Category: Ethics

Type 2 Modular Cognitive Responsibility for a New Year

Mark Davis1 Comment

Brain on QI’m rebooting a startup that I had set aside a year ago. I’ve had some recent research and development advances that make it again seem worth pursuing. Specifically, the improved approach uses a deep learning decision-making filter of sorts to select among natural language generators based on characteristics of the interlocutor’s queries. The channeling to the best generator uses word and phrase cues, while the generators themselves are a novel deep learning framework that integrates ontologies about specific domain areas or motives of the chatbot. Some of the response systems involve more training than others. They are deeper and have subtle goals in responding to the query. Others are less nuanced and just engage in non-performative casual speech.

In social and cognitive psychology there is some recent research that bears a resemblance to this and also is related to contemporary politics and society. Well, cognitive modularity at the simplest is one area of similarity. But within the scope of that is the Type 1/Type 2 distinction, or “fast” versus “slow” thinking. In this “dual process” framework decision-making may be guided by intuitive Type 1 thinking that relates to more primitive, older evolutionary modules of the mind. Type 1 evolved to help solve survival dilemmas that require quick resolution. But inferential reasoning developed more slowly and apparently fairly late for us, with the impact of modern education strengthening the ability of these Type 2 decision processes to override the intuitive Type 1 decisions.

These insights have been applied in remarkably interesting ways in trying to understand political ideologies, moral choices, and even religious identity. For instance, there is some evidence that conservative political leanings correlates more with Type 1 processes.… Read the rest

Evolving Ought Beyond Is

Mark Davis2 Comments

The is-ought barrier is a regularly visited topic since its initial formulation by Hume. It certainly seems unassailable in that a syllogism designed to claim that what ought to be done is predicated on what is (observable and natural) must always fail. The reason for this is that the ought framework (call it ethics) can be formulated in any particular way to ascribe the good and the bad. A serial killer might believe that killing certain people eliminates demons from the world and is therefore good, regardless of a general prohibition that killing others is bad. In this case, we might argue that the killer is simply mistaken in her beliefs and that a lack of accurate information is guiding her. But even the claim that there is an “is” in this case (killing people results in a worse society/people are entitled to be free from murder/etc.) doesn’t really stay on the factual side of the barrier. The is evaporates into an ought at the very outset.

There are efforts to enliven some type of naturalistic underpinnings of moral reasoning, like Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape that postulates an adaptive topology where the consequences of individual and group actions result in improvements or harm to humanity as a whole. The end result is a kind of abstract consequentialism beneath local observables that is enervated by some brain science. Here’s an example: (1) Better knowledge of the biological origins of disease can result in behavior that reduces disease harm; (2) It is therefore moral to improve education about biology; (3) Disease harm is reduced resulting in reduced suffering. This doesn’t quite make it across the barrier, though, because it presupposes an ought for humans that reduces the imperatives of the disease itself (what about its thriving?),… Read the rest

The Abnormal Normal

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Another day, another COVID-19 conspiracy theory making the rounds. First there was the Chinese bioweapons idea, then the 5G radiation theory that led to tower vandalism, and now the Plandemic video. Washington Post covers the latter while complaining that tech companies are incompetently ineffectual in stopping the spread of these mind viruses that accompany the biological ones. Meanwhile, a scientist who appears in the video is reviewed and debunked in AAAS Science based on materials she provided them. I’m still interested in these “sequences” in the Pacific Ocean. I’ve spent some time in there and may need to again.

The WaPo article ends with a suggestion that we all need to be more skeptical of dumb shit, though I’m guessing that that message will probably not reach the majority of believers or propagators of Plandemic-style conspiracy thinking. So it goes with all the other magical nonsense that percolates through our ordinary lives, confined as they are to only flights of fancy and hopeful aspirations for a better world.

Broadly, though, it does appear that susceptibility to conspiracy theories correlates with certain mental traits that linger at the edge of mental illnesses. Evita March and Jordan Springer got 230 mostly undergraduate students to answer online questionnaires that polled them on mental traits of schizotypy, Machiavellianism, trait narcissism, and trait psychopathy. They also evaluated their belief in odd/magical ideas. Their paper, Belief in conspiracy theories: The predictive role of schizotypy, Machiavellianism, and primary psychopathy, shows significant correlations with belief in conspiracies. Interestingly, they suggest that the urge to manipulate others in Machiavellianism and psychopathy may, in turn, lead to an innate fear of being manipulated oneself.

Mental illness and certain psychological traits have always been a bit of an evolutionary mystery.… Read the rest

Ethical Grounding and Numeracy

Mark Davis1 Comment

I recently discovered the YouTube videos of Paulogia. He’s a former Christian who likes to take on young Earth creationists, apologists, and some historical issues related to the faith. I’m generally drawn to the latter since the other two categories seem a bit silly to me, but I liked his recent rebuttal of some apologist/philosopher arguments concerning the idea that ethics must be ontologically grounded in something. The argument is of the sort stoned high schoolers engage in—but certainly more carefully attended to—as I commented on the video.

