Scott Fitzgerald once said, “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.” Not sure if that is an endorsement of incoherence and cultural drift, but maybe it is.
I can easily believe that we are so incoherent because of competing selection pressures. But why would that make me less interested in becoming coherent? I am not my genes, or my culture. Why should I care about adaption?
But I will either die, less adapted but more coherent, presumably without passing my coherence on to offspring or culture, for good or ill. Or I will live long thanks to technology, not thanks to adaption. Becoming coherent or living an examined life, seem to be things we do for ourselves, not affecting others that much.
But on a more object level note, and to your later points, being more coherent could be more adaptive than not. Genes and culture have a powerful but limited toolbox. They can build various drives into me that are pretty adaptive in many environments, but there's no reason to think they are optimal, or indeed don't get in each others way. Mostly I think becoming more conscious and deliberate really would allow society to respond better to rapidly changing circumstances. Though this might require something more institutionalized than the more personal journey of becoming more coherent. Or at least something would have to encourage people en masse to set out on the journey.
But eventually, assuming conscious thought can help in adaptation, people who consciously value being best adapted will come to dominate the gene pool. One 'trick' to valuing adaptation may be thinking that the universe is set up that way, and so see it as 'ordained'. Another 'trick' to convince oneself is to publicly commit to it. So here we are.
Why would you want to use such tricks? You are not your children or descendants. You are yourself. When you die, you die.
These statements about "adaptation" (which really is an excessively ambiguous word) don't come with a value system. They describe, coldly and dispassionately, what animals might populate the future. Cockroaches might be the winners.
If your response to that isn't, "hooray for cockroaches!" then you clearly value something other than "adaptation" - you value some particular qualities that make a human more valuable than a cockroach, independent of the "adaptiveness" of the organism. And it is these qualities that you should be talking about, not the red herring of "adaptiveness."
Cockroaches aren't the winners yet, so no one needs to respond to that outcome as if it has actually happened. That outcome would reveal something about nature that isn't currently apparent, so in the meantime it's best to proceed according to how things appear now.
Many of the qualities of humanity that are widely valued - such as the ability to communicate, cooperate, learn, record knowledge, etc. - are probably adaptively useful. Creatures that don't raise enough children disappear, so the universe values having enough children.
If you want to promote any values, and you don't like using adaptivity, you'll need to put up a different method or rationale of evaluating values.
> Cockroaches aren't the winners yet, so no one needs to respond to that outcome as if it has actually happened.
No, but you should have a consistent judgment about it in the hypothetical case that it does happen (as it well might, if humans nuke each other to extinction). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/counterfactuals/
A coherent value system needs to give coherent value judgments in hypothetical as well as actual scenarios.
> Creatures that don't raise enough children disappear, so the universe values having enough children.
Are you saying "the universe" values whatever things do not disappear? The universe will eventually enter heat death, in which all structures except for a diffuse gas of photons and leptons will disappear. Would you say the universe values the photons and leptons? Are photons and leptons the real evolutionary winners?
I would rather concern myself with what *humans* value - or more specifically with what I, personally, value, or more exactly what I rationally would value, if I thought about it enough. Because I value holding the values that I would hold if I were more informed.
> you'll need to put up a different method or rationale of evaluating values.
The ethics of reflective equilibrium. Values are preferences, and we *should* prefer, what we *would* prefer, if we rationally considered it for long enough and with enough factual evidence, so that we attained a reflective equilibrium.
You can't avoid having preferences, even if it's just for a certain type of hamburger. Preferences ought to be consistent with each other in the same way that beliefs ought to be consistent. Real people's preferences are often inconsistent; they may prefer the security of having done their work, but also prefer to read an article instead of doing their work. Wisdom is attained by resolving these inconsistencies, such as by eliminating the second preference.
I would love to chat with you and Geoffrey during the Natalism conference. Edit 2025-03-28: in the future I will not post up such comments in public because the conference organisers want paying attendees. Perhaps we will meet up some other time. In the interim, I saw a kind of funny light post on the ArXiV economics section on how AIs play a game called Musical Chairs. And you reference mental illness on Twitter in a way I struggle to understand.
