Neolicity

Wieseltier on Rosenberg

2012-01-08T16:59:00.000-08:00

The best article so far of 2012, about the "worst book of 2011." Remarkably concise, correct, and amusing at the same time. Link.

On Galen Strawson on Nicholas Humphrey

2011-04-09T20:15:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on Galen Strawson's review/criticism of Nicholas Humphrey's 'Soul Dust' (see also Midgely):

Once upon a time, not so long ago, no one thought that there was a mind-body problem. No one thought consciousness was a special mystery and they were right. The sense of difficulty arose only about 400 years ago

Going back all the way to Plato, the soul and the body are described there as entirely separate: The soul is active, immortal, while the body is made of various concrete elements, is passive, and will cease to exist. Arguments for the immortality of the soul focus on how the soul differs from the body.

I would argue that this is not, in fact, that different from the modern conception of the mind-body problem: Both the ancient Greeks and us today have two very different concepts. There is a mind/soul/consciousness, and there is a body/physical matter/material. The same notions about how the two differ appear both today and 2400 years ago.

Clearly there are great differences as well: We know far more about the physical world than Plato, and that has shaped our view of the physical and the mental. It has led to phenomenal consciousness being the main problem left to explain in the mind/body problem, hence the 'hard problem' of consciousness. Despite this difference, both the ancients and us have a distinction between mind and body. For the ancients this was a fact about the world; for us it is a 'problem' and has been made more specific. But the duality exists in both places. Had Plato learned that we can explain all physical action, including that of our own bodies, by means of impersonal mathematical laws, I believe he too would have arrived at the same 'hard problem' that we face today.

In Soul Dust, Humphrey seems to agree with Dennett, at least in general terms, for he begins by introducing a fictional protagonist, a consciousness-lacking alien scientist from Andromeda who arrives on Earth and finds that she needs to postulate consciousness in us to explain our behaviour. The trouble is that she's impossible, even as a fiction, if Humphrey means real consciousness. This is because she won't be able to have any conception of what consciousness is, let alone postulate it, if she's never experienced it, any more than someone who's never had visual experience can have any idea what colour experience is like (Humphrey says she'll need luck, but luck won't be enough).

In my opinion this really misses the hardest part of the mind-body problem, which I can try to state as follows: Our bodies are material, and governed by the laws of physics. We can explain their behavior without needing to say anything about consciousness at all, and with enough knowledge about physics and enough computation power, we can in theory explain all of our actions. There is therefore no need for a visiting alien to postulate consciousness when explaining human behavior. Consciousness may be a useful high-level concept, just like 'inflation' is a useful high-level concept in economics, but it is not a fundamental entity.

This so far argues against Humphrey's thought experiment. But the implications refute Strawson's rejoinder as well, for the entire point is that, to 'have a conception of consciousness' is not something that requires consciousness. Through entirely mechanistic methods - the abstract language of mathematics - we can explain why humans talk about having conscious experiences. In other words, we can explain why we talk about the subjective using entirely objective means. And in particular, having conscious experiences is not a precondition for talking about them in a justified way. This seems to leave no room for any actual subjective experience or qualia.

Strawson claims that "we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter." But we can take the same computational processes happening in the human brain, and simulate them in an entirely different physical setting (say, in a computer), and get the same behavior of talking about having conscious experiences. It would seem then that consciousness is more a matter of computation, or perhaps we must give in and apply Turing's test blindly. In either case, equating consciousness with matter seems a redefinition. Perhaps we can redefine one step further, and say that consciousness is matter, and matter is computation? But none of this gets us anywhere at all, and we are still left with a fundamental problem to solve, which has been open not for 400 years as Strawson claims, but for at least 2,400.

Fodor, Godfrey-Smith and Natural Selection

2010-07-05T08:45:00.000-07:00

Fodor has been arguing that the theory of natural selection is flawed, and many, including Godfrey-Smith, have claimed he was wrong. I'll respond to part of that response, which is representative I believe of many responses to Fodor.

In Peter Godfrey-Smith's example, trait T is that of having a camoflaged appearance, T* is an irrelevant property that is biologically linked to T ('linked' means that, due to practical biological constraints, the property passes together - perhaps they are adjoining on the same gene, etc.), and U is the trait of having an easily seen appearance, while U* is an irrelevant property biologically linked to U. Then, Godfrey-Smith's argument goes, we can examine the life of an individual, and see that it dies as a consequence of being seen - hence U was negatively selected for, and T positively selected for. Correspondingly, we can look at the population as a whole and see that many deaths occurred as a consequence of having trait U, and hence U was negatively selected for, while T was selected for, and T* and U* were just along for the ride. If this is correct, then Fodor's argument is flawed.

