j a c k *

Object of the Objections...

In my previous post I pulled one nugget from an otherwise flawed defense of the idea of objective morality -- a worldly and empirical definition of morality. The easiest assault on a proposed definition is to find a counter-example, and I can't think of any. Perhaps critics can do better, but I doubt it.

In fact the critics of this project seem to focus on oddly quixotic targets. PZ Myers, no shrinking violet in defense of science, fixates on the moral atrocities committed by scientists in the name of science. I guess he thinks that this disproves the idea that morality could be empirical and therefore subject to science? I don't really get it. His argument could be "if morality is a subject of science, then everything scientists do must be moral, and it isn't, therefore not," but that makes no sense. It instead seems to be an emotional appeal that if we let science get into morality then -- slippery slope! -- daycare centers will be run by modern-day Dr Mengele.

Patricia Churchland (via B&W) makes the weirdly reductionist -- and weirdly common -- leap from moral concepts directly to evolutionary biology:

It did seem likely that Aristotle, Hume, and Darwin were right: we are social by nature. But what does that actually mean in terms of our brains and our genes? To make progress beyond the broad hunches about our nature, we need something solid to attach the claim to. [pp 2-3]

What is it about 'science' that makes otherwise rational people jump from observing social relations to the assumption they can be explained or understood by genetics and biology? Can we maybe stop at one of the many levels inbetween where explanation can make sense? Like sociology, or psychology, or game theory even? So many instead seem to have this obsession with the idea that if science is going to probe human questions it has to be by scanning people's brains. It shows a terrible misunderstanding of science, among other things.

(Harris has this same problem, to some extent, so the reaction could be partly to what he wrote. I don't want to defend Harris specifically, however, and each individual involved is responsible for what they wrote in any case.)

The stupid objections aside, what can be made of the reasonable objections?

The definition contains the term 'wellbeing' that some may argue is poorly defined. That's true, but the concept is nonetheless subject to scientific revision. The physical aspect of wellbeing is called 'health', but no one argues that medicine isn't an objective, scientific field. In fact our definition of health evolves with new scientific knowledge, and so can the idea of wellbeing.

Another complaint often raised is the challenge that scientific morality might gore one of your own scared cows. "What if studies showed that hitting children was actually good for them," they sneer. "Would you support it just because of that?" The answer is "yes". I have the courage of my convictions -- please test my long-held ideals and make sure they are actually good. If I learned that an activity I held dear was hurting people, or a sanction I felt strongly about was actually counter-productive, I would totally change my ideas, feelings and actions. Wouldn't everyone?

The question, however, is deeply ignorant of history. Corporal punishment has been the cultural norm for thousands of years. No lesser authority than the Bible demands that we beat our children lest they be "spoiled." What started to change the consensus, only recently and incompletely, was scientific research. In fact, if we study outcomes, we find that hitting kids reduces their long-term wellbeing. That's why corporal punishment is slowly and surely becoming morally unacceptable. That's how morals change.

This is the starkest frame that anyone can face. Is any one of us so committed to an ideology that we would reject a valid scientific result that shows that our moral values are hurting our children? Some may reject the study, others may reject the result, but no one can accept the result and persist in the behavior. That is the ultimate demonstration that what we call morality is -- in fact -- objective.

- jack*

Objective Moral Questions...

I was excited to read Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape. I'm sympathetic to the project, contra Hume, of seeking empirical grounding for moral stances. Sadly the book is really bad. Harris glosses glibly over philosophical objections that should be handled in depth, defends his arguments with bizarre contra-factuals and strawmen, and makes predictions for a future of scientific morality that manages only to perplex and repulse readers. This is all sad because this signature failure has undermined the project itself.

But he did do one thing really well: he formulated a tentative definition of morality, a non-circular definition related to measurable states in the world. Specifically what he proposed is that moral questions are those that relate to the wellbeing of conscious creatures. A conscious creature being in a state of greater or lesser wellbeing is independent of moral concepts like right or wrong, and yet Harris is tying these together. All things being equal, greater wellbeing on the part of conscious creatures is a better moral outcome than lesser wellbeing.

People who agree with Hume of course challenge this definition. Ophelia Benson (also linked above, because this was the thread that got me thinking about this again) takes a crack at it:

Morality is about taking externals into account – other people; animals; the ecosystem we all depend on. It rests on the awareness that the self is not all there is. It’s a corrective to pure selfishness.

Note the circularity. 'Selfishness' is a morally-loaded term, and doesn't really aid in understanding. So what we're left with is that moral decisions are those that affect others. But that's no good because that includes almost all decisions, and not all decisions are moral ones. What to get my wife for her birthday affects other people, but it is not a moral decision. Landon in the comments tries to help:

I took the point of your broad statement to mean something like “any decision that affects others necessarily involves a moral assessment, even if we determine that the moral impact is negligible.”

Again circular. How do you make the 'moral assessment' to determine the 'moral impact'?

But I really don't need to argue this point. Harris has offered a definition and has done some of the hard work (albeit imperfectly) in justifying it. The critics have a much easier job. If you think Harris is all wet, if you think his definition is bunk, all you have to do is find a counter-example. The proposal on the table is 'moral decisions are those that relate to the wellbeing of other conscious creatures.' (I'll stipulate Ophelia's "others".) One counter-example will demolish the proposal and send people like Harris and myself back to the drawing board.

