Category: Ethics

Fiction and Empathy

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The New York Times reviews the neuroscience associated with reading fictional accounts, concluding that the brain states of readers show similar activation patterns to people experiencing the events described in the book. This, in turn, enhances and improves our own “theory of mind” about others when we read about social interactions:

[I]ndividuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels.

Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature suggests that the advent of the printing press is where we see the start of a shift in European societies’ attitudes about violence. The spread of reading and the growth of political satire correlate with reductions in state violence through the 19th Century and into the 20th (yes, he argues the 20th shows a reduction in violence, despite our intuitions about WWI and WWII). Think Voltaire. Think All Quiet on the Western Front.… Read the rest

Teleology, Chapter 26

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Wherein, the protagonist, Mikey, his twin brother, Harry, and a journalist, Jacob, are being physically healed by intelligent nanomachines while their consciousnesses are in a virtual world that appears to be a research ship in the Pacific Ocean.

26

We hovered in our “matrix” of sorts for ten more days. The Lexis reported that the search by US military forces was intensifying. Swarms of unmanned underwater and airborne vehicles were scouring the sea, though the most intense efforts were concentrated several hundred kilometers from our new location. The Lexis believed that the platform was in jeopardy because of the new connectivity that they had achieved to the outside world through the control of the nanobots, but also seemed consigned to whatever fate I dictated concerning their disposition. I chose to wait because our medical conditions were improving day by day—at least according to them—and I saw no reason to emerge until maximally healed.

We relaxed aboard the Recherché in the meantime, eating Cottard’s increasingly elaborate cooking and drinking his exceptional wines. The wines and foods were all familiar to me, I realized; the sensations had been mined from our thoughts and recollections. There was something disturbing about that, though I didn’t feel particularly violated because the Lexis were both a familiar quantity to me and their motivations I suspected were not malevolent.

While waiting I worked with the Lexis to try to understand how they had taken command of the external nanomachines and how they had modified them to improve their functionality. They regarded the entire exercise as something like the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It was an elaborate artistic effort designed to promote the idea of the Creator among their kind by showing my adventures in an almost unimaginable heaven that they saw us living in.… Read the rest

From Ethics to Hypercomputation

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Toby Ord of Giving What We Can has other interests, including ones that connect back to Solomonoff inference and algorithmic information theory. Specifically, Ord worked earlier on topics related to hypercomputation or, more simply put, the notion that there may be computational systems that exceed the capabilities of Turing Machines.

Turing Machines are abstract computers that can compute logical functions, but the question that has dominated theoretical computer science is what is computable and what is incomputable. The Kolmogorov Complexity of a string is the minimal specification needed to compute the string given a certain computational specification (a program). And the Kolmogorov Complexity is incomputable.  Yet, a compact representation is a minimalist model that can, in turn, lead to optimal future prediction of the underlying generator.

Wouldn’t it be astonishing if there were, in fact, computational systems that exceeded the limits of computability? That’s what Ord’s work set-out to investigate, though there have been detractors.… Read the rest

Uncertainty and Ethical Obligations

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LukeProg interviews Toby Ord of Oxford and founder of Giving What We Can about what may be an even more complex problem than that of the Existential dilemma over being itself: how do we overcome uncertainty in formulating an ethical system?

Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot: Toby Ord

There are few definitive answers, of course. How could there be? But Toby does a great job of drawing a map of deontological theories (rule-based, including “divine command theory”), virtue ethics, and consequentialist theories (utilitarianism, etc.). He’s partial to the latter (and even thinks most of the ethical systems might be unified as consquentialist), and his foundation has worked to perfect the calculations concerning how an individual’s contributions to specific charities can potentially result in the future reduction in human suffering.

Here’s a quandary, though: is exuberant excess sometimes necessary for enhancing future productivity that might lead to greater reductions in human suffering?  I may just be hoping to justify my failure to follow Toby’s example or, at least, to make up for it later in life.… Read the rest

Experimental Positive Morality

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Gated from Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature, the Dutch experiments concerning the “broken window hypothesis” are illuminating. The “broken window hypothesis” dates to the 1980s when criminologists Wilson and Kelling suggested that broken windows in an abandoned building might signal other vandals that breaking windows is permissible. This theory, though widely disputed among criminologists, informed increased enforcement efforts in the United States in the 1990s that correlated with the amazing reductions in the crime rate that have continued into the current decade.

What of the Dutch experiments? When artificial circumstances are established where people can, for instance, litter fliers, people will litter more when they are in an environment already littered or surrounded by buildings covered with graffiti. Small acts of theft also are enhanced by a shady environment.

If our moral sentiments are so heavily influenced by our environment, we don’t need convincing that our moral predispositions are socially influenced, as well. Teenagers and college students are case studies.

But what of positive influences? If graffiti enhances criminality, and a neutral environment is, well, neutral, is it possible that a beautiful, inspiring environment would promote positive morality?

In many cities and towns, artistic murals are applied to high-graffiti areas with the expressed purpose of eliminating graffiti, for example. Can astonishing architecture do similar things? Following the Dutch experimental setup, it would be easy to place fliers on bicycles around art galleries and interesting buildings, then monitor the littering rates. There are obvious problems with this methodology in that the people who live and work in some areas may have educational, class, and other differences with those who traffic other areas that are more prone to littering and graffiti.… Read the rest

China and the Origin of Rights

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Eric X. Li in The New York Times argues that:

America and China view their political systems in fundamentally different ways: whereas America sees democratic government as an end in itself, China sees its current form of government, or any political system for that matter, merely as a means to achieving larger national ends.

