Reading The Varieties of Religious Experience: Lecture 2

In his second lecture, James defines what he would 'religion' consider to be for the purposes of the lecture series.

He stresses right at the beginning that religion is such a complex phenomenon that anybody who thinks they can come up with a clear and simple definition is fooling themselves. He then mentions two aspects, the organisational structure (the church with its office holders and buildings) and the personal beliefs and feelings of each believer, and he excludes the former from consideration to focus his efforts on the latter.

That is unsurprising, given his psychological approach, and fair enough. A historian would perhaps be most comfortable addressing religion as an organised body while excluding personal psychology from their considerations. What I find interesting to observe, however, is that one aspect of religion as I see it is not even mentioned. To me, schools of thought that make truth claims, be they ideologies, religions, or scientific, philosophical, scholarly, and engineering communities, have three main components:

• The people who adhere to the school of thought; they are the focus of James' lectures,
• The institutional framework (research institutions, churches, political parties, think tanks, journals, internet fora, conferences, etc.); this James mentioned but excluded from consideration, and
• The actual body of knowledge or belief system; it appears to remain unexamined so far.

Because 90% of the lectures are still to follow I don't want to dwell on this too much, but I find it interesting even at this stage that James appears curiously incurious about the first question that would come to my mind when faced with a school of thought: are its beliefs true? I guess I will see if he will go there later or if he will remain completely disinterested in that question throughout.

After having settled on the personal relationship of an individual human to the divine as his focus, James clarifies that believing in an actual personal god is not a criterion for him. He mentions 'Emersonianism' and Buddhism as examples of  systems that work to produce religious feelings without having personalised deities. I had never heard of Emersonianism, but it appears to be a variant of pantheism, seeing the whole universe as divine and (believe it or not) benign.

Finally, James spends an astonishingly large part of his second lecture on discussing what mindsets he considers truly religious and what mindsets he does not. Again and again he negatively contrasts the philosophical, Stoicist acceptance of the way the world is with the Christian ideal of a joyous embrace of whatever happens, no matter how terrible. Although he sometimes calls the ascetic or highly spiritual Christian 'extreme', the language he uses leaves no doubt that he considers mindless exultation in the face of, say, seeing a loved one dying terribly to be an admirable state of mind, as evidence that religion is a positive force for humanity.

Again I hesitate to immediately reject his argumentation given how little I have progressed into this book, but even here I cannot help wonder if this view does not rely quite a bit of conflation of many different injustices or tribulations to which, really, we would be justified to react in very different ways. We are not merely talking about "the universe is unfair, and a truly wise person will accept that they can only do their best and be happier for it". No, depending on what we are talking about and if we assume gods to exist we may reasonably take very different stances - and I would actually say that religious bliss is the appropriate stance in none of the various cases.

We cannot always get all we wanted. Some things are unachievable, and sometimes we have to compromise with other people. Accepting that is just a sign of maturity. (Embracing such compromises joyously would seem to be a bit twee, though.)

Then there are the evils we do to each other, such as theft, bullying, rape, murder, etc. Really one of the most frustrating facets of human existence is how much needless misery we cause each other, both deliberately and accidentally, given that we would have quite enough misery left to deal with even if we were all perfectly nice to each other (see next point). Point is, in this case the perpetrators generally have a moral responsibility to do better, and joyously accepting their bad deeds is both unreasonable and counterproductive, as it will set perverse incentives and reward bad actors.

What James must really be talking about, however, would have to be 'natural evils', harm to us that is no other human's fault, everything ranging from having to die of old age across natural disasters to people being born with a genetic disorder. Under the (atheist) assumption that there is no god behind these phenomena, that they just happen, James' preferred stance of a joyous embrace would be ridiculous. Stoicist acceptance of what cannot be undone while trying one's best to undo these evils is a more sensible approach.

But what if we assume that natural evils are caused or at least allowed to happen by an omnipotent god who could, with the snap of their metaphorical finger, deliver us from such needless suffering? Does it make sense, under this assumption, to write, "dear superior intelligence running the universe, please accept my heartfelt thanks for making me slowly die of an untreatable, incredibly painful disease; and while on that topic, thanks also for that landslide that crushed my best friend when we were twelve years old"?

I can't say that this would feel sane to me. I would have some very serious questions about the moral character and motivations of such gods, if I believed for a moment that they existed. But then again, James acknowledges himself that there are some people who are unable to have religious feelings as he defined them. I assume I am one of those people, for better or for worse.

And note also that there are presumably many people who would consider themselves religious but who do not feel what James considers to be the religious impulse at its most pure.

Reading The Varieties of Religious Experience: Lecture 1

I have started reading William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience. Published first in 1902, this collection of twenty lectures is considered to be a classic of the study of religion. It approaches the subject with a psychological as opposed to theological, historical, or apologetic angle, but appears to remain rather charitable towards religious beliefs.

This becomes clear already in the first lecture, much of which is spent assuring the believing reader that they have no reason to be offended by a psychological examination of religious experience.

James calls 'medical materialism' the idea that religion originated as the hallucinations and ravings of 'psychopaths' and 'degenerates' and can therefore be dismissed. (His words; see e.g. the interpretation of Saint Paul's vision of Jesus as the result of an epileptic seizure.) He argues that the value of a phenomenon, here religious truth claims, cannot be deduced from its origins; as an argumentum ad absurdum he points out that a scientific insight would be judged on its own merits even if the scientist who gained it was suffering from some mental disorder. By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.

Well, fair enough, one might say. But while I cannot tell what the state of the discussion was around the year 1900, it seems as if this argument would miss the point of 'medical materialism' as it is applied today. Taking the position of an atheist, it is not the case that they attempt to answer the question of what to think of religious truth claims by looking at how they originated. They would most likely argue that that particular question has already been answered by applying the same criteria as James would (or at least the empirical one, see further down). They already take it as given that religious claims are largely false, and true only by lucky accident:

There is no evidence that there is something to us that lives on after death, and indeed the study of brain damages suggests that all there is to our personality is an emergent property of the physical. There is no evidence that the universe was created by a higher intelligence, and indeed it looks very much as if it wasn't. There is no evidence that the universe was created for our benefit, and indeed it looks very much as if it wasn't. There is no evidence that prayer works; and so on. There is also the small matter that hundreds of religions made and continue to make contradictory claims, meaning that only such a small percentage of them could be true as to be too close to zero percent to matter.

So given that background, the atheist now asks not what to think of a religious claim, but instead: How and why would people come up with something as wrong as that? And here hallucinations are a decent explanation for divine visions. That is why I feel that James' central argument in the first lecture misses its mark. But then again, he seemed to be more interested in reassuring religious readers than in criticising atheist ones anyway.

In this context it is also fascinating to examine what 'fruit' criteria James accepts as valid for judging spiritual and theological claims, now that he has rejected the 'root' criterion. He names three: immediate luminousness, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness.

Immediate luminousness is also described as based on 'our immediate feeling' upon being exposed to the claim. This seems rather oddly subjective and emotional, and at least in my eyes falls flat as a useful criterion.

Philosophical reasonableness is to be understood as based on how the claim relates to 'the rest of what we hold as true'. This is the most sensible of the three criteria, because that is also how we do it in science. If, for example, somebody presents us with the theories underlying homeopathy, such as water memory, we may consider in comparison what we believe we already understand about physics and chemistry. We then find that either large bodies of scientific knowledge supported by numerous experiments and empirical observations must all be utterly, mind-boggingly wrong, or that, alternatively, homeopathy must be nonsense. At this stage it should be easy to figure out which of the two options strains our credulity less.

Still, in the context of religious truth claims, this approach still appears unsatisfactory. How, after all, are any religious truth claims justified? If they are justified based on fitting into our body of scientific knowledge they are simply more scientific truth claims. If not, as of course they are, then each religion constitutes a network of beliefs that may (or may not) be internally consistent but that is completely unmoored from other such networks and from observable reality. The philosophical reasonableness criterion will have a Christian accept a vision of Jesus in heaven as true and reject a vision of the imminent death of the sun as false, and it will have a precolumbian Aztec reject the former as false and accept the latter as true, with exactly the same justification. How useful.

Finally, moral helpfulness suffers from exactly the same flaw as the previous does in a religious context. Unless the belief system is at some point anchored on empirical, observable reality, it is turtles all the way down.