A counter-example would be a decision that most people consider to be moral that doesn't relate to the wellbeing of other conscious creatures. Another would be a decision that relates to the wellbeing of other conscious creatures, but that most people would not consider a moral question.

One counter-example of either type is all that's needed. Just one. If Harris is as naive as they all claim it should be easy.

- jack*

UPDATE: more...

Broccoli Insurance...

I hadn't heard of the broccoli argument against the insurance mandate until Scalia referenced it during oral arguments. Why do right-wingers keep trying to compare health care to food service? That just makes no sense. And why are they picking on delicious, healthful broccoli? Perhaps they empathize with Bush I, who was such a big baby that he stomped his feet and held his breath to avoid eating it as president.

A sitting supreme court judge seems to think the argument has some kind of legal force, but it's hard to see why. As a slippery slope it's worthless. Not only are slippery slope arguments always a logical fallacy -- always an invalid argument -- but it's especially so in this case. It's not the job of the court to protect congress from powers that it might abuse in the future. Congress has the full constitutional ability to make all kinds of terrible laws, and elections are the proper remedy should that happen.

It's also bad as an analogy. As Krugman points out, when people don't buy health insurance it becomes unaffordable for others; if Gary refuses to buy broccoli it remains plentiful and cheap for Sue. Also as Akhil Amar explained on Chris Hayes' show, health insurance costs have interstate spillover, such as when a citizen of one state needs emergency care in a different state. This is clearly a case of interstate commerce, a feature not inherent the vegetable market.

Finally, this strikes me as projection and hypocrisy. Republican legislators are constantly playing food police, but only for poor people. Bill after bill are introduced, by Republicans, to force people on food stamps to buy "healthy" food. Couched as if it was concern for child health or adult obesity, these laws are really just there to stigmatize and punish people for needing assistance. Not only was the individual mandate a Republican idea, so was the law forcing people to buy broccoli. It's what they really want to do, but only to others.

- jack *

I Hate C++: Intrinsically Bad...

In computer software, less is more. If you're looking at programs with a certain set of capabilities, often the best will perform those functions with the fewest number of underlying ideas. Software of that type will be easier to learn because there's less to get your head around, and it will have the most potential because it can accomplish a lot by putting together just a few different kinds of things in interesting ways.

This observation is true for all of software engineering, from applications to APIs down to computer languages themselves. The best software designs will have fewer working parts, with each part having well-defined connections to a minimal subset of other parts. Such systems will be generally more powerful and more robust to changes than systems made from many different types of highly-interrelated parts. Think of this preference for parsimony as the Occam's Razor of engineering: employ the minimum number of entities for a task, and no fewer.

Object-oriented design and computer languages are well-suited to parsimonious design. While there may be many specific classes for the many types of objects used in an application, those typically derive from a much smaller group of more abstract ancestors. These root types and their relationships describe the core of the system in increasingly general terms. For example a graphics program might have classes for boxes, circles and lines, but all of them would derive from a more abstract "shape" class, and the other parts of the system would interact with them all as shapes. The more that functionality can be pushed down into more abstract types (without pushing it too far), the more robust the whole system will be to adding new types or new capabilities.

Object-oriented computer languages take this idea down to the foundation, defining what types of entities are possible at all. Ultimately all objects derive from some base "object" type, with the core features and functionality that all objects share. While programmers can define new types there must also be a core set of types that are implemented by the language itself, the common currency allowing the language to run on a physical substrate. These built-in entities are called intrinsics. We can learn a lot about a language by its intrinsics.

In more "pure" object-oriented languages, the object is the only type of entity that exists at all. Everything, including numbers, are understood as being objects. The expression "6 + 4" is interpreted as "the plus method on the object 6 is called with the object 4 as argument." While this may seem a little odd at first, the only other interpretation is that there is this one type of thing, the object, with its methods, and there's a different thing, the number, with its operators. In an abstract sense they're the same, and yet they are incompatible. We've multiplied entities when we didn't need to, and we've made the language more complex.

C++ is actually much worse than just this. Not only does C++ treat numbers differently from objects, the many types of numbers are incompatible with each other in important ways.

The intrinsics in C++ are inherited directly from C. Numbers come in floating-point and integer types, each in several different sizes (total range or precision). Integers can also be signed or unsigned, and some compilers add their own integer types for machine-specific word sizes. This can be represented as something like a class hierarchy:

                           char | short | int | long
                  signed_int
         integer
                  unsigned
                           char | short | int | long
number
                  float
         real
                  double

In many ways this appears reasonable. The operators that work on each specific type are derived from their super types. All numbers support arithmetic operators, integers support things like bit shift and modulo, and floating-point numbers support square root and trig functions. The C compiler will also convert between the different types so any reasonable formula will translate into code regardless of the exact types of the variables and constants. The problem is while the types are implicitly hierarchical, only the terminal types -- the ones in bold -- actually exist. As result any function that operates on an integer must have an argument declared as one of the eight specific integer types. Conversion from the local type to the type required by the function is done at the site of the call.

