Tag Archives: Philosophy

Big Questions

By Robin Hanson · January 10, 2010 6:10 pm · Comments (41)

When young, I imagined that the giants of the intellectual world would be found chipping away at our deepest most important questions.  Sure perhaps most intellectuals would work on practical problems with paying customers, or do less glorious but needed ground work, but the best and the brightest would focus on combining that ground work into deep answers.  Aspiring to high status, I also tried to identify and chip away at deep questions.

Imagine how strange, then, the real world seems to me.  For example, Caltech prof and top science blogger Sean Carroll publishes a well-written book, From Eternity to Here, arguing for his explanation for the arrow of time, clearly one of our deepest questions.  Yet not only are such attempts rare, they get surprising little engagement.  Of the fourteen other blurbs, reviews, and articles (besides mine) listed at the book website, none express an opinion on whether Carroll’s answer is right, much less offer reasons for such an opinion.  Of the six Amazon reviews, two do express an opinion, one by complete-crank Ranger McCoy, and one by Lubos Motl, who says there is no arrow of time problem.  I also found a review by Peter Woit, who rejects the whole idea of a multiverse.  Geez, what does it take to get serious engagement of a proposed answer to a deep question?

If you search for “arrow of time” or “origin time asymmetry” at arxiv.org you’ll find a smattering of papers, but almost no one makes the subject their main focus.  In our real intellectual world, smart ambitious folks find it far easier to signal their ability by working on more mundane ground work or practical questions.  So only a crank focuses their effort on a deep question, inducing people afraid of being confused with cranks to be careful to avoid such questions.  Super bigshots sometimes counter-signal, rambling on about such topics without having given them much thought, just to show that they can.

Kudos to Sean for bucking the trend, and I hope he gets more serious engagement sometime soon.  As I said, his story is consistent, if speculative:

Many of these are far-from-proven conjectures, but still it does all hold together. … Even so, it is very hard to over-emphasize just how far one must project current physics beyond the accuracy with which we have verified it to talk about tiny new universes popping out of quantum fluctuations in empty space at 10-29K.

In the social sciences books that propose answers to deep questions do at least get reviews that engage those proposed answers.  Is that because we actually care more about social science questions?

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“Oughts” Are Derived From “Is”

By Robin Hanson · December 12, 2009 12:35 am · Comments (62)

I tire of hearing folks repeat “you cannot derive `ought’ from `is’,” because there is an important sense in which most attempts to derive “ought” are built on “is.”  Let me explain.

An argument for an “ought” is typically built on some set of more basic “obvious” claims that the speaker assumes their audience will accept without argument. Many of those claims have their own supporting arguments somewhere else, but those arguments are also be built on further obvious claims.

Eventually we end up with with a set of basic supporting claims that seem obvious, but which don’t have much in the way of explicit arguments supporting them.  Yes, almost always one of these obvious but not explicitly argued claims is of the “ought” type. So in this sense every “ought” is derived from other “oughts.”

However, a key implicit argument sits behind these obvious unargued supporting claims, namely that those claims seem right. That is, we typically assume that we should believe an “obvious” claim because our subconscious/intuition recommends that we believe such a claim.

Now in order for it to make sense to believe an “ought” claim that seems right to our intuition, we have to at least believe that our intuition tends on average to be right about similar sorts of claims. There is no point in believing our intuition on some topic if it has no consistent relation to the truth there.

But the claim that one’s intuition about a particular “ought” claim correlates with truth on that “ought” claim is itself an “is” claim.  Yes that claim about the reliability of our intuition is itself also mainly supported by noting that this reliability claim seems right to our intuition, but I’m not complaining about that.

I’m instead pointing out that most every attempt to derive an “ought” is based ultimately on “is” claims about the reliability of our intuitions about such more basic “ought” claims.  If we can’t find a coherent way to integrate these “is” claims with the rest of our network of reasonable “is” claims, then we can’t argue coherently for such “ought” claims at all.

(This same argument applies to “wow” claims on beauty; yes every “wow” claim appears derived from other unargued “wows” but the support for those “wows” are key “is” claims on the reliability of our “wow” intuitions.)

