Thu - November 22, 2007

Trends (from the Google)


The hivemind leaves tracks in Google Trends, which shows relative search volume of given keywords.

I propose a game, called Know The Zeitgeist. Any number of players may play, probably best with 2-20 or so.

Players, in turn, spin an arrow that determines the kind of move they will make:

Move of the first kind: the player declares a keyword or keyphrase. All other players sketch a trendline that they think will match the Google trends output for the given keyword. The closest players get a point; the declaring player gets a point for every player who didn't get close.

Move of the second kind: the player declares two keywords (a "google trend fight"). All other players write one of five guesses: "1 dominates", "2 dominates", "1, then 2", "2, then 1", "too compicated to call'. The winning guess (for one point) is the best description of the two keywords for the period covered by Google Trends (2004-2007 as of today). Again, the declaring player gets a point for every wrong guess.

Move of the third kind: the player takes one keyword already used in the game, and pairs it with a new keyword to generate a move of the second kind. The declaring player gets two extra points if they do better than the first appearance of the keyword, but loses two points if they do worse.

Move of the fourth kind: the player declares a keyword. All other players decide whether the keyword is (a) flat, (b) seasonal, (c) stochastic (tied to news reports), (d) increasing (obvious upwards sweep), or (e) decreasing (...)

I will try to hold a google trends competition sometime soon. In the meantime, for a Hofstadteresque recursive trip, check this out:




This is absolutely the most interesting pattern I've seen on Google trends, with the possible exception of:




What causes that jump and subsequent sustain? Can you find another term that does that??






this is easier to explain; searches for "monthly" peak near the first of the month.


Comparing some actual month names gives something quite remarkable:




And a striking two-week phase shift can be seen here:




(numbers smaller than 14 would be contaminated with other connotations; 14th and 28th are very clearly used a lot for those days of the month).

Posted at 01:32 AM     Read More   |

Wed - February 21, 2007

Telling more than we can know


The paper telling more than we can know, written by Richard Nisbett and Timothy deCamp Wilson in 1977, deals with the question: when we introspect to find the reason for our beliefs or preferences or behaviors, just what are we doing? The "received" or naive view is that we are going into our memory or some other corner of our mind, and finding the right box (or calling the right bird to our hand), and reading out the contents; and the verbalization of these contents represents a fair, honest assessment of our real reasons and motivations. TMTWCK demolishes this view and puts in its place something that warms my cynical, robotic heart. Instead of introspection, the authors suggest, our ability is more accurately termed "creating an a priori causal theory" or making a "plausibility judgment". In other words, let's say someone asks you if you enjoyed last night's party, and you say yes; you are asked why you enjoyed it, and you avert your eyes and think for a second, perhaps while interjecting a "well..", and then you give the answer that the music was great, there were lots of interesting people there and you're going to meet a particular one of those people for a date in the coming days. Nisbett and Wilson report evidence from many studies that cast a humbling light on your answer. Instead of answering "why did I like the party?", they claim, what you have done is answered a different question, namely "why do people like parties?", in a way that does not obviously contradict your experience (you would not give this answer had you been turned down for the date). Of course, 30 years after this paper, many of us still give credence to polls that ask people why they prefer a particular political candidate, or chose their profession, or what brand of music player they enjoy, &c., but the wise student of humanity will benefit from taking a naturalistic stance toward these answers..

(Permanent Reference to the paper)

Posted at 12:16 AM     Read More   |

Mon - July 31, 2006

"X exists"-space


Consider these propositions: "a bird exists."; "a Swinhoe's storm-petrel exists"; "the Roc from the Sinbad tales exists". The first two are true in our world, and the last is not, although it may have been true long ago (extremely large fossil birds, not to mention dinosaur fossils, are found everywhere.) We can assert the truth or falsity of these 3 propositions with great confidence, due to our breadth of knowledge of the world. If you don't know of or have never seen a Swinhoe's storm-petrel, a quick internet search will convince you that they're the real deal; while we know the Roc does not exist - if it did, it would certainly be known to us by virtue of its voracious appetite and lack of natural predators. In other words, there is lots of evidence for the first two, while the complete lack of evidence for the last is more than enough reason for us to disbelieve in the Roc.

Now consider some more propositions: "an asteroid whose surface has been etched by collisions with space debris into a perfect copy of the entire works of Robert Hooke (both published and unpublished) exists"; "a green ostrich-like bird with ten necks, each capped not with a head but with a different brand of MP3 player, exists"; "an all-powerful being who created the entire universe exists". None of these are true; but I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let me say first that no one thinks that the first two are true, while many people think that the last one is true. If we were to pile up the evidence for any of these three propositions, however, we would see that there is none that stands up to scrutiny.

Of course, these things might exist - after all, they don't contradict logic - so how should we decide? Maybe we need to get some idea of the a priori likelihood of anything existing. It is my contention that this likelihood is extremely low. Consider this picture:



This represents what I call "X exists"-space. The top hemisphere contains propositions of the form "X exists"; the bottom is the opposite of the top, containing the negated expression "X does not exist". By usual convention, red represents FALSE and green represents TRUE. The tiny green islands in the upper red sea represent our knowledge; the things that we can assert with confidence. They have irregular shapes, as our knowledge grows in unpredictable ways. But they remain tiny. You can try it yourself: come up with some crazy entities like I did, and see if you have any reason to assert that it exists. Here's a hint: for every entity that does exist, we can construct many more that do not (the mp3 player trick works pretty well).