In old-style C code this issue is handled mostly by convention. Integer arguments would be declared in the form most reasonable for the function, and any failures due to conversion would be blamed on the caller. Math functions would always be written for doubles, because that would prevent the potential loss of precision. (In fact some old C compilers would cast all floating-point arguments to doubles regardless of how they were declared.) Of course doubles are slower when you only need single-precision, so often APIs would include versions of the same function taking a float argument, usually with a similar name but including an "f". Again, callers were left with the burden of type conversion on their end.

Giving callers that responsibility is arguably the worst way to do it, so C++ needed a better answer. But like so many of C++'s "solutions" to the problems of C, it turned out to be half-baked.

In C++ functions can have the same name but with different arguments, and the compiler will call the function that best matches the arguments and their datatypes. This moves the burden from the clients of an API to its author, but it imposes a substantially larger burden on the author in the process. Providing float and double versions of math functions is a huge pain, usually involving writing a function template and then invoking the template from the different entry points.

The correct solution, as indicated above, is to treat numbers as objects. Hard-core C programmers may blink in surprise at the thought, and wonder about how it could work internally. There are a couple of levels of support, and I have some ideas about implementation, but that's not the point of this post. The real point is to show how C++, by only dipping a toe into the object-oriented pool, has left everyone worse off.

Here are some things we could do with numbers as objects:

1) Write one function for all numbers. I could write a single function declared as "number my_func(number k, real r)", encode math and other operations over those arguments, and return a result. Clients could call it with any suitable value.

2) Subclass our own numbers. If I wanted to create an exotic type of number and call existing math functions on it, why couldn't I?

3) Add methods to numbers. I could create an "angle" subclass of real that could have additional operations appropriate for angles but not other numeric types.

4) Add new number classes. The canonical example is complex numbers. STL adds an implementation using templates which is unsatisfying on many levels. Why can't complex numbers be treated the exact same way a real numbers?

5) Finally, all those exotic number types native to specific architectures, like huge ints or SIMD vector values, could also exist in the same object class heirarchy. Any function compiled for "number" would work on them as well.

- jack*

Be Modern, Be...

I heard about an article attacking "new" atheists by reading Ophelia and PZ thrashing the thing quite soundly. Be Scofield makes many of the common mistakes in his critique -- debating strawmen, the Courtier's Reply -- and the atheist defenders make quick work of identifying those errors. Both of them, with Greta piling on, cut out the heart of the article by addressing the central issue of atheism: is religion true? If not then atheism is justified on that basis alone, end of story.

To these excellent responses I'd only like to point out that Scofield's clumsy hatchet job is thoroughly postmodern, and can only be fully understood in that context. Postmodernism argues that truth is a kind of story, so within any community or culture the local truth they all talk about is just as true as different "truths" in other communities. As result postmodernists take the view that Science, with its interest in universal, testable truth, is a kind of western cultural imperialism. That's why he puts "reason" in quotes -- it's just another western product, like blue jeans, to be forced down the throats of less privileged indigenous people who would be perfectly happy without it.

While there may be arguments that some of the prescriptions of modernism may not be appropriate for every social context, that is never an argument to reject the entire progressive project. In a search for objective truth, which must be the very definition of truth if anything is to mean anything, the discovery that a particular idea doesn't always work is just another observation to fold into the search.

The only interesting question that Be actually raises is whether religion on the whole does more harm than good. There could be arguments either way, but they will necessarily be historical. You'd have to weigh the role of religion in Bach's masterpieces against the horrors of the Inquisition, the religious justifications of slave holders against the comfort it gave to slaves, or the religious motivations of those who wanted to exterminate the Jews against the religious motives of those who wanted to protect them. It's by no means obvious that religion would come out on top.

But whatever the result it cannot have any bearing on the question of religion versus atheism. Atheism is not about the past -- it's about how we are now and going forward into the future. Do we value truth, or do we value the not at all certain possibility of comfort over truth? This what's at stake, even if the postmodernists refuse to see it.

- jack*

Material Matters 2...

I may take a while, but I do eventually circle back to threads of thought that I start however long ago. Six years ago I argued that materialism was necessary and complete -- that an honest inquiry would conclude that everything that exists is material. Such a claim is greeted by philosophers with eye-rolling condescension, and most laypeople reject the notion as far too sweeping. I nonetheless believe I can make a convincing argument.

First of all, let me clear up some confusion. Materialism is not the same as saying that science already knows everything that can exist. It seems odd, but when I talk about materialism some people seem to confuse that with tacit acceptance of the Standard Model, which is a theory about all the kinds of particles believed to exist. It may be right or it may be wrong, but that has nothing to do with materialism. All that materialism says is that anything new discovered by science will be material. If dark matter is real then it's made of something.

Materialism is also not the same as saying that science is the only way to study the world. I'm a big fan of science, don't get me wrong. It says so right in my blog banner. But there are many legitimate forms of inquiry that are not amenable to scientific methods. The fact that we live in a material universe has no effect on the study of art and literature. Indeed those works were created by humans with physical brains, but the workings of the brain are hidden and its mechanisms are mysterious, so the physical sciences can be of no help here.

