This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Friday afternoon culture war thread? No formal education outside STEM? Alright, let's solve philosophy by messily banging out a manifesto in under an hour and just paste it out there like I know what I'm talking about:
Searle's Chinese Room is no more interesting than p-zombies - both are empty questions. If you are definitionally not allowed to observe an empirical difference then the answer to the question is mu, as both answers yield exactly identical predictions about the future and so are the same answer.
Searle is assuming "understanding" means something functionally undetectable - he's smuggling in that there's "something more" to what we do, as all phenomenalists do. Even if we could open the brain and look inside to 99% accuracy, they'd continue to chase their mystery into the gaps. Their position is fundamentally reliant on there being an unknown element in play. If we had 100% certain explanation of exactly how the brain does what it does, there'd be no mysterious phenomenon left without explicitly postulating a non-physical ingredient.
Same story for Mary's room. If Mary has 100% understanding, then it's not possible for her to learn something new on seeing the apple, as she could just simulate the experience ahead of time. 100% means 0% remains, and anything else isn't part of the brain's physical system. The experiment's "insight" presupposes consciousness is not an operation of the brain.
I'll go one further. Every avenue that purports to explore the "hard problem" of consciousness must necessarily smuggle in dualism in just the same way. Either the mind is deterministically/probabilistically generated by the physical processes in play within the brain (or perhaps elsewhere in the body if your theories are exotic enough) or it is not. ANYTHING the mind "experiences" must come from these physical phenomena, unless there is some other thing not contained in the set of physics which is causing them.
To accept any theist view, one has to find some element of the world that cannot be explained by physics, else parsimony demands we not introduce the relevant deity. If one has such an element in mind, it belongs to a separate magisterium and so the dual layers of the universe themselves are quite an expensive answer to whatever question it was you couldn't answer. Further then, any specific description of or proscriptions from other magisteria cruelly desecrate poor parsimony's corpse. I simply can't see how any rigorous thinker can go this way.
A common objection might be that math or logic is not physical, but mathematics and logic can be instantiated in the physical - one can count apples, one can apply inputs to silicon logic gates. Let me clarify a bit. I am not saying that math and logic are physical. I am saying that despite the apparent ontological cost of introducing new categories, that cost is in reality dramatically reduced because as we can see by instantiating them physically they are not separate magisteria but manipulations of this one.
"Free will" is a popular card in the theist deck beyond the necessary, saying that God has granted us this. Agency is a useful fiction, and as we cannot map the causal web anywhere near deep enough to fully apply determinism to the actions of conscious beings, we are (for now?) free to let ignorance be bliss. But how could it be any other way? For matter to "choose" to behave differently than physics requires it to would be going right back to dualism again, once again importing that very same separate magisterium - and this time not only in the creative capacity, but in a 'has observable physical consequences' way.
Philosophy's mostly hokum. Essentially everything comes down to empiricism and consequentialism, but remembering that unknown and unknowable are distinct classes and keep in mind that Chesterton's Fence works everywhere. That is, assume an external reality exists (because without one everything falls apart and you can't get anywhere), find out what you can, be humble about what you can't or haven't yet, and make decisions based on the known consequences and not-known-to-be-impossible possibilities for which those Fences help you choose in the absence of your own data. To those who cry out that virtue ethics or deontology or any other framework are needed, hogwash! Prioritizing a virtue above and beyond its apparent consequences is really just going up a level and looking at second/third/fourth/etc order effects - sure, in this instance a bad thing happens, but because Virtue is preserved later more goodness happens with higher total value. It's all just fancy window dressing over consequentialist reasoning. Categorical imperatives are just nth order effects with very high n. Being the kind of person who does/doesn't do the thing reinforces other practices of doing/not doing the thing and sets the example that people should/shouldn't do the thing and etc. You're free to use these heuristics, because you can't fully map the causal web, but don't pretend they're some fundamental truths.
Justice (and many of its brethren concepts) are n-th order effect based feedback mechanisms that society instantiates to adjust the behavior of its constituents.
"What is good" is a category error and the values that congnitive systems overlay onto the world are simply chosen axioms (which consequentialism helps pursue the satisfaction of).
This is Physical System Realism.
To leverage PSR and eliminate even more persistent questions: the "self" is the shared boundary of several cooperating systems - a mind, a body, a genetic sequence, perhaps a few more - where they all align in roughly the same place: where their direct and immediate physical instantiation and control end. There are quite a few known pathologies of confused identity that map precisely to these boundaries falling out of sync. In some cases, when a person is particularly invested in the fate of a social organism they are a part of and very strongly feel "part of a community" their identity model may well include that (and this may again explain some pathologies).
Art fulfills axioms related to happiness and wellbeing through satisfying aesthetic preference or providing new heuristics (subtextual messages). Ideas are potential memes or infiltrators or viruses of the cognitive system, but upon examination most are benign. The true threat category is those that change axioms, but then we must allow for the possibility that if the axioms are ranked, a meme may "beneficially" change lower axioms in service of optimizing the higher.
