Patricia Churchland's science of morality

> It all began with a very adorable vole...

I've got a new post up at Rationally Speaking about what neuroscience can tell us about morality. I'll have more to say when I make it to the final chapter of Churchland's book (where she talks about religion). Here's the beginning:

A few weeks ago I went to a talk by philosopher-turned-neuroscientist Patricia Churchland about her new book Braintrust. The talk begins with the moderator turning to a packed audience in Columbia’s Havemeyer Hall and asking quite pointedly: “With a show of hands, can science tell us right from wrong?” 

Only about four hands go up. 

“All right,” he says, beckoning Churchland to the stage, “let’s see what you all think afterwards.” 

Presumably Churchland is about to change a few hundred minds on the science of morality. But as she proceeds through her lecture, it becomes increasingly clear that even she wouldn’t answer the moderator’s question wholeheartedly in the affirmative. She is providing the “yes” to another question, something more like “Can science tell us about right and wrong?” While the question is slightly less interesting (because it seems so obvious) her answer is fascinating. 

It all begins with me. Ok, not me, but the self. Each one of us is equipped with a neural circuitry that ensures our own self-caring and well-being — values in the most fundamental sense. As Churchland likes to say “we’re all born with systems that are very deep in the values business.” Neurons in the brainstem and hypothalamus monitor the inner state of our bodies to keep us alive; they also cause us to run from predators or eat when we’re hungry. Without these life-relevant feelings we wouldn't survive very long, let alone reproduce. 

The next step is to move from self-caring to other-caring. In mammals, this shift occurs not by some radical new engineering plan, but by slight adjustments to the neural mechanisms that are already in place. Modifications to the emotional, endocrine, stress and reward/punishment systems motivate new values, namely, the well-being of certain others. It’s as if the “golden circle of me” expands to include offspring, mates, friends and eventually even strangers.

The rest of the post is here.

Image: manual crank, flickr. com 

Less or equal to?

I love love love this. A huge, controversial, political, philosophical, racial, social and legal topic captured in three single marks. 

Less or equal to?

Amazing.

Unequally Free? The Social Limits of Liberty

Apr 19, 2011 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

20 Cooper Square, New York, NY

NYU Journalism 7th Floor Commons

It's been a-lot-of-coffee kind of month...

Here's my past few weeks or so of blogging and writing! On the nature/nurture debate, musical epigenetics, bias (or not) in political psychology, and why we do science in the first place. 

So, what's science good for? How doing science can make you a better person. 

March 7, Rationally Speaking

Political – or politicized – psychology? Scientists combat the charge of ideological bias.

March 8, Scienceline

The tangle of the nature-nurture debate. The false dichotomy and why it persists. 

March 10, Nature Education

The sound of epigenetics. Using musical software to explain the expression of our DNA.

March 16, Nature Education

Image: Philipp Hilpert, flickr.com

What Wittgenstein can tell us about happiness

Here's my recent story on happiness and its many dimensions. 

Ludwig Wittgenstein, a famous 20th century philosopher, was miserable all his life. Depressed and anxious, he once wrote in his diary, “There is no happiness for me; no joy ever.” Yet minutes before he died, he muttered: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” 

The concept of happiness is universally understood, yet escapes all comprehension. Can someone really be both unhappy everyday and happy over a lifetime? Does the notion of happiness change throughout the world, between communities, between people? Most importantly, do we have any choice in the matter?

Recent research in psychology, economics and public policy may help unravel this tangled knot of questions. 

“Objective choices make a difference to happiness over and above genetics and personality,” said Bruce Headey, a psychologist at Melbourne University in Australia. Headey and his colleagues analyzed annual self-reports of life satisfaction from over 20,000 Germans who have been interviewed every year since 1984. He compared five-year averages of people’s reported life satisfaction, and plotted their relative happiness on a percentile scale from 1 to 100. Heady found that as time went on, more and more people recorded substantial changes in their life satisfaction. By 2008, more than a third had moved up or down on the happiness scale by at least 25 percent, compared to where they had started in 1984. 

Headey’s findings, published in the October 19th issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, run contrary to what is known as the happiness set-point theory — the idea that even if you win the lottery or become a paraplegic, you’ll revert back to the same fixed level of happiness within a year or two. This psychological theory was widely accepted in the 1990s because it explained why happiness levels seemed to remain stable over the long term: They were mainly determined early in life by genetic factors including personality traits. 

Instead of existing as a stable equilibrium, Headey suggests that happiness is much more dynamic, and that individual choices — about one’s partner, working hours, social participation and lifestyle — make substantial and permanent changes to reported happiness levels. For example, doing more or fewer paid hours of work than you want, or exercising regularly, can have just as much impact on life satisfaction as having an extroverted personality.

The full story is here.

Image: Christiaan Tonnis, flickr.com

Shoes, Politics, and Willpower

Two stories and a blog up on Scienceline (several more coming soon).
A few conclusions I have reached:

1. From now on, every difficult task is energizing. I have heaps of self control. And a will of steel. (I just gotta repeat this often enough and it'll be true, I swear)

2. "Scientific articulacy" is a pretty cool term. I think we should adopt it. 

3. Apparently every shoe recommendation I've ever read in Runner's World is wrong. I should really stop buying those expensive Asics Kayanos. Sigh.

