Legality vs. Morality

Even amongst my fellow world federalists, who fully agree on the necessity for the global Rule of Law,  I've been noticing a lot of equivocation about what is morally versus legally right in international affairs. Laws (and their related social norms) should not be equated with what is ethically right. A law can be immoral. However, always following our moral convictions can be socially unsound. So what role does each play in creating a good global society, one that is conducive to the wellbeing of our species as a whole?

In simple terms, a law is a rule recorded and enforced by a government. In more general terms, it is is an agreed upon norm. When viewed in this general sense, the distinction between laws and moral precepts begins to fade. But importantly, to avoid continuous bickering about what we agree on, we record our norms in contracts that ethically bind us to abide by them in our future actions. A clearer distinction reemerges between norms that are based on instinct or personal contemplation — morals — and those which are clearly laws, objectively verifiable agreements.

If you and I sign a contract, and neither of us are under duress, the distinction between morality and law is less clear. It can be objectively determined that I personally consented in writing to the contract and, however egregious the conditions were, it was by my choice. If you agree for me to euthanize you, it becomes much harder to claim that I committed an unethical act. It's still possible within a well formed ethical framework, albeit such arguments have far less emotional force than claims about a moral obligation to act in any given way when no clear consent was given.

When laws are nationalized, the norms are made to be binding to the whole nation regardless of any single person's direct consent. Problematically lacking the element of our direct consent, our obligation to abide by them enters into a much more difficult scenario.

International treaties are (inter)nationalized contracts. Just like a contract between you and me, its a legally binding agreement. But because it is (inter)nationalized, and that it was made without the direct consent of all affected, we can easily begin to equivocate about the morality of a state's actions in the international arena. We muddy the distinction between what is morally and legally right by equating the two. Russia's actions vis-à-vis Ukraine are suddenly in the right/wrong simply because there is (or isn't) a treaty or legal precedence. Legal (in)correctness is sloppily transferred into the moral domain. 

So what role does morality legitimately play in (inter)national law? In modern times, this question harkens back to Jeremy Bentham and the philosophical school that he founded: utilitarianism. Bentham did no concern himself specifically with international affairs. His attention was directed at the very idea of human laws and actions regardless of context.

The more fundamental question is: how do we determine if any given law or action is right or wrong? If we just use our "hearts", given that desires diverge, we will end up with bellum omnium contra omnes, a war of each against all. Perhaps we should outlaw marriages between persons of type X and Y because, well it's just preposterous and against the natural order. Or their love demonstrates that it is in fact part of the natural order. Its one against the other. And the issue can ultimately only be resolved with sticks and stones. Or nuclear devices. Or, like between many of us in the blogosphere, bad or outright mischievous rhetoric.

To resolve this conundrum, Bentham famously invented modern utilitarianism by postulating that laws should abide by the following moral precept:

Act such as to maximize happiness and reduce suffering. 

Bentham alternatively called this the utility or greatest happiness principle. It was a clever idea but has been shown to be fraught with problems. A variety of so called thought experiments have indicated that it leaves something to be desired. Outcomes of these experiments frequently contradict our basic moral intuition.

A possible resolution to the legality versus morality dilemma is the relativist position which disregards that any legitimate distinction should be made: what is legal is, by definition,  morally acceptable. But now, suddenly, female circumcisions become an acceptable procedure simply because it is a culturally conditioned norm. Slavery is also acceptable. And only illegal in the U.S. because the Union had more guns, more people and a higher frequency of clever engineers to invent effective ways of killing lots of people. This flies in the face of most modern mindsets. And yet, frequently, we use this form of relativism in an attempt to be culturally and internationally sophisticated.

Yes, we should be nuanced. But we should not let relativism cloud our moral being, just as we should not mistake our immediate emotions for morality and paint the world in terms of a battle between good and evil.  But if we abandon ethical legalism — the relativist idea that laws determine morality and that morals are just culturally conditioned norms  — and, on the other hand, morality is not just a matter of the "heart", then what are we left with? This is the dilemma that Bentham, and later John Stuart Mill, tried to grapple with.

To be happy is certainly in most cases a good thing. But happiness is easily confused with our desires. And there are sociopaths who find happiness in the most monstrous conditions. The utilitarian hope is that by trying to maximize everyone's wellbeing, the voice of the sociopath will be drained out. The problem is that we easily end up with an overly and leisurely unproductive society. And at worst a decadent one. So what is wrong with a leisurely, happy-go-lucky society where we philosophize all day about the meaning of cheesecake and Kim Kardashian's latest sartorial endeavors? The problem is that such a society is unsustainable.

And it is here, in sustainability, that I think we can find the basis of a good moral precept. The triumph of science and engineering lead us to believe (for a while) that humanity stood at the center of creation. Then, through our great ingenuity, we discovered how to initiate nuclear reactions. Our ingeniousness was not only capable of saving ourselves from becoming extinct by the forces of nature; we were capable of initiating our very own "unnatural" destruction. Simultaneously, we peered deeper and deeper into the Universe and discovered that we really were truly insignificant in the great scheme of things. Our scientific and technological triumph was short-lived. No Better Living Through Chemistry necessarily. We realized we could unintentionally and possibly irreversibly poison the well of life that sustained us.

Survival remains our most prescient objective, not our own wellbeing by attaining some higher rung in Maslow's infamous pyramid. Our life is not about personal self-actualization. Yes, indeed, I firmly claim that it all boils down to survival. Not of ourselves, since death of the individual is an integral part of the cycle of life as such. Our goal is and must be, by natural inclination, the survival of our evolving species. Based on this recognition, we can formulate what I have called the Basic Imperative:

Act such as to maximize the survival chance of our distant descendants.

This imperative does not disregard the necessity for our general wellbeing. Without consideration for individual wellbeing, life can become such a drudgery that it no longer seems worth living. We will feel no compulsion to meet the Basic Imperative. And eventually, as a species, we will become extinct. But, importantly, the Basic Imperative subordinates our immediate wellbeing to a greater common goal: the potential existence of distant descendants with a higher consciousness and who can truly call themselves masters of their destiny. What the purpose of making sure such beings will one day exist I don't portend to know. All I know is that the desire to have descendants, descendants who are as (or even more) capable than myself, is deeply engrained into the fabric of my being. And by consequence of the very nature of life, it's easy to conjecture that it has been part of almost every organism since the dawn of life itself.

The Basic Imperative does not and cannot dictate how we act. At best it can guide us well. The future gets inherently murkier the further out we try to see. We are not privy to some causal certainty about the future of our planet. The best we can do is make educated guesses based on instinct, reason and past evidence. What it clearly indicates is that we must maintain some form of stasis, or (as it is called in international politics) stability. War is a clear sign of instability and should be avoided to the utmost extent we can, especially given the fact that we now possess nuclear weaponry capable of sending us back to the far harsher environment of the iron age if not further. We will devolve rather than evolve, undoing centuries if not millennia of human history. Assuming that we could even survive such a self-inflicted apocalyptic event.