The drive towards consistency and coherence led to the great achievements of Western civilization:
Propositions:
1. With 2500 years’ hindsight, the most distinctive aspect of Socratic dialogue, implicit in much of the Platonic corpus and to some extent in other Greek texts (e.g. Antigone), is the Socratic expectation that we should engage in a dialectic in which we all work towards consistency and coherence of our beliefs regardless of the possibly corrosive effects of such a process on existing standards of epistemological and social authority.
2. The most distinctive net positive contribution of western civilization is the Socratic norm of mutual rationality as described above:
A. When combined with the empiricism of Bacon and Galileo, the rational development of science is the result.
B. When combined with the assumption that every human being is equally deserving of dignity or possesses a soul of equal worth (an assumption foundational to Christianity), a rational commitment to universal human rights (e.g. the notion that slavery is immoral, or that human dignity should not be contingent on gender) is the result.
C. When directed towards an analysis of human institutions, an evolving understanding of political governance designed to protect the rights of the governed is a result (the U.S. Constitution being one such attempt, however flawed, ongoing innovations in voting design is another).
D. When the logical consistency driving Socratic inquiry is formalized in Aristotelian logic or the axiomatic mathematics of Euclid, and the logical consistency of non-Euclidean geometries are acknowledged 2000 years later, the foundations were laid for the formalization of logic that led to all of modern computing.
E. This is not to claim in any sense that science, human rights, humane political governance or logic are in any sense distinctively or necessarily Western or that Western versions of these institutions are in any sense distinctively superior to those that have evolved in cultures around the world for millennia. The only claim is that a common set of dialectic norms (which may have arisen sporadically elsewhere) has served as an engine of progress in a distinctive manner within Western civilization. This engine of progress has produced stunning outcomes over the centuries which have (mostly) benefited most of humanity.
In conclusion, Socratic norms of consistency and coherence regardless of their impact on authority have played a distinctive role in the development of Western institutions and thought that has been, on balance, remarkably positive.
That does not imply that the Socratic mode of living is optimal for all. I expect that in a full market in cultures, many or most will prefer living with a core dogma (often religious) that provides them with definitive answers to the meaning and purpose of life along with straightforward community behavioral norms that support their life direction.
But we do need an intellectual class committed to Socratic norms of consistency and coherence.
"The key question is the degree to which our confusion is selected for being adaptive."
There is no serious question of how much our inborn confusion IS selected for being adaptive; selection, I think, no longer operates on genes. The only question is how much it WAS selected for being adaptive. If it was highly selected for being adaptive, that would mean we evolved to be very unreasonable and unreflective in order to fit our ancestral environment. Almost certainly, the result would be that our confusion would be maladaptive in any environment other than our ancestral one, UNLESS there were enough social inertia or coordination to create a social environment in which that ancestral confusion would still be adaptive. As I think there has been.
"2. Current adaptive levels of confusion are much lower than they once were, as it is now easier to notice and point out inconsistencies."
What follows from "it is now easier to notice and point out inconsistencies" is that we are now more-aware of our confusion, not that lower levels of confusion are adaptive. I think the evidence is the opposite: the main criterion at present for becoming a member of the American nobility, which is to say, the elite class associated with our Ivy league schools plus Stanford, MIT, Wellesley, etc., is to be able to maintain a high level of internal inconsistency. They have an elaborate philosophical system, founded on Hegel's writings, and buttressed with a host of phenomenologist, proto-postmodernist, and racist ideas that were finally brought into a more-unified system in Germany in the 1930s, which dismisses conflicts between your beliefs and reality, using the beliefs that objective reality is unknowable, and that you can be true to your own reality and your "authentic" self not by using reason, but by relying on your own "lived experience" rather than statistics, and on your feelings, which derive from your racial essence.
I agree we should care more about understanding what is right. But one challenge is that it is very difficult to be coherent about why things that are “common sense” are right. Too often this means that when we are challenged by philosophical questions we end up discarding these “common sense” things because we can’t explain them coherently or defend them. The result ends up being increased verbal coherence and reduced confusion (assuming we align our actions with our verbal understanding) but also a world or a life that is manifestly worse off.