The Reins of Self Control: Changing your expectations could change your willpower
December 15, Scienceline

Scientists, Get Political: To move forward on climate change, the illusory boundary between science and politics must come down
November 17, Scienceline

No Glass Slipper for Runners: Current running shoe recommendations won’t protect you from injury
November 16, Scienceline

What You "Get Out of Reading"

What are you actually doing when you read a novel? What's the point of reading, and if you've forgotten what you read, did it really matter? I’ve noticed a few articles lately that deal with these questions about literature and the sort of knowledge you get out of reading. The most recent was a few days ago in the NY Times The Stone column, where philosopher Robert Pippin gave a “Defense of Naïve Reading.” After describing how an overly scientific “research paradigm” has infiltrated the modern study of literature, he says: 

"Literature and the arts have a dimension unique in the academy, not shared by the objects studied, or “researched” by our scientific brethren. They invite or invoke, at a kind of “first level,” an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language. This response can certainly be enriched by knowledge of context and history, but the objects express a first-person or subjective view of human concerns that is falsified if wholly transposed to a more “sideways on” or third person view. Indeed that is in a way the whole point of having the “arts.”

Likewise ─ and this is a much more controversial thesis ─ such works also can directly deliver a kind of practical knowledge and self-understanding not available from a third person or more general formulation of such knowledge. There is no reason to think that such knowledge — exemplified in what Aristotle said about the practically wise man (the phronimos)or in what Pascal meant by the difference between l’esprit géometrique and l’esprit de finesse — is any less knowledge because it cannot be so formalized or even taught as such. Call this a plea for a place for “naïve” reading, teaching and writing — an appreciation and discussion not mediated by a theoretical research question recognizable as such by the modern academy."

In "Reading in a Digital Age", literary critic Sven Birkerts suggests something similar – that the novel is not just a statement or message-driven device to allow an author to convey content to his readers. Not at all, in fact, literature is much more about creating an experience and fostering a new way of thinking:

"[The novel] is not, except superficially, only a thing to be studied in English classes—that it is a field for thinking, a condensed time-world that is parallel (or adjacent) to ours. That its purpose is less to communicate themes or major recognitions and more to engage the mind... it's inwardly experiential, intransitive, a mode of contemplation, its purpose being to create for the author and reader a terrain, an arena of liberation, where mind can be different, where mind and imagination can freely combine...

I read novels in order to indulge in a concentrated and directed sort of inner activity that is not available in most of my daily transactions. This reading, more than anything else I do, parallels—and thereby tunes up, accentuates—my own inner life, which is ever associative, a shuttling between observation, memory, reflection, emotional recognition, and so forth. A good novel puts all these elements into play in its own unique fashion."

Finally, author James Collins in "The Plot Escapes Me" struggles with the dreadful thought that all his reading might have been a waste of time, since he can't recall the plot:  

“But this cannot be. Those books must have reshaped my brain in ways that affect how I think, and they must have left deposits of information with some sort of property — a kind of mental radiation — that continues to affect me even if I can’t detect it. Mustn’t they have? …

 “It’s there,” Wolf said. “You are the sum of it all.”

This was very encouraging, and it makes intuitive sense: we have been formed by an accretion of experiences, only a small number of which we can readily recall. You may remember the specifics of only a few conversations with your best friend, but you would never ask if talking to him or her was a waste of time. As for the arts, I can remember in detail only a tiny fraction of the music I have listened to, or the movies I have watched, or the paintings I have looked at, but it would be absurd to claim that experiencing those works had no influence on me. The same could be said of reading.”

I tend to agree that literature can’t be measured in a strictly quantifiable way, books are not only objects of “research” to be studied and explicated, and reading must affect us long after the details of a novel or the experience of curling up on the couch are gone. How exactly – I can’t say. (I’ll obviously have to go read more about it). 

Two Cultures (and many more)

The first official reading assignment for school (yes, very excited to be a student again!) is C.P. Snow's "The Two Cultures." I've come across this essay – originally a lecture in 1959 – several times over the past year, mostly in the context of "look what a knowledge gap there is between scientists and the public" or "scientists are just fundamentally different people from the rest." Snow articulates a serious problem he notices in Western society: the splitting of intellectual life (and in turn, practical life) into two polar groups that do not communicate and do not understand one another. These two groups, literary intellectuals and scientists, have become increasingly isolated by a "gulf of mutual incomprehension." The gulf is widened by hostility, distortion, and most of all just a lack of understanding. In later writings, Snow called for a "third culture" to bridge this gap.

Even though Snow was writing 50 years ago, his observations are still relevant today. Many recent articles and books reference the "two cultures" theme, although it seems the modern flavor of this dichotomy has shifted – less "science & humanities" and more "science & everyone else". Those who can speak science to the masses – bypassing the literary intellectuals – are what John Brockman, editor of the Edge magazine, calls "third-culture thinkers." This brand of intellectuals include people like E.O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett. The success of popular science books may surprise the "old-style intellectuals," (Brockman's phrase) but he thinks this is just a sign that science is becoming the new popular culture. 

"The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are... 

Today, third-culture thinkers tend to avoid the middleman and endeavor to express their deepest thoughts in a manner accessible to the intelligent reading public. The recent publishing successes of serious science books have surprised only the old-style intellectuals. Their view is that these books are anomalies--that they are bought but not read. I disagree. The emergence of this third-culture activity is evidence that many people have a great intellectual hunger for new and important ideas and are willing to make the effort to educate themselves."

While I do agree with much of Brockman's characterization, I have some concerns about these "third culture" scientists. Thinking it sufficient to communicate directly to the public, they sometimes ignore the arts and humanities altogether, or act as if science has taken its "rightful" place at the top of the intellectual kingdom. To build a bridge across the gulf, there must be collaboration and openness between the disciplines – what Jonah Lehrer's calls a "fourth culture." 