At this point in the story, instead of agreeing with me about the last proposition (about the creator of the universe), the world's population splits along some interesting lines; roughly, into theists, deists, agnostics, and atheists. To retain intellectual integrity, a theist must claim to possess some kind of evidence that a deity exists, which these days is usually either the design argument, or the argument from personal experience. I will not deal with these here; they were refuted long ago. A deist doesn't need to have evidence, but is also in danger of losing integrity unless they can come up with some sort of a priori argument why that last statement ("an all-powerful being who created the entire universe exists") should be true. An agnostic is in the same boat as the deist; they need to give a reason why the door should be even left open for the last statement, if it does not need to be left open to the first two. To my knowledge, no one has done this yet. As for the first two propositions (the asteroid and the ostrich), there is far less disagreement.

Posted at 10:07 PM     Read More   |

Tue - January 3, 2006

Ray Kurzweil on NPR


Things to check up on/write about:
•exponential increase, "doubling every year" -- is this accurate?
•his bizarre health claims.. what to make of it?
•avoiding the subject of the singularity, despite his book being called "The Singularity"
•philosophical topics brought up by immortality

First impression: to say that Kurzweil is just a hankerer after immortality, that beneath his fanciful ideas lies nothing more exotic than the all-too-human fear of death. While apparently true, this does not refute the idea that a technological singularity may come; if not in our lifetimes, then at least in the next millenium or two. We should be taking the idea seriously, just as we take seriously the idea that we may be wiped out by an asteroid in the distant future.

•Immortality: although it is hard to imagine what one would do with a greatly increased lifespan, wanting immortality is simply the logical continuation of this idea: right now you want to live for, say, at least 5 more years; and are also reasonably confident that at any time within the next 5 years, you would also say that you want to live for at least 5 more years. There's no a priori end to this, yet at the same time it's not clear to me that anyone would really want to live for ten thousand years, let alone ten billion. I suggest re-thinking the idea of an "I" that can live that long and remain "I".

•A caller proclaimed that Kurzweil's theories supported "intelligent design". Kurzweil did not berate the man but instead changed the subject.

•If we are grossly disturbed by the actions of people who are not afraid to die, what are we to do with people who think they will never die? Actually, mightn't Kurzweil's kind of transhumanism, even if mistaken in its reasons, be a force for good in the world?

Posted at 08:03 PM     Read More   |

Sun - July 3, 2005

Duplication


There has been a lot of interesting discussion on the everything-list, an email list I'm a semi-regular member of, concerning personal identity in a multiverse. The approach taken recently has been to create thought experiments using duplication in a single universe to shed light on the harder question of massive duplication in a plenitude (a multiverse where everything exists).

Example: you are in a chamber from which there is no escape. There's a button on the wall which, if you press it, will create a living, breathing, atom-for-atom copy of you outside the chamber. It will also, at the same moment, instantly vaporize everything inside the chamber. Would you push the button?

This is the basic setup, and I think anyone who's watched Star Trek would have no problem with pushing the button. But by twiddling the knobs on this thought experiment*, we can provoke some very strange intuitions.

What if instead of being instantly vaporized inside the chamber, the chamber is instead flooded with a pain-inducing nerve gas that leads to days of torment followed by death? What if nothing happens inside the chamber at all - one copy is left inside, and the one outside is just free to go? What if you get to press the button an unlimited number of times? What if you had the choice between paying $100 to exit the chamber, or pressing the button? What amount of money, and what conditions of duplication, would incite you to push the button, and why?

I think investigations along these lines have the potential to illuminate questions of personal identity in general - what do we mean when we use the word "I"? How far can the concept of "I" be stretched, and what happens when it gets stretched too far?

The one thing I can think of saying so far is -- our desire for our own continued existence is just a special case of desire for any object's continued existence. Therefore, these questions can be approached from a third person point of view, and doing so is very helpful. Replace "I" and "you" with "person A" and "person B", etc., and the problems do not seem so hard anymore.

Posted at 09:16 PM     Read More   |

Sun - May 15, 2005

Google as Plato's Aviary


If this essay is read in some future age when "Google" no longer has any immediate, visceral meaning, imagine for a moment that you have spent many years searching for the key to knowledge, and one day, after ages of striving and longing, you finally come upon a great Hall, containing all the world's wisdom, freely available - then, Google is the guide who takes you right to the scroll you desire. If you are like me, every so often you get a chill down your spine in the stark face of the immediacy of understanding one can achieve with Google.