> If the main reason for our confused words, and deviations between words and acts, is the many strong conflicting selection pressures to say things that are inconsistent with each other and with our actions, then that calls into question the value of doing explicit analysis to find what is right
Exactly! Thus we should disregard all explicit analysis, including what you've said here.
... Oh, you meant yours would be an exception? Hmm?
Our languages – and presumably the thought processes they mirror – are combinatorial systems that enforce certain rules (e.g. subject-verb-object) but otherwise can't ensure that a valid sequence of tokens necessarily comprises a valid thought. It is easy to write down linguistically well-formed thoughts that, on closer inspection, are gibberish: What is the color of an electron? What does it feel like to be a rock? The universe hates me! What would I experience if I traveled at the speed of light? etc.
Some of these gibberish questions are more subtle: What came before the first thing that happened in the universe? Why does the universe exist? What will happen to my soul after I die? These most subtle of the gibberish questions tend to attract people – especially smart ones – like a crow is attracted by shiny trinkets. I would put many of the classic philosophical conundra into this category.
In some cases it's reasonable to say, "I don't think that sequence of words is a valid thought/question" and move on with one's life.
I suspect animals don't suffer existential angst. One reason humans aren't smarter might be that at some intelligence level we decide our lives don't have intrinsic meaning or purpose, and that the struggle of life isn't worthwhile. Existence can seem a burden. This may lead to suicide. Perhaps religion evolved as a counter to this.
Philosophers have struggled with meaning and purpose for millennia, without any obvious progress. As evolved creatures we shouldn't expect to have any such beyond biological reproduction. Other than meaning/purpose that we consciously choose for ourselves, or that are generated by our culture (I favor these).
Bostrom's recent _Beyond Utopia_ has some thoughts on this, esp. in the context of AI and "technological maturity", where even the instrumental purposes most of us have today (survival, caring for family, job functions...) are better addressed by purpose-built machines than by people. I don't think he has good answers either.
Scott Fitzgerald once said, “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.” Not sure if that is an endorsement of incoherence and cultural drift, but maybe it is.
I can easily believe that we are so incoherent because of competing selection pressures. But why would that make me less interested in becoming coherent? I am not my genes, or my culture. Why should I care about adaption?
Maladaptive things go away, don't have as many descendants.
But I will either die, less adapted but more coherent, presumably without passing my coherence on to offspring or culture, for good or ill. Or I will live long thanks to technology, not thanks to adaption. Becoming coherent or living an examined life, seem to be things we do for ourselves, not affecting others that much.
But on a more object level note, and to your later points, being more coherent could be more adaptive than not. Genes and culture have a powerful but limited toolbox. They can build various drives into me that are pretty adaptive in many environments, but there's no reason to think they are optimal, or indeed don't get in each others way. Mostly I think becoming more conscious and deliberate really would allow society to respond better to rapidly changing circumstances. Though this might require something more institutionalized than the more personal journey of becoming more coherent. Or at least something would have to encourage people en masse to set out on the journey.
Everybody goes away regardless of whether they have many descendants.
But eventually, assuming conscious thought can help in adaptation, people who consciously value being best adapted will come to dominate the gene pool. One 'trick' to valuing adaptation may be thinking that the universe is set up that way, and so see it as 'ordained'. Another 'trick' to convince oneself is to publicly commit to it. So here we are.
Why would you want to use such tricks? You are not your children or descendants. You are yourself. When you die, you die.
These statements about "adaptation" (which really is an excessively ambiguous word) don't come with a value system. They describe, coldly and dispassionately, what animals might populate the future. Cockroaches might be the winners.
If your response to that isn't, "hooray for cockroaches!" then you clearly value something other than "adaptation" - you value some particular qualities that make a human more valuable than a cockroach, independent of the "adaptiveness" of the organism. And it is these qualities that you should be talking about, not the red herring of "adaptiveness."
Cockroaches aren't the winners yet, so no one needs to respond to that outcome as if it has actually happened. That outcome would reveal something about nature that isn't currently apparent, so in the meantime it's best to proceed according to how things appear now.
Many of the qualities of humanity that are widely valued - such as the ability to communicate, cooperate, learn, record knowledge, etc. - are probably adaptively useful. Creatures that don't raise enough children disappear, so the universe values having enough children.