So rather than pick on definitional minutiae, let’s take an expansive view of ethical reasoning and try to apply it to contemporary problems in society. For instance, while all societies have generally condemned murder in one way or another, how do we approach something like whether governmental control or regulation of environmental pollution and interaction is necessary or obligatory?

For the apologist/philosophers in the video, they seem to argue that scriptural claims places a grounding of ethics in a person’s “heart,” but then leave open how that gets translated into some kind of decision-making. At one point, one of the guys says he tends towards virtue ethics, while the other notes that some might see deontological ethics as the proper extension of that ontologically- and theistically-grounded impetus.

Let’s take a minimalist and observational approach to ethical behavior. We can perhaps tease out a few observations and then try to fit an explanatory theory onto that.

  1. Moral and ethical perspectives are and have been varied across people and time.
  2. There seems to be some central commonalities about interpersonal and group ideas about what is ethical and moral.
  3. Those commonalities have reflections in the natural world and among non-human species.
… Read the rest

Overcoming Projection and Fear in the 2020s

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The end of 2019 has come with a soul-searching of sorts. While the politics of America is in an unexpected tribal divergence given the recent good economic performance combined with a world not in major conflicts, there are also undercurrents of religious change that many see as threatening to the established order. Religion in America is on the decline for the last decade, with young people, especially, indicating that they have no particular affiliation, and with the rise of atheism and related thinking in print and online.

Let’s take a look at some of the most recent journalism on the topic. We will start with an example of how, I believe, it contributes to this decline, then segue to some sage survey work and science concerning how people regard these ideas.

The Washington Times is almost always filled with sloppy journalism, editorials, scholarship, and thinking, but here we have quotes suggesting that lack of religious affiliation is “pagan.” (Wrong: paganism was and remains highly religious). Or editorialization that overthrowing “blue laws” is linked to the decline of religious adherence (or, perhaps, a better separation of church and state). Shakespeare’s jokes require biblical understanding? Perhaps some, but many others required (pagan) mythological and historical understanding. The hit list goes on and on: evangelization like in the Age of Exploration? Swords out, anyone?

But this kind of sloppiness reflects mostly a desire to denigrate religious skepticism and project onto it the fears of the religious themselves, at least according to this survey from the Public Religion Reseach Institute, as reported in the Washington Post, which is the anti-Times for some. The Christian religious right sustains a fear of losing their religious freedoms that is not actually desired by atheists or the non-affiliated.… Read the rest

A Great, Modern Rambling

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I read across the political spectrum. I would say I read religiously across the political spectrum, but that is using the term in a secondary and impoverished way, which is part of my point in this particular post. When an author has no clearly defined thesis there is a tendency to ramble, or to fall back on form in the absence of content, or to play to the expectations of the audience through deliberate obscurity.

It is by a chance intersection that I encountered two ideologically conservative pieces that suffer from this tendency in the same week, but it could also be that everyone on the right is exasperated by the often vacuous—and always narcissistic—current happenings within the political parties that represent them. I sympathize with them if that’s their defense, and will also agree that the far left can be equally exhausting.

It has become de rigueur for the right’s commentariat to claim that this is not what they expect from the Party of Lincoln or, given a spat with National Review, that the magazine lacks the heft of Bill Buckley’s original ideals. If all of conservatism has become tainted by reactionaries and semi-populists, the very idea of intellectual conservatism huddles against an ever-present and threatening cloud.

So we start with Andrew Sullivan’s rambling in New York Magazine. Sullivan likes to praise the intellectual heft of those he argues against. Maybe he just likes to be pleasant and this is his way of signaling a commonality of purpose, or perhaps it’s to gird his own rejoinders as having equal weight. In this piece, it’s hard to discern why. The entire argument is a typology or map of what a center-right conservative is and is not.… Read the rest

A Most Porous Barrier

Mark Davis2 Comments

Whenever there is a scientific—or even a quasi-scientific—theory invented, there are those who take an expansive view of the theory, broadly applying it to other areas of thought. This is perhaps inherent in the metaphorical nature of these kinds of thought patterns. Thus we see Darwinian theory influenced by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of economic optimization. Then we get Spencer’s Social Darwinism arising from Darwin. And E.O. Wilson’s sociobiology leads to evolutionary psychology, immediately following an activist’s  pitcher of ice water.

The is-ought barrier tends towards porousness, allowing the smuggling of insights and metaphors lifted from the natural world as explanatory footwork for our complex social and political interactions. After all, we are as natural as we are social. But at the same time, we know that science is best when it is tentative and subject to infernal levels of revision and reconsideration. Decisions about social policy derived from science, and especially those that have significant human impact, should be cushioned by a tentative level of trust as well.

E.O. Wilson’s most recent book, Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies, is a continuation of his late conversion to what is now referred to as “multi-level selection,” where natural selection is believed to operate at multiple levels, from genes to whole societies. It remains a controversial theory that has been under development and under siege since Darwin’s time, when the mechanism of inheritance was not understood.