I have written previously of the ever-blurring line between what we know and what we can find out. To me it seems that the difference lies solely in the time elapsed between epistemic hunger and its satiation, and does not lie in the process by which satiation occurs. We can bring to mind an amazing array of facts and impressions - right now, please explicitly discover within your mind these things: your mother's maiden name; your phone number; the capital of China; an eight-legged silk-spinning arthropod; the feeling of being pinched; the sound of walking in snow. Now, ask yourself how you were able to succeed at this task. Somehow, we do it effortlessly - the process of bringing to mind is entirely hidden from our perception. This effortlessness has masked the fact that something very strange is going on - until Plato came along, that is. He was, as far as we know, the first person to notice that the process needs to be accounted for. He didn't have an answer in the end, but at least he set out the problem in a very concrete, memorable way. He compared our recollection of memories to a man with an aviary, who desires first one bird, then another, to fly to him and land on his hand. Inside the aviary there are all manner of diverse birds, flying around at random, and yet the man is able to call precisely the bird he wants. That would be a bizarre trick - but equally strange, said Plato, is our ability to recall the things we know.

Now, let's look at our situation in the 21st century. I do not know the capital of Mauritania, right now. But - give me a second: there, it's Nouakchott, and okay, that took me 12 seconds. I simply asked Google for "mauritania capital", and went to the first entry. How did I (or Google, rather) get this particular bird to come to me when I asked? With the use of a fairly complicated algorithm called PageRank. We may think that our own, internal recollections use quite different methods - but, and here's the point, we have no good reason to think this. We might in fact use a very similar mechanism - since in the end, our thoughts are based on one mechanism or another. Similarly, we often contrast human prowess at chess - using words like insight, overall strategy, gestalt, and intuition - with computer chess programs, who use brute force and tree-pruning algorithms. But how do we know we don't use the same algorithms under the surface?

On a related note, Daniel Dennett brought up (in Two Contrasts: Folk Craft versus Folk Science, and Belief versus Opinion) an example of the kind of problem computers would have to deal with if they could ever be said to emulate a human mind. Paraphrasing*: ask yourself these two questions.

1) Have you ever danced with a brown-haired person under 6 feet tall whose name begins with V?
2) Have you ever danced with a green-haired person over 7 feet tall whose name begins with V?

You might have had to think about the first question, but I doubt you had to think about the second. We can effortlessly answer "no" (or for a small percentage of the population, "yes") by reacting to meta-information: the question presents such a bizarre situation, that had the dance ever occurred, we would remember instantly - and since we don't, we conclude that the answer is no.

What I want to point out is that we have the very same ability with Google. If a search term does not come up, one can conclude quickly that the term has no referent. If you don't know how to spell a word, googlefight the options you have, and go with the one with more hits. No one had to be told to use Google this way - it comes effortlessly to us, because it's how we think. And no one explicitly made Google for this purpose. The abundance and correct use of search engine meta-information brings us one step closer to Turing test-capable artificial intelligence.

(*I added the qualifiers for height, since now, 20 years after Dennett first wrote this, it's not clear to me that dancing with a green-haired person would be particularly memorable)

Posted at 10:33 PM     Read More   |

Thu - March 24, 2005

Conway and Free Will, Continued


The indeterminacy of measuring spin reminds me of another case of supposed indeterminacy, which is really an illusion of what can be called "first-person indeterminacy".

Imagine that you want to flip a coin to select a bit (1 or 0) at random. One way to do it is to throw a coin into the air in such a way that chaotic motion overwhelms the in-principle ability for any computer (including you) to predict which way it will land.

Another, more philosophically interesting way is to enter a coma, have a complete, atom-for-atom copy of yourself constructed and placed in a different room, and place a heads-up coin on the floor in your room and a tails-up coin on the floor in your copy's room. When both copies wake up, one will see heads and one will see tails.

Now, you may ask yourself, "Why did I get heads instead of tails?". In the first case it's because of the way the coin landed. In the second case, it's because of which room you woke up in. But something is interestingly different in the second case -- you may ask, "Why did I wake up in the heads-room, instead of the tails-room?", but the guy in the tails-room can ask the same thing, and no answer can satisfy you! The reason is because it involves that word that so often brings puzzlement to our lives: "I". From the third-person perspective, everything has happened for a reason and Leibniz's principle is satisfied. From your "first-person" (yes, these are scare-quotes) perspective, something has happened for no reason at all.

I am taking this analogy as the beginning of a line of questioning in which I intend to ask whether Conway and Kochen's paradox can be accomodated by a "Many-worlds" type of solution. In outline: the first measurement has a 50-50 chance of being a 0 or a 1. Which result you see is entirely dependent on which universe "you" are in. (If things are getting too crazy at this point, please check out the references at the bottom of the "Game of Life" post, as well as Nick Bostrom's site.) Before you see the result, your existence is entirely unaffected by which value you measure, so the differences between the "0" universe and the "1" universe do not really make a difference. Once you make the measurement, though, you have learned which universe you're in. That's why it seems completely arbitrary whether it was a 0 or a 1.

Posted at 09:02 PM     Read More   |

Mon - March 21, 2005

John Conway and the "Free Will Theorem"



John Conway presented his "Free Will" theorem on Friday night in Berkeley.