Instead, I will argue that this example is flawed. Consider the following case: There are two further traits that are biologically linked to both T and T*: T1 and T2. T1 is the property of making unnecessary noise - which makes you more likely to be heard by a predator. T2 is the property of being quick. Assume that it is the case that the noise T1 makes is detrimental in the same amount as T2 is beneficial: T1 makes you likely to be heard, but T2 makes you faster, so you have a better chance of escaping. So, when looking at just properties T1, T2, they 'cancel each other out' as far as natural selection is concerned. So, this apparently does not change the picture - T was still selected for, T* is along for the ride, and T1 and T2 are 'noise', not affecting things on the bottom line.

However, we can look at this in a different way. Imagine that the beneficial effect of T is the opposite of the negative effect of T1. So we can summarize the combination of T and T1 as having no net change to how likely you are to be detected by a predator: You are less likely to be seen due to T, but more likely to be heard due to T1, and these effects balance each other (remember we are assuming that the amounts are in the right magnitudes - which means the amount of predators, whether they use vision or hearing mostly, how effective they are, etc. etc.). That leaves T2, which is beneficial - being faster helps avoid predators when they do detect you - so the cluster of traits T, T*, T1, T2 will be selected for. So T's frequency will rise, as in the original example. However, in this interpretation, T does not seem to be selected for.

Arguably the latter interpretation makes more sense - T and T1 are two aspects of 'being detected', while earlier we considered T1 and T2 together only because we introduced them at a later time than T and T*. But the order of introduction makes no difference of course. Likewise, if traits T and T1 appeared together historically at exactly the same time, that does not matter to the present. From the present's perspective, it is the same as if T1 and T2 appeared together: In both cases, the change is a net zero, as two new traits appear together and they cancel each other out. So, despite there being various possible interpretations here, it seems we should either conclude that T is not being selected for, as per the second interpretation (which has perhaps a slightly more appealing intuition), or that there is something wrong with both interpretations.

Indeed, there is something wrong here. The problem is that statements such as 'T was selected for' implicitly assume that T is 'independent' of other traits, in the sense that natural selection can 'pick it out' by itself. Indeed, if T were not biologically linked to any other trait, then the frequency of T should rise over time, statistically speaking. However, if traits are linked as we have assumed above, then that is no longer true. All natural selection can 'work on', in the example above, is the combination of T, T*, T1, T2. When we had just T and T*, it seemed easy to say that T was being selected for. But when T and T2 are both beneficial, as we have seen finding the proper interpretation of what is selected for is less clear. From the perspective of natural selection, the combination of T, T*, T1 and T2 is beneficial, so it's frequency will tend to rise. That is the only safe claim we can make here, that does not depend on interpretation.

Still, perhaps we can say more, with more data? Imagine that the traits did *not* perfectly balance each other out, as we assumed before. That seems the more likely case in general. In that case, we might argue that one of the traits is indeed being selected for. However, if it turns out that it is T2 being selected for, and not T, then we still have a problem with the original argument - which arrived at the false conclusion that T was being selected for. Note that the issue is not that we simply didn't know enough about T itself. The problem is that, if we are not even aware of the existence of traits T1 and T2 and their link to T, then no amount of knowledge about the usefulness of T will avail us. T, considered by itself, seems useful. But only by knowing about all the relevant genes can we find out that T in fact is not selected for.

Let's make that more explicit. T is useful in itself - as we can see from counterfactuals. However, it is linked to trait T2 which effectively cancels it out, and also to trait T1 which is also useful, in fact slightly more useful than T. In other words, a counterfactuals argument on T itself leads to a faulty conclusion. It simply does not follow that, if counterfactuals show a trait to be useful, then it is selected for. Being actually selected for depends on something more.

So, there are two possibilities here:

There is a fact of the matter about which genes are selected for. But, to say anything with certainty about that, we do not just need a lot of data about the usefulness of the genes we are aware of, but all other genes that are biologically linked to it. Otherwise, we may be wrong, and we cannot at present even estimate the chance of our being wrong (perhaps once we know a lot more about biology, we can answer that).
There is no fact of the matter about which genes are selected for, if there are linked properties that have usefulness levels that are too close together. There may also be more complicated forms of linking than that we have considered here, that make things even worse.

Information in DNA

2007-07-14T01:13:00.000-07:00

In a lecture by Richard Lewontin at Berkeley, he mentions the oft-ignored fact that DNA doesn't determine the organism: In fact, it is a combination of DNA and the environment - and these two factors can interact in paradoxical ways - that 'determines' an organism (actually the entire argument is more complex, but if anyone is interested they should see the lecture, I can't explain it better than him). But one specifically interesting matter was the way in which Lewontin put it:

You can't compute an organism from its DNA

That is, given the DNA of an organism, the naive view that a 'sufficiently-powerful computer' could calculate the organism that would develop from that DNA is, just as the name implies, naive and incorrect. To perform such a computation, the computer would also need the environment (and in addition there might be random factors due to quantum physics, but lets ignore that for now).

