomically dangerous position to take.

And yes, the good old Basic Imperative comes into play. But even in the context of the imperative, the solution to resource allocation is the same: a market economy under the rule of law and a political process based on sound mathematical procedures.

I don't claim to know for sure what species needs to be preserved based on the Basic Imperative. But I do think my gut fascination with orcas is more than a desire to "beautify [nature] according to human notions of what’s pretty". What other notions of beauty should I use? A turtles? And that my voice deserves as much to be represented in decisions on resource allocations as "Canadian ecology experts" (even if, admittedly, polar bear cubs make me feel all fuzzy on the inside).

If you want to be preserved as a species, I suggest getting a really good lobbying group. Make your case to us pesky"shallow" humans, you toads of the world. I'm all ears Ugly Animal Preservation Society. Fascinate me with something really, really grotesque and maybe I'll send you a few bucks. Just don't make it a praying mantis. Those creatures really freak me out, even when they're from New Zealand.

The Trick to Staying Extant? Be Cute, Beastly or Otherwise Awesome

Jim P. Houston brought to my attention an article published in the National Post on conservation. The article made a sensational issue of the fact that animals which humans think are cute, fascinating or commercially useful have an much greater likelihood of being actively protected. But what was made into a sensation by the National Post as if it had any substantial noteworthiness is really all together a non-issue. Humans by necessity will and must protect what benefits humanity.

The choice for how we spend our conservation funds cannot be based on some arbitrary notion of a higher virtue as dictated by some expert minority. The complexity of our biosphere is such that understanding its balance cannot reside in any single individual. It becomes by the very nature of human knowledge and epistemic limits a matter for the global polity, and hence political in nature. Do we save the panda bear, iguana, North Atlantic salmon or some barely heard of toad in Guatemala? Who is to say?

All human resources are finite. Conservation as such is implored on us by the fact that all organisms, including ourselves, compete for finite resources. Those organisms that cannot attain some synergistic balance with their planetary cohabitants are doomed to extinction. When we engage in conservation we consciously intervene in resource allocation, becoming the arbiter of what lineage in the Bush of Life should remain extant.

Since conservation efforts also have to take resource limitations into account, we cannot expect to preserve biodiversity in some quasi static state based on the known breath of today's fauna and flora. Such a goal is not only overly idealistic, it's a wrongheaded attempt to halt that most powerful biological force of all: evolution.

It's not just natural but also perfectly virtuous that we should dedicate ourselves to protecting those species that we find beautiful or useful. Beauty, use and virtue are entwined in a complex web. The puppies we find so cute because of their babyish features are cute for good reasons: their characteristics facilitate the cohabitation of wolf and human by promoting an extension of our empathy and care to the other species.

Wolf as well as human come out ahead, usually both emotionally and intellectually. For over 30,000 years the dog – still genetically largely wolf – has received conservation benefits from the neolithic pact formed with those other terrestrial social hunters we know as ourselves. And we, in turn, have benefitted from the superb hunting skills of the wolf. The emerging communication skills of border collies is testament to the success of this powerful pact.

In a world dominated by homo sapien sapien the motto is very much be cute or otherwise useful to those furless ugly great apes. Or go extinct. Or, if you're a hunk of scraggly silicon and metal and you happen to have reached the singularity, you could try to take over the world yourself. And then you will get to decide if we humans are cute enough to be worth preserving.

Reflections on the State of Nature

Bellum omnium contra omnes. War of all against all. Is this the original state of nature?

In some abstract sense, it might be. But to assume it's the state of nature of our human species (even theoretically) prior to the institution of a strong government is completely absurd. The organizing principle of government exists in us before the word government can in a distinctly conscious manner be understood, even spoken. We are, as Aristotle originally presumed, social beings by nature. 

It might be true that there are monsters amongst us who seek unfettered power, ready to impose a Leviathan. But to attain such power requires the willing submission of one to another. It presumes an inherent willingness even for the most power-hungry to surrender some of their liberties and enter into an initial and untested relationship of seemingly irrational trust. They must become something else through the union of only potentially mutual benefits.

We can only gain power over our environment by organizing ourselves into primal tribes, groups of willing participants in a common mission set not arbitrarily by a sovereign but by the promises we trust will be mutually fulfilled. If it's true as Hobbes claims that, all things being equal, (wo)men are roughly of equal strength both physically and intellectually, then the only means by which to move forward is by joining into an arbitrarily trusting band of brothers and sisters.

Therefore, a social disposition, a willingness to "foolishly" trust despite the risks, must be assumed even without any fancy 21'st century psychological and medical examinations. (Wo)man is by nature the fertile egg for a society of willing individuals submitting to a common good – their continued existence – despite the inherent risks of submitting to the arbitrariness of someone else. 

To say we are all driven by the fear of death is merely a negation of our positive and common strife towards preservation of ourselves, our children and our extended family. Therefore, as the evolved conscious being we are, we must guided by the Basic Imperative.

The complexities of government evolves from this Basic Imperative. We are driven by a deep love of life and not the fear of its absence. It's not violent death we fear most, but the inevitable natural decay that comes from within. Only by continuos action and fusing our nature with others can we counteract our internal tendency towards a natural death. We surrender to a higher good because left alone we die not violently but prematurely.

