Studying for Exceptionalism

Caustic modern American politics has arisen in the new metaverse of communications technologies. Everyone has an opinion and shares it. This perhaps leads to pervasive unhappiness with any kind of governance. There’s always something to bitch about because real change is both hard and always has winners and losers of some sort. But what do the happiest countries in the world do differently than those of us in the second and lower tiers? Worth reading is the seventh chapter of the World Happiness Report titled “The Nordic Exceptionalism.” Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, and Norway are all at the top, along with Switzerland, New Zealand, and Austria. And what do these countries do right that makes them so exceptional in terms of happiness? Well, it’s not due to some of the suggested culprits like low immigrant rates and cultural uniformity or high rates of suicide culling out the unhappy. It’s also not clearly due to lower levels of income inequality compared with peer countries. The effect of inequality on happiness appears to correlate with GDP per capita and is reduced in impact by the presence of a generous welfare state; it contributes but is not central.

Instead, important factors include trust in social institutions and low rates of corruption. People in these countries also feel freer than in peer countries, including the United States. Their overall life satisfaction levels are very high and have much lower variation within the populace than countries like ours, as well. Part of the sense of freedom may arise from the generosity of the welfare states by reducing the risk of exploring life options, which is also a side-effect of wealth in these countries.

A dive into potential root causes reveals some surprises, like:

Another important underlying factor might have been mass education.

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Searching for Emergence

I have a longstanding interest in the concept of emergence as a way of explaining a wide range of human ideas and the natural world. We have this incredible algorithm of evolutionary change that creates novel life forms. We have, according to mainstream materialist accounts of philosophy of mind, a consciousness that may have a unique ontology (what really exists) of subjective experiencers and qualia and intentionality, but that is also somehow emergent from the meat of the brain (or supervenes or is an epiphenomenon, etc. etc.) That emergence may be weak or strong in various accounts, with strong meaning something like the idea that a new thing is added to the ontology while weak meaning something like we just don’t know enough yet to find the reduction of the concept to its underlying causal components. If we did, then it is not really something new in this grammar of ontological necessity.

There is also the problem of computational irreducibility (CI) that has been championed by Wolfram. In CI, there are classes of computations that result in outcomes that cannot be predicted by any simpler algorithm. This seems to open the door to a strong concept of emergence: we have to run the machine to get the outcome; there is no possibility (in theory!) of reducing the outcome to any lesser approximation. I’ve brought this up as a defeater of the Simulation Hypothesis, suggesting that the complexity of a simulation is irreducible from the universe as we see it (assuming perfect coherence in the limit).

There is also a dual to this idea in algorithmic information theory (AIT) that is worth exploring. In AIT, it is uncomputable to find the shortest Turing Machine capable of accepting a given symbol sequence.… Read the rest