Philosophy of mind: consider the children

'Thanks' to a post on Crooked Timber I had the misfortune of finding David Bentley Hart's review of Daniel Dennett's new book From Bacteria to Bach and Back.

Hart's 'review' is not so much a review as a meandering, bile-filled rant wrapped up in obscurantist terminology. I find it very hard to extract an actual argument from it, mostly because of the lack of a clear line of thought. But to the degree that there is a core to what he seems to be trying to say, he claims that (a) language and (b) our mind or consciousness are irreducibly complex. To quote only the perhaps most immediately relevant parts:

There is simply no causal narrative -- and probably never can be one -- capable of uniting the phenomenologically discontinuous regions of "third-person" electrochemical brain events and "first-person" experiences, nor any imaginable science logically capable of crossing that absolute qualitative chasm.

Then there is the irreducible unity of apprehension, without which there could be no coherent perception of anything at all, not even disjunctions within experience. As Kant among others realized, this probably poses an insuperable difficulty for materialism. It is a unity that certainly cannot be reduced to some executive material faculty of the brain, as this would itself be a composite reality in need of unification by some still-more-original faculty, and so on forever, and whatever lay at the "end" of that infinite regress would already have to possess an inexplicable prior understanding of the diversity of experience that it organizes. For, even if we accept that the mind merely represents the world to itself under an assortment of convenient fictions, this would involve a translation of sense data into specific perceptions and meanings; and translation requires a competence transcending the difference between the original "text" and its rendition.

This problem, moreover, points toward the far more capacious and crucial one of mental intentionality as such -- the mind's pure directedness (such that its thoughts are about things), its interpretation of sense experience under determinate aspects and meanings, its movement toward particular ends, its power to act according to rationales that would appear nowhere within any inventory of antecedent physical causes. All of these indicate an irreducibly teleological structure to thought incongruous with a closed physical order supposedly devoid of purposive causality.

Similarly, there is the problem of the semantic and syntactic structure of rational thought, whose logically determined sequences seem impossible to reconcile with any supposed sufficiency of the continuous stream of physical causes occurring in the brain.
[...]
In every case, most of his argument consists in a small set of simple logical errors. The most conspicuous is one I think of as the "pleonastic fallacy": the attempt to explain away an absolute qualitative difference -- such as that between third-person physical events and first-person consciousness -- by positing an indefinite number of minute quantitative steps, genetic or structural, supposedly sufficient to span the interval. Somewhere in the depths of phylogenic history something happened, and somewhere in the depths of our neurological machinery something happens, and both those somethings have accomplished within us an inversion of brute, mindless, physical causality into, at the very least, the appearance of unified intentional consciousness.
[...]
Everything in nature must for him be the result of a vast sequence of tiny steps. This is a fair enough position, but the burden of any narrative of emergence framed in those terms is that the stochastic logic of the tale must be guarded with untiring vigilance against any intrusion by "higher causes." But, where consciousness is concerned, this may very well be an impossible task.
[...]
So, for Dennett, language must have arisen out of social practices of communication, rooted in basic animal gestures and sounds in an initially accidental association with features of the environment. Only afterward could these elements have become words, spreading and combining and developing into complex structures of reference. There must then, he assumes, have been "proto-languages" that have since died away, liminal systems of communication filling up the interval between animal vocalizations and human semiotic and syntactic capacities.

Unfortunately, this simply cannot be. There is no trace in nature even of primitive languages, let alone proto-languages; all languages possess a full hierarchy of grammatical constraints and powers. And this is not merely an argument from absence, like the missing fossils of all those dragons or unicorns that must have once existed. It is logically impossible even to reverse-engineer anything that would qualify as a proto-language. Every attempt to do so will turn out secretly to rely on the syntactic and semiotic functions of fully developed human language. But Dennett is quite right about how immense an evolutionary saltation the sudden emergence of language would really be. Even the simple algorithm of Merge involves, for instance, a crucial disjunction between what linguists call "structural proximity" and "linear proximity" -- between, that is, a hypotactic or grammatical connection between parts of a sentence, regardless of their spatial and temporal proximity to one another, and the simple sequential ordering of signifiers in that sentence. Without such a disjunction, nothing resembling linguistic practice is possible; yet that disjunction can itself exist nowhere except in language.

And so on, believe it or not, in the same tone for a total of more than 5,400 words. I cannot for one moment image writing a book review of even half of that length.

Anyway, this is pretty much the same argument as always. A creationist would say, look, the eye is really complicated. Half an eye would not work, so how could an eye have evolved? And Hart says, look, language / consciousness is really complicated. There is no half-language or half-consciousness, so how could they have evolved?

Now unfortunately for the creationist, nature abounds in half-eyes, so to say. Extant animals show everything from single light-sensitive cells across groups of such cells arranged in a little depression of the skin across ocelli to vertebrate style camera eyes of varying degrees of sophistication. Hart has it a bit easier in that our ancestors who would have had half-languages are gone, so he finds it possible to claim that such intermediates are unthinkable.

It is less clear to me how the same claim can reasonably be made about consciousness given the obvious progression in mental capability from worms to chimpanzees, but let's assume for present purposes that there is a vast gulf between us and any other species on the planet. The problem is still that Hart's position falls apart the moment somebody vaguely gestures towards children. This idea is not original to me, indeed one of the commenters on the otherwise mostly distressingly woolly Crooked Timber thread soon made the same point.

Note what I am not saying. I am not saying that Dennett is right about everything he wrote in his book. I have not read it, nor do I have any intention of doing so anytime soon. More to the present point, I am not saying that human ontogeny recapitulates evolutionary history. I am not saying that a six month old human's mind is a very accurate model of a rodent mind or suchlike.

But it is nonetheless obviously and demonstrably the case that every human starts as one cell, clearly without a consciousness, and (if healthy and unharmed) develops gradually into an extremely complex being with what Hart calls consciousness*. Yes, somewhere during ontogeny "something happens", and as far as I can tell most of us would accept that it is gradual. This indicates that gradual evolution can well be assumed to have produced this outcome, no magic involved.

Likewise it is obviously and demonstrably the case that young humans do not suddenly acquire "a full hierarchy of grammatical constraints and powers" in one go. Has Hart actually ever communicated with a toddler? We acquire our language competence gradually, and again this indicates that humans can well be assumed to have acquired language competence gradually over the course of their evolution.

For language in particular it is indeed trivial to visualise how even very rudimentary language immediately confers an advantage. Forget grammar; merely being able to grunt a few words meaning "danger", "food", and "shelter" while pointing into the distance would have served our ancestors quite well at some point. Next they may have come up with a few verbs. Even without tenses and suchlike "you wait; me go" will convey useful information, and of course lots of tourists successfully communicate at this level in a local language.

Again, I do not know how good Dennett's book is. Nor do I claim to have all the answers. But sometimes it is quite easy to tell that a given answer must be wrong even if you don't know what the right answer is. And it is really fascinating to read with what a tone of condescension Hart argues that there cannot be a gradualist explanation for capabilities that are demonstrably acquired gradually during human ontogenetic development.

----

*) Another point potentially to be made here is that certain philosophers of mind frustratingly take terms that have been invented to give a name to an observed phenomenon and then mystify them to the point where they cannot imagine a non-magic explanation for the phenomenon.

Consciousness is a perfect example. When our ancestors came up with that word they would have done so to describe the difference between a sleeping, knocked-out, drugged or dead person on one side and an awake and aware person on the other. They would then at some point have observed that while for example a beetle may be kind of awake and aware it does not appear to have the same awareness of itself (~consciousness) as a human. Finally a certain type of philosopher of mind comes in, picks up the term consciousness, reinterprets this label slapped on an observed distinction into a mysterious substance sitting in human heads, and claims that such a mysterious substance cannot be explained scientifically.

I would take one step back and say, no, actually this is straightforward in principle (if not necessarily easy in practice): that person over there is sleeping, just study how the brain processes differ from when they are awake and you have your explanation. Of course this is not what the philosopher means, but it is what consciousness means! The same goes for qualia, experience, apprehension, intentionality, and a whole host of other buzzwords used by Hart. They all have been created to describe observed distinctions, and being observable they can be studied using empirical science.

Luckily most scientists and philosophers understand the difference between things and processes, the concept of emergent processes, and the fallacies of composition, division and reification. (The last of these seems particularly relevant to how Hart discusses the terms mentioned in the previous paragraph.)

Does philosophy produce knowledge?