Put very plainly, "believe what is true, act on what is helpful" - which just sounds like common sense. You only have to take it seriously.
Since everything non-quantum is fully clockwork without free will, can we clean up quantum mechanics? Superdeterminism sounds pretty cheap. What extra cost does it impose on us, besides needing to assume the expansion of the universe (which we already accept) began at a single point rather than beginning from some non-single-point state?
None. So accept it. Quantum randomness is just what the current state looks like from within our light cone. With a (much) longer cone, we'd see the causality. It's all just frames of reference. From within our light cone quantum results are indistinguishable from the probabilistic models, and so since we can't escape our light cone there's no reason to worry about predetermination. Universally predetermined, locally random.
One last stroke. Surprise is your heuristic for detecting that you need to update your model. If you can see the fixed future, you cannot be surprised. With omniscience's inability to be surprised and the fixed future, the very idea of a deity "touching" the universe becomes impossible. If any deity even could exist, it would be solely one that set the initial condition of the universe and hit go - an entity elsewhere running a simulation that is our universe. Theism is now isomorphic to the simulation hypothesis. Because this generates infinite regress, parsimony demands we remove it. There can be no god.
Philosphy's pretty easy - you just can't give up when something feels cold. Friend, the universe is on average quite cold. Axiomatically choose warmth, then go find it.
But they aren't the same answer. In the one possibility, the Chinese Room is conscious. In the other, it's not. What does it mean to be conscious? It means having subjective experience, which is by definition not something that can be directly probed. But that doesn't make the distinction meaningless. I know what it's like for the lights to be on. It's easy for me to imagine a copy of myself that behaves almost exactly like I do without the lights being on, or to imagine that for others, the lights are not on. It so happens that I will never be able to test whether that's the case, but, if there is a real world, then there is a fact of the matter as to whether others have subjective experience. In principle, it's no different from any other phenomenon where the fact of the matter is out of reach, like whether the cook spat in your food. The only difference is that the class of first-person phenomena, which are undeniably real (do you not see the color red?) and undeniably beyond the ability of at least current science to explain in material terms (can you show me the equation that has a bunch of terms representing physical magnitudes on the left side and the color red on the right side -- not simply an array of numbers representing wavelength or a pattern of neuronal activity, but the actual color red as perceived by humans?), are such that they can't even hypothetically be overcome in the same way that you could, hypothetically, find out whether the cook spat in your food if there happened to be a security camera in the kitchen (or something).
And you would still have to postulate that ingredient, because you would still not have that equation with the color red on the right side. Which is inconvenient to the point of view that materialist science should be able to enumerate all the constituents of reality, but wishing doesn't make the problem go away. There is, in fact, something left over. And even that's underselling it. The thing that's left over is the absolute most basic element of experience -- not just an element of experience, experience itself. A few minutes' reflection should be enough to dispel the naive belief that the tools of science, which have been very successful in describing patterns in what we see, should also be able to explain that we see. No, science has not brought us one step closer to that. No, no neurobiological revolution will unlock the red crayon that would permit scientists to fill out the right side of the equation. Sorry! Being a hard-headed realist means accepting this. Instead, you posit the philosophy-addled metaphysics according to which there is a world-out-there, but one that's beholden to human epistemology at its deepest ontological level. "If we can't tell the difference between two states of affairs they must be the same, otherwise it wouldn't be fair!" Tough luck, kid. Life isn't fair.
This is just word games. The "100% understanding" means a complete mechanistic understanding of the process by which someone answers "red" when asked the color of a presented apple, from the reflection of 700nm light off the apple, through the retina, optic nerve, visual cortex, etc., and eventually the relevant motor nerves. It's not a problem for the thought experiment that the actual color red, as you and I understand it, won't show up anywhere in this decomposition, and that Mary's understanding of redness is therefore incomplete despite all appearances. That's just what it's trying to show. The name of the paper where the thought experiment was proposed is literally Epiphenomenal qualia. For qualia to be epiphenomenal means that they are, somehow, the output of physical processes, but not the right kind of thing to serve as input to other physical processes. (Except certain physical processes implicated in discussions of consciousness themselves, which is a hole in the theory. They don't call it the hard problem for nothing.) It's like Carl Sagan's invisible dragons, if every thought and experience of the world you had ever had were somehow inextricably and unmistakably predicated on the fact that you were yourself an invisible dragon.
True. Again, this is why they call it the hard problem. There are no cheap answers. The one answer that's decidedly worse than the rest is the one that simply denies the fact of first-person experience or pretends that it's somehow trivially obvious that such-and-such an algorithm or whatever should be accompanied by awareness/perceptual experience. That just seems dishonest. It's a more flagrant departure from common sense than you'll find literally anywhere else in philosophy, ever, anywhere, and that's saying a lot. It isn't parsimonious to throw out consciousness in order to have a more unitary understanding of the things that appear in consciousness. Experience obviously precedes theorizing about experience. Experience of the world obviously precedes any understanding of the world. And yet, one hesitates to say that experience precedes, and thus obviates, the world itself. It's almost as if any experience of reality has a dual character: the experience, and the reality. Solutions to the hard problem don't "smuggle in" dualism; they simply recognize this screamingly obvious enigma, and try (and fail) to resolve it. The most commonsense "concept of a plan" may be panpsychism: all phenomena are "material" in the sense that they arise from matter, but matter has both a physical dimension and an experiential dimension. With panpsychism, you can, in theory if not in practice, derive that equation with the color red. It would still be dualistic, though.