“This fourth culture, much closer in concept to Snow’s original definition… will ignore arbitrary intellectual boundaries, seeking instead to blur the lines that separate. It will freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and humanities, and will focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience. It will take a pragmatic view of truth, and it will judge truth not by its origins but by its usefulness." (from Proust Was a Neuroscientist)

Chris Mooney, author of Unscientific America, agrees with Lehrer. But he takes the argument one step further, urging science to interact and learn from all parts of society. 

"It’s not just that we need people transplanting knowledge between science and humanities—it’s that we need people who can transplant between science, the humanities, politics, communication, law, business—and everything else. All other walks of life, types of talent, kinds of expertise…the more science draws upon these and the more these intersect with science, the closer science will move back into relationship with the society that fosters it." 

For Mooney, science should not attempt to take the place of other intellectual traditions, but rather it should mesh and share ideas freely with all of them. 

And at this rate (with enough communication, interaction, and Snow's 1959 lecture firmly in mind) we may end up with a fourth, fifth, or sixth culture sooner than we expect.

Related link: Are We Beyond the Two Cultures? Video series from seedmagazine.com

They're Made Out of Meat

Just came across a short story that brought me back to the beginning of high school. It'd be fair to say it was one of the first pieces of writing to get me interested in the whole mind/body problem and philosophy in general. I had completely forgotten about it. It's pretty amazing (in a gross but awesome sci-fi way).

They're Made out of Meat, by Terry Bisson

"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"
"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat."
"Maybe they're like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take long. Do you have any idea what's the life span of meat?"
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."
"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there's a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat! That's what I've been trying to tell you."
"So ... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal!  Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
"Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
"Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?"
"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual."
"We're supposed to talk to meat."
"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there. Anybody home.' That sort of thing."
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
"So we just pretend there's no one home in the Universe."
"That's it."
"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You're sure they won't remember?"
"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."
"A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."
"And we marked the entire sector unoccupied."
"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"
"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again."
"They always come around."
"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone ..."

Apparently, some fans also made a short video version of the story.

You Don't Know That You Don't Know (and Other Such Puzzles)

This series is making my brain hurt... in a good way.

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is
(Part 1)

DD: There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires and so forth.  We literally see the world the way we want to see it.  But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that.  Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it.  Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it.   We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.

EM:  Knowing what you don’t know?  Is this supposedly the hallmark of an intelligent person?

DD:  That’s absolutely right.  It’s knowing that there are things you don’t know that you don’t know. Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.”  It goes something like this: “There are things we know we know about terrorism.  There are things we know we don’t know.  And there are things that are unknown unknowns.  We don’t know that we don’t know.”  He got a lot of grief for that.  And I thought, “That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.”

(Part 2)

In a brief communication presented to the Neurological Society of Paris, Joseph Babinski (1857-1932), a prominent French-Polish neurologist, former student of Charcot and contemporary of Freud, described two patients with “left severe hemiplegia” – a complete paralysis of the left side of the body – left side of the face, left side of the trunk, left leg, left foot. Plus, an extraordinary detail. These patients didn’t know they were paralyzed. To describe their condition, Babinski coined the term anosognosia – taken from the Greek agnosia, lack of knowledge, and nosos, disease.

The contemplation of anosognosia leads to many questions about how the brain puts together a picture of reality and a conception of “the self.” It also suggests that our conception of reality is malleable; that it is possible to not-know something that should be eminently knowable. It may also suggest that it is possible to know and not-know something at the same time. But additionally, it puts the question of how we “know” things at the heart of a neurological diagnosis, and raises questions about how we separate the physical from the mental.

What is a Philosopher?

I'm pretty excited about this new opinion series in the New York Times called The Stone, which will "feature the writings of contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless." The first piece is by Simon Critchley (the moderator of the series) who tackles the question what is a philosopher? in little more than 1000 words. Here are some of them:

By contrast, we might say, the philosopher is the person who has time or who takes time. Theodorus, Socrates’ interlocutor, introduces the “digression” with the words, “Aren’t we at leisure, Socrates?” The latter’s response is interesting. He says, “It appears we are.” As we know, in philosophy appearances can be deceptive. But the basic contrast here is that between the lawyer, who has no time, or for whom time is money, and the philosopher, who takes time. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity. Pushing this a little further, we might say that to philosophize is to take your time, even when you have no time, when time is constantly pressing at our backs...

Socrates adds that the philosopher neither sees nor hears the so-called unwritten laws of the city, that is, the mores and conventions that govern public life. The philosopher shows no respect for rank and inherited privilege and is unaware of anyone’s high or low birth. It also does not occur to the philosopher to join a political club or a private party. As Socrates concludes, the philosopher’s body alone dwells within the city’s walls. In thought, they are elsewhere.

This all sounds dreamy, but it isn’t. Philosophy should come with the kind of health warning one finds on packs of European cigarettes: PHILOSOPHY KILLS.

And with that rather dramatic thought, I leave you to find out exactly why philosophy is so dangerous. Take your time.

The Woolly Mammoth of Ideas

If you’re exhausted by all of the new books on happiness, maybe you want to move on to something a bit heavier – say, wisdom? If so, you could start with Stephen Hall’s new book by that title, which he refers to as the “woolly mammoth of ideas.”  Hall is a science journalist who writes about philosophy (seriously? my new hero), and has turned a New York Times Magazine article he wrote in 2007 into a full “philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific enquiry into the subject of wisdom.” I haven’t read it yet, but a recent review by A.C. Grayling brought up several points about investigations of this kind (you know, the kind where someone applies the scientific method to the most perplexing riddles of humanity and hopes to emerge with something of real interest.)