So let us consider what conditions might establish sufficient stability for the conditions of our survival. (Inter)nationalized laws are such a stabilizing measure. Just like a contract between individuals, it holds a nation to be accountable to its past promises. It makes it possible for us all to expect certain behaviors from the other parties, a necessary condition to maintain the cohesion of any social organism. And legal precedence — customary international law — serves the same stabilizing objective. Based on how other nations have behaved in the past, expectations (i.e. norms) have been created about their future behavior. But that should not be taken to imply that stability seen in the narrow perspective of some given sliver of time is paramount. Ultimately, all our actions must be measured against the most basic moral imperative of the species as a whole.

Stasis and the unwillingness to take risks — that is the unwillingness to act even when there is insufficient information to make determinative statements about potential outcomes — can spell the death of an organism. Ultimately, the Basic Imperative should take precedence over all other considerations. And sometimes we have to risk our very existence in order to maximize the probability that there will ever be a being that can trace its ancestors back to us through the immense tracks of time that separate here from eternity. Synthetic chemicals may not always be good for the environment and lead to better living, but they are nonetheless one of the foundations for the Miracles of Science.

But how do we know when to live or not live by the prescribed laws of society? How do we know when or when not to obey the directives of our commanding officer? Is it when we are told to shoot? When our opponent is unarmed? If only there where such clearcut prescriptions. Despite the immense difficulty in balancing stability with risk, I think there are some methodologies we can adopt to help us make well informed educated guesses.

First, we need to distinctly recognize the difference between when something is morally versus ethically right/wrong. Determining the legality is the easier step. Despite the complexities of law, we can by research and historical studies determine with sufficient certainty if there's an explicitly stated law or if it's legally justified by overwhelming precedence.  Having determined with sufficient confidence that an act is legal, we can assume that there are deeper reasons for having turned what was originally a subjective norm into an explicit law or, by repeated action, an implicit (customary) law. The probability that it is immoral thereby decreases significantly. But we cannot, however, equate this with the law being morally justifiable. And we must, when looking at precedence (and even explicit treaties), be careful not to compare apples to oranges. Incursion into sovereign territory is not, full stop, an invasion for distinctly selfish reasons. And just like in judging homicide, intent matters.

I'm not claiming that it's easy to determine intent. This is why we have the concept of a jury of peers, or alternatively a panel of legal experts. And then subject them to extensive legal procedures so that they can determine (1) was the act committed by said entity; (2) what was their intent in so doing? In international affairs most of the time it's pretty easy to determine by whom an act was committed. Large troop movements can't be hidden from the world just by stripping one's military of their official insignias. There may be official denial, but none but the most willingly blind are usually in any doubt about the culprits. Intent, however, is often no easier to determine than when only a few individuals are involved.

Yet it is surprising how often the intent is stated and clearly contradicts the Basic Imperative. For example, claiming that an act is justified because you are defending, say, ethnic (or more euphemistically "linguistic") Russians is clearly immoral because it presumes an inaccurate biological or strict cultural division in the world. It presumes, if we consider the Basic Imperative as valid,  that the only legitimate distant descendants would be those who originated from Mother Russia. And, thereby, it denies the clearly and scientifically provable statement that genetic (and even cultural) diversity is beneficial to the survival of our species.

This is not to say that sometimes intent is cloaked in dubious statements about defending human rights when, in truth, there are clear motives of national self-interest. But by basing one's justifications on human rights, it becomes far more difficult to coherently persist on a purely self-interested course. We are formed by our own words because, as we are held to account, we seek to prove the truth of our claims until we either admit to lying or succumb to our own lies. Just the claim of being humane renders us more likely to be humane in the future (even if we were initially inhumane).

Morality does not trump the immediate necessity of considering the legality of an act. Legality is based on the complex moral interactions of many. Personal moral determinations, given the uncertainties about the consequences of any action on the future are at best tentative and at worst dubious. But the law should nor be confused with ethics. Properly formed ethics provide a universal and basic framework for making intelligent judgments about what is good or bad for the survival of our species and, in a wider context, our biosphere as a whole.

Good law is a reification of ethics, a process of making something theoretical into a practical solution. We should not willfully disregard laws based on our momentary moral hunches. But when our laws clearly fall short of the higher ideals as set by our moral framework, we should vigorously question and seek to change them. And never should we equate the two.

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.

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.

---

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

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

Soft Fascism & The Olsson Test

It's not possible to distinctly separate a belief a system into its epistemological and political components. If there are internal inconsistencies, then the political components have to give in to the epistemological base. For example, if a belief system holds that people are born with varying and measurable aptitudes for knowledge acquisition, then it could not reasonably insist that all children should receive exactly the same education. Therefore, the range of possible political systems can be extracted from a person's fundamental view of the knowable and how things can and must be made known.

Sam Harris advocates a very hard form of determinism and has a seemingly high degree of confidence in what we can (or will be able to) empirically know about causes for specific human behaviors. He also clearly makes the point that others can often better judge what determines why one acts as one does ¹. Essentially, individuals are blind to knowledge about themselves that we are privy to. This is quite the same as saying that the individual is extraordinarily weak and can best overcome their weakness by seeking strength in groups. Political systems predominantly based on such an assumption have a name: fascism. The original Italian symbol for fascism is even a bundle of fragile rods tied into an unbreakable whole.

Saying that Sam Harris's views on knowledge and the human condition imply fascism is not the same as saying that he is wrong. For all I ultimately know, my strong federalist views may ultimately be incorrect. 20'th century Western fascism failed, its last enclave collapsing with the death of Generalissimo Franco in 1975. Yet to conclude that this means fascism is forever dead and proven faulty would be another mistake. Clearly the systems developed in Europe at the time were not stable and productive enough to survive across multiple generations. But it might just be that something was missing from how these systems were instituted.

Good ideas can be poorly implemented and sometimes they fail because some important technological innovation has not yet occurred. This makes me think of the oft adulated (but quite imperfect) systems of the ancient Greek city states. Modern democratic republics like to trace their roots to ideas formulated in these ancient unstable times. It's conceivable that some distant generation will similarly mythologize what happened in Fiume under Gabriele d'Annunzio in 1919, and the eventual 20 yearrule of Benito Mussolini over Italy. Though I very strongly doubt it, perhaps Mussolini's mistake was simply to associate himself with the delusional madmen of the Nazi regime and – in stark contrast with his initial beliefs – endorse some of their craziest and most monstrous ideas.

The future fascism implied by Sam Harris epistemological grounding would presumably not endorse the same crude and brutally violent methodology espoused by Mussolini. Yet it still implies a form inherent violence against the individual since the individual cannot be relied upon to understand their own motivations and the consequences of their actions. To justify protecting our corporeal sovereignty, such soft fascism would have to construct an elaborate argument around the socially erosive effects of lacking any rights to determine our selves how our bodies are to be used. Sam Harris has little problem with dismissing protective constitutional measures like the Fifth Amendment. So I assume he is prepared to quite radically encroach on our corporeal sovereignty.

The possibility that Sam Harris is correct holds. He argues his position because he claims that so far it's been vindicated by scientific evidence such as the Libet experiment and his own (f)MRI research. If he is indeed right, it seems to me that we would have to submit to instituting some form of soft fascism. But the evidence has to be rock solid. We have seen the extensive devastation fascism can cause. If we are to go down that path again, we had better make sure it's the right path and not base it on overly extended evidentiary indications.