In other words, DNA contains only part of the information necessary to compute the resulting organism. But things are more complex still. DNA does not directly generate the organism; DNA is used by complex machinery in the cell to generate proteins. Now, that complex machinery itself is generated by the same process, i.e., some interaction between DNA and that machinery itself (or previous copies of that machinery). There is therefore a subtle question here.

The question can be posed using computer science metaphors. Let's say that DNA is 'data', specifically, compressed data (like files on a computer can be compressed: gif files, mp3, etc.). The cellular machinery is a 'program' that uncompresses the 'data'. Now, given a .gif image file, I can ask: Is there enough information in the gif file itself to generate the image (which was used to generate the gif file)? There isn't, in the sense that I need both the file and a program to uncompress the file. We can even pose this question in a quantitative way (sort of): How much of the information in an image is in the gif file generated from it, and how much is in the program used to uncompress it?

An immediate objection to this is that the same uncompressing program is used for all gif images. Yet, an example can perhaps make my point clear. Say that an image file format's uncompressing program contains a little picture of a red gradient. Compressing images then uses that fact, that is, gradients are removed from the images and just 'notes' appear, something metaphorically like "there should be a gradient here, at angle X and size Y". So the actual gradient appears in the program, not the compressed images. In that sense, when I compress a particular image, part of its 'information' is in the compressed image file, and part in the program. (Yet, despite this concrete example, I intend this idea in a more general way.)

So, we might ask,

How much of the information present in an organism's cells is in its DNA, and how much in the machinery that works on its DNA?

Here is one particular consequence of that question. Say that we recover the remains of an extinct animal, like the baby mammoth recently found in Siberia, and let's assume that its DNA is somehow miraculously preserved but the rest of its cells is too degraded to be of use. Do we then have any hope of creating a live mammoth, as in Jurassic Park, from the DNA alone? If there is a significant amount of information in the non-DNA portions of the cell, then we might have a problem. Now, the problem might be solved if the non-DNA portions of a modern elephant's cells are similar enough; metaphorically, that the same 'program' can be used to decompress both mammoth and elephant DNA. In fact this might be expected, if DNA is the primary vehicle of evolution, and the rest of the cellular machinery is more stable - but that is still a question I do not believe biology has yet answered.

Politically Correct Falsehoods About Human Nature

2007-07-06T06:36:00.000-07:00

Sociobiology appears prominently in a Psychology Today article (somewhat ironically, in that a non-psychological theory is trumpeted in a publication supposedly concerned with psychology) entitled "Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature". Once again we hear how 'for evolutionary reasons, men are attracted to young women for their reproductive capabilities, and since blond hair is an indicator of youth, men are therefore attracted to blond women', and so forth.

Now, there may be quite a lot of truth in such theories. But the problem is that it is hard to discern the truth from the falsehoods. Indeed, much has been said regarding sociobiology being unfalsifiable. In a simpler type of argument, however, let us consider that sociobiology is always used on cases in which it appears to work well, ignoring those in which it doesn't. Here are some examples.

If being blond is indeed a factor that makes women more attractive, why is it not more prevalent? In fact, why isn't it ubiquitous? Some might say that it is because men are less attractive with blond hair, so the trait tends to reach a balance. Perhaps; yet I have never seen evidence for that claim, and in fact, sociobiological theory generally claims that appearance is more important for women (whereas power, authority and resources/money are more important for men). Given that, we would expect to see blond hair in more than half of the population - at least given enough time. Thus, the only defense left is that not enough time has passed for the trait to spread. Perhaps. Yet research seems to show people with blond hair appearing in sizable numbers 10,000 years ago in Europe - quite a long time indeed. Not enough?
Models are very tall; in fact significantly-above-average height is generally a prerequisite to work in that field. In addition, many women make themselves appear taller using high heels. But why is height attractive in women? Simple sociobiological reasoning seems to imply it should not be a cause of attraction: Tall women tend to have higher levels of testosterone, which implies lower reproductive fitness. Of course there are ways to reason for the opposite result: Height implies health during youth, for example.
Body fat is another questionable area. Why are thin women attractive now, whereas in the past fuller women were considered the ideal? There are competing ways to reason about this matter: Being thin is somewhat correlated with youth (people gain weight over time), yet being thin can also imply malnutrition or disease.

Clearly sociobiological theories have something to teach us about human beings. Yet, given a particular behavior, we cannot quantitatively say how much of it is due to sociobiological factors, and how much to other factors (cultural, psychological, etc.). Sociobiology will mature as a science only if and when it becomes a quantitative science, capable of measuring its successes as well as its limitations.