Likewise, materialism doesn't deny the existence of emotions or ideas. "What about love?" people always ask. Yes, love exists. Of course it exists. The question is: how do we know that love exists? We know it because we observe its effects. We see it demonstrated in the physical world as acts of compassion between people. Saying the words or feeling the feeling subjectively isn't enough. The stalker may feel deeply that he loves his victim, but we can determine by his actions that he's mistaken. It's this objective aspect of love, and other feelings and ideas, that grounds it and makes it meaningful. Stripped of its material aspects, love ceases to exist.

- jack*

Snowman in Lava...

John Scalzi, noted Sci-Fi writer, challenges nerds to justify their whining about how this or that isn't realistic. Why do they accept some otherwise-crazy events in the stories they read but not others?

This is about "suspension of disbelief," the foundation that allows fantasy literature to work. It's a pact between author and reader -- the author asks the reader to accept something unbelievable in exchange for an interesting story. It's a kind of bargain, but the onus is entirely on the author. If the author pushes the reader too far the bargain breaks down, and the fantasy crosses the line into the absurd.

Scalzi calls this a "Flying Snowman":

When my daughter was much younger, my wife was reading to her from a picture book about a snowman who came to life and befriended a young boy, and on each page they would do a particular activity: build a snow fort, slide down a hill, enjoy a bowl of soup and so on. The last three pages had the snowman walking, then running, and then flying. At which point my wife got an unhappy look on her face and said ‘A flying snowman? That’s just ridiculous!’

To which I said: ‘So you can accept a snowman eating hot soup, but not flying?’ Because, you know, if you can accept the former (not to mention the entire initial premise of a snowman coming to life), I’m not sure how the snowman flying became qualitatively more ridiculous.

A snowman comes to life, he eats hot soup, he flys -- what finally breaks the fantasy writer's pact? The answer is simple -- what's not required for the story. Snowmen come to life all the time in fantasy, as do all manner of anthropomorphic artifacts. But why? Do they come to life to explore the boundary between living and dead? To terrify people as unstoppable foot soldiers of darkness? Or is this a study in ice-based life forms?

No, in this case the purpose is for a human child to have a fun companion. Someone to do all the things that a child would want to do in the winter. Building, sledding, eating soup. Those all make sense for that story. For an 'ice-based life form' story soup is a problem, but for the 'companion' story eating soup is OK.

But flying? No, that doesn't fit the concept as required for the story (at least as relayed here). Thus, disbelief dissolves.

This whole discussion originated with a thread about Gollum falling into lava at the end of Lord of the Rings, and how he shouldn't have sunk. Two things about that.

First, the fantastical elements that Scalzi points out as potential flying snowmen really aren't: impossibly large spiders, talking trees, rings freighted with corrupting evil, Uruks birthed from mud. These are all really the same thing. This is a world where evil exists as a material force, and all the other oddities derive from that. Evil makes spiders huge and animates the Orcs and Uruks. Its opposing force presumably makes eagles giant and motivates the Ents. But lava's just lava.

Second, everyone always gets lava wrong. Molten rock isn't an everyday occurrence, and lava lakes aren't a human-scale phenomenon. You can't walk out on to a bridge and look down into a lava lake. The first problem is the heat. If you've ever been at a glass blowing demonstration you've gotten a tiny sample of it. When the glass furnace is open you can feel the heat biting into your flesh and the air starting to dry and heat up fast. After only a few tens of seconds it starts to become unbearable. Now imagine that expanded to fill a mountain, and opened long enough that the surrounding rock is heated through and the air is as hot as it can get. If the Hobbits managed to walk into that they'd be cooked before they got to the edge.

Of course they wouldn't get very far anyway because of the air. Melting rock releases a lot of gases, none of them fit to breathe and many of them poisonous. In what is depicted as a relatively enclosed space, unless Gollum can metabolize sulfur he'd be long dead before he got anywhere near the lava.

The fact that lava can boil and flow belies the huge forces required to move it about. It's dense, viscous and very sticky. If Gollum's body were to land in it, it would most likely lie on the top or be dragged under by the force if its movement, like a bit of straw in a pasta pot. It would then be quickly consumed, like a snowflake in hot soup.

- jack*

A Modestly Tricky Proposal...

Obama has always been a fan of precedent; he thinks it armors him from criticism. For example the first time he made recess appointments -- absolutely required since his nominees have been filibustered at a rate far higher than prior presidents -- he appointed exactly the same number as Bush did in the same period of his presidency.

So I have a suggestion.

Obama is strongest when making direct appeals to citizens, something that the GOP has tried to minimize with comical effect. Here's my idea. I'm apparently bad at The Google because I can't figure out how many times G.W.Bush made prime time addresses and how many times the filibuster -- failing to reach cloture in the senate -- happened during his 8 years. But those two things are knowable numbers that could make a ratio. Suppose Bush did one TV address for every 20 filibusters. Obama could follow the precedent.