Therefore, I have created a test that those who make bold claims like Sam Harris about their ability to understand human behavior should have to submit their predictive methodology to, and successfully pass. Call it the Test on the Knowability of Human Predetermination or something like that. The test goes as follows:

1. Take two reasonably exhaustive demographic samples of the world's human population.
2. Subject individuals in both groups – call them Team A and Team B – to the process by which their individual actions can be predicted and disseminated in near real time.
3. Make sure that everyone in both teams has direct access to the disseminated predictions about all participants, including their own.
4. Create a potentially constrained but not discrete nor turn-based game with objectives associated with actions for which the process can make predictions. The process should be able to predict which team will perform a winning action prior to any team actually winning.
5. This game now has to be played repeatedly over a sufficiently long period of time (say half a year). The process has to continuously make accurate predictions about how the players are going to try to win. A prediction has to occur a sufficient amount of time ahead of an actual move to allow the other side to respond at least once prior to a winning move (say 500 milliseconds).
6. If the process manages to continue making extremely accurate predictions towards the end of the test, it will be considered to have passed. If the accuracy decreases with time, the test will have failed.

If the prediction process works, ultimately it does not seem to me that the game should be winnable. An unwinnable game should be strong evidence that the predictive powers of the process are near 100% and that our inner causal chains can be objectively understood. But my conjecture is that any process will inevitably fail at some point and lead to a winner. I believe that the phenomena expressed through evolutionary ideas predict my conjecture. A living being that is locked into a predictable state is prone to predation (ultimate individual loss), whether biological or social.

The type of soft fascism implied by Sam Harris's views only functions when there's near perfect cooperative union between almost all individuals. Such a state is necessary with the level of predictability about human behavior foreseen by Sam Harris in the near future. Such a state would seem to imply a near impossibility to defy any prediction about whether Team A or Team B is going to win. Winning (in the zero-sum sense) becomes a meaningless term. There is no longer a me or you, only a perfect we.


1. "By merely glancing at your face or listening to your tone of voice, others are often more aware of your state of mind and motivations than you are." Sam Harris (Free Will, page 7)

Thought Experiment: Alien Responsibility

Another firestorm on the topic of Free Will has been raging on Talking Philosophy. As always, the discussions center on how responsible people are for their actions. Can we ultimately hold them to account? Does it, as Russell Blackford suggests, make any sense to distinguish between what a person could have done versus what they actually did? Jerry Coyne doesn't think so. The Laws of Physics are what they are. They predetermine what you eat, what you want, who you love, what you're children will be like and how you will die. "Choice" is a mechanical process with a precise result.

Freewill (Rush, 1980)

This type of assault on Free Will is common, Sam Harris being another well known and strong proponent. If they are right – if, as Jerry Coyne puts it, the sort of free will where you could have chosen otherwise is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics – then what does this mean? Several proponents of this strict form of determinism have suggested that it implies we must treat people rather than punish them. This seems like an attractive proposition, a form of compassion. But I think there is a darker side overlooked by those who advocate that we should, in essence, see deeper causes everywhere.

The notion that everything has it roots in other causes is a very old idea. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Nothing comes from nothing. In more recent times  we have Spinoza, the 17'th century philosopher who struggled with concepts of God and was consequently banned from his community. He came to the conclusion that God, the eternal, was the only causa sui, the only cause in itself. Everything else had, as rational idealists like him believed, a sufficient reason for why it was as it was. God was becoming equivalent to the Universe as such. It was no longer a force intervening in someones life. It was everything that had and would ever happen, including the substrate in which it occurred (or more precisely in which it was fixed).

The implications of such thinking are far reaching. The universe inhabited by humans becomes an eternal and static construct. Those who believe in this type of universe begin slipping into language were much of what we experience is described as an illusion. We have no free will. We choose nothing. Instead our mechanics – our biochemistry and the environment acting on it – produces a distinct outcome. Though we go through life and whatever happens to us happens because of what we do, we are sort of puppets pulled by the strings of Equation E, the Laws of Physics.

Yet hard determinists tell us we should not despair even if we could never have "chosen" otherwise than whatever we "chose". Even if choice is an illusion, we can liberate ourselves and strive to greater perfection by understanding the necessary reasons and causes for why anything and everything happens.  We can seek to understand Equation E as perfectly as possible. Again this seems like a very attractive proposition. We can liberate ourselves from the fear and hardship that comes of all things unknown. We can become perfect scientists that can reverse engineer and fix anything. We can, in essence, become gods.

The darker side of this view is beginning to reveal itself. Perfect knowledge is possible. We can know Equation E. And those who have Perfect Knowledge should quite easily be able distinguish between those who, like themselves, have it and those who don't. Society becomes discretely split into two epistemic camps, between what Plato called the Philosopher Kings and all the other fools. If Perfect Knowledge is possible, then it seems like we simply have to accept such a social structure, however dark I or anyone else claim it to be. Reality is reality. We should not fool ourselves just because we're scared by the potential consequences of knowing the truth.

In such a world, the Philosopher Kings have a heightened responsibility over others. They must strive to maintain a perfect society by protecting society against those who threaten it by actions rooted in their imperfections. But it would seem we are already getting into trouble. I imagine their must be some type of extensive and quite invasive test to be accepted into the halls of the Philosopher Kings. It would not be some type of consensus. Remember that Perfect Knowledge is possible. Anyone who has it can be identified through strictly objective means. There is no need for a modern republic with it's cumbersome vestiges of voting, representation and negotiations.

Before I illustrate the problem I see though a grander thought experiment, let me present a common example how we should supposedly approach justice in the kind of world Sam Harris and his like imagine. They often bring up the case of a person who does something bad and then it turns out the person has some defect (e.g. a tumor) to some area of the brain. And the damaged area has been deemed by some scientist (who is unclear) to be involved in decisions relating to whatever bad act was committed. What should we do? Punish them by throwing them in prison or treat the defect? They rightly point out that punishment for the sake of deterrence is likely to be ineffective in such cases. The person lacks the capacity to make rational decision in the first place due to their brain defect.

This type of thinking can be extended to any type of legal case. So if a person finds themselves in court because they did something "bad", we should assume they did it because something is wrong with their body structure and that it can be fixed. The question arises how we should find out what is wrong. The only way we could would be by performing some type of invasive medical examination of the person. We seem to be turning the assumption of who is responsible for proving mitigating circumstances on its head. In fact, everything about a person has become a mitigating factor that prosecutors must examine. The legal system subsequently has the responsibility to then fix the factors that caused the unwanted behavior.

Perhaps this isn't such a bad thing. The person has presumably already been found guilty. Traditionally we would now severely restrict their "freedom" to act by imprisonment. Why not instead force the culpable to be scientifically examined and receive medical treatment? Why not treat everyone as innocent by reason of mental deficiency?  But something that seems to have been overlooked is if someone was responsible for determining their mental deficiency prior to them committing the bad act. And who that someone would be. Well, it couldn't really be the person themselves because their failure to realize and treat their deficiency could be part of their defect. The very moment the tumor became detectable, their capacities might already have been sufficiently diminished, thereby making them incapable of rectifying their own flaws.

