Category: Philosophy

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

Etruscan Teleology

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I was, somewhat ironically, concocting salmon risotto with a drizzle of white wine while my wife read to me about Etruscan mythology from Wikipedia this evening.  From Seneca the Younger:

Whereas we believe lightning to be released as a result of the collision of clouds, they believe that the clouds collide so as to release lightning: for as they attribute all to deity, they are led to believe not that things have a meaning insofar as they occur, but rather that they occur because they must have a meaning.

Last year we had the opportunity to visit the National Etruscan Museum in Rome during the most unbearably tropical European summer in recent memory.

Seneca the Younger somewhat snidely detected a difference, driven at least partially by a feeling of cultural dominance, that teleological explanations are inferior to naturalistic ones, that one more entity (or a host of them) provides no additional value to the explanatory system.… Read the rest

Artistic Fitness

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Following on Wirt’s 1991 treatise, On the Role of Males, that suggests that sexual caste is a meta-trait that operates at a level above simple, beanbag “selfish genetics” by supporting eliminating genetic defects through Y chromosomes (unmasked heterozygous alleles) combined with combative behavior, we can easily ask what other traits elevate female choices for mammals because, by being selective, female choice accelerates evolution even more. And, for humankind, we can ask the most interesting question: what drives women to desire men?

From Geoffrey Miller’s Aesthetic fitness: How sexual selection shaped artistic virtuosity as a fitness indicator and aesthetic preferences as mate choice criteria:

From 1871 until the turn of the 20th century, Darwinian aesthetics was an active area of theorizing.  Darwin (1871) himself viewed the human visual arts as an outgrowth of an instinct for body ornamentation.  He pointed out that males in most cultures indulge in much more self-adornment than females, as predicted by his sexual selection theory. (He understood that men of his own culture ornamented themselves with country estates and colonial treasures rather than tattoos and penis sheaths).  Herbert Spencer argued that sexual selection produced most of the beauty in nature and culture, while Max Nordau posited a neurophysiological link between reproductive urges and artistic creativity, which Sigmund Freud appropriated in this theory of art as sublimated sexuality.   Friedrich Nietzsche developed an especially intriguing and little-appreciated biological aesthetics in The Will to Power, in the section titled ‘The will to power as art’. Nietzsche (1883-1888/1968, p. 421) also accepted a sexual display function for the visual arts, writing “Artists, if they are any good, are (physically as well) strong, full of surplus energy, powerful animals, sensual; without a certain overheating of the sexual system a Raphael is unthinkable.”

… 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

Transcendent Ivory

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Alain de Botton has an interesting suggestion in the Wall Street Journal: create restaurants that are communal and that are designed to foster social interaction with an almost religious quality. This follows fairly closely on the heels of Hubert Dreyfus of Berkeley’s suggestion that maybe a good religious substitute can be found in mass sports events.

Why is a secular substitute for religion needed? It’s not completely clear. Each author argues that there is something fundamentally missing from our modern, cosmopolitan lives. What is missing is a sense of wonder, a sense of transcendence, a sense of community involvement, a sense of egoless participation, a universe of interactions based on something other than commercial interests, non-creepy greetings (de Botton)…something.

But they both neglect one of the crowning achievements of the modern world. Organized sports are largely passive events for the spectators. Restaurants are far too much about eating and not about ideas. What we do have, however, are university systems that are dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and are accessible (with all the caveats of price) to almost all of the population. Only in university systems are people organized around a commitment to knowledge, science, and art. Economic status is less important than intellectual capacity. Ideas reign and social interaction is driven by common cause.

What we need is more ivory towers. After all, even the phrase may have been sourced from the Song of Solomon:

Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus

… 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

Bostrom and Computational Irreducibility

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Nick Bostrom elevated philosophical concerns to the level of the popular press with his paper, Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? which argues that:

…at least one of the following propositions is
true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

A critical prerequisite of (3) is that human brains can be simulated in some way. And a co-requisite of that requirement is that the environment must be at least partially simulated in order for the brain simulations to believe in the sensorium that they experience:

If the environment is included in the simulation, this will require additional computing power – how much depends on the scope and granularity of the simulation. Simulating the entire universe down to the quantum level is obviously infeasible, unless radically new physics is discovered. But in order to get a realistic simulation of human experience, much less is needed – only whatever is required to ensure that the simulated humans, interacting in normal human ways with their simulated environment, don’t notice any irregularities.

Bostrom’s efforts to minimize the required information content doesn’t ring true, however. In order for a perceived universe to provide even “local” consistency, then large-scale phenomena must be simulated with perfect accuracy. Even if, as Bostrom suggests, noticed inconsistencies can be rewritten in the brains of the simulated individuals, those inconsistencies would have to be eventually resolved into a consistent universe.

Further, creating local consistency without emulating quantum-level phenomena requires first computing the macroscopic phenomena that would be a consequence of those quantum events.… Read the rest

Radical Triangulation

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Donald Davidson argued that descriptive theories of semantics suffered from untenable complications that could, in turn, be solved by a holistic theory of meaning. Holism, in this sense, is due to the dependency of words and phrases as part of a complex linguistic interchange. He proposed “triangulation” as a solution, where we zero-in on a tentatively held belief about a word based on other beliefs about oneself, about others, and about the world we think we know.

This seems daringly obvious, but it is merely the starting point of the hard work of what mechanisms and steps are involved in fixing the meaning of words through triangulation. There are certainly some predispositions that are innate and fit nicely with triangulation. These are subsumed under The Principle of Charity and even the notion of the Intentional Stance in how we regard others like us.

Fixing meaning via model-making has some curious results. The language used to discuss aesthetics and art tends to borrow from other fields (“The narrative of the painting,” “The functional grammar of the architecture.”) Religious and spiritual terminology often has extremely porous models: I recently listened to Episcopalians discuss the meaning of “grace” for almost an hour with great glee but almost no progress; it was the belief that they were discussing something of ineffable greatness that was moving to them. Even seemingly simple scientific ideas become elaborately complex for both children and adults: we begin with atoms as billiard balls that mutate into mini solar systems that become vibrating clouds of probabilistic wave-particles around groups of properties in energetic suspension by virtual particle exchange.

Can we apply more formal models to the task of staking out this method of triangulation?… Read the rest

Learning around the Non Sequiturs

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If Solomonoff Induction and its conceptual neighbors have not yet found application in enhancing human reasoning, there are definitely areas where they have potential value.  Automatic, unsupervised learning of sequential patterns is an intriguing area of application. It also fits closely with the sequence inferencing problem that is at the heart of algorithmic information theory.

Pragmatically, the problem of how children learn the interchangeability of words that is the basic operation of grammaticality is one area where this kind of system might be useful. Given a sequence of words or symbols, what sort of information is available for figuring out the grammatical groupings? Not much beyond memories of repetitions, often inferred implicitly.

Could we apply some variant of Solomonoff Induction at this point? Recall that we want to find the most compact explanation for the observed symbol stream. Recall also that the form of the explanation is a computer program of some sort that consists of logical functions. It turns out that creating a program that, for every possible sequence, finds the absolutely most compact program is uncomputable. The notion of what is “uncomputable” (or incomputable) is a mathematical result that has to do with how many different potential programs must be investigated to try to find the shortest one. If that number grows faster than the length of a program, it becomes uncomputable. Being uncomputable is not a death sentence, however. We can come up with approximate methods that try to follow the same procedure because any method that incrementally compresses the explanatory program will get closer to the hypothetical best program.

Sequitur by Nevill-Manning and Witten is an example of a procedure that approximates Algorithmic Information Theory optimization for string sequences.… 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