Not explicitly. That would be kind of like bullying or just being a jerk to make it an explicit rule. But he could do it implicitly. Drop enough hints through other people that maybe that's what he was doing. Every 20 filibusters (or whatever the real number is) he'd schedule a prime time TV address. He could talk about the important legislature that was being blocked by GOP obstruction. Talking heads on TV could speculate breathlessly about how this next vote would be the 20th filibuster and what would the president talk about this time. Democratic Senate leaders could tease Republicans about whether they want to trigger another prime time speech by the president.

At the very least it would make the unprecedented use of the filibuster less of business as usual and something to be discussed as actual news.

Assuming this makes sense. My crude research suggests that although cloture votes are succeeding less frequently for Obama, there may also be fewer of them overall. So perhaps senate Dems would have to bring to heat, about which they are very weak. In any case I offer this kind of thinking as a way to get outside the box of ordinary politics that's killing us one quiet cloture vote at a time.

- jack*

Objective Free Will...

Some bloggers have recently hashed over the old dilemma about free will vs. determinism. If the future evolution of physical systems is determined by their past circumstances, they ask, and if the human brain is a physical system, then human behavior is -- at least in theory -- predetermined and predictable. And if so, do people really have free will? And can we honestly hold people responsible for their actions?

The premises are inescapable. The entirely mechanistic features of the known laws of nature are unlikely to be undermined by future discoveries. Skeptics invoke quantum fluctuation and chaos as ways out of the conclusion, but these are no help here. Both are just ways to introduce randomness into clockwork processes that average out in statistical aggregates. I don't think anyone is cheered by the idea that their decisions are mostly predetermined but might be slightly random as well.

Likewise Cartesian dualism is entirely untenable. There is no immaterial soul, no ghost in the machine. The mind is the brain and the brain is the mind and that's just all there is. Trying to rescue salutary free will is wishing for magic.

The conclusion is therefore equally inescapable: human behavior unfolds from the prior state of the brain and the environment. To the extent that the evolving state of the universe is deterministic, future human behavior is deterministic. But so what?

As human beings we don't know the state of the atoms that make up our brains, and we know even less how those states translate into actions. The problems we face are completely the opposite. We have far too little information going into decisions and often agonize over possible outcomes we can't begin to predict. Action coming out of that kind of indecision might feel like salutary free will, but that's a subjective question and I don't want to address that right now. Instead I want to address the second question: should we hold people morally accountable for their actions if they have no ability to act other than they did in any given circumstance?

Imagine a world populated by perfectly rational actors. These are not people, but are instead thinking beings with no free will who know they have no free will. They will always act to maximize their own personal benefit and, as they are all identical, they know that all their neighbors will act for themselves in the same way. Facing any decision they weigh all the evidence against everything they know and they pick the choice most likely to benefit them the most. They have human bodies, senses and limbs, but a limitless capacity for analysis and no ability to choose other than that which benefits them.

It's objectively true that cooperation is better than brute individualism. These are creative beings (that's compatible with determinism -- just look at evolution) and will eventually figure out that it's better for them personally to be part of a group than to continue to kill anyone that gets near them. (Or at least the cooperative ones will out-compete the solitary ones.) So there will develop some kind of steady state in which these rational actors -- call them Ayns -- can coexist. A kind of society.

What happens when the rational self-interest of members of this society conflict? Suppose Ayn0147 is doing quite well making baskets in exchange for membership in the group, but new member Ayn8802 intends to start making baskets as well. It's quite possible that the best, most rational response would be to kill the competition. So Ayn0147 kills Any8802 and threatens to do the same to anyone who tries to make baskets. Because that's what she determined was the rational thing to do.

As you see, although they are perfectly rational, they are nonetheless constrained by their senses. That means that they suffer -- like us -- from information asymmetry. Some of them know things that others of them don't know. They all realize, if they didn't before, that any of them might be killed by a rival without being aware of the danger beforehand. The rational action, it seems to me, is to form an anti-murder collective. Since all members of the group wish to live, and they are in constant social contact with other members of the group, they create a new rule. No murder within the group. If one group member kills another, the entire group will use their superior numbers to kill or expell the murderer.

They decide to adopt this rule because they know it will change the calculation in a way that serves each individual's best interests. Given a severe consequence for murder, killing becomes a much less attractive option. Any Ayn facing a tough decision will have to take the new rule into account, and although murder is still quite possible the potential downside will mean that other choices will generally be better for that individual's self-interest, and thus for the self-interest of all the members of the group.

By pre-stating their intentions, the group has changed the incentives. Murder may still be the rational action in some conflicts, but it will have to be done secretly.

Of course they all know this, so when murders happen it's important for the group to find and punish the culprit. This makes it even less likely for future Ayns to conclude that murder is the best of all possible options. Being highly rational they can examine forensic evidence and determine who performed the act with great accuracy.

But there's a new problem. The rule against murder is too simple; it can be exploited for fraud. It's quite possible for a fully rational Ayn, with only asymmetric access to information, to be manipulated into committing murder for what would seem like rational reasons. Highly rational beings would be good at framing others for crimes, assuming they determined that was the best course of action given what they knew. So what happens in that case? Are the Ayn willing to allow their mutual protection pact to be abused in that way?