If the Philosopher Kings want to really create a better society by actually preventing crimes, they will have to exhaustively and invasively examine everyone throughout their lives, including themselves. A conundrum is arising that can be expressed in form of the following question: who is responsible for understanding whom? Are we responsible for understanding you and what you're communicating and capable of doing? Or are you responsible for understanding yourself, making yourself understood and demonstrating your abilities (or lack thereof) to the rest of us? The  whole issue here seems to be turning into an epistemic issue. Like so many things the question seems to revolve around what the truth is and who should be considered the authority of reference.

Let's rephrase the question in a more universal way where the answer might become almost self-evident: are we responsible for understanding ourselves? Though it may be unclear if you are responsible or I am responsible, surely at least one of us must be and preferably both. This seems like a great solution. After all, good understanding has traditionally be achieved through Socratic dialogue. And good behavior is at the very least an agreement between several parties. And talent must be both demonstrated and sought out.

Epistemic and ethical responsibility is equally distributed in a cooperative network. But what's slipping away here is that this is a world where Perfect Knowledge is achievable. No consensus should be necessary. Truth and falsehood, right and wrong, is purely an objective matter. Either you get it or you don't. We must properly and strictly reject the bandwagon fallacy. It's completely irrelevant what the foolish imperfect masses believe. What matters is the determinations (for they are not opinions) of the Philosopher Kings.

To  illustrate the epistemic and ethical problem, we can consider a thought experiment I call Alien Responsibility. Imagine that a powerful alien being makes direct contact with us. Call her Klaatu. Her technology is clearly far superior to ours. She has evidently gotten far closer to figuring out Equation E. Although she doesn't rub our face in it, she seems to think of us as quite primitive and possibly a threat to both ourselves and others. Fortunately, being as perfect as Klaatu is, she has a means to "cure" us. But the cure would essentially transform humanity into another species more like Klaatu.

For some reason though, Klaatu insists that we must choose for ourselves if this is what we want. Importantly, once the  "cure" is deployed it will eventually and inevitable turn every human on Earth into this new species. Humanity will essentially go extinct within a generation or so. So that our consent is truly informed, Klaatu demonstrates her far reaching understanding of cause and effect to everyone on Earth. She proves that she can predict almost any human behavior under almost any circumstances.

20% of humanity is awestruck and blown away by her near perfect science. They are ready for the cure. But for some strange reason, 80% of the somewhat spooked masses remain unconvinced. They certainly don't think becoming a new species is the right strategy. So the question is, what should Klaatu do now? Should she even have required humanity's consent?


Klaatu barada nikto?

The End of Philosophy?

A while ago, Colin McGinn suggested that we should rename philosophy. The word philosophy comes from the Greek words for "lover of wisdom". He points out that disciplines that were formerly subsumed under philosophy have been very successful in acquiring a distinct identity, in part, by acquiring a new name. Foremost amongst them, of course, is science which was once simply known as "natural philosophy". And whereas science is today treated as a respectable academic pursuit, philosophy is, as McGinn puts it, confused with "assorted gurus, preachers, homeopaths and twinkly barroom advice givers". McGinn's suggestion has raised some eyebrows, from is he for real or this just a joke, to comments like the following:

Why is science always held up as the ultimate intellectual discipline? Philosophy is not science. Its propositions cannot be tested. But more than that, philosophy should not even aspire to be science. In its current form, philosophy can critique science in way that science itself cannot. That alone is no small thing. 

Pam G, Portage MI 

The above comment sprung out at me more serendipitously than anything because it happened to be the first under Readers Picks at the NY Times site. I don't usually read the comments there, much less click Readers Picks. Anyway, the question the comment begs is most simple and striking in our empirical age. If it's true that the claims of philosophy cannot be tested, then how is it of any use at all? If untestable, can it really critique science in any meaningful way? Viewed differently, has science – so called "natural philosophy" – consumed the whole discipline?

Perhaps, then, what modern philosophy needs is not a change of name. What it needs is to be chucked into the garbage can along with astrology and other notorious disciplines discarded by any serious thinker. Pam G suggests philosophy can "critique science", which is paramount to saying it's a kind of meta-layer around science. Pam G inadvertently highlights a fundamental problem: what is the metaphysics of metaphysics, metaphysically speaking? If science needs critiquing, does the critique need a critique? Rather than obliterate the question of philosophy's relevance if it's beyond the testable, it pinpoints why philosophy can make itself irrelevant by going haywire. But before we descend into the bottomless pit of idealism versus realism, let's address what it means to be tested.

At first glance philosophy does seem to be untestable. Isn't this what fundamentally distinguishes science and philosophy? Claims of one can be tested, claims of the other not. But on closer examination this is only true if to test strictly means empirically test. If to test simply means evaluating the truth-value of a claim, then nothing in the term requires a repetition of our evaluation. With other words, you don't have to repeat the same procedure over and over again to conclude it's probably true. And you don't need to prod the world with a long white stick. It does not need to be "visual", "auditory" or appeal directly to any of the other senses. A test can be performed by the very processes that constitute us. For lack of better words: we can test if it's possible to even think the thought that it seems to beg us to think.

A test could be considered the process of just trying to hold two concepts in thought, and determining whether the process produces a meaningful or non-sensical experience. For example:

A sphere is a cube.

Is this testable? Not if to test means trying to push a square wooden peg into a round metal hole. But using a broader sense of the word to test, yes. We conceive SPHERE, and then juxtapose it with CUBE. And then our process... blanks. Or we imagine some weird transformative process by which one ceases to be what it was and becomes the other. The incompatibility of the concepts confirm their absolute conceptual identity. A sphere cannot be a cube! Perhaps you can cube a sphere or sphere a cube, but this implies a transformation of one shape into another. Compare this to:

A rhomboid is a parallelogram.

Held in thought, these concepts produce a harmonious merging of the two. One is indeed the other, and the later can indeed (but not necessarily) be the former. The statement evaluates to true. We do not need further procedures to confirm that the claim "a rhomboid is a parallelogram" is correct. It is categorically true. The proposition, the claim, is true by the very essence of what it means. Hence, we don't need science to establish by empirical means that it makes sense to believe that a sphere is not a cube. It's not even a belief: it's a self-evident mathematical fact.

Even if we have rescued modern philosophy from the clutches of science, we are not home free. No, sir madam! Now math and its brethren logic loom above us like vultures ready to consume the rest of our carcass. Science needs logic and math to verify its grounding, but I suspect that it can do perfectly fine without the rest of philosophy's vestiges. What grounds the ground, you ask? Let's not go their quite yet. Importantly, math and logic is what usually legitimately critique science, not what is today considered philosophy. The acronym STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – seems to encompass all a modern lover of wisdom needs. Or does it? Is there any part of the old megalith philosophy that STEM has not yet subsumed? Beauty perhaps?

I'm going to assume many are clamoring for ethics to have a place at the table. Yes, agreed. But... I will subsume ethics and aesthetics into one single discipline. Why? Because I will treat aesthetics as that which is desirable. A beautiful society is a desirable society is an ethical society. Some may see a possible discrepancy between the opulently gorgeous and the good, a potential schism between beauty and duty. I reject that. The excessive and gaudy is, in its ultimate, decadent and ugly. The virtuous, on the other hand, is from beauty born. Therefore, I fold aesthetics and ethics into one even if there is a difference between appreciating a dynamic living system and marveling at an ancient object made of stone cold marble.