Recently I jumped, rather rashly, into a discussion about the purpose of philosophy. On his blog, philosopher Daniel Kaufman commented on the suggestion by a different philosopher that philosophy PhD students should be banned from publishing and took the opportunity to argue that there were too many PhDs hunting too many jobs, partly because graduate students were exploited as cheap labour, everybody was publishing too much, many of the leading philosophers weren't doing enough undergraduate teaching, and the field had gone down a dangerous and misguided path by assuming that it was a knowledge-generating exercise like science.

In Kaufman's telling, (a) philosophy does not generate knowledge ("these are not the sorts of questions that will ever admit of conclusive answers") but its purpose is to enrich our lives, (b) universities should fund things that enrich our lives even when they do not generate knowledge, and (c) admitting that philosophy does not generate knowledge is the best strategy for minimising future funding cuts, while trying to play scientist will backfire.

I could clearly have expressed myself better, especially in my first comment, but my position is that (a) philosophy can generate knowledge, (b) I do not see why universities should teach things that are self-admittedly non-academic, and (c) I strongly doubt that pitching philosophy as intellectually futile is going to work in its favour.

Note that I am not saying in any way whatsoever that universities should only train people for jobs, quite the opposite. I am merely saying that they are there to produce, manage and transfer knowledge (e.g. history of music or theory of music), while mere amusement or practical skills (e.g. appreciating music or learning to play the piano) are better accommodated in other ways, for example by buying a music CD or paying a private piano teacher. I am also not saying that anything that doesn't produce, manage or transfer knowledge is useless, merely that such a non-academic activity could perhaps better be accommodated outside of the university.

The main point I want to discuss now is, however, the first: can philosophy produce knowledge? The example that I would like to use is that of divine command theory and the Euthyphro dilemma. It may be said that that is very low-hanging fruit, but well, if somebody wanted to show how science can produce knowledge they would also choose something simple like the shape of the earth as opposed to the minutiae of population genetics or quantum physics.

As most people will know, divine command theory is the claim that "what is moral is determined by what God commands, and that for a person to be moral is to follow his commands" (quoted from Wikipedia, 11 Aug 2017). As most people will also know, Plato challenged this idea with the Euthyphro dilemma, which in modern terms is perhaps best summarised as follows:

There are two possibilities. Either the gods command that some action is moral because it is moral by an independent, objective standard. If that is the case, then we can cut out the middleman and conclude that morality does not actually flow from the gods. Alternatively, whatever random thing the gods declare moral is moral merely because the gods say so. If that is how it works, what if the gods commanded you to torture an innocent person to death? Clearly the first option is incompatible with divine command theory, but if the alternative is accepted then the theory is shown to have absurd consequences.

Religious people have, of course, tried to find answers to this dilemma. They seem to fall mostly into two categories, either stating that god would never command something evil, which even if they do not realise it grants that there is an independent standard and thus divine command theory is false, or claiming that the answer is "both", that there is no dilemma. As I have written on this blog before, that latter rebuttal does not work because both you can't avoid a bad outcome by accepting two bad options. If a judge asks whether you have murdered your neighbour or whether you got him killed through recklessness replying "both, your honour" won't clear you either.

I would consequently argue that Plato's philosophy has in this case generated a piece of knowledge: divine command theory does not work. And it was generated through philosophy as opposed to science, as no empirical data were involved.

What possible objections could be raised?

First, this is merely what we might call 'negative' knowledge. We still don't know what to base our moral reasoning on, merely that we cannot base it on "but the gods said so". To this I would respond that there is a clear parallel in science, which can also test and reject hypotheses and models but only ever tentatively (!) keep the ones that are currently not superseded and rejected.

Second, it could be argued somebody could find a solution to the dilemma or perhaps already has found a solution to the dilemma. Again the parallel to science should be clear: knowledge is always tentative until somebody comes along and disproves it and/or suggests an even better idea. The fact that we are never omniscient does not mean that we are as ignorant after somebody has thought through a problem as we were before.

Third, it could be observed that there are still plenty of people working as philosophers who accept divine command theory. And once more I would like to point towards the example of science. There are plenty of creationists, even some (if few) biologists; does that mean that biology does not produce knowledge? The only difference is that even the professionals in philosophy share less consensus on what is right than professional biologists.

Here I would argue that how much of a consensus can be achieved in a field depends on two main factors: whether the knowledge produced by the field is important in some kind of practice, and whether there is a lot of motivation to continue accepting a falsehood. Engineering, for example, has immediate and crucial practical applications. If an engineer accepts nonsense, they may construct something that fails embarrassingly, and consequently engineers are very likely to reject nonsense in their field of expertise (this qualifier is obviously important).

Economists, on the other hand, work in a field where things do not just work or fail, but they generally work in favour of either this interest group or that interest group. Even if raising wages would be "better" for the economy as a whole, it might still not be in the interest of individual investors; and even if lowering wages would be "better" for the competitiveness of an economy, it might still not be in the interest of an individual employee who wants more money now. It therefore seems entirely unsurprising to me that there would be a lot of motivated reasoning in economics, making it hard to discard false beliefs.

Philosophy has no immediate applications on the lines of keeping a bridge up, but it certainly deals with a lot of questions that are dear to people or affect closely held beliefs, for example ethics or epistemology. It therefore seems entirely unsurprising to me that the field would have it harder to discard false beliefs than chemistry or geography, for example. The take-home message here is that individual practitioners disagreeing does not demonstrate that there is no knowledge to be had; it may merely indicate that some practitioners reject that knowledge due to personal biases.

In conclusion, I remain convinced that philosophy does, or at least can, generate knowledge. It does so, among other approaches, by thought experiment, showing claims to lead to absurd consequences, or showing claims to involve a self-contradiction. Much of that may be rejection as opposed to proving of claims, but again, science is also mostly rejection of false ideas. The (always tentative) understanding we have now is what remained after myriads of mistakes were corrected.

What philosophy is "good for"

There is a very strange discussion popping up from time to time in some of the blogs that I read, where somebody will claim that philosophy is useless because it has not contributed anything to our understanding of the natural world or "to society" in recent times. Although I think that the charge of scientism - empirical science is all we need, every other field of scholarship is useless - is usually, mostly a straw man, it seems that there is a vocal minority of people who really think like that.

For starters, to the degree that this is about philosophy contributing to our understanding of the natural world this is clearly the wrong question to ask. What have bus drivers, as a profession, lately contributed to that endeavour? Nothing; but that does not mean the profession is useless, merely that it has a different job. Conversely, everybody who does contribute to our understanding of nature is by definition a scientist, so the claim that only scientists directly contribute to that understanding is true but trivially so.

The question could then rephrased more generally as: what do philosophers actually do? What is philosophy good for?

Now I am not a philosopher myself, and the question would perhaps be best answered by a member of that profession. But it so happens that just before I saw that remarkably nihilistic discussion about the value of philosophy I saw a use of philosophy outside of the academic context that provides a very good example of the kind of thing that the field is "good for".

In this post on his website Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne had taken a completely consequentialist stand on the issue of punishment:

If you're a determinist about behavior and a consequentialist about punishment, as I am, then you punish people only if it's for the good of society. (My view is that at the moment of the slaughter, Gutierrez had no "choice" to not kill the birds.)

And there are three social goods to come from punishments like incarceration: deterrence of others, sequestration of someone who could be dangerous to society, and reformation of a criminal so he doesn't repeat his offense when freed. All three of these apply to Gutierrez: jailing him will probably deter others who want to kill wild animals, people who do that tend to be murderous psychopaths who could kill again (maybe people next time) and so need to be put away, but such people may be susceptible to reformation [...].

If none of these reasons obtain, there's no reason to imprison anyone; or can you give me one? But surely deterrence and sequestration apply in most cases--though not capital punishment, which data show isn't a deterrent. And if no social good results from imprisonment, in what sense would Gutierrez still "deserve" to be imprisoned? To satisfy a sense of vengefulness? That, to me, is not a good reason, for it caters to our baser instincts--the same instincts and feelings that make people favor executions. So, if Gutierrez can be reformed, poses a danger to society, or can be a deterrent to others, yes, he "deserves" punishment. But he doesn't deserve it just because he needs to be "paid back" for what he did.