Of course not; that wouldn't be rational. So the rule should be modified. The group's judicial body have to consider not only the outcome of an Ayn's decision, but the reasons for it as well. Perhaps Ayn4146 committed murder, but that doesn't have to be the end of the story. His analysis of the evidence indicated that murder was the best -- and therefore inevitable -- course of action. And yet because the evidence he used had been doctored by Ayn1105, his conclusion could not be faulted. He should therefore not be punished.

Even if the source of the deception could not be identified, or if there was no active deception at all, then the self-interest of the group would still be to reject summary judgment in those cases. All things being equal, rational beings would configure their social environment to prevent decisions to murder -- about which they have no control -- to lead to incorrect punishment.

This is a simple thought experiment, and I may be wrong about what it might mean in many details, and yet I think that it shows that it makes sense to develop a judicial system that takes intention into account regardless of any model of free will. We attribute free will to our neighbors, but that's not really a philosophical position. It derives from living in a community of rational beings with asymmetric access to information.

In terms of crime and punishment there is no difference between a world with free will and one without. Treating people as if they are responsible for their actions is necessary, one way or the other.

- jack*

Occupy Leverage...

I've finally realized something I should have already have known, that the Occupy Wall Street movement is about leverage. It's natural over time for those who rule to employ the law to disenfranchise those who oppose or threaten them. In the last thirty years this means that wealthy corporations and powerful business interests have been handed more and more direct control over the levers of governance, while those who might object to this concentration of power have been more and more cut out of the process.

As a proud member of the progressive blogger brigade I have sometimes wondered -- as I cataloged more and more brazen abuses of authority from the quiet comfort of my home office in my middle-class neighborhood -- "This is an outrage! Why aren't people rioting in the streets over this?" I was not alone in my confusion. But the answer was not simple.

It's entirely possible that people were protesting these outrages, but how would I or anyone not already aware have known about it? 50,000 people might have gathered in peaceful protest, but if there are no pictures anywhere did it make any difference? Remember "Free Speech Zones?" Bush and his enablers segregated protesters in pens, far away from events and nowhere near reporters, in a constitution-shredding stunt that nonetheless successfully curtailed criticism by using the force of law against citizens.

But you don't even have to look that far; there are many more subtle ways to defang the first amendment. In Zuccotti park -- the bizarrely privately owned public space that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters brilliantly decided to use as their base -- mechanical sound amplification is illegal. Apparently we must relax regulations on for-profit media, but we have to crack down on soapboxes. Go figure. Likewise other "occupy" groups have run into zoning regulations, camping regulations, use permit regulations, and more. In the age of corporate deregulation it's curious how we find our constitutional free speech and assembly rights so difficult to exercise.

In the face of these structural impediments, OWS has managed to find leverage. After realizing that officially-sanctioned marches -- no matter how large or how popular their message -- don't make the nightly news, they decided instead to park themselves in the middle of Manhattan where they couldn't be ignored. They were then ignored and discounted because of their "outsider" status for another two weeks until the powers that be overreached and sent in the police who also overreacted. Then it was a story. And every time since then that city officials and the police attacked peaceful protesters the story grew.

Likewise dealing with the lack of amplification OWS invented the "human microphone" which allows them to transmit their thoughts to each other, albeit slowly. It's inefficient and subject to ridicule, but it also embodies the very spirit of the free speech that it transmits. And more than that, it creates leverage. At a speech in Chicago, the infamous Scott Walker was interrupted and effectively shouted down by a group using the human microphone to drown out his electronic one.

Through collective action OWS has shown us that we can use the natural leverage of our superior numbers against the legal leverage of those few who are actually in power. I'm inspired and I compliment their efforts. However, this is an arms race. There can be no doubt that American aristocrats and their toadies will also discover ways to counter anything they see as effective. The destruction of multiple OWS encampments under media black-out and with DHS coordination is start of a bourgeoisie backlash. I'm cautiously confident that this movement can innovate in the face of an opposition with too much undo leverage, and that the opposition will expose its straight-up Machiavellian core for the public in the process.

- jack*

Duck Diligence...

I'm a bit behind on this one -- about two years behind -- but I only just saw it on The Daily Show recently. Pat Robertson was concerned that hate crime legislation, in addition to preventing violence against openly gay people, might protect people who have sex with ducks.

Yes, sex with ducks. That's so stupid it's not even wrong.

On the day that any individual of any species of duck demonstrates a sufficient level of awareness and intelligence to be able to legally sign contracts we can start talking about ducks having sex with humans. Until that day, however, any interaction of the type Robertson feverishly imagines would be abuse, and plain old animal cruelty.

But what does this say about the conservative concept of sex, and especially women? Robertson obviously believes that sexual attraction to fowl is bad, but completely fails to grasp -- or at least believes his audience won't grasp -- that the key distinction between this case and the case of human-human attraction is the question of agency. A duck cannot consent, a human adult can. It almost seems that for the conservative male, the agency of their sex partners is rather irrelevant.

We've certainly seen conservatives who have little regard for the agency or autonomy of women. Suffrage was won over their opposition, and every slow gain since has been met by bastions of male privilege asserting that women don't belong in the halls of power or academia. The abortion debate in particular has highlighted how little regard conservative minds give to female agency. They want abortion to be murder, but say they won't send women who self-abort to prison. How does that make sense unless all women are essentially children without the ability to make moral choices?