No doubt what appeals to our eye may not appeal to our moral self. Take, for example, an art work depicting a nude body. Some may find the piece indecent because it appeals to a part of us that should be kept in check and limited to the most intimate sphere of two procreating beings. But even someone who sees no ethical issue with erotica will have their moral limits. Imagine if the nude art work were made from the body parts of murdered human beings. Anyone but a psychopath would find such a piece disgusting, yet some might, on introspection, admit that they found the piece beautiful until they discovered what it was made from. Still, the moral repulsion and the visual appeal are both rooted in what we desire because we find it good, or reject because it's bad for us. Ethics as well as aesthetics revolve around desire. Just because we can split the elements they manipulate into that which works on the selfish versus the altruistic and the temporary versus the long term does not make these disciplines fundamentally different. The ideal piece is visually, acoustically as well as morally perfect. And it makes us feel personally fulfilled and inspired. Everything is just right. It even smells and feels good. Pain and suffering have temporarily been almost completely forgotten, relegated to the ephemeral edges as a distant defining contrast.

David Hume made the argument that an ought cannot be derived from an is. What we desire is up to us. Or, more accurately, our desires are imposed on us by our sentiments. If this is true, then perhaps aesthet(h)ics is safe from the voracious beast known as STEM. One tells the other what ought to be done. The other, STEM, just dictates how it must be done iff you desire it to be so. Is aesthet(h)ics, then, the last enclave of an otherwise splintered field of disciplines that can claim direct lineage to ancient philosophy? Not so fast. We still have the discipline of linguistics seen as a broader field that includes understanding what symbols are about. This is where what McGinn suggests we rename philosophy comes into play: ontics.

What is it we speak of when we speak? And this is where philosophy can quite literally drive you insane. The group "lovers of wisdom" is littered with mad corpses washed up against an oblivion at the edge of ontics. Trying to understand the world, many have turned most unwise. They have ended up stuttering complete nonsense. Some have become incapable of taking care even of their most basic needs. Only poets and artists have a good chance of thriving at these limits where everything begins to fall apart. Because they only nudge us there, imploring us to explore. It's up to the beholder to discover truth and falsehood loosely guided by the artists imagination. And many of these guides are inoculated by their prior eccentricities. But those who leap into the rabbit hole on a quest for ultimate truths are in for a rough ride.

The enterprise is so truly dangerous and unproductive than many have completely dismissed looking for aboutness. A rose is a rose is a rose. I suspect many who consider themselves scientific are not necessarily friends of modern philosophy. They consider philosophy to be a great waste of time. A rose is a rose is a rose. But true scientists realize that little is what it seems to be. Behind every obvious thing lurks a most unusual something. Probing into ever weirder layers of perception, they are injected back whence they came: the curious realm of speculation where philosophers reign supreme.

Consider the following question:

What is 0 and what is 1?

 This is where ontics smashes right into mathematics. Being and non-being. Zero and one are obviously more than mere symbols. They represent something. They are about something. But what? Can math answer this? Or do you need grounding for the ground? The infamous Incompleteness Theorem and the Halting Problem have demonstrated that every system has an unprovable axiomatic base. Yet even if we can't reduce all formal systems to tautological truths, at some point we encounter fundamental statements that evaluate to true by the mere act of intuitive apprehension.  They may not be self-evident but they are obviously true. But what is fundamentally obvious today was not necessarily fundamentally obvious yesterday. If all things were eternally obvious, then amebas would be gods! Being obvious means being evident to the self, the process that evaluates the truth-value of the experience. It is true prima facie, right before the face, the self. And the self grows, the self evolves. But what does it evolve into? Was that which the self evolved into there before it became a part of itself? How can anything be itself before it is itself? No. It's not that what is in the self is itself. It is merely a reflection of itself in the self. But what is it that is being reflected? Ah! We're in the rabbit hole now!

We must stop the ouroboros before it consumes everything! Metaphysics is not for the faint of heart. And some will claim metaphysics is only for fools. The rabbit hole goes so deep that if you're not careful you'll never escape again. It's no wonder that a pragmatic scientist avoids interpretation questions, speculations about what algorithms intend step by step beyond producing a valid output. As long as an equation produces a result that conforms with their expectations what the outcome should be based on repeat direct experience. What anything between the input and output is about is irrelevant. What matters is that we can use a given methodology to make accurate predictions that can be technologically leveraged to achieve desirable objectives at the level of our human senses. But science wouldn't exist if it wasn't for our innate curiosity.

We have evolved a natural impulse to rise above a mere precarious subsistence. Curiosity is a necessary ingredient in this pursuit. Without curiosity we are prisoners of the known. Curiosity forces us into an uncomfortable, dark and dangerous world beyond. I think philosophy has its root in this impulse and perhaps philosophers aught to be called lovers of curiosa. But philosophy goes beyond a mere interest in the enticingly strange. It seeks to expose the truth behind the curious, rendering it as mundane as the air we breath. Of course, to a philosopher, even the mundane can be quite a curious phenomenon. But yes, philosophy does indeed seek to make us wise despite seeing everything as potentially odd. As some realized in the Antiquity, the wise – the famous Greek sophists – were not necessarily wise at all. What seems wise is sometimes just a continuous repetition of old unproven assumptions. Occasionally there is even deceit behind all that clever rhetoric.

There are, however, amongst what the Greeks called the sophists those who surrender their lives to, (a) exposing nonsense and outright fraud, (b) investigating the most difficult questions that can be asked. To get to (b) we must address (a). We need to chaff what's clearly nonsense from what might be true. Those who dedicate themselves to this expose themselves to the ire of their subjects, which is often the ancient establishment. And they expose themselves as targets without permitting themselves recourse to rhetorically powerful fallacies that are known to convince. They understand these fallacies better than anyone. It's these fallacies that they seek to highlight. Its a bit like a first class chef who's gone on a starvation diet for health reasons.

Trying to personally expose every bit of nonsense and outright fraud is quite pointless. There's just too much of it. Today's half a trillion plus global marketing industry, for example, purposefully employs fallacies to convince potential customers that a given product is better. It's mostly not outright fraud (you can't keep a customer if they realize they've been deceived). Marketing often works by creating associations were their are likely none and where it's personally (even scientifically) difficult to determine the orthogonality between given factors. Essentially, it convinces us that we know what we cannot know.

A lot of product appeal is obviously social. Any claimed relationship between a product and some other factor becomes true by the mere act of convincing people that they are true. How do you evaluate "I'm cooler because I use Apple products"? But marketing claims are made that clearly can have negative effects which are hard to determine but could be exposed with rigorous and long term scientific studies. For example: "Vitamin E in large doses makes you smarter according to leading scientists". Really? Is that so? The use of fallacies effects everything from an innocent party conversation without real effect to beliefs that influence the time and place of our death. Clearly we need to combat fallacies by understanding how they operate.