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Majoritarian Philosophy

By Robin Hanson · December 11, 2009 8:45 am · Comments (39)

Bryan points us to this survey on thirty key philosophy questions.   The survey offers four indicators to estimate philosophical truth:

  1. Most popular opinion of anyone who responded to the survey.
  2. Most popular of responding profs at “99 leading departments of philosophy.”
  3. Most surprisingly popular in #2, which is a Bayesian Truth Serum indicator.
  4. Most popular among responding profs specializing in the question’s topic area.

There’s lots of detail there I hope someone will analyze.  This seems a great chance to exercise majoritarian epistemic principles.

As a first pass, I compared my opinions to indicator #2 and found I can comfortably accept the modal professional opinion on 25 of the 30 topics!  For three of them I was moderately temped to disagree, choosing mental content: internalism, knowledge claims: invariantism, and epistemic justification: internalism.  But on reflection I think I just tend to use the words “think”, “know” and “justify” differently; I’m not sure I substantively disagree.

On only 2 of 30 topics was I strongly tempted to disagree with professionals.  Popular and specialist opinions agree with my choice aesthetic value: subjective, but professionals pick objective, and their opinion is surprisingly popular.  So while I might have an excuse to hold my ground, I guess I can live with the idea that there might be substantial elements in common among the concepts of beauty that would evolve among a wide variety of intelligent species and their descendants.  Could this be what objective beauty means?

Meta-ethics: moral anti-realism also tempted me strongly.  But here all four truth indicators point toward moral realism.  So I guess I should seriously consider changing my mind.  Is it plausible that there is something substantial in common among the moral intuitions that would evolve in a wide range of intelligent species and their descendants?  Am I agreeing if I accept that as moral reality, or does moral realism demand I believe something more?

Yes I’m still a contrarian in many ways, but I really do largely accept professional opinion in fields where I know and largely respect the professionals.  These include physics, analytic philosophy, computer science, and micro-economics.

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Does Real = Feel?

By Robin Hanson · December 5, 2009 2:30 pm · Comments (46)

Consider two fundamental distinctions:

  1. Real vs. Unreal – In the space of all possible worlds, only one is the “real” world; the rest are unreal.  Or if you prefer, among all mathematical structures, only some describe real things; the rest are only abstract math things.
  2. Feel vs. Unfeel – Many think they can imagine physical objects just like our brains, except that those brains do not have an associated internal life, i.e., feeling or experience or consciousness.

Once can deny each of these distinctions.  Some claim that all math objects are equally real, or that all possible worlds are just as real.  Others say all physical objects with the right info processes must experience.

While both these concepts seem to me reasonably understandable, it isn’t obvious to me that they are distinct concepts – maybe they are the same concept.  That is, I’m not sure it makes senses to talk about unconscious but real physical brains, or conscious but unreal brains. Maybe what it should mean for a world to be real is that its brains, at least of the right sort, really do feel.

Added:  To clarify, it is not clear it makes sense to posit a real world made of parts which could never be conscious, no matter how they were arranged.  Actually assuming a conducive arrangement is not required.

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Feels Data Is In

By Robin Hanson · December 4, 2009 12:30 am · Comments (35)

Bryan Caplan and I recently discussed if brain emulations “feel.”  In such discussions, many prefer to wait-and-see, saying folks with strong views are prematurely confident. Surely future researchers will have far more evidence, right?  Actually, no; we already know pretty much everything relevant we are ever going to know about what really “feels”.

We know we each believe we feel (or are “conscious”) at the moment; we say so when asked, and remember so later.  When we trace out the causal/info processes that produce such sayings and memories, they seems adequately explained as a complex computation in signals passed between brain cells, and in state stored in cell type and connection.  We can see that this info process, including how it has us believe we feel, is basically preserved even when our brains are physically perturbed in many substantial ways, such as by changing location, chemical densities, atomic isotopes, the actual atoms, etc.

In the future our better understanding of brain details will let us make much bigger changes that preserve the basic computational process, and so still result in very different brains that say and remember that they feel similar things in similar situations.  Yes, some changes might modify their experiences somewhat; these new brains might be much faster, for example, and so talk about feeling events pass by more slowly. But they’d still say they feel things much like us.