The implication developed further is that:

The West seems incapable of becoming less democratic even when its survival may depend on such a shift.

Li’s argument develops the idea that the repression of the Tiananmen movement in China was a strategic move that resulted in the underlying political stability for the current economic growth wave in China!

It’s hindsight bias, though, that builds on a kind of utilitarianism that asserts that there are political and social values that outweigh the rights of individuals (and that are predictable in their output). Indeed, Li asserts as much with:

The fundamental difference between Washington’s view and Beijing’s is whether political rights are considered God-given and therefore absolute or whether they should be seen as privileges to be negotiated based on the needs and conditions of the nation.

God is, of course, unnecessary in this equation. What is more relevant is whether an individual’s rights to freedom–whether of conscience or property–should be considered to supersede the desires of the state or collective. This was expressed as endowed by the Creator in the Declaration of Independence, but there was no particular justification provided in the Constitution. Rights are simply agreeably good in the US Constitution, subject to the same floor-plan as the rights and limitations of the Judiciary or the Legislative Branch, and even limited in some cases where just compensation for property seizures is allowable.… Read the rest

Adaptive Ethics via iBooks Author

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For fun, I decided to try writing a partial post using Apple’s iBooks Author. The application runs on Mac OS X Lion and is available for free. It appears to be derivative of Keynote, which explains Apple’s rapid development of the authoring tool.

There are some limitations, though. I couldn’t embed equations from Word for Mac 2011 without converting them into images. It also only publishes to iBookstore,  although you can export to PDF (as below). There are few PDF export options, however, and the metadata and labeling includes Apple logos.

Tearing apart the .iba format via unzip showed a collection of .jpg and .tiff images, a binary color array, and an .xml specification of the project. Fairly simple, but not including the compiled .epub file that iBookstore generally takes.

Total elapsed time: 1 hour (including download/installation). With improvements to the software and with more experience, that should be halved.

… Read the rest

Are Theists Obligated to Create a Simulated Universe?

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I recently re-read Mark Alan Walker‘s manuscript (unpublished?), A Neo-Irenaean Theodicy: Evolution, Playing God and Becoming Gods. The argument is straightforward and expands on the Theodicy of Irenaeus: God created evil as part of the process of letting His children–humanity–develop their own moral faculties as part of becoming gods ourselves. This quiet trick contra Augustinian Theodicy made it fashionable to treat The Fall as somewhat metaphorical that was inverted by the reclamation of the potential for moral perfection by Mary and Jesus.

Professor Walker’s paper takes Irenaeus further by suggesting that the obligation of becoming like God extends further towards perhaps genetic manipulation of ourselves, for if by having bigger, better brains makes us less likely to sin and more like God, then that transforms into a moral obligation. The argument seems to prescribe even more radical actions, too: are theists morally obligated, following our ascension as gods, to create new universes? Are simulations mandatory? Should Christians begin now?

… Read the rest

Simulated Experimental Morality

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I’m deep in Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It’s also only about the third book I’ve tried to read exclusively on the iPad, but I am finally getting used to the platform. The core thesis of Pinker’s book is something that I have been experimentally testing on people for several years: our moral facilities and decision-making are gradually improving. For Pinker, the thesis is built up elaborately from basic estimates of death rates due to war and homicide between non-state societies and state societies. It comes with an uncomfortable inversion of the nobility of the savage mind: primitive people had a lot to fight about and often did.

My first contact with the notion that morality is changing and improving was with Richard Dawkin’s observation in The God Delusion that most modern Westerners feel very uncomfortable with the fire bombing of Tokyo in World War II, the saturation bombing of Hanoi, nuclear attack against civilian populations, or treating people inhumanely based on race or ethnicity. Yet that wasn’t the case just decades ago. More moral drift can be seen in changing sentiments concerning the rights of gay people to marry. Experimentally, then, I would ask, over dinner or conversation, about simple moral trolley experiments and then move on to ask whether anyone would condone nuclear attack against civilian populations. There is always a first response of “no” to the latter, which reflects a gut moral sentiment, though a few people have agreed that it may be “permissible” (to use the language of these kinds of dilemmas) in response to a similar attack and when there may be “command and control assets” mixed into the attack area.… Read the rest

Singularities as Child’s Play

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Dystopian literature is mostly about the unintended consequences of technological change.  Cory Doctorow expands on this theme related to technological singularities on Boing Boing:

Indeed, it seems to me that in literature, the Singularity’s role is to serve as a straw-man for critiquing technology as a one-sided panacea.

Fair enough. Literature and drama are all about conflicts and Man vs. Technology is at least one of the primary conflicts of the modern age.

Heaven stuffBut why is it that we are drawn to this notion of some kind of transcendent mechanism that alleviates us of the struggles of everyday existence? It’s a central theme of Hinduism (get off the wheel of existence), Buddhism (existence is void; free the mind of your very desire of it), Christianity and Islam (post-life existence is better and more perfect). I think it arises from the same predisposition for magical thinking combined with hope that is part of imaginative play among children. In play, the child creates an imagined and utopian existence where their alter egos typically overcome all obstacles. There are a few sex differences that are part conditioning and likely partly biological, but the patterns are remarkably utopian in terms of the dispositions of the children’s play avatars.

The translation of this into adult formulations of heavens filled with inchoate goodness and light (or many virgins), or even an emptiness that defies ordinary characterization, is just an extension of this urge to play. In a technological world, singularities are the secular equivalent, but with the additional propellant of observed technological change that surrounds all of us.… Read the rest