In short, locking somebody up is to be justified (only) by good societal outcomes, while that person "deserving" to be locked up is not a just and reasonable concept (because JC believes that the existence of cause-and-effect is incompatible with personal responsibility). To this the commenter cjwinstead replied as follows:

Suppose we have strong justification to believe that punishing Gutierrez's mother will satisfy the goals of deterrence and reformation; and keeping her hostage would be as effective as sequestration (maybe he really cares a lot about his mother). If we have evidence that this will be more effective in those goals, is there any reason not to punish her? What if she gladly volunteers to receive the punishment on his behalf? I would say that Christian Gutierrez deserves to be the subject of punishment in a way that his mother does not. Proxy punishments do happen in our justice system, and they are arguably effective at deterrence and reformation. Should they be supported if they work?

This, right there, is one of the things that philosophy is "good for". This is not science, obviously, as no empirical data are involved in any but the most remote ways. What cjwinstead has done is propose a thought experiment - a classical method of analytic philosophy - to lay bare our instincts about something (here, that we would consider punishing the mother unjust), to start a conversation about where those instincts come from and what, if anything, they mean to us, and perhaps in particular to demonstrate the absurd consequences of a position (here, basing moral philosophy entirely on consequentialism).

Of course, you may disagree with cjwinstead in this instance. What is more, while his comment sparked a very long discussion, nearly all the people who replied to it missed its point in a way that is somewhere between spectacular and hilarious. But again, this is the kind of thing that is philosophy, and it is useful and necessary to hash out issues that cannot be adjudicated based on empirical studies alone.

We may do science to find out if deterrence and reformation work or not, but science alone cannot necessarily tell us if we should prefer consequentialism to deontology, for example. And even if some scientismist were to argue that it can, using analytic philosophy to point out an internal contradiction or absurdity in an argument still saves us the major investment of conducting a large scientific study to test it.

Are brains machines?

Recently I was somewhat amused to see an online discussion on the merits of philosophy as a research field turn to the question whether our brain can properly be called a machine. One of the reasons why I found this amusing was that I had not too long ago been involved in the very same discussion at a completely different venue.

What I think is going on here is less that the people arguing about the word actually disagree substantially, but rather that the word is used in two completely different ways, with different meanings.

If we think about it, it is really interesting how we use analogies to describe concepts. There are, of course, words that have pretty much only one proper meaning, where a word is a clear, unambiguous name for a concept that you have to learn directly without the help of an analogy. In my area, for example, one might think of words like phylogeny or clade. Yes, those words are derived from Ancient Greek terms that actually meant something else originally; klados is apparently a branch, and phylon a “race, tribe, kind”. But the point is, few English speakers today will hear the word clade and think branch. They will either have no idea what it means or they are biologists who have learned the technical meaning without first having learned Ancient Greek.

A phylogenetic “tree”, on the other hand, uses an analogy to capture the idea of a branching structure with no reticulations. This analogy works fairly well indeed, but there are stranger ones. Take “identification key”, for example; where does the metal object for unlocking doors come into this picture?

Anyway, back to the brain. Does it make sense to discuss the brain in terms of a machine? And if we do so, what do we mean by that? Is it a helpful analogy?

Again, the problem that I perceive is that there are two groups of people using the same word for very different analogies. There are many different definitions of “machine” that we can find in dictionaries, but the two relevant ones appear to be:

1. A technological device built by humans to achieve a purpose, and

2. A complex structure consisting of interrelated parts with separate (sub)functions.

Note that in the first definition the point is about a machine as a human artefact, really any human artefact beyond a certain level of complexity. In contrast, the second definition is considerably more general and can also apply to natural structures that can be seen as having a function, even in the context of evolutionary biology.

And this, I think, is the problem. There are those coming from a computer science background or people skeptical of supernatural claims about our minds who want to stress that the brain is purely physical and “merely” a very complicated mechanism for information processing. And they are correct (in my eyes). And then there are those who hear “the brain is just a machine”, are skeptical about hyperbolic claims around the feasibility of mind uploading or brain simulations and respond, no, there is something fundamentally different about machines and the human brain. And they are also correct. Obviously there is a massive difference between a purpose-built car or even a supercomputer on one side and the messy, squishy, improvised end product of billions of years of natural selection and drift on the other.

The picture that one side wants to draw with the analogy does not work for the other side, because they understand the word in a different manner, because to them this specific analogy doesn't work. It is possible that this confusion underlies a few other discussions in areas that are hard to talk about without using analogies.

I must be missing something

As I continue to contemplate Ebach and Michael's recent paper From Correlation to Causation: What Do We Need in the Historical Sciences?, I would first like to make clear that I like reading and appreciate papers like this one. If we want to get things right it is crucial to be pushed out of one's comfort zone from time to time, so asking a question like "have recent developments in the field gone totally in the wrong direction?" has its value.

That being said, however, it would appear to be a reasonable assumption that >90% of the experts are somewhat unlikely to all overlook a fundamental flaw in what they are doing. It could happen, yes, but especially as a non-expert one would need to see a rather good and clear argument before agreeing that they do.

With this in mind, I will now describe my thoughts about the core of the paper and my understanding of what the authors argue for and why. The first parts of the paper feature a lengthy discussion of the interpretation of ancestry and character evolution in phylogenetics and evolutionary biology, of unstructured and structured representations of the same data, and of the dangers of letting unwarranted assumptions distort the data. There might be quite a bit to be discussed here - for example the claim that "historical sciences, such as taxonomy and palaeontology ... are mostly descriptive and defy testing", which might be news to the discoverers of Tiktaalik, who were able to predict and subsequently test their prediction of where to look for this "missing link" - but the meat of the paper as I understand it starts with the criteria the authors suggest for "comparing ... assumptions against a well-attested set of aspects of causation".

Reference is made to the Bradford Hill Criteria of the medical sciences, and they are then adapted to the presumed needs of historical science, which, as discussed in the earlier post, the authors perceive to be fundamentally different from experimental science. The new Historical Sciences Bradford Hill Criteria are presented under key words that sometimes describe what to look for and sometimes describe what to avoid:

Selection bias. This is an obvious problem in science, although I must say that I do not find the specific examples provided by the authors to be the most convincing.

Temporality. I am afraid I do not really understand what is meant here, so I will quote the relevant paragraph from the paper in full, excepting references. "Present day distributions are the result of past events. Therefore there is the possibility that different taxa alive today may be resultant in different events that occurred at different times. In using a single historical event (e.g., the Oligocene drowning of New Zealand ~30 Ma) to address a larger biogeographical question has resulted in several debates about the age of the New Zealand biota. Single event hypothesis are rare, however little to no scrutiny is typically taken to test their validity."

Especially considering that in the original, i.e. medical science, criteria temporality was apparently about dose-response and reversibility of an effect, I am unsure where the above comes from. It is even less clear to me what is wrong with using a single historical event to address a large question. If New Zealand was indeed completely under water then it quite simply follows that all endemic land-living organisms would at that moment have perished, and that the current land-living organisms would have had to disperse into New Zealand afterwards, when it rose up again. (I am not qualified to assess if it was indeed completely under water, but that is not the point.)

Evidence for a mechanism of action. This again makes more sense to me, although we may have to agree to disagree about how plausible any given assumption of a mechanism of action is. The authors, for example, appear to consider dispersal from one biogeographic region to another to be implausible, but I believe that as long as the probability of that happening is not zero it would have to be a matter of weighing it against the plausibility of alternative explanations (such as those requiring that a family of flowering plants arose before multi-cellular life).

Coherence. In effect the question whether a claim fits what else we are currently confident we know. Makes sense.

Replicability or, as I would call it, reproducibility. The authors argue that historical data are not replicable, so the equivalent is correlation between different datasets.

Similarity. Do two different datasets for the same study group arrive at the same result? It is not entirely clear to me how this is different from the previous, but at any rate the two seem sensible enough.

In summary, some of the above is not clear to me, but other aspects appear immediately reasonable. In fact there would a trivial interpretation of what the authors want to say: Examine your assumptions; remove indefensible assumptions; all else being equal, use the simpler model instead of an unnecessarily convoluted one.

But one would assume it cannot really be that easy, because there is hardly anybody in science who would disagree with that. Modellers are all aware of the danger of over-parameterisation; the problem is simply that all else is not always equal. Sometimes a more complex model is quite simply the better explanation. If you have a plot of dots forming a straight line as data, a very simple linear model with one parameter will do nicely. If you have a plot of dots forming an S-shaped pattern you will quite simply not be able to explain them with such a simple model, you need more parameters. I would suspect the same applies to biogeography; if there are data that defy the explanation of vicariance then our explanation needs to incorporate more processes than vicariance. I thus find hard to accept the authors' judgement that "complex models are designed to extrapolate data under highly speculative assumptions" whereas "simple models, with plausible assumptions[,] are more likely to pass the [criteria]". It really depends.