The gist of the argument: when the squared spin of a "spin-1" particle is measured from 3 orthogonal directions, the answers are always 1,1, and 0 in some order. However, it is impossible to label all orthogonal triplets (simplified: all white spheres in the above picture) with 0s and 1s in a way that satisfies this rule. This is the "Kochen-Specker paradox". Conway and Kochen extend this result, via the phenomenon of quantum entanglement and the finite speed limit of information transfer, to show that the particular result obtained from 3 measurements must be "decided" on-the-fly by the particle, just as the experimenter "decides" which set of directions to measure. Conway's conclusion: if the experimenter was "free" in their choice of which directions to measure, so must the particle be "free" to choose what answer to give.

There are a few takes on this, and I'll try to write about each of them.

The first thing that caught me, even before the talk, was - this has a very restricted application to the entire body of thought on free will. Conway only considers the libertarian idea of "free will" and completely ignores compatibilism. His idea of free will was explicitly at odds with compatibilism, as one of the first examples he gave of why we might not have free will took the form of the idea of eternal recurrence. Paraphrasing, 'since this could be simply the second re-playing of the universe, we might not really have free will'. The compatibilist says that this does not bear on the issue of free will: even if this is the 2000th time the universe has gone exactly this way (leaving aside what it would mean for this to be the '2000th time'), as long as there are agents whose actions are influenced in accordance with their desires, those agents have free will. Under compatibilism, complex enough agents in Conway's own cellular automaton, the Game of Life, could have free will, although Conway himself would not agree with this.

Leaving this aside, however, it does seem that Conway and Kochen have found a real paradox, wherein the properties of some object logically cannot have been "set" before they were measured. In other words, let's say an experimenter measures spin magnitude in 3 orthogonal directions x, y, and z, and gets the results 1, 0, and 1 in that order. Now, *if* the experimenter had had the freedom to choose three different directions x', y', and z', then it cannot have been the case that the particle's spin was already set in such a way to have given the answer 1, 0, and 1 for directions x, y, and z. So either the particle's spin was set beforehand, in which case the experimenter could not have done otherwise than they did, or something else is going on. In Conway's opinion, this "something else" is best termed "free will". His "demonstration" of his free will went like this: he held up an object and made a great show of not knowing whether he would drop it or not - in this case, he didn't drop it. There you go, that's free will. He may as well have said, against the idea of determinism, "I refute it thus."

There is another question, whether the observed spin magnitudes really are completely independent of the particle's causal history. If this were true it would be at odds with Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason, stated thus in The Monadology:

"... we can find no true or existent fact, no true assertion, without there being a sufficient reason why it is thus and not otherwise, although most of the time these reasons cannot be known to us."

Posted at 06:20 PM     Read More   |

Wed - March 2, 2005

Platonic Functionalism in the Game of Life


(Background: John Conway is coming to Berkeley to speak on the "Free Will Theorem". I don't expect to agree with him on the details -- I'm pretty much a compatibilist with regard to free will -- but I've always been a fan of his Game of Life, so what better time to rehash a 5 year old post of mine..now in blog form! Adapted from the PSYCHE-D list, October 2000).

Let's assume that robots can be built from conventional microprocessors that are functional replicas of humans, or at least good enough to pass Turing tests regularly. Under functionalism (or "Strong AI"), these robots are conscious the same way you or I are. Let's say these robots have cameras that take pictures of their surroundings, microphones to pick up sounds, and in general have sensors equivalent to those you or I have.

Let's say two such robots are communicating to each other in English over a cable. They could just send each other streams of plain ASCII text, but for now they are talking in a more intimate way: they are streaming spoken English sounds and various images (they either previously stored them, or generate them in real time) directly into each other's sensory registers. We can't tell by a cursory examination that they're engaged in communication, but they are - and we could peek into their registers and confirm this if we wanted to. So far, ex hypothesi, they're two conscious observers talking to each other and showing each other pictures. So there's no difference between what's going on in these robots and what would be going on in you, if you were for instance put into a sensory deprivation tank with earphones and virtual reality goggles connected to some rich outside world.

We're going to put these robots through some transformations, and it's the point of this thought experiment to see if any transformation robs the robots of their "observerhood" or consciousness.

The first one has already happened; shutting off contact with the real world and communicating only with each other.

Next, we play around at gracefully cycling their power on and off. Their program states are saved before power is lost, and reloaded when power is regained. They do not notice that this is happening.

Next, at each power cycling, we replace one of their conventional microprocessors with a "Game of Life" processor (GLP). I'm assuming familiarity with this cellular automaton; more information can be found on the web (see wikipedia or mathworld for details). A GLP is a hardware implementation of Life set up as a universal Turing machine (say, a G5 processor). (It has been proved that this can be done in principle). A real GLP as complicated as a modern processor, with cells a micron wide, would probably be the size of a large city, but as usual with these thought experiments we will gloss over the impracticalities. The GLPs are put in one by one, and kept synchronized with the conventional chips and each other.

Next, we replace *all* conventional chips and wiring of each robot with one giant GLP. Leads connecting chips have been replaced with glider streams, etc. They're still connected with the high-speed cable, though. But in the next transformation, the cable is also replaced and both robots are embedded on a single GLP (probably several astronomical units across).

Taking a step back now: we now have one GLP running forward in synchronous time steps, but it's isomorphic to the original setup of two free-standing robots. We still can't tell by looking from the outside, but if we examined the proper registers (glider streams) we could, with a lot of work, eavesdrop on the robots' conversation.