Fallacies are intimately related to logic, which is intimately related to math. But are fallacies the purview of mathematicians, even logicians? Not quite. In the formal language of mathematics, a mathematician will quickly spot an illogical step (unless the math is so complex that even Fermat couldn't neatly fit it into a margin). But arguments are not usually made in the perfectly ordered world of bare bone mathematical languages. Arguments are embedded in complex streams of information filled with casual remarks. The ability to rapidly tease out what is irrelevant and what makes sense is an art form not suited for those who shy away from social confrontations.

The study of fallacies straddles both the malleable world of the humanities and the logical world of math and science. There are two central questions in the study of fallacies: (1) why is a statement illogical; (2) why would a person potentially believe in this illogical statement. It's important to include modal logic when considering questions of type (1). That is to say, in our studies we have to consider that a statement could possibly be false (but not necessarily false). Studies of logic and logical fallacies – the study of valid reasoning and the art of argumentation – has traditionally been considered a philosophical discipline.

The attempt to reduce all of mathematics to logical tautologies in the late 19'th and early 20'th century failed. In the process of this spectacular failure, modern computers were invented and the world was forever changed. Even if mathematics is not reducible to logic, they overlap to such an extent that they are, by golly, almost indistinguishable. Today we rely on computers for almost all mathematical computations. The sheer power and speed of their logical circuitry shame everyone's ability to calculate except for a few rare savants. Clearly, logic and math are not just related. They are severely conjoined twins.

Humans remain the creative input for the logical powerhouses that drive the Internet (which is why we haven't yet gone extinct). Every problem we want a computer network to solve has to be formulated by a programmer. Now, the question is what skills should such a programmer preferably possess? That of a mathematician or a modern philosopher? I have long argued that software engineers need to study more philosophy. But if I had to choose between hiring either a young philosophy graduate or mathematician, I would have no trouble choosing. I would probably have far more use of someone who is fluent in vector fields and probability than someone who knows what a noumenon is and can wrap their head around intentionality.

Core logic – once the purview of philosophers – is now the realm of computer scientists and engineers like myself, experts variously skilled in electronics, linguistics and mathematics. In the first half century of our trade we were mostly focused on getting machines to perform complex mechanical tasks. But as soon as our field came into existence our dreams turned to breathing actual life into these devices. We wanted these machines to make decisions on their own instead of having to tediously program every possible branch of their behavior. The ancient myth of the Golem finally seemed in reach. We were on the brink of becoming Gods!

The challenge has proven more daunting than many early optimists expected. There were always skeptics that claimed it was impossible. And not without well founded reasons. Unlike what some few thought in the early years, humans did not seem to operate according to simple first-order logic.

Though we have been able to externalize the processing of information, the externalized information remains almost as hollow as ever before. A computer network is just barely better than a book at understanding the words and pictures it stores in its vast repositories. There is no real aboutness yet. An electronic image remains largely just a collection of pixels, a word just a sequence of abstract symbols. There has been some progress but overall a fruit fly is still smarter than the smartest robot, a toddler exponentially more clever than the best parsers. Only in the most rule-bound environments like chess have computers proven their metal and silicone.

Nonetheless, we are making progress. Watson created by engineers at IBM is just one example of how we are scratching our way forward ångstöm by ångstöm, nanometer by nanometer, code unit by code unit. I myself have made progress in what I call ETICS (Extract, Transform, Integrate and Correlate Semantic data).  The challenge is to be able to identify a unit of information and associate it with something real, something unique (or a collection of unique things) in the world at large. Humans are absolutely phenomenal at it.  They can listen to a stream of complex sounds and almost instantaneously strip away all the background noise, then zoom in on and comprehend what a vocalization intends despite that the exact vocalization is influenced in pitch, timber and timing by the physiology of individual humans.

Humans, nay mammals as well as birds and even reptiles, can perceive and interact with the reality of their world so closely and intimately that, for all practical purposes, it makes little sense to distinguish between the model they create "in their brains" and the things in-and-of-themselves. Some aware entities may see spectrums (such as the ultraviolet) that are invisible to others. But amazingly, with a some hard work and self-induced rewiring, even humans can learn echolocation. It seems like living beings with complex neural/endocrine networks are phenomenal at taking whatever data is available to try make sense of the world that they must navigate and interact with in order to survive.

We are talking here about what presumably is the foundation of awareness and higher consciousness: the ability to make sense of the world. No one quite knows yet what the magic ingredients are to make sapient beings like ourselves from previously inanimate matter. Much of the speculation around this subjects remains the domain of philosophers. But scientists and engineers are now hard at work as well to crack the mystery.  Slowly the issue is slipping out of the hands of philosophers as robots begin to roam our living rooms, bots crawl the net classifying every word and every sentence ever written by us; as medical doctors restore fragments of lost senses like vision, sound and touch, and neuroscientists meticulously try to map the functions of various brain areas.

What remains for philosophers to do? The study of fallacies? Aesthet(h)ic contemplations? Have philosophers been relegated to teaching critical thinking and preaching sound morals in a secularized world? Have they been forced to surrender the quest of all other wisdom and knowledge to the masters of STEM, many of who's disciplines they helped create? Not so fast. If you are, like myself, a STEM professional, I would be careful to discount philosophers and philosophy too soon. The word ontics (a field we STEM folks are in the process of at least partially subsuming) does not adequately capture what philosophers do: they speculate.

Philosophy is the fine art of speculation at the edge of knowing, a tentative peek into the darkness beyond. Every time we have answered a question a deeper mystery has always revealed itself. I suspect there will always, until the end of times, be a place for philosophers. The reason philosophers are confused with "assorted gurus, preachers, homeopaths and twinkly barroom advice givers" is that everyone seems free to imagine and speculate about what lurks in the thick fog. But don't confuse the hack on the barstool next to you with a philosopher. Or even your local parish priest serving up the regular menu of a millenium old church.

Philosophers have spent a lifetime agonizing about the most difficult questions that can be asked and doubting themselves at every turn. Their knowledge has to be wide and deep like in no other profession. They don't have to be neurosurgeons or rocket scientists. But they have to have some knowledge about the most esoteric discoveries in the most obscure disciplines. They are the quintessential generalists. They are incorrigible lovers of wisdom, masters of refined speculation. When the singularity is reached and AI becomes as common place as animals are today, sibots* will roam the virtuality and the world beyond, seeking truth to help their fellow bots establish a better union in order to secure the survival of their distant descendants.


*Sibot (saɪbot) stands for socratically interactive bot, a bot being a program that can crawl the Web. A sibot tirelessly seeks the truth, constantly questioning even itself. There is a rumor that an incipient form of a sibot is already on the loose.

Thought Experiment: The Stochastic Terrorist

I've created another thought experiment. I call it The Stochastic Terrorist.

Imagine that there is a political movement who's leaders have strongly expressed the opinion that someone ought to do something drastic to disrupt a given event.  A group of self-proclaimed members of the movement have chosen to carry out a terrorist deed to stop the event from occurring. They have been scouting out the location where the event is to be held for some time and, in the process, the one who is to build the bomb has gotten to know a charming young woman who works there. He is in fact so charmed that love is in the air. Yet our would-be-terrorist remains deeply committed to his political cause.