Similarly, everybody in science will agree that we shouldn't base our conclusions on bad assumptions. Problem is, everybody will argue that their assumptions are the good ones. Perhaps now would be a good moment to turn to the example provided by the authors of the present paper, to see how they use their new criteria. This might also clear up those aspects that I did not understand when reading the criteria themselves.

Interestingly, the four methods compared by the authors under their criteria are at least partly apples and oranges. They are Brooks Parsimony Analysis (BPA), Ancestral Area Analysis (AAA), Ebach's own Area Cladistics (AC), and the Dispersal-Extinction-Cladogenesis model (DEC). To the best of my understanding the point of BPA is to reconstruct how biogeographic regions are related, as in "the rainforests of New Zealand are sister to the temperate rainforests of Australia, and sister to both of them are the temperate rainforests of Patagonia" (this not a quote but a hypothetical). We might also call this reconstructing the evolutionary history of biogeographic areas. In contrast, my understanding is that the other three are concerned with reconstructing the inverse, the biogeographic history of an evolutionary lineage, either in its entirety or at least to infer where the common ancestor of the lineage was found (although admittedly I was unable to look deeply into AC as the relevant paper was behind a paywall).

Still, all four are biogeographic methods. I found it easiest to proceed once more criterion by criterion.

Selection bias. DEC is criticised for assuming that "areas" are the result of dispersal and extinction, while the criterion is said to be inapplicable to the other three methods because "the type of area is not specified" in any of them. Once more I can only say that I don't get it.

There are two possible interpretations of "area" in this context. The first is that we are talking about the cells or regions defined a priori as the units of the analysis. If this is the case, then all four methods face the exact same problem, because in all cases the user has to define areas a priori. But this doesn't make sense because the cells defined for a DEC analysis are quite simply not "considered as [sic] a result of dispersal and extinction", they are the units of which a potentially larger range considered to be the result of dispersal and extinction consists.

The second possibility is that we are talking about the results. If this is the case, then yes, obviously a Dispersal-Extinction-Cladogenesis model assumes that the present ranges of organisms are the result of dispersal and extinction (and cladogenesis). That's the point. But if this is what we are talking about then we cannot simply say "doesn't apply" for the other three. AC, for example, assumes that current ranges are the result of vicariance, so at the very least it would need a green marker for a plausible assumption, if indeed we find this assumption plausible; realistically, we would have to start discussing whether vicariance as the only process makes sense.

Temporality. As mentioned above I don't understand how the things considered under this name are any more temporal than the ones that aren't. The example does not really clarify the matter for me either. BPA and DEC are criticised as "speculative" because they use "incongruence" (between distribution patterns of different lineages? I believe that is not how DEC works...) to "explain" or "justify" "ad hoc events" or "processes". First, I think what is meant here is the other way around, i.e. that BPA and DEC explain certain patterns by invoking events that the authors consider to be ad hoc assumptions, apparently in practice meaning any biogeographic process except vicariance.

Second and more importantly it is, to say the least, not clear to me why vicariance is less ad hoc than dispersal, extinction and cladogenesis, which just goes back to my earlier point that everybody thinks their preferred explanation is the plausible one. Anyway, AAA is likewise criticised as speculative because "duplicated areas are considered to be part of an original ancestral area". AC, on the other hand, is given a green for entirely plausible assumptions because it only assumes that "geographical congruence is a result of common historical processes". Taken on its own that may sound reasonable, but what about the incongruences? Are they simply ignored? As mentioned above, if there are data that defy a one parameter model then more parameters would appear to be warranted.

There is little to say about evidence for a mechanism of action because none of the four methods is given a clean bill of health. I actually find it rather impressive that the authors call this aspect even of their preferred method speculative for explaining every congruence with vicariance. I do not, however, understand what is meant with "tree topology determines all processes" in the case of DEC. Taken at face value it is plainly wrong because not only the phylogeny but also the present distribution data go into the analysis. What is more, the same necessarily applies in the three other methods, only that some of them use "areagrams" instead of the phylogenetic tree of a group of organisms.

Finally, the treatment of coherence, replicability, and similarity seems even stranger to me. CA is lauded for comparing its results against other data, and with the exception of BPA for similarity the three other methods are criticised for not doing so. But how does the method determine what the end user does with it? What if the user of CA decides not to make any further comparison? What if the user of the DEC model goes on to apply the model to the next four lineages occurring across the same biogeographic areas? How would using DEC exclude such a possibility?

Maybe I am missing something, but it seems to me as if all four methods generally merit at best the same colour, or level of plausibility, on all criteria. If anything I would look somewhat askance at BPA, AAA and CA for simply assuming that the concept of "areagrams" makes sense in the first place, because if there is any significant degree of exchange between biogeographic regions it doesn't.

Either way I am afraid I cannot claim to have understood how to apply these new criteria to in an unbiased manner going forward.

Freedom!

In the light of two more recent rounds of the perennial Free Will discussion elsewhere, I think I now finally understand the incompatiblist position. Let's see if I got this right.

Free Speech. The right to express one's opinion without being punished. Generally considered to find its limits in libel and incitement to violence. In the stricter sense limited to the understanding that the government should not be able to punish a person for expressing their political views; on the other hand it can be argued that free speech in this strict sense alone would be hollow, that expressing an unpopular opinion should not be grounds for losing one's job either. Either way, this concept does not imply anything magic, is perfectly compatible with a deterministic universe, and we are free to say it.

Academic Freedom. Same as free speech but in the context of university employees, particularly tenured professors. Sometimes misunderstood to mean that professors have the right not to do the job they are being paid for without facing any repercussions at all, e.g. when somebody uses what should have been a science course to promote their religious beliefs or political ideology. Most importantly, this concept does not imply anything magic, is perfectly compatible with a deterministic universe, and we are free to say it.

Degrees of Freedom (Statistics). The number of parameters that can vary, that are not determined by others. In many models or statistical tests this number is one less than the total number of parameters, as the value of the last parameter follows necessarily from the values of the others. This concept does not imply anything magic, is perfectly compatible with a deterministic universe, and we are free to say it.

Degrees of Freedom (Mechanics). The number of ways in which a machine can move, counting dimensions and rotations around dimensions. A locomotive for example would have one, a car three (two dimensions and rotation around the third), an aeroplane six. This concept does not imply anything magic, is perfectly compatible with a deterministic universe, and we are free to say it.

Freedom of Religion. The right to practice one's religious faith without being punished for it. Sometimes badly confused with the right to also force others to adhere to the rules of one's own religion or to discriminate against members of other religions. This concept does not imply anything magic, is perfectly compatible with a deterministic universe, and we are free to say it.

Freedom of Movement. Commonly understood to mean the right to move without restriction through one's own country, including choosing one's place of residence, and to leave the country and return to it. This concept does not imply anything magic, is perfectly compatible with a deterministic universe, and we are free to say it.

Free Lunch / Entry / Drinks / etc. Descriptive of receiving a service or item that usually has to be paid for, without having to pay for it in this instance, generally because somebody else pays for it. Funnily enough this concept does not imply anything magic, is perfectly compatible with a deterministic universe, and we are free to say it.

Free Press. The right of the news media to report what is going on without being punished for it. Generally understood to be reasonably limited by the right to privacy and national security concerns. Generally understood to be an important aspect of a functioning democracy, as only a well informed electorate can make well informed decisions. This concept does not imply anything magic, is perfectly compatible with a deterministic universe, and we are free to say it.

Free Range Chickens. Chickens that are, while still obviously fenced in so that they do not escape, given a healthy amount of room to move around, as opposed to "battery" hens. This concept does not imply anything magic, is perfectly compatible with a deterministic universe, and we are free to say it.

Free Fall. The situation in which the only significant force acting on a body is gravity, as opposed to being held up by the ground or being slowed down by a parachute. Even this concept does not, despite having the word "free" in it, imply anything magic, is perfectly compatible with a deterministic universe, and we are free to say it.

Free Style. Being allowed to conduct an activity without having to follow strict rules or being required to achieve a set goal. This concept does not imply anything magic, is perfectly compatible with a deterministic universe, and we are free to say it.