Altruism Dialogue

2007-07-03T06:40:00.000-07:00

A: "No-one is altruistic. Even when someone does something for someone else, they only do it because they enjoy doing so. Perhaps they enjoy the feeling that accompanies doing good deeds."

B: "How can you tell that people in fact (1) feel good when helping others, and (2) do good deeds for that reason?"

A: "I would say, 'If they didn't, they wouldn't perform the good deeds,' but that is circular logic, of course. So I base myself on personal experience (and let's assume that my personal experience is representative of others, as well, for argument's sake): I feel good when helping others, and if I didn't, I wouldn't help them."

B: "I might say, 'Well, I believe I am doing the right thing when helping others, and if I didn't, I wouldn't help them.' And in fact I do claim that."

A: "But I know that the good feeling is the reason I do altruistic acts."

B: "I can only respond that I know that my belief that my actions are 'right' is the reason for my helping others."

A: "But if you did not feel good when helping others, you would not believe that altruistic acts are 'right'."

B: "Well, if you did not believe that altruistic acts are 'right', then you wouldn't feel good when performing them."

A: "In fact I do not believe that altruistic acts are 'right'."

B: "Well, in fact I do not feel an enjoyable sensation when doing altruistic acts. Not in every case, at least, which is enough to counter your argument."

A: "But surely you feel a good sensation, even if it is far in the back of your mind, when performing an altruistic act?"

B: "Not necessarily; why would I?"

A: "Well, because you know that the act is the right thing to do -"

C: Can we not conclude that "the enjoyable sensation felt when helping others" and "the belief that helping others is the right thing to do" refer to essentially the same 'thing', in some sense?

Skepticism Need Not Imply Boredom

2007-07-02T02:09:00.000-07:00

Aliens are back in the news, due to a deathbed confession. Most likely the confession won't convince anybody (the confession comes from an owner of a UFO museum; even if he can't benefit from raising interest in UFOs after his death, presumably friends or relatives of his now own the museum and have much to gain).

But let's ignore the question of the existence of aliens, about which enough (or more than enough) has been said. What is less remarked-upon is the cultural phenomenon of interest in UFOs. This is clearly one of the more striking trends in the second half of the twentieth centuries, including innumerable pop-culture references and scores of fanatics-for-the-cause.

If aliens exist, then that is clearly thought-provoking. But if they don't, then the widespread interest in them is perhaps no less fascinating. In that case, for not-immediately-obvious reasons scant evidence became the basis for a self-sustaining movement. Why do some conspiracy theories die, others linger (such as that concerning the JFK assassination), and others thrive?

Many have said that UFO abduction stories are merely a replacement for, or a contemporary version of, previous myths and beliefs (for example, Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World"). But in such skeptical interpretations something may be missed, and that is the speed and and wide reach of the current phenomenon of interest in UFOs. Psychological, cultural, sociological, historical and other factors may play a role here, in ways that I do not believe are yet fully understood.

The real danger in these matters is to make them bland, uninteresting, when they are not. "Explaining away" the UFO phenomenon, in the sense of ignoring the fascinating cultural aspects of it, is a shame. Skepticism need not be less interesting than the alternatives.

It's Ok, You're Neurotic For The Rest Of Us

2007-06-29T06:38:00.000-07:00

Many people suffer from an irrational phobia, be it snakes, public speaking, or such. Typical explanations point to a traumatic event; explanations on a higher level speak of evolutionary reasons: It was beneficial for our ancestors, supposedly, to be easily phobic of snakes.

All of which is fine and good, but doesn't explain the severity of the response. To be wary of snakes does make perfect sense; to be unable to function in the presence of one doesn't. One possible reason is that people who suffer from such crippling phobias are 'malfunctions' of biology; they are just the fringe cases, not worthy of further explanation.

Here is an alternative view. Perhaps people have severe phobias not for their own benefit, but to benefit others. Consider, as an analogy, the prairie dog: When a single prairie dog spots a predator, it sounds the alarm, and all the others scurry for the safety of their borrows. Notice that the response of the initial prairie dog was beyond the immediate needs of the animal; it didn't just go and hide, it alerted the others as well.

Are phobias similar? Suppose that, in a community of people, one has a phobia of snakes. Whenever that person sees a snake, their response is exaggerated, out of proportion - just what is needed to call attention to the danger. Seeing the entire community as a whole, the phobic person is simply the designated lookout for a particular threat.

In this perspective, phobias seem irrational and unnecessary only because we (or many of us) live in individualistic cultures. Yes, a phobia is senseless for the individual. But the phobia may also, in part, serve a purpose - for others.