First, Grayling points out that minds – and the wisdom they contain – are not mere isolated, individual brains, but instead depend very much on social interactions:

One must point to another and quite general difficulty with contemporary research in the social and neurosciences, namely, a pervasive mistake about the nature of mind. Minds are not brains. Please note that I do not intend anything non-materialistic by this remark; minds are not some ethereal spiritual stuff a la Descartes. What I mean is that while each of us has his own brain, the mind that each of us has is the product of more than that brain; it is in important part the result of the social interaction with other brains. As essentially social animals, humans are nodes in complex networks from which their mental lives derive most of their content. A single mind is, accordingly, the result of interaction between many brains, and this is not something that shows up on a fMRI scan. The historical, social, educational, and philosophical dimensions of the constitution of individual character and sensibility are vastly more than the electrochemistry of brain matter by itself. Neuroscience is an exciting and fascinating endeavour which is teaching us a great deal about brains and the way some aspects of mind are instantiated in them, but by definition it cannot (and I don't for a moment suppose that it claims to) teach us even most of what we would like to know about minds and mental life.

I don’t think Grayling is making any controversial claim here – sure, you can’t reduce wisdom to electrochemistry. But I am not sure what he means by distinguishing so sharply between individual brains and socially-produced minds. If social interaction is crucial in providing much of the content for the mind, isn’t it crucial because it changes individual brains? As long as social settings have some effect on our conscious experience, wouldn’t some of that effect take place in our brains? Studying brain matter may not provide the content of wisdom (or happiness, or morality, other topics of the contemporary research he refers to), but that seems like a separate – although related – point. I guess I’d have to read more about how exactly he makes this distinction between brain and mind. But I do certainly agree with him that looking more closely at social interaction (and studying social, historical, and educational dimensions) is important if we want to find out more about wisdom. He continues:

But the complexity of the task does not entail that it is permanently unresolvable; rather, it forces us to think afresh about what questions we are asking and what phenomena we are investigating…wisdom relates to character and behaviour in a social setting, and that we are therefore more likely to learn about it from literature, history, and philosophy than from other sources. This is not to downplay the importance of the new neurologically-informed social sciences, which are fascinating and promising in equal measure; but it is to insist that all our studies need to connect with all our other studies, and that some of them might merit still taking the lead even though others now have superb new machines to aid them. I suspect that Hall shares this view; which is the most interesting implication of his book.

Studies connecting to all our other studies? I’m all for it. It seems that an interdisciplinary approach may be our best (or wisest?) bet in tackling this woolly mammoth of an idea.


Related Link: What is Wisdom? 2009 lecture by Brown University professor Charles Larmore (PDF)

Facts, Values, and the Moral Landscape

 Say I told you a story. A story chock full of facts, evidence, and detailed descriptions of human beings – everything you’d want to know about this species of ours. I could even throw in a brain scan or two. But despite my bundle of empirical, scientific data, I still could not tell you how we should be. There is a fundamental gap between facts and values, and it's here to stay. Period.

Or maybe not. The ought/is distinction - namely, the idea that I cannot make any claim about what ought to be based simply on what is - may not be as chasm-like as previously thought in philosophical circles. At least, Sam Harris would like to think so. Best known for his book "The End of Faith" and his vocal criticisms of religion, Harris has now moved into the domain of morality and neuroscience. In his TED talk and subsequent article, Harris argues that it is possible to make objective, scientific statements about what is morally good. In other words, is possible to be right about right and wrong. So how exactly does Harris manage to resolve centuries of ethical inquiry and debate? By brushing past the fact/value distinction altogether and basing morality entirely in the notion of human well-being - which he claims is ultimately rooted in human consciousness.

“science can, in principle, help us understand what we should do and should want – and, perforce, what other people should do and want in order to live the best lives possible. My claim is that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics, and such answers may one day fall within reach of the maturing sciences of the mind… there are facts about human and animal well-being that we can, in principle, know – simply because well-being (and states of consciousness altogether) must lawfully relate to states of the brain and to states of the world.”

Harris is fully aware of the controversial claim he is making, but he chastises philosophers and scientists for elevating the ought/is distinction (what he calls Hume’s “lazy analysis of facts and values”) to the status of mathematical truth and thereby hindering all critical thought on the matter. Most of all he worries that the philosophical skepticism that divides facts and values leads to a moral relativism with dire consequences: 

“Many of my critics piously cite Hume's is/ought distinction as though it were well known to be the last word on the subject of morality until the end of time… There are very practical, moral concerns that follow from the glib idea that anyone is free to value anything – the most consequential being that it is precisely what allows highly educated, secular, and otherwise well-intentioned people to pause thoughtfully, and often interminably, before condemning practices like compulsory veiling, genital excision, bride-burning, forced marriage, and the other cheerful products of alternative “morality” found elsewhere in the world. Fanciers of Hume’s is/ought distinction never seem to realize what the stakes are, and they do not see what an abject failure of compassion their intellectual “tolerance” of moral difference amounts to.”

Harris admits that science is not guaranteed to map the entire realm of morality, or that it will produce answers to every conceivable moral question. He also acknowledges that there may not be a single "good" for everyone or every society. He draws the analogy to food. There is no one single best food to achieve optimal health – good nutrition can be achieved in a whole multitude of ways. Nevertheless, there is still an objective difference between food and poison.