In the next transformation, the GLP is replaced by a giant grid of pennies, face-up for "alive" and face-down for "dead". The pennies are manipulated by hand (by someone with a lot of free time) to run the generations forward.

Next, instead of flipping pennies over to run it forward, new pennies are simply placed on top of the old ones. This is done for several trillion generations, enough for, say, 10 minutes of conversation by the robots.

Now we have one big stack of pennies. It seems as if we could now point to each layer in succession, saying 'this one is the current step', 'now this one is the current step', and so on up, thereby making the robots relive their experience over and over. But this pointing seems to be a "pointless ceremony": the robots are embedded in the structure, the same way we could be seen to be embedded in four-dimensional spacetime. So subjectively the robots cannot tell the difference; that ten-minute stretch exists to them in the same way it existed previously, and still what it's like to be them is essentially the same as what it's like to be you.

At this point, do we need to keep the stack of pennies intact? It seems we really don't have to; after all, the individual pennies are not interacting with each other in any way. So let's melt them all down (actually, its great mass would probably have done this for us long ago). Now we have a molten copper sphere in space. Something is different now - we can't peek in and check that the robots are still conversing happily - but we don't need to, since we're not running any programs anymore. And this fact shouldn't affect the robots, anyway. We may even destroy the sphere (throw it into a black hole, or let it evaporate away in the universe's heat death).

Note, that the same final product (a molten copper sphere in space) would result from any GLP implementation of any self-aware being put through the same steps. So it would appear that functionalism entails a kind of vacuity, namely, that all possible experiences of all possible simulatable experiencers exist timelessly without need for a particular (or any?) physical embodiment. What "mattered" from the beginning was not the matter the robots were made of, but the succession of states. If you can get these states in a digital computer, you can get them in the game of life, and then on a grid of pennies, between levels of a stack of pennies, and in nothing at all - since what are the pennies doing but acting as a visual reminder of what the states were?

The totality of Games of Life can be numbered. The Vast majority of these do not involve conscious robot observers talking back and forth, but a Vanishingly small number of them do. These numbers contain patterns that can be interpreted from the Intentional Stance, just like you or I can. Are these numbers also conscious?
--
For more along these lines, see the everything-list, and the writings of Max Tegmark, Bruno Marchal, and Jürgen Schmidhuber...

Posted at 03:41 PM     Read More   |

Mon - January 17, 2005

On 'The evolution of morality'


Thoughts on Andro Hsu's "The Evolution of Morality", at The Colossus.

The overarching theme of the essay is that "moral values" are those things that allow cooperation, survival and flourishing. Hsu sees moral values as increasing "group fitness"; they are selected and shaped on that basis. In the absence of further distinguishing factors, he would seem to be claiming that every behavior that enabled one group to succeed where another, lacking the same behavior, did not succeed, is a "moral value". If so, then the courtesy, forbearance, and love of neighbor that happened to enhance the fitness of one culture share the same status as the slavery, oppression, and preemptive war that at one time did the same in another culture. It is more likely, however, that a single culture, such as ours, will have all these behaviors popping up for consideration from time to time. What a study of morality is supposed to do is explain why some of these activities are right, and others are wrong. Hsu claims that the distinction is to be found in the particular effect on fitness or competitiveness the behavior has on the population at the time:

"Slavery, for example, was morally acceptable for thousands of years, but today's societies—the successful ones—have determined that slavery weakens their ability to compete."

Although the conclusion is valid (slavery does lead to the downfall of the society that enslaves), what we want from an explanation of slavery's immorality is a larger discussion that includes such elements as the infringement of human rights. There is more to the argument against slavery than that it leads to a lesser common good in the utilitarian sense. Although we can explain the willingness of otherwise rational people to engage in reprehensible acts such as slavery by demonstrating how they believed they were acting in their best interests at the time, we seek different criteria to condemn the same acts when they occur today.

Although Hsu invokes "group selection" at several points during the essay, it is not clear why group selection as opposed to individual or gene selection should be a firmer ground for morality. Further, the examples given can be seen to work, if they do work at all, at the individual level instead of the group level. At the first level of direct benefit, in the discussion of the kosher dietary laws, if you just replace "don't eat shellfish" with a more general "don't eat harmful things", you have unceremoniously arrived at the normal foraging behavior of any organism, which is an outcome of ("selfish") gene-level selection. How does a group's blanket law against all shellfish improve on this, and what makes that moral? Surely it would lead to even greater individual fitness to adopt a policy of weighing the benefits of eating a particular batch of shellfish against the possible risks, making the final decision based on all the information available at the time. A group law that prohibits optimal foraging behavior is an overall detriment, if maximization of fecundity is the aim.

At the second level, a universal "taboo" against murder does not prevent murder from being carried out in all human societies. The evolutionary rationale for murder is plain - it is the ultimate conflict resolution - as is the rationale for preventing it to one's self and allies. As Steven Pinker points out in "How the Mind Works", the complexities of human society, involving conflicts, temporary alliances, promises, betrayal, revenge, and peacemaking make sense at the level of genes and individuals. Game theory has also provided sound theoretical reasons why beneficial actions toward non-kin, as well as "altruistic punishment" of defectors, could also be selected for at the level of genes. One does not need to ascend to the level of group selection; the choices made by agents striving to maximize their genes' presence in a socially complex world take care of almost everything.