If you want to promote any values, and you don't like using adaptivity, you'll need to put up a different method or rationale of evaluating values.
> Cockroaches aren't the winners yet, so no one needs to respond to that outcome as if it has actually happened.
No, but you should have a consistent judgment about it in the hypothetical case that it does happen (as it well might, if humans nuke each other to extinction). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/counterfactuals/
A coherent value system needs to give coherent value judgments in hypothetical as well as actual scenarios.
> Creatures that don't raise enough children disappear, so the universe values having enough children.
Are you saying "the universe" values whatever things do not disappear? The universe will eventually enter heat death, in which all structures except for a diffuse gas of photons and leptons will disappear. Would you say the universe values the photons and leptons? Are photons and leptons the real evolutionary winners?
I would rather concern myself with what *humans* value - or more specifically with what I, personally, value, or more exactly what I rationally would value, if I thought about it enough. Because I value holding the values that I would hold if I were more informed.
> you'll need to put up a different method or rationale of evaluating values.
The ethics of reflective equilibrium. Values are preferences, and we *should* prefer, what we *would* prefer, if we rationally considered it for long enough and with enough factual evidence, so that we attained a reflective equilibrium.
You can't avoid having preferences, even if it's just for a certain type of hamburger. Preferences ought to be consistent with each other in the same way that beliefs ought to be consistent. Real people's preferences are often inconsistent; they may prefer the security of having done their work, but also prefer to read an article instead of doing their work. Wisdom is attained by resolving these inconsistencies, such as by eliminating the second preference.
I would love to chat with you and Geoffrey during the Natalism conference. Edit 2025-03-28: in the future I will not post up such comments in public because the conference organisers want paying attendees. Perhaps we will meet up some other time. In the interim, I saw a kind of funny light post on the ArXiV economics section on how AIs play a game called Musical Chairs. And you reference mental illness on Twitter in a way I struggle to understand.
The drive towards consistency and coherence led to the great achievements of Western civilization:
Propositions:
1. With 2500 years’ hindsight, the most distinctive aspect of Socratic dialogue, implicit in much of the Platonic corpus and to some extent in other Greek texts (e.g. Antigone), is the Socratic expectation that we should engage in a dialectic in which we all work towards consistency and coherence of our beliefs regardless of the possibly corrosive effects of such a process on existing standards of epistemological and social authority.
2. The most distinctive net positive contribution of western civilization is the Socratic norm of mutual rationality as described above:
A. When combined with the empiricism of Bacon and Galileo, the rational development of science is the result.
B. When combined with the assumption that every human being is equally deserving of dignity or possesses a soul of equal worth (an assumption foundational to Christianity), a rational commitment to universal human rights (e.g. the notion that slavery is immoral, or that human dignity should not be contingent on gender) is the result.
C. When directed towards an analysis of human institutions, an evolving understanding of political governance designed to protect the rights of the governed is a result (the U.S. Constitution being one such attempt, however flawed, ongoing innovations in voting design is another).
D. When the logical consistency driving Socratic inquiry is formalized in Aristotelian logic or the axiomatic mathematics of Euclid, and the logical consistency of non-Euclidean geometries are acknowledged 2000 years later, the foundations were laid for the formalization of logic that led to all of modern computing.
E. This is not to claim in any sense that science, human rights, humane political governance or logic are in any sense distinctively or necessarily Western or that Western versions of these institutions are in any sense distinctively superior to those that have evolved in cultures around the world for millennia. The only claim is that a common set of dialectic norms (which may have arisen sporadically elsewhere) has served as an engine of progress in a distinctive manner within Western civilization. This engine of progress has produced stunning outcomes over the centuries which have (mostly) benefited most of humanity.
In conclusion, Socratic norms of consistency and coherence regardless of their impact on authority have played a distinctive role in the development of Western institutions and thought that has been, on balance, remarkably positive.
https://michaelstrong.substack.com/p/the-moral-and-intellectual-value
That does not imply that the Socratic mode of living is optimal for all. I expect that in a full market in cultures, many or most will prefer living with a core dogma (often religious) that provides them with definitive answers to the meaning and purpose of life along with straightforward community behavioral norms that support their life direction.