So in a vacuum, it's no longer the case that 2+2=4 or that "If A then B, A, therefore B" holds? Actually, forget the vacuum. What do you mean by "manipulations"? Do you mean humans manipulating symbols/independent variables? If so, were math and logic not features of reality before humans began to use them? I have a lot to say about the ontological nature of math and logic, but you need to make your position clearer before I can respond to it.
Agreed, both for the reasons you state and because free will is internally incoherent. Suppose A and B are both given the marshmallow test. A passes, B fails. What's the difference? Let's say that A was able to delay gratification because he has more willpower. OK, so A's choice was constrained by his having willpower, and B's was constrained by his lack of willpower. Those constraints are just like any other deterministic constraint. (It might be odd to call "having willpower" a constraint, but it does constrain A's choices: you can't say that A was free to have more or less willpower, but became responsible for his having greater willpower by an act of will, in turn made possible by his... greater willpower -- without infinite regress, so it must be posited as a causally efficacious background condition for which A is not (ultimately) responsible.) No matter how else you explain the difference, in order for it to count as an explanation, you must posit some such constraint. Any leftover difference will necessarily be inexplicable. So any choice carried out according to one's "free will" will be inexplicable, essentially random, and few people would be willing to dignify randomness with the term "free will". Unlike the hard problem of consciousness, there is no mystery here, because the sense that we have free will is something that we might be mistaken about, whereas the sense that... we have any sense at all, is not.
(In other words: if free, then unconstrained; if unconstrained, then random; and randomness ≠ free will as naively construed.)
What do you mean by "needed"? Needed to explain base reality? No moral framework is needed for that, consequentialism no more so than the other two. Needed to cultivate what would generally (across times and places) be regarded as a high standard of morality? No. Needed to characterize the moral systems of individuals and societies? No: some people believe, or act as though they believe, in non-consequentialist moralities. Or, take my case: I don't "believe" in any kind of morality. What I mostly have is feelings that particular states of affairs (or actions) would be good or bad -- not even good or bad, as those are post hoc characterizations of my feelings -- rather, some specific feeling in each scenario compels me to act in a certain way, or turns my thoughts in a certain direction. Such feelings are the basis of morality for everyone. Sometimes I reason about my feelings, but I never delude myself into thinking that in doing so I uncover "moral truths"; and even if I discover a "contradiction" in my feelings, I accept both feelings and the contradiction along with them, as no feelings can ever really be in contradiction the way two propositions can be; after all, I did have both of them. Sometimes people, myself included, feel moved to assent to higher-level principles that purport to govern the way they should feel about more atomic situations. Some of those principles, really just since the 19th century but with some proto-examples here and there, are about universal states of affairs, as in consequentialism, although as you might have guessed, I tend to find those the hardest to take seriously in that they're the remotest from the feelings that undergird all morality. Insofar as consequentialist arguments do sometimes resonate with me, that resonance coexists or alternates with other resonances across the spectrum of abstractness. So where does the privileged position of consequentialism come from? What is it uniquely needed for? Because to me, its main utility seems to be to empower nerds to pretend to reason rigorously/quantitatively about morality to the point that they forget that what they are reasoning about is a completely artificial construct that explains nothing.
(My favorite example of this is Sam Harris's quest many years back to solve ethics (such was his framing) by pinpointing the neural correlates of happiness. (Phase 2 was going to be to figure out how to configure society so as to maximally stimulate them, or something like that. Yes, it really was that retarded.) "Doesn't assuming that good = happiness sidestep... all of ethics?" Yes, but you see, what matters is that we scientists have answers, and it's your fault for asking the wrong questions.)
Some people really are virtue ethicists. Traditional Christian morality treats virtues as ends in themselves. Probably a resurrected medieval theologian wouldn't deny that virtuous conduct tends to manifest in benefits for the self/community, but they would still choose a world of maximally virtuous people who experience perpetual suffering over a world of unvirtuous people who experience perpetual bliss. Evil people experiencing bliss might even be a bad thing in its own right. Consequentialists can fold that in by stipulating that they believe in utilitarianism for the good and reverse-utilitarianism for the evil, but then they have to give an account of good and evil in non-consequentialist terms. There is of course a trivial sense in which all conceivable morality is consequentialist -- "According to my world model, which currently extends only as far as the room I am standing in, and my constantly fluctuating value function, which assigns a high negative value to the unpunched face of the guy who just insulted me, it would improve the global state of affairs for me to punch him in the face" -- but that's boring, akin to the trivial sense in which every action is selfish.
This comment is long enough, so I'll leave it there.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link