“there may be many different ways for individuals and communities to thrive – many peaks on the moral landscape – so if there is real diversity in how people can be deeply fulfilled in life, this diversity can be accounted for and honored in the context of science…the concept of "well-being," like the concept of "health," is truly open for revision and discovery.”

Much depends on this concept of “well-being." At times Harris uses the word “happiness,” or invokes the Aristotelian notion of “flourishing,” but in general he leaves the term extremely vague on purpose. By doing so, he tries to avoid the objection that there are some moral values (say, equality), that are not encapsulated in “well-being” and therefore cannot be established with his scientific approach. But Harris declares that every bit of morality (and all notions of value) are related to the experiences of conscious beings, and furthermore “those philosophical efforts that seek to put morality in terms of duty, fairness, justice, or some other principle that is not explicitly tied to the well-being of conscious creatures – are, nevertheless, parasitic on some notion of well-being in the end.”

I am still rather skeptical about the details, but no doubt Harris will elaborate on these arguments in his forthcoming book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Given the heated discussion he has provoked in the past few weeks, it’s sure to get quite a response.  

Of Tools and The World

I've stumbled upon two items recently concerning the role of objects and tools in defining ourselves and how we function (or don't) in day to day life. I don’t really know what to make of this experiment, titled "A Demonstration of the Transition from Ready-to-Hand to Unready-to-Hand". It’s seems to be either a naïve overstepping of the bounds of empirical data into some pretty heavy german philosophy, or it’s a fantastically cool example of what science can tell us about ourselves and our being in the world. Here's the explanation from Wired magazine.

An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves. The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn’t superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition.

“The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing,” said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. “The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.”

 Chemero’s experiment, published March 9 in Public Library of Science, was designed to test one of Heidegger’s fundamental concepts: that people don’t notice familiar, functional tools, but instead “see through” them to a task at hand, for precisely the same reasons that one doesn’t think of one’s fingers while tying shoelaces. The tools are us. This idea, called “ready-to-hand,” has influenced artificial intelligence and cognitive science research, but without being directly tested.

On a related note, this talk by Matthew Crawford (author of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work), addresses the use of tools and the moral significance of working with your hands. Especially relevant was this quote, which contrasts the character of the narcissist with that of the repairman:

Constantly seeking self-affirmation, the narcissist views everything as an extension of his will, and therefore has only a tenuous grasp on the world of objects as something independent. He is prone to magical thinking and delusions of omnipotence. A repairman, on the other hand, puts himself in the service of others, and fixes the things they depend on. His relationship to objects enacts a more solid sort of command, based on real understanding. For this very reason, his work also chastens the easy fantasy of mastery that permeates modern culture. The repairman has to begin each job by getting outside his own head and noticing things; he has to look carefully and listen to the ailing machine.

The repairman is called in when the smooth operation of our world has been disrupted, and at such moments our dependence on things normally taken for granted (for example, a toilet that flushes) is brought to vivid awareness. For this very reason, the repairman’s presence may make the narcissist uncomfortable. The problem isn’t so much that he is dirty, or uncouth. Rather, he seems to pose a challenge to our self-understanding that is somehow fundamental. We’re not as free and independent as we thought.

Here's a longer piece Crawford wrote last year for the NY Times. I'm off to go use some tools.

Who's Sitting in the Armchair?

Do intuitions from the armchair depend on who's sitting in it? In a new paper called "Gender and Epistemic Intuition," Wesley Buckwalter presents some interesting findings on exactly this question. Philosphy has traditionally taken for granted the notion that intuitions are unanimous. Turns out, women may beg to differ. 

To explore this novel idea, we'll start with a two-part thought experiment (this one was first constructed by Joshua Knobe, but Buckwalter uses a version of it in his study). 

1. A chairman of a board is asked to approve a certain policy. He is told that it will harm the environment. He replies: " I don't care at all about the environment. I just want to make a profit." He approves the policy, it goes forward, and sure enough, the enviroment is harmed. Does the chairman intentionally harm the environment?

2. Same scenario, only the chairman is told that the policy will help the environment. He responds the same way -- he doesn't care, he only wants the profit. Policy is approved, and environment is helped. Does the chairman intentionally help the environment?

In the original experiment, Knobe wanted to find out what people thought about the chairman’s intentions. Surprisingly, although the two scenarios are identical except for harm/help outcome, participants overwhelmingly (82%) agreed that the chairman intentionally harmed the environment, but only 33% said that he had intentionally helped the environment. This odd asymmetry has since been dubbed the “side-effect effect.” It seems that when the side-effect of an action is bad (in this case, the effect on the environment), people are more likely to say that it was performed intentionally.

In his study, Buckwalter predicted that a similar effect would appear for questions about the chairman's knowledge. He asked people whether the chairman knew that his actions would harm/help the environment. As he expected, more people attributed knowledge to the chairman in the harm case – the asymmetry appeared again. How come? One possibility is that people make a (moral) judgment about the chairman based on the outcome (good or bad), and then attribute knowledge afterwards. In the case of a bad outcome, people will try harder to make the chairman "responsible," by saying that he really did know the outcome. In the case of a good outcome, the chairman’s lack of care about the environment means that he should not get “credit” for really knowing the outcome.