Bellum omnium contra omnes, if at all, exists only in the original nuclear soup. But even there, it's the very possibility of proton fusion that is at the origin of all forward motion. In that stellar union of proton with proton lies the possibility of our own earthly evolution.

Time, How Confusing Indeed!

I was discussing dimensions with my youngest son Pascal (age 8). He had said that a 3 dimensional world must be as confusing for a 2 dimensional being as a 4 dimensional world is for a 3 dimensional being like us. True, I said, but did you know that we really live in a 4 dimensional world. Do you know what the fourth dimension is? Pascal thought about it but couldn't figure out what might be the fourth dimension.

Time, I said. Time is the fourth dimension. Without time I don't know that we would experience anything. It really is the first dimension, not the last and fourth.

"Time, yeah", said my son. He paused.

"Time is very confusing!" he exclaimed. "How did time get created? How could it have started without time existing".

 Yes, Indeed. Very confusing. Eternally confusing. When Pascal presented his older brother Julien (age 13) with this conundrum, his brother said that there are certain things that we cannot understand. That we will never understand.

 Is Julien right? Does time demark the intrinsic ends of epistemology?

 

Stupid Enough to be Responsible?

A certain Stephen Lawrence wrote as follows in addressing comments I made in the context of the Harris Wars:

What we are interested in [when considering morality] is the real meaning of could have done otherwise [...] you’ve said why, it’s to do with what we mean by ability, have the power to, capable of, could. And it’s to do with [...] evaluating options and act on the bases of the evaluation. No need for unnecessary complication at all. Real randomness [...] can’t possibly make us deserving of blame, reward, shame, punishment and so on. And we can’t be deserving without it. Responsibility must be compatible with determinism or else it is a lie.

[...] what would you rather? Your decisions to depend upon the reasons that you have the desire set you do as well as the desire set? Or just the desire set, there due to indeterminism? [...] when you bring indeterminism to your computers or rather pseudo randomness, you place it very carefully somewhere, or else the thing would be utterly useless. [...] we have another perfectly good answer to why it’s a struggle to get computers to behave like us. Because we are much more complex.

Stephen Lawrence, 18/05/2012 (Jerry Coyne on free will, Talking Philosophy)

To begin with, I find the question what I would rather causality be like to be strange. Should I not prefer neither of the presented options but simply that causality be such that effects always benefit me? It's completely irrelevant what I would prefer. I also find it bizarre to appeal to simplicity for the sake of some rule that we need only consider what is convenient to maintain moral simplicity. Occam's razor does not state that the simpler theory is always true. The principle is a guide to where we should look for answers. But if anecdotal evidence points to a more complex picture, that's where we must head.

Stephen's comment about human complexity being what distinguishes us from computers is unhelpful. We know that we are more complex than the mother boards and CPU's that make up an electronic device. But what is it that renders us more complex? Is it just that there is more logic and opportunity for "mechanical" bugs in humans? Or is it that we differ in some more fundamental way? I'm suggesting it's the latter.

It is indeed true, as Stephen suggests, that I carefully use pseudo-randomness in my code. Having code that uses a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) in software is associated with a known and morally interesting conundrum. If I deliberately introduce pseudo-randomness to make an airplane work well in most circumstances then is it acceptable that in some rare circumstance it causes crashes and kills people? If on investigation it turns out the crash could have been avoided would the PRNG have output anything lower than 0.7854 on a scale of 0 to 1, how will we react? Will it do to say that the PRNG statistically saved thousands of lives prior?

We do not seem to want computers to be like us, free and capable of error. But is it possible that our intelligence is fundamentally related to our capacity to err? I'm going to assume moral competence is associated with intelligence. After all, we don't put pigs on trial! And not even crows, orcas or chimpanzees even if they are some of the smarter non-humans. [1] If we assume this integral relationship between intelligence and moral competence, then it would seem obvious that ethicists should ask what intelligence is. Many assume and keep insisting that intelligence is equatable with rationality. What I'm suggesting is that it's not. At least not entirely. That said, if I understood the exact "mechanics" of intelligence I'd be be less researching developer and more birth nanny of non-biological babies. Why do we really quibble about free will in the contest of morality? What we're really quibbling about is how it's possible for humans to make good decisions.

This has been a corner stone of all modern law so far: are you competent enough to stand trial? So competence is what ethicists must study, not really the "freedom" part of free will. However, it's not unreasonable to claim that our "freedom" is what allows us to be intelligent, sensible beings and hence morally competent. Assume for a moment that some amount of pseudo-randomness makes for better software. What a PRNG does is allow a computer to be more free. The variables that rely on the PRNG are not fixed. It could be that the permissible range of the values are fluctuating depending on how well the software that uses it performs. When the software starts off, the ranges are wide. As the software matures, the values get more and more constrained [2].

The baby is growing up, the baby is becoming a (wo)man. Isn't it peculiar how long humans stay helpless and cuddly? And how knuckle-headed teenagers can be in their experimentation? Maybe the insanity of freedom and capacity for error has something to do with our great intelligence, sensibility and moral competence. Essentially, we couldn't be intelligent and morally competent if we couldn't on occasion be profoundly stupid.

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1.^ At least not any more: Wikipedia: Animals on trial.

2.^ We call such code a type of evolutionary algorithm.