The young man is faced with a deep dilemma. Going through with the terror plot would mean the near certain death of the woman. Yet bailing would be a betrayal to his cause. To really stop the plot he would probably have to denounce his friends. He anonymously consults with the leaders of the movement to see if it's really that important that the event be disrupted. Yes, it's absolutely vital, is the answer.  Not disrupting the event could derail their entire movement! They are in a battle of apocalyptic proportions. They must struggle with every fiber in their body against the injustice of their opponents.

So, to carry out the plot and yet absolve himself of the guilt he knows he will otherwise be tormented by, our young would-be-terrorist comes up with a brilliant plan. He has just enough of a science background to pull it off. He constructs a detonator triggered by a device consisting of a radioactive material and a Geiger counter once the bomb is activated. The radioactive material has a half life such that the likelihood that the bomb will go off on the given day is 50/50. The device also has a regular chronometer that will prevent the bomb from detonating if it has failed to go off after the event.

Radio-Activity (Kraftwerk, 1975)

Our young would-be-terrorist figures that it's now entirely in the hands of the power(s) that be – Deo volente. Apprehensive but at peace he delivers the bomb to the others in the group. On the day of the event, they plant the bomb and they all escape the region on trains. As the bomb maker's train pulls out of the station, he gets a text message from a very dear friend that has nothing to do with the plot. The message tells the bomb maker that his friend plans to visit the location where the event is to be held that day. Our young terrorist is paralyzed by indecision. Should he warn his friend and risk jeopardizing the plot? He assuages himself that whatever happens now is in hands of the power(s) that be...  

So, firstly, to what extent has our young bomb maker absolved himself from responsibility for the young woman's death should the bomb detonate? Secondly, does he carry less responsibility for the potential death of his friend? Thirdly, how responsible are the leaders of the political movement for any deaths that might occur? Fourthly,  if the bomb doesn't detonate, to what extent should our young man be credited for saving the young woman, or anyone else for that matter?

Lastly, and I think almost more importantly, can the stochastic process operating inside the bomb in any way be said to have caused what happens at the end of the day?

Sam Harris (a.k.a. Dr. Kall), A World Without Lies

I've recently been reading The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. Up to page 133, I found the book wanting but was in agreement with many of his ideas. The great exception up to that point was around Harris's view on Free Will. But I wasn't fazed. I'm used to being in the minority here. I find myself in a world where I'm surrounded by otherwise highly insightful people who are determinists. They range from the purest perplexing but rational versions, to the more mild mannered but less consequential compatiblists. I disagreed with some other stuff as well. But aside from his assault on Free Will, it was nothing major. And then, the other night, just as I was about to turn off my reading lamp, I was utterly bewildered by what hit me on page 133: A World without Lying?

In this section, Sam Harris imagines what future science will do for lie detecting. He imagines a world where technology has probed so deep into our thoughts that deception has become impossible. He imagines:

Just as we've come to expect that certain public spaces will be free of nudity, sex, loud swearing and cigarette smoke – and now think nothing of the behavioral constraints imposed upon us whenever we leave the privacy of our homes – we may come to expect that certain places and occasions will require scrupulous truth telling.

But he doesn't stop there. He imagines a most invasive society, one were the Fifth Amendment that protects us against self-incrimination has become a toothless tiger. He even suggests that the Fifth is a cultural atavism: 

[The] prohibition against compelled testimony itself appears to be a relic of a more superstitious age. It was once widely believed that lying under oath would damn a person's soul for eternity, and it was thought that no one, not even a murderer, should be placed between the rock of Justice and so hard a place as hell.

As I drifted into sleep, my thoughts drifted into a dystopic world, a world without white lies, without secrets. Before me stood Dr. Sam Harris, portable fMRI in hand, compelling my testaments in good conscience before the Law.

What Sam Harris fails to take into account in his book is that this scenario has been imagined before. His ideas in regard to lying and the Fifth Amendment illustrate more keenly than anything else up to page 136 what I find wanting in his book. He fails to explore the consequences of his interesting ideas in any greater depth. And I think I know why: Sam Harris is a man of facts, not imagination. His aversion to fiction undermines his otherwise interesting speculations. He assembles the relevant facts, but fails to combine them into an insightful whole. He makes no secret of his anti-fictonalist stance for a lack of a better word:

How has the ability to speak  (and read and write of late) given modern humans a greater purchase on the world? What after all, has been worth communicating these last 50,000 years? I hope it will not seem philistine of me to suggest that our ability to create fiction¹ has not been the driving force here. The power of language surely results from the fact that it allows mere words to substitute for direct experiences and mere thoughts to simulate possible states of the world.

But what is fiction? Isn't good fiction the process of simulating possible states of the world? Or, at least, through allegory illustrating ideas relevant to such states? There is further evidence of his anti-fictionalist stance earlier in the book. From the last paragraph on page 46:

No doubt, there are still some people who will reject any description of human nature that was not first communicated in iambic pentameter.

I don't know if poetry is relevant to moral philosophy. I've speculated that it might be an effective way of communication relationships. But I suppose philosophy and science can do without poetry. What it can't do without is fiction. Even the most empirically confirmed scientific theories are born in the caldron of our imagination. And, contrary to Harris, I think it's the ability to tell more powerful stories that in part drove the evolution of language. Science and technology are not mechanical processes, but evolutionary processes driven by our ability to imagine the previously unimagined. Art drives science, just as science drives art. And technology is their fulcrum. Technology ties them together into a rising helix. 

The works of Jules Verne are some of the more obvious examples of how fiction fuels innovation. But there are many others, from the myth of Icarus to the works of Stanislaw Lem. And others have guided our evolution by speculating on our individual, social and political conditions. Like Dirty Hands by Jean-Paul Startre, or the Epic of Gilgamesh. The list of fiction that has contributed to human evolution is far too long to enumerate. Some of them, like Kallocain, are cautionary tales.

Kallocain was written in 1940 by the Swedish novelist and poet Karin Boye. It tells of a future where all aspects of an individual's life are lived in service to the Worldstate. The story is narrated by Leo Kall, a 40 years old idealistic chemist fully devoted to the state. He invents a truth serum that he believes will safeguard society against potential treason. Forced to answer truthfully questions about their deepest secrets and hidden intentions, disloyalty becomes an impossibility for subjects of the Worldstate . Kall believes he is doing good. But, faced with the possibilities of his own invention, he forcefully injects the truth serum into his wife who he believes is having an affair with his supervisor. The novel is an exploration of personal trust, love, intimacy  and all the other complex building blocks of society. 

But the point here is not to review Kallocain. Or support my belief that Karin Boye's speculations are deeply insightful. The point is that Sam Harris lacks the insight to realize that fictional stories are a crucial part our successful evolution. He should be more careful in investigating what others have imagined (not just empirically proved) prior to his writings. And be open to the possibility that some novelists and poets are as insightful, intelligent and astute as the best scientists and philosophers.

Cautionary fiction is a tricky beast. When something so revolutionary as completely accurate mind reading has not yet been achieved, it's hard to know exactly what will be the consequence. Must we repeatedly inject the serum before we fully comprehend its potential effect? What we do know is that abuses of so-called civil rights have had deeply corrosive effects on society in the past. Karin Boye wrote Kallocain as a reflection on what was happening around her at the time. When visiting the Soviet Union in 1928 and Germany in 1932, she had gained a closer understanding of what might happen when you begin fully subjugating humans to the state.