The book is brief and does not provide much, if any, new material since his Social Conquest of Earth, which was significantly denser and contained notes derived from his controversial 2010 Nature paper that called into question whether kin selection was overstated as a gene-level explanation of altruism and sacrifice within eusocial species.… Read the rest

Free Will and Algorithmic Information Theory (Part II)

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Bad monkey

So we get some mild form of source determinism out of Algorithmic Information Complexity (AIC), but we haven’t addressed the form of free will that deals with moral culpability at all. That free will requires that we, as moral agents, are capable of making choices that have moral consequences. Another way of saying it is that given the same circumstances we could have done otherwise. After all, all we have is a series of if/then statements that must be implemented in wetware and they still respond to known stimuli in deterministic ways. Just responding in model-predictable ways to new stimuli doesn’t amount directly to making choices.

Let’s expand the problem a bit, however. Instead of a lock-and-key recognition of integer “foodstuffs” we have uncertain patterns of foodstuffs and fallible recognition systems. Suddenly we have a probability problem with P(food|n) [or even P(food|q(n)) where q is some perception function] governed by Bayesian statistics. Clearly we expect evolution to optimize towards better models, though we know that all kinds of historical and physical contingencies may derail perfect optimization. Still, if we did have perfect optimization, we know what that would look like for certain types of statistical patterns.

What is an optimal induction machine? AIC and variants have been used to define that machine. First, we have Solomonoff induction from around 1960. But we also have Jorma Rissanen’s Minimum Description Length (MDL) theory from 1978 that casts the problem more in terms of continuous distributions. Variants are available, too, from Minimum Message Length, to Akaike’s Information Criterion (AIC, confusingly again), Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), and on to Structural Risk Minimization via Vapnik-Chervonenkis learning theory.

All of these theories involve some kind of trade-off between model parameters, the relative complexity of model parameters, and the success of the model on the trained exemplars.… Read the rest

Free Will and Algorithmic Information Theory

Mark Davis1 Comment

I was recently looking for examples of applications of algorithmic information theory, also commonly called algorithmic information complexity (AIC). After all, for a theory to be sound is one thing, but when it is sound and valuable it moves to another level. So, first, let’s review the broad outline of AIC. AIC begins with the problem of randomness, specifically random strings of 0s and 1s. We can readily see that given any sort of encoding in any base, strings of characters can be reduced to a binary sequence. Likewise integers.

Now, AIC states that there are often many Turing machines that could generate a given string and, since we can represent those machines also as a bit sequence, there is at least one machine that has the shortest bit sequence while still producing the target string. In fact, if the shortest machine is as long or a bit longer (given some machine encoding requirements), then the string is said to be AIC random. In other words, no compression of the string is possible.

Moreover, we can generalize this generator machine idea to claim that given some set of strings that represent the data of a given phenomena (let’s say natural occurrences), the smallest generator machine that covers all the data is a “theoretical model” of the data and the underlying phenomena. An interesting outcome of this theory is that it can be shown that there is, in fact, no algorithm (or meta-machine) that can find the smallest generator for any given sequence. This is related to Turing Incompleteness.

In terms of applications, Gregory Chaitin, who is one of the originators of the core ideas of AIC, has proposed that the theory sheds light on questions of meta-mathematics and specifically that it demonstrates that mathematics is a quasi-empirical pursuit capable of producing new methods rather than being idealistically derived from analytic first-principles.… Read the rest

Poetics and Humanism for the Solstice

Mark Davis4 Comments

There is, necessarily, an empty center to secular existence. Empty in the sense that there is no absolute answer to the complexities of human life, alone or as part of the great societies that we have created. This opens us to wild, adventurous circuits through pain, meaning, suffering, growth, and love. Religious writers in recent years have had a tendentious tendency to denigrate this fantastic adventure, as Andrew Sullivan does in New York magazine. The worst possible argument is that everything is religion insofar as we believe passionately about its value. It’s wrong if for no other reason than the position of John Gray that Sullivan quotes:

Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.

Many religious people absolutely disagree with that characterization and demand an entire metaphysical cosmos of spiritual entities and corresponding goals. Abstracting religion to a symbolic labeling system for prediction and explanation robs religion, as well as reason, art, emotion, conversation, and logic, of any independent meaning at all. So Sullivan and Gray are so catholic in their semantics that the words can be replanted to justify almost anything. Moreover, the subsequent claim about religion existing because of our awareness of our own mortality is not borne out by the range of concepts that are properly considered religious.

In social change Sullivan sees a grasping towards redemption, whether in the Marxist-idolatrous left or the covertly idolatrous right, but a more careful reading of history proves Sullivan wrong on the surface, at least, if not in the deeper prescription. For instance, it is not faith in progress that has been part of the liberal social experiment since the Enlightenment, but a grasping towards actual reasons and justifications for what is desired and how to achieve it.… Read the rest