Authoritarian morality is rule-based. Men having sex with women is "normal" and everything else is equally abhorrent by virtue of breaking that rule. Any other object of sexual attraction -- and that's what they are: objects -- adult of the same sex, child, dog, turtle, duck -- they're all the same.

- jack*

High-Definition Liberty...

I love this story:

“The alleged purpose of Tea Party HD was to be the ‘world’s first HD provider of news about the Tea Party,’” the lawsuit states. “In reality it was an investment scheme to defraud politically conservative-minded citizens who support the Tea Party mission.”

Hard core Tea Partiers dream of a world of unfettered enterprise and no government regulation, a free market paradise where savvy investors make their fortunes on good ideas and stupid people are left with only the ashes of their own failure. Somehow in their imaginations they always end up the winners, triumphing over the less capable by virtue of their superior minds. In reality, not so much.

Investors in "Tea Party HD" not only used their genius insight to fund a straight-up fraud, once they found out they took their complaints to the taxpayer-funded justice system to cry like little babies. Ayn Rand would be spinning in her grave.

Here's the lesson. In reality a political system dominated by private enterprise is going to produce scam after scam, corruption after corruption. Capitalism is the best system ever invented for separating fools from their money, and people who believe they are smarter than everyone else end up being the sucker most of the time.

- jack*

Occupy Headspace...

The most amusingly frustrating aspect of the reaction to Occupy Wall Street is the inability in some circles to grasp what it's about. Tom Tomorrow nails it, as always. They lack a coherent message, say right-wing detractors. They need to make concrete demands, say left-wing concern trolls.

Really? You really don't see what they're about? You can't think of anything that happened in recent history that might correlate with anger at Wall Street?

Remember? Remember that one thing? Remember how the financial elite crashed the world economy and no one has ever been held accountable? Oh yeah. That little thing. Maybe that has something to do with it.

But that was the past; we need to look forward our leaders tell us. So what do the OWS protesters demand? What do they want to happen?

Really? You can't think of a single thing that they might want? You have no idea at all of an action, policy change, law or declaration that could be made by people in power that would cheer the protestors? Nothing at all that would make them feel like they were heard and could go back to their families rather than lying out in the rain and getting beaten up by cops?

You can't think of anything? Then you're a smug, complacent idiot because I can think of about fifty off the top of my head.

- jack*

UPDATE: Glen Greenwald gets it.

Extropian Wake-up Call...

Charlie Stross has a post making the rounds among skeptics and curmudgeons about how the Singularity is not particularly near and may be impossible. I agree, but largely on the conclusion not necessarily on the particulars of Stross' argument.

It was nice of Stross to link to the 1993 article by SF author Vernor Vinge that first coined the term. Vinge looked ahead, as is proper for his profession, and he found his speculations on the human future were clouded by an event he imagined to be both world-altering and imminent. He rightly called this a "singularity" -- the point where the current rules no longer apply and further extrapolation is impossible. The future beyond the singularity is governed by principles so radically different that we cannot imagine it.

Nonetheless he imagined it anyway and described an apocalypse. This result is fairly common when people try to deal with potentially powerful historical processes. Malthus famously predicted much the same when he looked into the arithmetic of population growth. Likewise, those of us who grew up in the 70's and 80's can recall the widespread belief that once there were enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world multiple times over that it was just a matter of time before we did.

The event that Vinge cannot see beyond (or can only see as the end of the world) is the development of super-human artificial intelligence. AI is an old trope in SF. We've imagined a future full of wise-cracking robots or homicidal computers for decades and no one really gave them a second thought. We would always somehow defeat them with our human cleverness or some unique biological illogic that's always better than rationality.

The modern wrinkle is Moore's Law -- the observation that computer power is increasing exponentially. How can we continue to think we'll outsmart the robots if they are always getting smarter than we are?

Formally the argument goes like this: through heroic efforts or just by accident we develop super-human AI. That AI turns its efforts to improving both the algorithms that make it intelligent, and the hardware on which it runs. Any improvements in intelligence or performance result in a faster rate of improvement. Thus a runaway feedback loop produces super-super-human AI in short order and normal meat-based humans are toast.

One counter-argument is that Moore's Law will peter out. That's true eventually, of course, but I think we're a long way from the limits of how much computation can be wrung out of small amounts of matter. Others argue that hard AI is impossible. Either the brain must be made of meat for some reason, or that human attempts to understand the brain must necessarily fail.

I disagree. I believe that AI is possible; I don't think there's anything magical about the human brain that can't be figured out or converted to an algorithm. I do believe, however, that AI is hard. It isn't going to happen by accident, or just as a result of some threshold level of complexity. The Internet isn't just going to "wake up" one day and become conscious, like some fanatics fervently hope.

This will require a theory of mind. I believe we will eventually puzzle out the mystery of how neuronal interactions create mental phenomena, including awareness and consciousness. And it will be a singular event; people will understand the world and themselves very differently after that. On the other hand much will stay the same. People will have better insights into how their own minds work but that won't necessarily produce better behaviors. The problem is that because this development requires both research and insight, we cannot put a time estimate on when it might emerge. It could be a very long time to discover a theory of mind.