But we do need an intellectual class committed to Socratic norms of consistency and coherence.
"The key question is the degree to which our confusion is selected for being adaptive."
There is no serious question of how much our inborn confusion IS selected for being adaptive; selection, I think, no longer operates on genes. The only question is how much it WAS selected for being adaptive. If it was highly selected for being adaptive, that would mean we evolved to be very unreasonable and unreflective in order to fit our ancestral environment. Almost certainly, the result would be that our confusion would be maladaptive in any environment other than our ancestral one, UNLESS there were enough social inertia or coordination to create a social environment in which that ancestral confusion would still be adaptive. As I think there has been.
"2. Current adaptive levels of confusion are much lower than they once were, as it is now easier to notice and point out inconsistencies."
What follows from "it is now easier to notice and point out inconsistencies" is that we are now more-aware of our confusion, not that lower levels of confusion are adaptive. I think the evidence is the opposite: the main criterion at present for becoming a member of the American nobility, which is to say, the elite class associated with our Ivy league schools plus Stanford, MIT, Wellesley, etc., is to be able to maintain a high level of internal inconsistency. They have an elaborate philosophical system, founded on Hegel's writings, and buttressed with a host of phenomenologist, proto-postmodernist, and racist ideas that were finally brought into a more-unified system in Germany in the 1930s, which dismisses conflicts between your beliefs and reality, using the beliefs that objective reality is unknowable, and that you can be true to your own reality and your "authentic" self not by using reason, but by relying on your own "lived experience" rather than statistics, and on your feelings, which derive from your racial essence.
I agree we should care more about understanding what is right. But one challenge is that it is very difficult to be coherent about why things that are “common sense” are right. Too often this means that when we are challenged by philosophical questions we end up discarding these “common sense” things because we can’t explain them coherently or defend them. The result ends up being increased verbal coherence and reduced confusion (assuming we align our actions with our verbal understanding) but also a world or a life that is manifestly worse off.
> If the main reason for our confused words, and deviations between words and acts, is the many strong conflicting selection pressures to say things that are inconsistent with each other and with our actions, then that calls into question the value of doing explicit analysis to find what is right
Exactly! Thus we should disregard all explicit analysis, including what you've said here.
... Oh, you meant yours would be an exception? Hmm?
> Here once could you adaptive value
I think you need to rewrite this for it to have a clear meaning. Did you mean to write something like "Here once again you could use adaptive value"?
Fixed.
Our languages – and presumably the thought processes they mirror – are combinatorial systems that enforce certain rules (e.g. subject-verb-object) but otherwise can't ensure that a valid sequence of tokens necessarily comprises a valid thought. It is easy to write down linguistically well-formed thoughts that, on closer inspection, are gibberish: What is the color of an electron? What does it feel like to be a rock? The universe hates me! What would I experience if I traveled at the speed of light? etc.
Some of these gibberish questions are more subtle: What came before the first thing that happened in the universe? Why does the universe exist? What will happen to my soul after I die? These most subtle of the gibberish questions tend to attract people – especially smart ones – like a crow is attracted by shiny trinkets. I would put many of the classic philosophical conundra into this category.
In some cases it's reasonable to say, "I don't think that sequence of words is a valid thought/question" and move on with one's life.
I focused on "Why am I doing any of this?" Does that seem gibberish to you?
I suspect animals don't suffer existential angst. One reason humans aren't smarter might be that at some intelligence level we decide our lives don't have intrinsic meaning or purpose, and that the struggle of life isn't worthwhile. Existence can seem a burden. This may lead to suicide. Perhaps religion evolved as a counter to this.
Philosophers have struggled with meaning and purpose for millennia, without any obvious progress. As evolved creatures we shouldn't expect to have any such beyond biological reproduction. Other than meaning/purpose that we consciously choose for ourselves, or that are generated by our culture (I favor these).
Bostrom's recent _Beyond Utopia_ has some thoughts on this, esp. in the context of AI and "technological maturity", where even the instrumental purposes most of us have today (survival, caring for family, job functions...) are better addressed by purpose-built machines than by people. I don't think he has good answers either.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/bostroms-deep-utopia?utm_source=publication-search
typo: drifting int