Hsu introduces a belief in deities as a "meta-rule" to bind other rules together, but I do not think it needs a level of its own. If one needs a third level to enforce the lower levels, wouldn't a fourth level be needed to ensure the third's operation, and so on? Hsu's divine third level can be compared to a sign posted on a wall that says "Observe all posted notices". If one does follow this sign (and those under it), it can only because of an a priori commitment to do so. That objection aside, if belief in deities per se confers an advantage on a person, it is surely by virtue of being accepted (i.e., not burned at the stake) by other believers, rather than through Freud's notion of staving off terminal existential despair. In any case both paths are cases of individual, rather than group, selection.

In the case of morality being grounded in belief in god there is a stronger opposing argument to be made. A belief in the supernatural is never guaranteed to produce good results. The critic of religion can produce innumerable examples of religion used to justify and facilitate terribly brutal acts. This exercise is usually followed by a countermove wherein the supporter of religion brings up examples of religion being employed to great humanitarian benefit. However, this countermove does not negate the original claim, but merely tries to redirect attention. Unfortunately for the religious person, the argument itself ends up supporting the critic's position. If religion can be used to justify what people would call both morally right and morally wrong ends, then clearly an appeal is being made to something outside of religion itself for the final arbitration.

We can conclude what no biologist should be surprised at: evolution has shaped the human brain, including those aspects of it that govern the activity of social interaction with other humans. As Hsu would no doubt agree, we should therefore be able to use evolutionary psychology to help predict and explain human intuitions and behavior that have traditionally been described as "moral".

I would argue that this is as far as we can go. As David Hume pointed out, there is a huge problem in getting from "described as moral" to "is moral". A classic formulation is found in book III, section I, of his Treatise of Human Nature:

"In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it."

On what grounds, even allowing that it is the case that some degree of altruistic behavior causes "flourishing" of the society, can one state that this fact ought to influence a person's actions? Why should behaviors that enhance fitness, or indeed any other behaviors, warrant the term "moral value" in the first place?

The traditional expectations of a theory of morality is that it will tell us what sorts of actions are right and which are wrong. At best Hsu and Wilson's direction, based in evolutionary psychology, has the potential to shed light on why some actions feel right or wrong. But I do not believe other lines of reasoning could do any better - these traditional expectations cannot be fulfilled. The problem in the outset is taking morality to be a matter of fact, rather than opinion. I would argue that attempting to "ground" morality is akin to attempting to "ground" the grammar or lexicon of a language. There is no objective "ought" when it comes to language; no objective reason why in English, for example, a canine pet is called a "dog" and two or more instances of a child are collectively called "children". It is a matter of convention - but one must follow these conventions if one's goal is to be understood by other people using the same language. It is likewise with morality: if your goal is to live with other humans (and since humans are social by nature, this translates to: if you want to pass on your genes), then you can only do so by following the relevant moral conventions. Evolutionary psychology and game theory can help us understand why moral conventions take the form they do, as Hsu has pointed out, but these disciplines cannot say whether any actions are right or wrong. This is not a shortcoming, but rather the best solution presented thus far to the "problem of morality": to eliminate talk of morals in favor of talk of evolved social behavior. Hume's objection to the rational derivation of moral truth has not been overturned by Darwinian thinking. If this is consilience, it is consilience by replacement.

Posted at 12:49 AM     Read More   |

Fri - December 10, 2004

Continuing essay development


I got a moleskine notebook to help me write this essay; it's impossible not to take it with you and write in it when you have a spare moment. I thought I would write my thought process here as well. Whenever I need to cringe in the future, I can look back at this.

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We can roughly separate propositions into several levels which I will number here. I'll start with the ends and work through the middle.

"0" level propositions are not really even propositions, because they're logically inconsistent. "The present king of France is 30 years old" is such a proposition. Since there is no referent, this proposition doesn't get off the ground. It's neither true nor false; it's not a proposition. Some propositions offered for consideration in polite company are like this, so you have to watch out.

At the other end, 4th level propositions are evidentiary propositions which, we could say, one could not deny without giving up being rational. If I know you can see and talk, and I show you that I'm holding a spoon and say, "I am holding a spoon", and you deny it, then I have to start wondering what's wrong with you. The only thing I could say is that you're not taking part in the dialog.

Just under 4th level, we have 3rd level. Here you don't have direct evidence of the truth, but you're led to suppose the truth for completely normal reasons. Let's say I told you I have a spoon behind my back. You have no particular reason to deny it. Nothing would be out of the ordinary if it were true. Disbelieving this proposition would mean believing something uncomfortable, namely that I was lying or playing with you. You also wouldn't feel foolish if you were proven wrong; you had good reason to believe it was true, after all. "Julius Caesar once ruled Rome" is like this, as is if I were to say "I was born in Seattle".