But here’s the twist: women showed this asymmetry to a much greater extent than men. Women were more likely than men to say the chairman knew he would harm but didn’t know he would help. Why? Buckwalter puts forth a theory – what he calls the Normative Evaluation Hypothesis – to explain the gender difference. Essentially, it says that women are more likely to consult their moral judgments (or “normative evaluations”) about a situation before making their decision regarding knowledge. The moral significance of an action, therefore, plays a greater role in shaping women's decisions about knowledge than men's.

Buckwalter then predicts that his theory will also explain women's intuitions about the Gettier cases (see last post for a summary). There doesn’t seem to be an immediate moral dimension to this case (no good or bad outcome), but consider the evaluation of Smith himself. Since he was totally justified in his belief, he seems to have done everything "right,” and is therefore a praiseworthy person. To say he doesn’t really know is to deny him knowledge that seems rightfully his! If women are more likely to consult this moral evaluation of Smith, then they should also be more likely to attribute knowledge. And sure enough, women are much more likely than men to say that in the Gettier case, Smith really knows.

These findings raise several interesting questions. First, does this mean that, in general, women are more influenced by their moral judgments than men are? Second, if confronted with rival intuitions, how should we decide which one to follow? Finally, has much of traditional philosophy to this day been biased toward male intuitions? Clearly, the implications of a gender difference in intuitions are significant. Buckwalter suggests that it may also partly explain the scarcity of women in philosophy departments. After all, if a women's intuitions don't seem to match those of her male counterpart (and tend to go against the traditional "correct" intuition), they may simply be dismissed. And how long would you tolerate being repeatedly told your deeply felt intuitions were “wrong”? It is possible, Buckwalter says, that many women have been discouraged from entering the field of philosophy simply because they do not share the relevant intuitions of the (male) majority.

Buckwalter leaves us with a striking quote from Stephen Stich:  “For 2500 years, philosophers have been relying on appeals to intuition. But the plausibility of this entire tradition rests on an unsubstantiated, and until recently unacknowledged, empirical hypothesis – the hypothesis that the philosophical intuitions of people in different…groups do not disagree.” More and more evidence shows that in fact, they do disagree. This, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean we should throw out all traditional intuitions for being discriminatory or skewed in some way (for one, what would we replace them with?). It does mean, however, that these intuitions may have profound effects on how we go about (and who goes into) philosophy, and these effects should be taken seriously. As the research comes in, my guess is that it will probably challenge more of the philosophical tradition. Let’s just say I’ve got an intuition about it.*

*sorry, couldn't resist ;)

Swapping Armchairs for Clipboards

Attention! The philosopher has left the armchair and is now… conducting tests? Welcome to the world of experimental philosophy (or x-phi), a growing movement to combine pure-thought traditional philosophy with the empirical sciences. Putting the experiment back in “thought experiment,” members of the x-phi community are taking out their clipboards, asking people questions, and collecting information on a whole range of topics. How do people think about moral dilemmas? Do their intuitions about traditional thought experiments match up to those of the philosophers? What do they count as real knowledge? Answers to these questions may shed some light on traditional philosophical questions and claims – at least, the experimentalists hope so.

How could experimental philosophy tell us anything useful? Consider one tool out of the philosopher’s toolbox: the Thought Experiment. This is an imaginary scenario often used to test our intuitions about certain cases, and then demonstrate how those intuitions support a particular philosophical claim. One series of famous thought experiments called Gettier cases involve intuitions about knowledge. In 1963 Edmund Gettier published an article challenging the notion of knowledge as "justified true belief,” which until that point had been the standard definition. He proposed the following scenario: Smith is a job candidate who believes justifiably that "Jones will get the job." Smith also believes justifiably that "Jones has a dime in his pocket." Smith concludes that "The man who will get the job has a dime in his pocket." But Jones ends up not getting the job -- Smith does instead. Smith also, as it turns out, had a dime in his pocket. So Smith was correct when he concluded that "The man who will get the job has a dime in his pocket." But Gettier argued that it does not seem correct to say that Smith had real knowledge, rather, it seems like a lucky coincidence. Gettier’s intuition (that Smith did not really know) was taken as evidence to show that knowledge is not simply justified true belief.

What really constitutes knowledge is an enormous question that I won't even begin to get into here. The point is that whenever we are trying to answer such philosophical questions, appeals to intuition about thought experiments play a rather important role in the conclusions we draw. But whose intuitions should count? Does everyone have the same intuitions? Could age, gender, religion, culture, class, ethnicity, or any other unforeseen variable, have an effect? Sounds like a problem for experimental philosophy. Next post I’ll elaborate on some surprising results about intuitions from the armchair. Turns out, they may be misrepresenting a rather large portion of the population (hint: roughly half).

Persons of the Sea... continued

I wasn’t able to get to all the different angles I wanted to in my last blog post, so I’m going to try to do that here. Quick summary: Thomas White wants dolphins to have the status of “nonhuman persons”. Humans are not unique in their complex intellectual and emotional abilities – science is showing that dolphins (and perhaps other animals like chimps and elephants) have these abilities too. "Personhood" is used as a shorthand way of referring to this combination of abilities, and generally the status of "personhood" gives an individual a place in the moral community. Therefore, White argues, dolphins should be considered persons, complete with moral standing as individuals.

The significance of all this becomes apparent when you start looking into current practices involving dolphins. Dolphins are injured and killed by the thousands every year in connection with the fishing industry, and are often kept in small concrete tanks in captive facilities for entertainment or scientific research. Inflicting unnecessary pain and suffering on dolphins is objectionable on its own, but capturing, selling, buying and breeding persons is seriously disturbing. This is not to say that an animal must be a “person” to merit appropriate treatment – pain and suffering are very real to all sentient beings. White acknowledges that fighting for “personhood” status is just one strategy out of many. But it's a strategy that is clear cut and easy to understand – under no circumstances do we treat persons this way. Period.