Once we understand how minds work it may still be a long time before we can put that knowledge to practical use. The path from science to engineering can be grueling and tortuous, especially if the subject is complex. We have a very good theory of life; we understand how DNA works, we have a large body of work on proteins and enzymatic action, we have great models of signaling inside and among cells, and we can manipulate all of these processes in the lab. And yet the grand results of biotechnology imagined decades ago are still decades away. Life processes aren't very amenable to engineering. Mental process may be just as complex if not more so.

But suppose they aren't. Suppose that engineering minds is relatively easy, or -- given enough time and research -- we've figured out how to do it. In that case do we get a runaway AI, a Frankenstein's Monster in silicon?

No. If we have a theory of mind, and if we have experience building artificial minds, then we'll know how to build them to omit or subsume anything that could be anti-social or dangerous. There's no reason to think that any of the features that come standard with natural human minds -- greed, pettiness or tribalism -- are required for the useful application of general intelligence. Even if an AI bent on domination did arise, we'd still have AI's on "our side" that would use their super-human intelligence to counter the threat.

Could we get super-human AI without a theory of mind? Possibly. The path in that case is to wait for technological development to reach the point where a human mind can be "digitized" by scanning the configuration of neurons and their interactions. We still wouldn't know how the brain works but we wouldn't have to -- we'd just be simulating it as a program, and if the computer runs faster than the equivalent neurons then you have a faster, and therefore super, human mind.

Except that because we don't know how it works, the only way the mind simulation can function is in a simulated world with a simulated body. That has to be a huge bottleneck. What you have is not really super-human AI but rather a sub-culture of normal humans living really fast. Sure, they can think faster than physical humans, but subjectively they are still living normal -- albeit virtual -- lives.

More importantly, there's very little that these uploaded fast-humans can do to improve themselves. They could work in the field of electronics to create faster computers, thus making themselves (and every other computer) faster, but that will still require them struggling through what for them will be years of virtual college. Without a theory of mind they cannot improve their own intellect. They are just a simulation of the off-the-shelf natural-selection model, and short of simulated evolution nothing can change that.

Put simply, I think SF writers can relax for a while.

- jack*

The Importance of Expertise ...

Editors of Scientific American, Dear Sirs:

Your recent article A Test for Consciousness was subtitled "How will we know when we've built a sentient computer? By making it solve a simple puzzle." I'm puzzled how an article lacking any substance could be published at all, let alone with such grandiose headlines.

To start with the authors seem entirely ignorant of the history of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. They state, for example:

To your computer, all pixels are just a vast, disconnected tapestry of three numbers (corresponding to three colors) with no particular meaning. To you, an image is meaningful because it is chock-full of connections among its parts, at many levels.

In the 60's people used to take the more reductionist view that computers process images as a series of ones and zeros. I guess RGB is an improvement. But let me quote from my 1976 textbook on AI The Thinking Computer by Bertram Raphael:

Therefore the problem for the software is to translate confusing arrangements of numbers into simple, meaningful descriptions of visual scenes.

In other words, software engineers have known for at least 35 years that just dealing with raw data from the sensors is not enough. The goal is to interpret perceptual data in useful ways. Perhaps common knowledge and context can be important. Indeed the authors suggest:

Today's machines can pick out the face of a likely terrorist from a database of a million of faces, but they will not know his age, his gender or ethnicity, whether he is looking directly at the viewer or not, or whether he is frowning or smiling. And they will not know that if he is shaking hands with George Washington, the photograph is probably digitally doctored. Any conscious human can apprehend all these things and more in a single glance.

Wait -- what? Any conscious human can identify George Washington and knows the context in which he lived? What about William Kamkwamba, aka the Boy who Harnessed the Wind? He was about as ignorant as one can be of the modern world and still be a genius. I'm sure he had never seen George Washington during his life in tribal Malawi. Is he non-sentient?

What Koch and Tononi are talking about is the "general" knowledge or "common sense" knowledge problem. This is an old, well-known issue in AI research.

While researchers were aware that in an AI system, knowledge would have to be explicitly represented, they did not anticipate the vast amount of implicit knowledge we all share about the world and ourselves. [...] In retrospect, this is perhaps not surprising, because the implicit nature of this knowledge in humans means that we all take it for granted, and never have to state it or consider it explicitly.

I could excuse this lack of scholarship if the authors offered anything new or interesting. They do not. They propose a test for consciousness that involves ranking pictures based on cultural knowledge -- something only slightly better than IQ tests that require culturally contextual interpretations. Perhaps I know that a flowerpot can't be used as a computer keyboard. Or more likely I've never seen anything like either of those things.

The most disappointing part of this terrible article is that they never answer their own questions about "sentience" or "consciousness". These are very, very important questions, and yet they just wave their hands in response. Consciousness, they say, is related to complexity of wiring, while never considering software complexity. "Sentience" is never mentioned in the article at all.

There are a lot of smarter people who came before you. You are welcome back when you have something substantive to say.

- jack*