Next we have 2nd level propositions. These are simply more outlandish propositions than 3rd level. If they were true, it would not require a wholesale revision of your worldview, but it would be very interesting and possibly shocking. "There are civilizations thriving under the ice crust of Ganymede" is such a proposition. I have no reason to believe this one as things stand. However, I can imagine in full detail what events would have to transpire to either prove this proposition false, or elevate it to 3rd or 4th level. Also, and relevantly, you were probably not too surprised by my introduction of this particular example. Wondering about life on other worlds is a common enough event. The question it raises is not arbitrary, but is one that some people are disposed to think about from time to time. I think that this aspect is relevant too.

Finally, there are 1st level propositions. These are, simply, any logically consistent statements that do not fall into the other levels. It can be any arbitrary statement, as crazy as you can possibly imagine, as long as it does not contradict itself. What should our attitude be towards such a proposition? Here is one, for example: "Whenever anyone puts a quarter in a parking meter in the next week, George Carlin will at the same instant spawn a double of himself who will materialize on the surface of Pluto, die a horrible death, and then vanish without a trace".

What can we make of level 1? It's hard to even approach the idea of having any attitude towards this. At first glance a good response seems to be "Well, I don't think I believe it, but it *might* be true for all I know." In that case, and here is the point of this exercise, I would have to ask the person, "Do you disbelieve in anything?". We agreed that one had to believe level 4 statements. However, the negations of level 4 statements are level 1 statements. It is as crazy and arbitrary to deny a self-evident truth, as it is to affirm George Carlin's extraterrestrial duplications. If I hold up a spoon to your face, and say, "I am not holding a spoon", what response should you have? Let's say you get all the evidence you could possibly get that I am in fact holding a spoon; all the evidence that would have led you to believe the positive 4th level proposition. Would you then hold out and say, "But, for all I know, the negation of that proposition *might* be true."? Again, you're not taking part in the dialog. Which is to say, you are not being rational. Not supporting the negation of a level 1 proposition is identical to leaving the door open for the negation of a level 4 proposition.

I will attempt to develop a two-pronged approach:
1) that this sketch is correct; disbelief is the proper attitude to hold towards level (1) propositions.
2) that the proposition "A deity exists" is a level 1 proposition.


UPDATE (1/17/05):
I think it's more or less correct that "negation of level 4" is tantamount to "affirming of level 1". Either case is making a strong declaration that a great portion of what we hold true about our world is wrong.

Posted at 10:52 PM     Read More   |

Sat - November 13, 2004

Science vs. Religion; Atheism vs. Agnosticism


Topic for a future essay: why science and religion are not compatible, and why atheism makes more sense than agnosticism.

Here is the thesis:

The shred of possibility we must logically allow for the existence of a deity is no more than that which we must allow for any other logically possible event that nevertheless contradicts everything we believe to be true about our universe. These events, in general, make up the set of things in which which we do not believe. In other words, if the word "disbelieve" has any meaning, we must disbelieve in deities.

Posted at 02:33 PM     Read More   |

Sun - August 29, 2004

Pirahã continued


The recent flurry of discussion about the Pirahã and their linguistic/cultural differences from us (by us I apparently refer to everyone except the Pirahã) has made me think about incommensurability. That's the idea that there might be concepts that one group uses that another group utterly fails to comprehend. There are some phantom examples: is the concept of "color" incomprehensible to congenitally blind people? Apparently not: although they don't know through direct experience what seeing is like, they "get" that sighted people can tell from a distance various surface properties of objects such as color and brightness, they "get" how vision works, etc. Do some languages have words whose emotional affect or cultural significance is in principle incomprehensible to speakers of other languages? Take Homer Simpson's exclamation "D'oh!" for example, which has become quite common in American English. It can replace "shit!", "oops!" or "too bad!" but it definitely has an affect to it, that can only be properly understood by Simpsons cognoscenti. Does this mean it's incommensurable? No, because all that an Oroqen speaker, say, would have to do to understand it is read some books about "D'oh!" and maybe see a few episodes - a lot of work, perhaps, but in the end if they wanted to understand they could. How then can we understand what's going on with the Pirahã?

Let's imagine for a second that the tables are turned. You're an anthropologist studying a different tribe. You immerse yourself in the culture and eventually gain the trust of the people and learn the language. Except, there are about 20 words that people use all the time that you just can't figure out. They all appear to be adjectives. Sometimes the adjectives are used in conjunction with animals: in particular you are told that some dogs are awiki, but others are apiki, and still others are onipiki. You can't tell the difference, and have ruled out color, size, health, sex, breed, age, number of teeth, ownership, and everything else that came to mind as a possibility when discussing the subject. When you ask the tribe to explain these terms in detail, they can only do so by reference to other words you haven't learned. Word starts to spread in the tribe about the curious anthropologist who lacks the basic concept of apiki, and they begin to wonder whether your parents raised you correctly.

Is this an imaginable situation? Wouldn't you begin to suspect that instead of just not understanding these 20 words, that instead you have systematically failed to understand a large portion of their entire language? How could it be that there would be just a few words that they couldn't explain to you? A good anthropologist could tell, though - you could see if different people consistently apply the words to randomly selected animals, to see if there's any consistency in how the terms are used. Other experiments readily suggest themselves. The point is that we can pretty much only imagine two outcomes: finally understanding the words, or realizing that they aren't words at all - they are properly speaking meaningless.