Free Will. The ability to contemplate different possible courses of action and then decide between them in the absence of external pressure or pathological compulsion, resulting in actions that match one's preferences. Despite its equivalence with most of the other terms above, acceptance of this concept (and only of this concept) implies a belief in magic and a rejection of deterministic rules of cause-and-effect. Although a compatibilist view like the one just described was already promoted by the determinist stoics of Greek Antiquity, this view is actually nothing but goal-post moving by unreasonable contemporary philosophers who don't want to accept that neurophysiology has shown determinism to be true. And of course until a few years ago nobody ever had that determinism idea. What stoics? No idea what you are talking about. While we are at it, please ignore all religious traditions that have promoted determinism for hundreds of years because their gods are omniscient; focus on the traditions that have promoted magical, non-determinist Free Will because they were troubled by the Problem of Evil. Using the term even under the non-magical, compatibilist definition given earlier aids them (somehow), so the term Free Will (and only this term, but none of the other equivalent concepts containing the word "free") should not be used any more. Because that is totally going to happen. And when we need to describe the difference between, say, a coldly calculating thief and a kleptomaniac we will come up with something. Perhaps just use "voluntary" and pretend it is not simply the Latin translation of Germanic "out of one's own free will". Or maybe we don't need a word to describe the difference after all, because due to determinism the former had as little choice as the latter; then again, we also believe that there is a difference after all because we would still lock the former up but give the latter treatment, so maybe a term would be useful; then again, due to determinism the former had as little choice as the latter... (Oops, I think I entered an infinite loop there.)

Is that about correct? Bit uncertain about the end, but well, I am not an incompatibilist. There might also simply be different perspectives in the incompatibilist camp.

Experimental versus historical science

Long time no blog; it seems to come to me in bursts.

Anyway, a colleague has drawn my attention to a paper that has recently appeared, From Correlation to Causation: What Do We Need in the Historical Sciences?, by Ebach and Michael. It argues that "the integrity of historical science is in peril due [to] the way speculative and often unexamined causal assumptions are being used", and further suggests six criteria to check these supposedly speculative assumptions against.

In effect, the issue appears to be the use of models in phylogenetics and, in particular, in biogeography, and here, in particular and unless my reading between the lines is mistaken, the acceptance of any process except vicariance.

Before even delving into any other parts of the argumentation, it would be interesting to consider one of the underlying premises, which is clear already from the title of the paper: the assumption that historical sciences are fundamentally different from experimental sciences. As the authors write, "any evidence we adduce for some historical event needs must be contemporary evidence from which we make inferences on the basis of auxiliary hypotheses". But is it really any different in experimental sciences like medicine or physics? Do they not also have auxiliary hypotheses and assumptions at every step? Perhaps it is a failing on my part, but I at least cannot clearly see a marked difference.

Yes, of course we have easier access to evidence about things that happen around us every day today, and it is much easier to gather more of it. But that is a question of quantity, not the question of a qualitative, let alone epistemological, difference. To illustrate the point, let us consider an extremely simple case, the textbook statistics example of die throws.

First assume that I give you a die and ask you if you think it is loaded. You will then perhaps roll it twelve times, and get the result 2, 6, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 3, 6, 6, and 6. Instinctively you might now conclude that it is, indeed, loaded. If you want to be scientific about it you would do statistics to calculate what the likelihood is of rolling these results with a fair die. It is, after all, possible that a fair die produces nine sixes out of twelve rolls; in fact it could produce a hundred sixes out of a hundred rolls, the question is merely how unlikely that is.

You have the die in your hand and you just did an experiment. Experimental science, right? Okay, now assume that after the twelve rolls described above, I snatch the die away from you and drop it in the Mariana Trench. It could be argued that from that moment on the research question "is the die loaded?" has turned into historical science. The twelve rolls are all the data we will ever get. From there we can take the next step and consider a scenario where we read about the twelve rolls in a book that is hundreds of years old. Surely now the question is squarely in the realm of historical science.

But has anything changed? I don't see it. The exact same statistical approach that applied before still applies afterwards. There is no difference in how we address the problem in either case.

And of course this situation is what we always face in science, in a certain sense. We don't literally have a die snatched away, but we do have time, money and other resource constraints. At some point we stop collecting data for any given study and analyse them. Consequently I fail to see where the philosophical difference is between being limited by the data that are available due to an accident of history and being limited by the data that are available due to, for example, our luck with DNA sequencing success before the project budget ran out.

The flip side of being limited by the dataset we have in any given situation is whether we can get more data in the future. Again, with experimental science we can get additional data more easily than in, say, palaeontology. But in real life historical research we are usually not reliant on a single die that has been destroyed either, as the most interesting questions are broader than that. So even with historical data we can usually go back and try to acquire more fossils or archaeological artefacts.

What we have considered so far was inferring what process operated in the past (a fair or a loaded die?) from data we have available (the results of twelve rolls). Thinking of biogeography this would be comparable to inferring whether long distance dispersal of plants and animals happened in the past from contemporary patterns of distribution. We can also flip that around now and consider the inference of past one-off events from processes we can still observe today. In biogeography, we can today observe spores, seeds, insects, birds, and ballooning spiders being blown across vast distances and arriving on remote shores. Did Rhipsalis, the only cactus genus naturally occurring outside of the Americas, arrive in Africa through chance dispersal across the ocean or is its current distribution the result of a much older vicariance event?

Of course this was a one-off event, and yes, we will never know the answer for certain. But again I fail to see the difference in principle. I cannot possibly know for certain that the sun will rise again tomorrow morning, but I can have a great deal of confidence in my admittedly tentative conclusion. Going back to the die example, if I give you a die and then ask you, "I rolled it once yesterday evening - what do you think the result was?", you cannot know it for certain either unless I tell you. But you can observe the process - you can roll it a thousand times - and then infer a probability distribution. If you find that it is severely loaded and produces a six 81% of the time, you may be willing to go so far as to suggest that my roll was a six.

In summary, I personally do not at this moment see the big difference between experimental and historical science; at least not a difference that could be used to argue that the latter cannot employ, for example, models of the same complexity as the former. Admittedly I am not a philosopher of science though.

Life, consciousness, free will: words were defined to describe something

From time to time, even in groups where you'd think people would be a bit more sceptical, somebody will suddenly pipe up and say something on the lines of

Is matter really alive? Maybe the distinction between inorganic and organic is false. If we push further into the nature of matter, would we find that matter is alive and conscious in a monistic, naturalistic, materialistic sense?

Or perhaps

I don't know about "alive" - I would think not - but "conscious", yes, that has been my hunch for many years. I think fundamental particles simply must be conscious in some sense. Not in the same full sense as humans, presumably; but to build that full-sense consciousness in organisms like humans, it seems to me that you need building blocks that have some sort of consciousness themselves.

Subatomic particles alive and/or conscious? Right. The easy answer to this is somewhere on the spectrum from hysterical laughter to shocked silence. But as so often, isn't it much more interesting to explore where exactly the reasoning has gone wrong here?

I think what is going on here, and in some other cases one of which at least I will come to, is a fundamental confusion about what concepts are good for and how they arise. There seems to be this idea that there is an essence of life-ness or consciousness, and we just randomly happen to have a name for this essence, and now we can start speculating about whether this or that item is imbued with the relevant essence.

As far as I can tell that is not how it works.

It was surely not the case that when language developed to the degree of complexity that concepts like "alive" and "conscious" were first expressed and named some metaphysicist named Ugh sat down, deduced from first principles that such an alive-ness essence must exist, made up a word, and then went about applying it to stuff. It seems fairly clear that it must have been the other way around (not least because that other way is how we still coin new terms today):

Pragmatic hunter-gatherer Ugh would one day have observed that his grandfather, Ogh, who just yesterday was still walking around, eating, drinking, and having a chat about the weather, has over night gone cold, stiff, and unresponsive, and will now start to decompose. Ugh is growing concerned about these goings-on that he has previously observed in other older people (and younger people who have been clubbed on the head), and he wants to discuss the matter with his partner Agh. So he needs a word or two to describe the difference between, in this case, being able to walk around and have a conversation, and being forever incapable of doing that. So he must have a term for alive and another for dead.