Of course we don’t think that video game characters today really feel when they say they feel or remember feeling – their talking about feelings behavior seems canned, and not remotely as flexibly responsive to circumstances as ours. So we believe this canned behavior isn’t connected to feelings processes inside that are anything like ours. Thus we do think that some things with surface similarities to us can only apparently, but not really, feel (what they claim to feel). Continue Reading "Feels Data Is In" »

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Philosophy Kills

By Robin Hanson · November 29, 2009 2:10 pm · Comments (145)

Philosophy is often presented as a rather useless, if perhaps interesting, type of thought.  Arguably, however, defective philosophies of mind are a leading cause of death today!  Exhibit one, Bryan Caplan:

What disturbed me was when I realized how low he set his threshold for [cryonics] success.  Robin didn’t care about biological survival.  He didn’t need his brain implanted in a cloned body.  He just wanted his neurons preserved well enough to “upload himself” into a computer.  To my mind, it was ridiculously easy to prove that “uploading yourself” isn’t life extension.  “An upload is merely a simulation.  It wouldn’t be you,” I remarked.  …

“Suppose we uploaded you while you were still alive.  Are you saying that if someone blew your biological head off with a shotgun, you’d still be alive?!” Robin didn’t even blink: “I’d say that I just got smaller.” … I’d like to think that Robin’s an outlier among cryonics advocates, but in my experience, he’s perfectly typical.  Fascination with technology crowds out not just philosophy of mind, but common sense.

Bryan, you are the sum of your parts and their relations.  We know where you are and what you are made of; you are in your head, and you are made out of the signals that your brain cells send each other.  Humans evolved to think differently about minds versus other stuff, and while that is a useful category of thought, really we can see that minds are made out of the same parts, just arranged differently.  Yes, you “feel,” but that just tells you that stuff feels, it doesn’t say you are made of anything besides the stuff you see around and inside you. Continue Reading "Philosophy Kills" »

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There Is No Science

By Robin Hanson · September 17, 2009 3:00 pm · Comments (23)

Eric Falkenstein:

I like listening to journalists talk about science … most of the translation to outsiders comes from non-scientists simply because there are more of them, and some write very well.  Yet, I find many times, when these journalists digress from a specific subject, to science in general they are extremely naive or duplicitous. If you go to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, you invariably hear a bunch of caricatures of those who disagree with conventional wisdom on science—most of which truly are quacks, but not always—and they pedantically emphasize how these alternative views are ‘not science’: they have beliefs that do not have peer-reviewed tests supporting a falsifiable hypothesis. …

When journalists talk about science in general this is usually a pretext for saying those who disagree with their favorite idea are wrong, because they are unscientific. … They then caricature their opponents, taking the most inarticulate advocates from the other side, and skewering their illogic. They then sit back and take take inordinate pride in their scientific pretensions, as if their selective discussion was objective. The fact is, most ‘big’ scientific issues do not conform to the scientific method, where one puts out testable hypotheses, rejecting ones that are falsified.

He’s right: “science” basically means “study”, and there just is no simple way for outsiders to tell who is studying something well.  The best way to study a subject depends a lot on the details of that subject.  We have a few rough guides to expertize, such as careful language, formalism, attention to detail, years of study, IQ, cleanliness, endorsement by respected folks, etc., but there is no surefire ’science’ checklist that can tell outsiders if research is good.

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Moral uncertainty – towards a solution?

By Nick Bostrom · January 1, 2009 4:48 pm · Comments (64)

It seems people are overconfident about their moral beliefs.  But how should one reason and act if one acknowledges that one is uncertain about morality – not just applied ethics but fundamental moral issues? if you don't know which moral theory is correct?

It doesn't seem you can simply plug your uncertainty into expected utility decision theory and crank the wheel; because many moral theories state that you should not always maximize expected utility.

Even if we limit consideration to consequentialist theories, it still is hard to see how to combine them in the standard decision theoretic framework.  For example, suppose you give X% probability to total utilitarianism and (100-X)% to average utilitarianism.  Now an action might add 5 utils to total happiness and decrease average happiness by 2 utils.  (This could happen, e.g. if you create a new happy person that is less happy than the people who already existed.)  Now what do you do, for different values of X?