Now look at it from the Pirahã's perspective: are they curious about this thing that their guests call "counting"? Are they exerting themselves to get to the bottom of it, the way a trained anthropologist would do to get to the bottom of some deeply ingrained cultural concepts? Or do they systematically misunderstand this activity and think of it as a game, or a trick, that has entertainment value? The anthropologist is highly motivated to learn the intricacies of his subjects, but are the Pirahã similarly motivated? If they aren't, I don't think we can conclude that they're incapable of learning how to count.

Obviously I'm not writing in good essay form here - just jotting down the random thoughts that occur to me about it.. but I read that the first rule of blogging is to write something every day, so instead of shaping it up (amid all the other things I have to do.. I'm a biologist, not a philosopher) I'll just send it off..

Posted at 12:00 PM     |

Sat - August 21, 2004

hello, mcfly!


As we've all seen on the Simpsons , it's good advice to would-be time travelers into the past to avoid killing things. Imagine if you went back in time and killed your grandfather before he met your grandmother - you wouldn't exist! And Marty McFly showed us a different danger: if one of your ancestors fell in love with you they may never show the same favor to the one they "did" end up conceiving you or another ancestor of yours with. Of course we then get the familiar paradox: if you don't exist, you couldn't have gone back to mess things up, so things didn't get messed up, so you do exist after all... well, I'll talk more about that later.
But, you might think, as long as nothing so untoward took place, it would be quite nice to go back and talk to your grandparents as young people. Well, too bad, Sunny Jim! The slightest interactions with not only your ancestors but with anyone or anything in the remote past will wipe you out and cause the same paradox. Why?
Consider one of the the defining events of your life: the moment when the sperm that provided half your genes met with the egg that provided the other half. At that moment, as Richard Dawkins has pointed out, the odds against your existence dropped from the truly astronomical to the readily -- conceivable. Out of the hundreds of millions of sperm swimming their way to the egg, only one succeeds; any other one succeeding would have given rise to an individual who would not have been you. So anything that affects this process can wipe you out, if it acts early enough. What can affect it? Almost anything: a few seconds of delay, a few millimeters of shift in position. And the effects of tampering get greater as time goes on, i.e., the earlier the tampering occurs. A time traveller's displacement of air molecules on the other side of the globe will change local wind patterns, which will eventually result in a difference in weather or temperature, which will change people's dispositions to do all sorts of things. The famous "butterfly effect" will be your undoing.
What are some of the upshots of this.. well, think of all the terrible events that happened in the remote past, from the loss of ancient knowledge the genocides of the 20th century. We all in some way wish these events had never happened. But wishing for this is the same as wishing we had never been born. Even if you are not a direct descendent of one of humanity's scourges, anyone who goes back in time and prevents their existence is also "preventing" you and everyone you know.

I find it interesting to imagine what time travel would be like in a cellular automaton like the Game of Life , or a one-dimensional cellular automaton.

Side note: of all the possible time travel scenarios, which have been depicted in stories or film?
We have 6 possibilities. I'll fill in the ones I know. "The present" means the present of the story.
Someone from the past comes to the present. (Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure)
Somone from the past goes to the future. (?)
Someone from the present goes to the past. (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)
Someone from the present goes to the future. (The Time Machine)
Someone from the future comes to the present. (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)
Someone from the future goes to the past. (?)

I don't know of any depictions of the "skip-the-present" scenario, but such a story might be interesting...

Posted at 01:09 AM     Read More   |

Fri - August 20, 2004

this and that


I guess I'm obsessed with signs for some reason...anyway,

..A sign on a lawn says "keep off the grass". We know that it means someone wants us to keep off the grass on which the sign is placed, and not for example the grass across the street. We don't have to have that spelled out for us. But I will argue that we couldn't possibly spell "it all" out in any case. There will always be a residue of convention that enters into the picture, as we will see..
It would be a more precise, if strange, way of putting it if the sign read "Keep off this grass". But it's still only by convention that we know this refers to the grass under the sign. Even more precision could be gained, it would seem, by putting a downward-pointing arrow underneath the words. But this just exploits more convention; that arrows refer to the things they point to, which direction you are meant to follow the arrow in, etc. So let's get completely erudite and put on the sign: "Keep off of any grass-covered earth contiguous with the ground that touches this sign." Now the grass seems to be specified well, but we've moved the problem to referring to the sign. "Keep off of any grass-covered earth contiguous with the part that touches the sign on which this sentence is written" won't do either, since we've moved the problem from referencing the sign to referencing the sentence. We can try a different tack and specify the lawn through its geographical coordinates, but this only moves the problem to referencing the origin and metric of that coordinate system.

There is a problem here, akin to the one Lewis Carroll pointed out in logic. We can go on and on pushing the question back, or requiring more premises, but at some point we simply act. When these actions are the right sort of actions, we have used reference correctly - and nothing else can ultimately explain it. When we speak of the correct use of words like "this" and "that", we are really speaking of our behavior not surprising people when these words are used.

Posted at 11:07 AM     Read More   |

x <= Two weeks <= x

Well, what do you know?

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