In his arguments for dolphin personhood, White spends a lot of time outlining dolphin “intelligence.” He admits from the beginning that any time we talk about something as vague and multifaceted as intelligence in animals, we run the risk of anthropocentrism – that is, measuring other beings with a human yardstick. With chimps, this approach seems reasonable enough; after all they’re our animal cousins and we share with them much of our evolutionary history and DNA. But dolphins pose an interesting problem. Humans and dolphins have been on two very distinct evolutionary paths for the past 100 million years (that was the last time we had a common ancestor). The complex intelligences that we (and they) possess may be fundamentally different, in ways we can’t even comprehend. For example, dolphins interpret the outside world primarily through echolocation (biosonar), which can be thought of as either an entirely different sense or a highly sophisticated hearing ability. But the intelligence “tests” we give dolphins are mainly based on the primary human sense, that of sight. So when we put a dolphin in front of a mirror and call it “self-aware” because it seems to recognize its reflection, is this an even more remarkable feat? Dolphins are operating in a foreign cognitive environment, and they still pass with flying colors! What should we do in this sort of situation? Is it even feasible to measure intelligence without using some human standards? Professor of psychology Diana Reiss has suggested that we understand dolphins as a form of “alien intelligence”, emphasizing the real difficulty in drawing comparisons with our own intelligence. But the question remains – how do we deal with something so different it's alien?

Another question that comes up in this discussion of moral status and persons is the whole notion of drawing boundaries to moral obligations, of setting criteria in the first place. A brief look at history makes it clear how problematic this attempt has been. I came across this quote by philosopher Thomas Birch that seems to capture the precarious business of setting moral criteria: “we see that whenever we have closed off the question with the institution of some practical criterion, we have later found ourselves in error, and have had to open the question up again to reform our practices in a further attempt to make them ethical.” So what can we do? I don’t think the process of negotiating boundaries and criteria is useless; in fact a great deal of good can come out of just such deliberation. But as Birch makes clear, the problem arises when we settle upon a set of criteria and move on, acting as if the case is closed. White wants to re-draw the moral lines to include animals, and I think his efforts will get a lot of people thinking. I suppose we should just be open to these lines changing again.

Day 2 & 3: Evolution & Ethics – They Come in Twos

It seems that often in the attempt to explain an idea, people will set up dualisms to more clearly define the terms and concepts in question. This two-sided approach seems to come up time and time again in the discussion of the origins of human morality – pitting moral reasoning against moral emotions, intellect vs. passion, nurture vs. nature, culture vs. genes, etc. I’ve been wondering about the usefulness of dividing controversial issues into these extreme dichotomies, especially when the subject matter seems either A) too complex to even formulate sides that are truly distinct, or B) more realistically involving a place somewhere in the middle. Granted, dualisms may be useful to illustrate a point – after all, it is helpful to define what something is by illustrating what it is not – but there is a tendency to paint caricatures instead of real positions.

This seemed to happen in the debate between Darwin and one of his critics, St. George Jackson Mivart. Mivart actually agreed with much of what Darwin had proposed in the Origin of Species and was a supporter of natural selection, but the two scientists had a falling out after Mivart wrote a scathing review of The Descent of Man. Their main point of disagreement was the difference between humans and other animals – particularly that difference which leads to morality. Whereas Darwin argued it was a difference in degree, Mivart was adamant that it was a difference in kind.

Mivart's argument goes like this: no one denies that man is an animal, but the mistake is to conclude that man is no more than an animal.  There is plenty of evidence to show that we share with other primates the capacity for sensations, passions, desires, etc. But sensational knowledge of the world is fundamentally different from intellectual understanding. What sets humans apart is their intellectual faculty and ability to reflect upon their experiences. Morality, which is uniquely human, requires some sort of judgment to evaluate competing emotions and desires. And this ability to judge is not simply an outgrowth of the evolved capacity to feel emotion – it is another thing altogether. Darwin's mistake is getting so caught up in man's similarities to animals that he obscures the crucial dissimilarity: a moral sense that we do not share with any other creature.

In this argument we see the two sides shaping up quite nicely: Darwin's morality as a continuous evolving capacity that developed from lower animals to humans (it only differs in degree) vs Mivart's morality as an discontinuous jump (it differs fundamentally in kind). But was Darwin really advocating this definition of morality? Is there any room for him to accept some sort of difference in kind? There just may be. Reading through The Descent of Man, one finds seemingly contradictory statements about the human moral capacity that suggest Darwin may not have had the view Mivart charged him with. On the one hand, Darwin says that:

"...the mental faculties of man and the lower animals do not differ in kind, although immensely in degree. A difference in degree, however great, does not justify us in placing man in a distinct kingdom..." 

That seems like a rather straightforward statement. But Darwin also acknowledges that:

"A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives- of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who certainly deserves this designation, is the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals." 