The problem gets even more complicated if we consider not only consequentialist theories but also deontological theories, contractarian theories, virtue ethics, etc.  We might even throw various meta-ethical theories into the stew: error theory, relativism, etc.

I'm working on a paper on this together with my colleague Toby Ord.  We have some arguments against a few possible "solutions" that we think don't work.  On the positive side we have some tricks that work for a few special cases.  But beyond that, the best we have managed so far is a kind of metaphor, which we don't think is literally and exactly correct, and it is a bit under-determined, but it seems to get things roughly right and it might point in the right direction:

Continue Reading "Moral uncertainty – towards a solution?" »

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Trade With The Future

By Robin Hanson · December 14, 2008 9:30 am · Comments (28)

Richard Chappell rises to my challenge:

We're not doing the world any favours by populating the future with our primitive 20th(-21st) century minds. … So cryonicists must assume that it is better to extend an existing life than to create a new one. … Many people are (quite reasonably!) wedded to the particularities of their life and situation, … insofar as this newly awakened person would be enculturated into a new society, acquiring new values and life projects, they are effectively becoming a new and different person. But … then revival is unjustified: a better new life could be created 'from scratch', so to speak.  So cryonics is (at best) only justified for people whose central concerns and life projects could continue to be fruitfully pursued upon revival in a transhuman society.

Imagine a volcano is about to destroy an island and we go to local villages telling the natives boats are waiting at the shore, and urging people to leave without delay.  It would be odd to object saying their lives somewhere else will be different enough to make them different people, and so the world would be better off just raising new people to live in those other places.  Perhaps you just want us to remind people that maybe they would really rather just die than live such a different life, but even that seems a bit odd.

Continue Reading "Trade With The Future" »

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Animal experimentation: morally acceptable, or just the way things always have been?

By Rebecca Roache · November 18, 2008 9:00 pm · Comments (65)

Following the announcement last week that Oxford University’s controversial Biomedical Sciences building is now complete and will be open for business in mid-2009, the ethical issues surrounding the use of animals for scientific experimentation have been revisited in the media—see, for example, here , here, and here.

The number of animals used per year in scientific experiments worldwide has been estimated at 200 million—well in excess of the population of Brazil and over three times that of the United Kingdom. If we take the importance of an ethical issue to depend in part on how many subjects it affects, then, the ethics of animal experimentation at the very least warrants consideration alongside some of the most important issues in this country today, and arguably exceeds them in importance. So, what is being done to address this issue?

In the media, much effort seems to be devoted to discrediting concerns about animal suffering and reassuring people that animals used in science are well cared for, and relatively little effort is spent engaging with the ethical issues. However, it seems likely that no amount of reassurance about primate play areas and germ-controlled environments in Oxford’s new research lab will allay existing concerns about the acceptability of, for example, inducing heart failure in mice or inducing Parkinson’s disease in monkeys—particularly since scientists are not currently required to report exactly how much suffering their experiments cause to animals. Given the suffering involved, are we really sure that experimenting on animals is ethically justifiable?

In attempting to answer this question, it is disturbing to note some inconsistencies in popular views of science. Consider, for example, that by far the most common argument in favour of animal experimentation is that it is an essential part of scientific progress. As Oxford’s oft-quoted Professor Alastair Buchan reminds us, ‘You can’t make a head injury in a dish, you can’t create a stroke in a test tube, you can’t create a heart attack on a chip: it just doesn’t work’. Using animals, we are told, is essential if science is to progress. Since many people are apparently convinced by this argument, they must therefore believe that scientific progress is something worthwhile—that, at the very least, its value outweighs the suffering of experimental animals. And yet, at the same time, we are regularly confronted with the conflicting realisation that, far from viewing science as a highly valuable and worthwhile pursuit, the public is often disillusioned and exasperated with science. Recently, for example, people have expressed bafflement that scientists have spent time and money on seemingly trifling projects—such as working out the best way to swat a fly and discovering why knots form—and on telling us things that we already know: that getting rid of credit cards helps us spend less money, and that listening to very loud music can damage hearing. Why, when the public often seems to despair of science, do so many people appear to be convinced that scientific progress is so important that it justifies the suffering of millions of animals? Continue Reading "Animal experimentation: morally acceptable, or just the way things always have been?" »

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