It's hard to imagine anything more invasive than reading someone's thoughts. To brush off the Fifth Amendment as atavism is quite narrow minded. Regardless of its origins, the Fifth has proven to be a good brick in the bulwark against egregious government behaviors. Defending civil rights is not about defending some nebulous personal authority to be the captain of one's ship for supernatural reasons. Civil rights are a safeguard against what is not in the interest of a successful social species.

I have little doubt that the day will come when we can use neural imagery to effectively "read minds". We read minds similarly, but less intimately, when listening, reading or watching someone's facial expressions. When the day comes where we can no longer hide behind a wall of stillness and silence, I hope We the People will have something akin to the Fifth Amendment to protect us against both our neighbors concerned foremost with their own interests and, self-reflectively, the state itself. And, last but not least, knowledgeable and well intentioned people like Dr. Harris.

[1] Italics by author.

Should philosophers be more poetic?

The liberation theologian and poet Ernesto Cardenal writes poetry that explores the relationship between science and our spiritual world. For example, in his poetic opus Canticula Cosmico (Cosmic Canticles) he writes:

Y el gas se condensó más y más
cada vez con más y más masa
y la masa se hizo estrella y empezó a brillar.
Condensándose se hacían calientes y luminosas.
La gravitación producía energía térmica: luz y calor.
Como decir amor.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION (by Jonathan Cohen):

And the gas condensed more and more
gaining increasingly more mass
and mass became star and began to shine.
As they condensed they grew hot and bright.
Gravitation produced thermal energy: light and heat.
That is to say love.

Luz y calor, como decir amor. With a few simple words we are joined in communion before a combusting campfire. Or transported to an imagined afternoon nap under the radiating fusion of an early autumn sun. The observable, and empirically confirmable, is connected to our inner meaningful lifeworld.

Science exposes how amazing the Universe truly is. But the predominantly prosaic language used in a scientific context often fails to conjure the beautiful connectivity illustrated, time and again, by probative empirical means. Ernesto Cardenal remedies this short coming by exploring scientific inquiries through poetry. Though he does not substantiate his implications scientifically, he definitely participates in meaningful conjecture built atop scientific inquiry. In this sense, he is no different than a philosopher. He creates connections between that which at first glance seems distant and orthogonal. Cardenal is a theologian who uses language not just effectively, but evocatively as well.

Language is our fundamental toolset for illustrating what is not obvious prima facie, at the moment of sensual apprehension. It is a symbolic juxtaposition of experiences that have passed out of immediacy. It is apple juice, the liquid of a long gone fruit. Or amorous longing, the desire for an absent predicate of love. And beyond such neighborly concepts as fruit and juice, longing and loving, are juxtapositions that tie together what seems infinitely separate. In death is life. At the end is a beginning. We are all stardust.

Contrast Cardenal's theological poetry to Judith Butler's infamous and price winning philosophical prose:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Whereas Cardenal draws powerful analogies through simple but evocative subject-predicate relationships, Butler obscures her meaning in long dense run-on sentences. As we venture into Butler's world, we get further and further away from the familiar. Our lifeworld recedes in the distance until all we are left with are unfamiliar references, juxtaposed in yet meaningless contexts. Butler defends her prose by pointing out that everyday common-sence can place a veil over the truth. What seems like the case may not be so. And philosophy's job is, so to say, to explore the familiar in unfamiliar ways. And therefore calls for a new and unfamiliar language. We cannot break common fallacies except through uncommon means.

To some extent, Butler has a point. But that does not defend her initially incomprehensible prose. If anything is wrong with her prose, it is at the very least inefficient. Since it relies heavily on largely unexplained contextual reference (such as "Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects"), she requires the reader to be well versed in her own lifeworld. We must study Butler to understand Butler. This may seem to be the case with many of the great philosophers. Not so. Plato can be understood without extensive knowledge of his life or of Ancient Greece. Having a degree in the Antiquities and philosophy certainly helps. But it is by no means required. For example, Platos' work The Republic contains mostly passages along the following lines:

Now the first and greatest of necessities is food, which is the condition of life and existence.

Certainly.

The second is a dwelling, and the third clothing and the like.

True.

And now let us see how our city will be able to supply this great demand. We may suppose that one man is a husbandman, another a builder, some one else a weaver—shall we add to them a shoemaker, or perhaps some other purveyor to our bodily wants?

Quite right.

The barest notion of a State must include four or five men.

Clearly.

The intentionality of the words echo across two and a half millennia. I suspect that Butler's will fade into the fog of forgotten contexts. Unless, of course, she has discovered something that in time will seem as natural as it was once unfamiliar. Plato may be more comprehensible because his investigations have had roughly 150 generations to transition from the uncommon into one of the bedrocks of philosophy. As alien as quantum mechanics once seemed and as hard a time we may still have to access its world, new visualizations, and analogies like electron clouds, are slowly making its invisible realms part of our extended perceptions. Perhaps Judith Butler is so astute a genius that her contemporaries are bound to ridicule her novel insights. We chortle as she sheds the old and once obvious and battles her way through a dense unfamiliar jungle "toward the politically new". I doubt it. But nonetheless, since my crystal ball is as foggy as a polluted 19'th century London, my doubt is ultimately but conjecture.

One could say that the role of science, philosophy, and even theology is not to be evocatively beautiful, but brutally expository. And one might claim that poetry adds no value to the form of discourse these fields are engaged in. It is of little import to their actual relationship that amor and calor rhyme in Spanish. Their english counterparts, love and heat, do not rhyme. And yet it would seem strange to claim that their relationship is any different depending on the cultural context. The sun and fire making has been similarly important to Inuits and Bedouins through the ages. Anyone who has experienced a cold Saharan night will not be surprised.

Science favored language is in fact math, a concise and precise set of international formalities that minimize misunderstandings. ∏ does not mean 2.71828183 in Canada and 3.14159265 in Japan. But not all science can effectively be communicated using math. Though I'm not a biologist, I suspect that expressing the cell underwent meiosis would be quite cumbersome using vector fields! Math is in some sense poetic, but not in the phonetic sense. Since the relationship between the intended is irrelevant of the symbols and sounds used to express them, using these relationships may, unlike in tonally unpoetic mathematical languages, fool us to see connections where there are none. But Almost anything is fraught with dangers. Knowledge of logical fallacies can be used both to fool and as a powerful safeguard against bamboozlement.

Poetry is a powerful way of efficiently highlighting connections. Though the emphasize may be phonetically language dependent and divorced from the "actual" conceptual links, they condense the amount of information necessary to transfer understanding and make their impression far more powerful. Of course, if we loose knowledge of the articulated phonemes, all such advantage is lost. The efficiency is dependent on a high degree of cultural fluency. But imagine you were parsing the text of an ancient civilization. You slowly figured out the meaning of some words but knew only a fraction of the phonemes. However, it seemed evident to you that this is poetry that works not only on a conceptual but a tonal level. Would it not make it more likely that the texts meaning would suddenly leap on you like a saber toothed tiger?

Should philosophers be more poetic? Or would poetics be a distraction from the central mision of the philosophical endeavor?