Even later he admits that articulate language is "peculiar to man." This sounds inconsistent, but only if we are using Mivart's two-sided notion of morality, one that pits "degree" against "kind". We could see Darwin as viewing the human moral sense as less of a radical break and more of an emergent property (this is an interpretation Larry Arnhart proposes in his book Darwinian Natural Right). If Darwin is describing a novel trait that appeared at a high level of complexity, producing an intellectual capacity that could not have been predicted at lower levels, then he is not contradicting himself. He really can say that man is distinct from other animals in a fundamental way (given the size and complexity of the human brain), without giving up the claim that man evolved his morality in a continuous way. This does not imply a break in the laws of nature, but rather an underlying uniqueness of human morality that depends on emergent traits. Novelty, therefore, can arise in a way that is compatible with Darwin’s theory.

I'll most likely have more to say on the dualisms that reappear in this evolutionary story, but so far it seems like breaking out of a two-sided world can be quite helpful.

Day 1: Evolution & Ethics – Darwin Was Here

The past decade has seen an explosion of research in the biology of human nature as related to morality. Systematic studies in genetics, neuroscience, cultural anthropology and animal behavior are supplying more data than ever before about the role of emotions in our moral judgments, similarities between human and non-human primate social behavior, and the evolutionary roots of our sense of right and wrong. Spanning both the sciences and humanities, this emerging field of the biology of morality seems to fulfill what E.O. Wilson had in mind over 30 years ago when he called for "ethics to be temporarily removed from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized." Philosophers may still cling tightly, but they're having to share their grip of ethics with a growing number of scientists.

Given all the increased attention – from an assortment of disciplines ranging from molecular biology to law – the concept of "biologicized" ethics may seem new, but in many ways it reflects an earlier trend in human inquiry that goes back to the ancient Greeks. When Aristotle called man a "political animal", he was not simply speaking in metaphor. His comparison was rooted in his own studies of biological sciences, which included detailed observations of a variety of plants and animals (and apparently the first dissection of a chimpanzee). He also compared humans to the other social animals – ants, bees, wasps and cranes. The moral and political nature of humans in biological terms was not an unfamiliar notion to Aristotle, but it would be transformed and solidified by another intellectual heavyweight millennia later: Charles Darwin. In his work The Descent of Man, Darwin laid out the basics for almost all subsequent discussion of evolution and ethics, and he did it without any knowledge of genetics or neuroscience. In fact, it can be quite a challenge to find a new idea in the field today that does not have its roots in Darwin's writings over 150 years ago. Consider the following quotes:

"any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man."

"The moral nature of man has reached its present standard, partly through the advancement of his reasoning powers and consequently of a just public opinion, but especially from his sympathies having been rendered more tender and widely diffused through the effects of habit, example, instruction, and reflection... nevertheless the first foundation or origin of the moral sense lies in the social instincts, including sympathy; and these instincts no doubt were primarily gained, as in the case of the lower animals, through natural selection."

The continuity of morality from lower animals to humans, the additional element of reason, the emphasis on social instincts and emotions like sympathy; all of these insights are coming into the forefront right now. Of course, some of the terminology has changed and there is vastly more data to work with, but the discussion still echoes Darwin to a surprising degree. As we face a new decade, I can only speculate about the potential advances in science, how their implications will ripple out into other disciplines, and how they'll change our views of human nature and morality. But if the past is any indicator, they'll probably stem from something Darwin said.

Philosophy-types

In the spirit of end-of-the-year lists, here is an amusing collection I just came across: who you are, as revealed by your favorite philosopher.

Socrates: People who didn’t study philosophy.
Plato: People who did study philosophy, but only as an elective.
Aristotle: People who know they should tidy their room, but never do.
Parmenides: People who cross their legs in a slightly stiff and awkward way.
Pythagoras: People who are suspicious of beans.
Thomas Aquinas: People who express overly convoluted arguments to justify things that we all already agree with.
Francis Bacon: People who like art, but know little about science.
Thomas Hobbes: Highly intelligent, highly irritable men.
Rene Descartes: Americans who call him “dez-car-dees” and love saying “I think therefore I am” but don’t know what “cogito ergo sum” means.
John Locke: People who read Newsweek, but only because they haven’t yet discovered The Economist.
David Hume: Jolly people with a lingering sense of urgency.
Immanuel Kant: People who are never, ever late.
Machiavelli: People who wear their collars turned up, and probably earn more than you.
Gottfried Leibniz: People who wear berets, but shouldn’t.
George Berkeley: People who got the heebie-jeebies from watching The Matrix.
Hegel: People who pause in conversation, grasping for the longest word they can think of to express a simple idea.
Friedrich Nietzsche: People who came to philosophy during the most awkward 15 minutes of their teenage years.
Adam Smith: People who secretly enjoy romantic comedies.
Karl Marx: Men with beards and women who don’t wear makeup.
John Stuart Mill: People who like scotch and soda.
Gottlob Frege: People who wear different coloured socks.
Bertrand Russell: People who secretly want to smoke a pipe.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: People you’re always surprised to see in the queue to the latest Hollywood blockbuster.
Jean-Paul Sartre: People who once smoked – and may still do – even though they hate it.
Simone de Beauvoir: Men who think quoting philosophy impresses women; women who aren’t impressed by men quoting philosophy.
Martin Heidegger: People with a disconcerting lazy eye, so you never know if they’re talking to you.
Jaques Derrida: People with expansive bookshelves, prominently displayed, few of which have been read.
Michel Foucault: Good looking people who wish they were better looking.
John Rawls: People who fantasise about working for Obama.
Ayn Rand: People who are polite but insistent, and who wear comfortable shoes.
Richard Rorty: People who still like merlot, no matter what anyone thinks.
Noam Chomsky: People who confuse a conversation for an argument at dinner parties.
Daniel Dennett: People who have never watched commercial television.