Considering the matter further, we can then start arguing about how these terms apply to other things. Rocks are certainly quite like dead-Ogh. Are plants more like alive-Ogh or more like dead-Ogh? They don't walk around or talk, okay, but obviously plants can also die, just look what happens to the tree uprooted by the storm three weeks ago. Perhaps movement and speech are not the best criteria after all? Perhaps it should be growth and being able to make children? Maybe once we consider viruses (which would not have been known to Ugh) we find that it is really hard to find a clear cut-off between the two categories. But the starting point, the rationale for having a word like "alive", was the need to describe an observed sharp difference.

Same for "conscious". Ugh-awake versus Ugh-asleep, or perhaps Ugh-having-eaten-too-many-fermenting-berries. Useful concept. Then we look around us and ask if a beetle or chicken is ever conscious like we are. Maybe we find that consciousness is not a binary state but a smooth gradient, with chickens having a bit of it. Maybe we can even develop weird speculative thought experiments about people being just like us in every regard except consciousness. But the starting point, the rationale for having a word like "alive", was the need to describe an observed sharp difference.

And that is the problem with going "duuude, what if all matter is conscious?" Yes, we could redefine these terms to apply in that way. Only then they would become empty, content-free, utterly useless for their original purpose. We would at best have to discard them and invent new terms to describe the very same concepts over again. In the worst case we'd just confuse our language.

The same situation obtains, by the way, in the perennial discussion whether Free Will is an illusion. At least in the everyday languages I am familiar with the concept was invented to describe the difference between being able to act on your own true desires or rational preferences and being forced, compelled or tricked into acting against them. If the term is discarded because of the entirely irrelevant observation that our brains follow cause-and-effect we will need a new term to describe the same difference.

Eliminating "out of my own free will" is as unhelpful as watering down "alive" and "conscious". They weren't invented as abstract essences that we now realise are everywhere or nowhere. They were invented to describe empirically observed differences, differences that very definitely do exist.

Structuralism

It is interesting that a few weeks after learning that at least some proponents of paraphyletic taxa argue that phylogenetic systematics is structuralism two science bloggers I am following have started to discuss what structuralism is and what its merits are. The problem is, I am getting more and more confused about the first of those questions.

The Dark Side of the Sun

I have also just recently re-read one of Terry Pratchett's Science Fiction novels, The Dark Side of the Sun. Its message is one that I have always struggled with when it was presented as a more explicit claim: there is no objective view of reality, instead we cannot avoid having a subjective perspective depending on our identity. The scientifically most advanced alien species in the book have realised that they have hit the limits of what they can figure out, and so they try to gather insights from other intelligent species. The Creapii go as far as to recreate the natural environment of other life forms to immerse themselves in it, to try to feel what it is like, for example, to be a human.

This idea that all knowledge is subjective is a very po-mo concept, and I somehow suspect that Pratchett cannot mean it quite to the strictest interpretation. Indeed I can hardly believe that postmodernist scholars can really mean it like that. A water molecule consists of two atoms hydrogen and one atom oxygen. If a Creap, a Phnobe or a Drosk - three types of alien from the novel - examine water, would they find it to consist of three hydrogen atoms instead, or perhaps to contain plutonium? Surely not. Instead of “it has two atoms of hydrogen” they might say “sldjlkjs lksjf l slkfdj lsj fs”, but once we clarify all the definitions and translations we would expect to arrive at the same number of atoms of each kind, because that is just what is observable out there in nature.

By extension the same goes for everything that can be tested or examined empirically. There should be no female or male astronomy, no Jewish or Aryan physics, because the stars are the stars and the Theory of Relativity is either a good description of reality or it isn't.

What there is, if anything, is the good old “what it is like to be a bat” question. In an important sense, we humans will never know what it is like to be a bat, and I will never know what it is like to be a woman. All we can do is contemplate things at a purely intellectual level, such as that bats use echolocation and that women can (usually) become pregnant, but how any of that feels I at least will never be able to truly appreciate.

But there are two things to be considered here. The first is that this is perhaps somewhat regrettable but not really crucial. It is much more important to know the stuff that we can indeed figure out as objective knowledge, the kind of stuff that allows us to heal diseases, build working machines and improve our agriculture, than to know how if feels to be somebody or something that we just plainly aren't.

The second is that it cannot be helped anyway. Even the super-advanced aliens of Pratchett's story must ultimately make do with asking other species about their views. The book ends with everybody talking, listening, exchanging perspectives. And that seems to be all that is really needed.

Real and difficult problems

One argument that I have come across surprisingly often in recent times is this: Many smart people have thought hard about topic X and found it difficult, therefore X is a real and difficult problem. Examples would include the hard problem of consciousness and Gettier problems.

A closely related and likewise frequently heard claim is that some person Y's work and opinion must be taken seriously because they know a lot about a topic, have given serious thought to it, and published many books on it; in this case I remember the claim being made with reference to some theologian who Richard Dawkins had interviewed and whom he had supposedly treated very dismissively and arrogantly, but I have not seen the interview myself, so I cannot judge.

The problem is that while it may well be true that topic X is a real and difficult problem, or that person Y should be taken seriously, neither conclusion follows from this kind of argument.

Folk understanding of Free Will, part 2: Hopeless confusion?

Continuing from here.

So, about those two studies on folk perceptions of determinism and incompatibilism; these are two different issues that need to be tested separately. First, do non-philosophers, do Joe and Jane Average believe that the world including ourselves is deterministic or do they believe that we have some magical ability of making decisions independently of cause-and-effect? Second, do they believe that free will, choice, moral responsibility and suchlike are still useful concepts under the assumption of determinism? In the second case, a yes would make them compatibilists, a no would make them incompatibilists. Both studies accordingly made an effort to test these questions one after the other.

The first study, Nahmias et al, presented its participants with a hypothetical supercomputer that could perfectly predict the future. It then first asked them whether such a scenario was possible. Subsequently, the participants were told to assume that all actions had been predicted by the supercomputer, and asked wether a hypothetical person called Jeremy acted out of his own free will and is morally responsible when predictably robbing a bank, going jogging or rescuing a child from death.

Results: The majority of participants answered that the above scenario was impossible. The overwhelming majority of participants answered that Jeremy had both free will and moral responsibility despite the determinist scenario they were told to assume.

The second study, Sarkissian et al, first presented its participants with two hypothetical universes: a universe A which is carefully described as deterministic and a universe B in which human decisions are "not completely caused by the past", and then asked them to decide "which of these universes is most like ours". Subsequently, the researchers asked the participants whether it is "possible for a person to be fully morally responsible for their actions" in the deterministic universe A. Note that this is a much less specific question than that used by Nahmias et al, and Sarkissian et al chose it on purpose, arguing that very specific questions such as about a bank heist would "trigger affective responses" instead of getting at people's theories of moral responsibility.

Result: The overwhelming majority of participants answered that universe B, the one in which human decisions are magically exempt from cause-and-effect, is most similar to our actual universe. The overwhelming majority of participants answered that "full moral responsibility" is not compatible with determinism. Interestingly, a determinist answer to the first question was very highly correlated with a compatibilist answer to the second.

Folk understanding of Free Will, part 1: Does it matter?

Over at one of my favourite blogs websites, two studies of folk philosophy have recently been discussed: what do average people, as opposed to trained philosophers, think about determinism and free will?

To recap, this is part of the greater controversy around compatibilism. Both compatibilists and incompatibilists assume that the universe we find ourselves in is essentially deterministic - with perhaps a bit of quantum randomness thrown in, but surely without any supernatural soul making decisions independently from the laws of physics.

However, compatibilists such as myself argue that even given complete determinism, there is still a significant difference between doing something voluntarily and doing something under coercion, or between doing something deliberately and doing it accidentally, or between being mentally sane and in control and being insane or drunk; and further, that terms like "free will", "choice" and "agency" are useful descriptors of these differences. Incompatibilists, on the other hand, do not believe that these terms make any sense given determinism.

As I have pointed out before, the funny thing is that all sane incompatibilists actually make the same difference in practice: they also treat an accident differently than harm that was caused deliberately, and they would also treat a lunatic but punish a sane criminal. So in practice every sane person is a compatibilist, and the only difference is semantic. Which is odd, because once you accept a difference, would it not be useful to have terms to describe it?

The argument made by incompatibilists for the rejection of these terms is ultimately that they are confusing, that they are loaded with supernatural meanings. They claim that when the average person hears "free will", they understand "supernatural soul doing things independently of deterministic laws of nature". And this is why we have to get rid of this terminology. I have never been able to accept this claim.

Are we our bodies?

In a recent discussion on another blog somebody claimed that most people would not identify with their bodies but instead with their consciousness or (if they are inclined to give it a supernatural phrasing) with their souls*:

Alex, I can understand your perspective and there may be a considerable number who consider themselves “their whole body”, but I think most people have the conception that they are the consciousness that inhabits and wills the body.
The illusion of separateness from our body I think is rather strong. You may argue that this is just an illusion and you would be completely correct. But I would respond with the concept of soul which seems to be a popular concept throughout the world, not universal but something quite like it probably is for a majority of the human race. This concept suggests that there is a separate conscious entity that is distinct from the body. Why is this an almost universal concept, well the illusion the illusion that we are a separate homunculus is very strong. So I think those who support the idea of the self being defined as the part of the body/mind that is conscious and self aware have the stronger case.
Another thought experiment that will put this in better perspective. It we were able to perfectly record and make an exact copy of your nervous system and then simulate it in a sufficiently advanced computer-like device, I would argue that the simulation would have an experience and that experience could be labeled “you”. Conversely, If we used an extremely potent general anesthesia that precluded any awareness yet did no damage either to your brain or body would “you” still exist?

 I believe that both the assumption that most people consider themselves to be something immaterial living in the body and, to the degree that some people actually do believe that, the reasons for the belief are wrong.

Hobgoblins

Some time ago, deep in the understorey of the internet, I argued that somebody was advancing an intellectually inconsistent position, and was rewarded with the witty reply "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds".

I was then puzzled about two things. First, how one could be so cavalier about not contradicting oneself; I had rather assumed that that was a necessary precondition for making sense. Second, where that quotation came from, for I assumed that it had not originated with the blogger who was hurling it at me.

Thanks to Ana Mardoll I have now found out where it came from. Wikiquote (accessed 31 Dec 2013) has a large collection of quotes on the topic of intellectual consistency, and they must have been assembled by someboy who is very much of one mind with the guy mentioned above because they pretty much all ridicule the concept:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. --- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Well, so it appears at first sight. Of course it would not matter anyway what a bunch of famous people thought on a topic because it is quite possible that they were all idiots honestly mistaken. But if we look closer, we notice that there are actually two sets of quotes here. There are those that proudly declare that you do not have to make any sense if you are just awesome enough (apparently without wondering how we are supposed to recognize awesome people as awesome if they contradict themselves all the time). In addition to the hobgoblin one, for example:

Consistency is a virtue for trains: what we want from a philosopher is insights, whether he comes by them consistently or not. --- Stephen Vizinczey

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. --- Oscar Wilde

Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art. --- George Bernard Shaw

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. --- F. Scott Fitzgerald

No idea who Vizinczey is, by the way. And then there are a few that have a completely different thrust:

If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing. --- Miguel de Unamuno

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago. --- Bernard Berenson

A silly ass ... wrote a paper to prove me inconsistent. ... Inconsistency is the bugbear of fools! I wouldn't give a damn for a fellow who couldn't change his mind with a change of conditions. --- John Arbuthnot "Jacky" Fisher

The facts changed. Since the facts changed, I changed my position. What do you do, sir? --- John Maynard Keynes

These are quotes in which people defend themselves for having been inconstent not in the same argument, but inconsistent over time. In other words, they argue that being able to change one's mind is a virtue. And it is; it is the opposite of being unreasonable and dogmatic. I do hope that whoever organized that Wikiquote entry is aware that there are two completely unrelated issues.

But even given that being able to change one's mind in the face of new evidence or better arguments is good, I have to stay by my original position in this case. Intellectual consistency in one and the same discussion is not a goblinoid of whatever species (whether hobgoblin or bugbear). It is not an unworthy obsession of those who have run out of arguments. It is the first, lowest hurdle you have to clear for your position to make any sense whatsoever. Only after it is clear that you aren't obviously contradicting yourself is it even worth the effort to check whether your position is also supported by evidence.

For example, those who use 'faith' and 'religion' as insults when discussing other people's beliefs and criticize them for not having an evidence based worldview but then turn around and promote their own religious faith should be laughed out of the conversation. And somebody who manages to write in two consecutive sentences that (1) there is no clear line between the birds and the non-avian dinosaurs that were their ancestors and (2) there is such a strong divergence between birds and non-avian dinosaurs that we should accept the latter as a paraphyletic taxon without realizing what they have just done does not deserve to be taken seriously.

People who contradict themselves within the same line of argumentation may be confused, they may be dishonest, or they may be insane, and at least in the first case pointing the problem out to them may be helpful. But those who are downright proud of making incoherent arguments simply do not have anything to offer to rational discourse. They aren't misunderstood geniuses surrounded by nagging little minds, they are charlatans.

Free will once more, with a growing realization

Round and round it goes, perhaps forever. One may be forgiven for wondering whether one side is so sure that it is right that it is not actually listening to what the other says.

It could be either side. Note, however, that the discussion, at least as conducted over at the linked comment threads, is quite asymmetrical: Incompatibilists say quite openly that they consider compatibilism to be merely a crutch manufactured to soften the blow of determinism, that compatibilists are deluded or even outright dishonest, and that everybody should stop using the term "free will" and, depending on their mood, sometimes also the term "choice", because they supposedly mean something supernatural. Compatibilists, on the other side, merely reply that these terms do not necessarily mean something supernatural, and would you please stop talking about us in this aggressive and demeaning way when the discussion is only about terminology anyway?

Or in other words: Incompatibilists condescend towards compatibilists but the compatibilists do not condescend back. That might explain something about the dynamics of this discussion.

To recap: When discussing free will vis a vis determinism, it is generally assumed that there are three different positions, or groups of people:

1. Those who hold that we have a form of free will that allows us to make decisions independently from the laws of physics, our genetic makeup, the environmental influences that shaped us, our current state of brain chemistry, whatever, either because our body is steered by a supernatural soul (contra-causal/dualist free will) or without any attempt at explanation because it is a necessary premise for libertarian ideology (libertarian free will).
2. Those who hold that everything is determined by cause-and-effect, with perhaps a bit of (quantum) randomness thrown in, and thus our decisions are also predetermined with a bit of random, and thus it does not make sense to speak of free will and choice because those terms are commonly understood in the sense that the first group is advocating* (incompatibilism).
3. Those who hold that everything is determined by cause-and-effect, with perhaps a bit of (quantum) randomness thrown in, and thus our decisions are also predetermined with a bit of random, but it still makes sense to speak of free will and choice because those words do not necessarily imply anything contra-causal and supernatural*, and even given determinism we still need some terms to describe the difference between somebody acting out of their own free will and being forced to do something, or between a kleptomaniac and somebody stealing for profit (compatibilism).

For me, at least one thing came out of the discussions linked to above: I am increasingly coming to the realization that the first two positions are not actually, really, in practice, held by any significant number of people, or at least not by anybody who is sound of mind. And yes, I realize that this can be seen as at least as condescending as the idea that compatibilism is nothing but motivated reasoning because it may be taken to mean that the incompatibilists are either deluded or dishonest; but I would prefer to stress that the difference between the second and third position boils down to semantics anyway.

So why would I think that the first two positions do not really exist? Aren't there a lot of people advancing them?

In practice, people are determinists anyway

Jerry Coyne once more raises the issue of free will, about which I have also written before, so I do not want to repeat myself. Instead, let us look at some of the premises of the discussion. It appears as if the motivation of incompatibilists is founded on the following assumptions:

1. If left to their own devices, people are naturally leaning towards a black/white dichotomy of dualism versus incompatibilism, i.e. they believe that the only possible meaning of "free will" is some kind of supernatural or libertarian free will that allows people to do whatever they want independent of their genes, upbringing, personality, current state of brain chemistry, and whatever other influence of the natural environment you may want to add. In other words, when you say "free will" everybody will assume you believe in supernatural stuff.
2. If one could only convince people of the truth of determinism and incompatibilism, if they could only be convinced that there is no free will, they would become better people. For example, revenge would not make sense any more if it were understood that a criminal is the sum of their genes and experiences and thus never had any really free choice in committing their crime.
3. If one could only convince people of the truth of determinism and incompatibilism, that would be a mighty blow to religion, at least partly because religious apologists use free will as a standard defense for the so-called problem of evil.

The thing is, there seems to be some good evidence that all three of these assumptions might be wrong.