The meanings of the meaning of life

by Massimo Pigliucci

I just finished reading the excellent collection Philosophy and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, edited by Nicholas Joll, a must for anyone who has ever been captivated by Douglas Adams’ comic genius and its scientific and philosophical undertones. Here I am going to briefly comment on a single table that appears in the last essay of the volume, “The funniest of all improbable worlds — Hitchhiker’s as philosophical satire,” by Alexander Pawlak and Joll himself. It’s a table about several potential meanings of the phrase “the meaning of life” and how they are related to each other.

Of course, a major feature of the plot of the Guide is precisely our heroes’ quest for the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. The answer turns out to be “42,” at least according to Deep Thought, a supercomputer constructed by an alien race for the sole purpose of answering said question. When the somewhat disappointed builders of Deep Thought asked what sense should they make of such a superficially meaningless and preposterously simple answer, they were told that the real quest had just begun. You see, the big prize is not, as so many had assumed, the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. The real deal is to find out the question that made sense of the answer, 42. But even Deep Thought did not have the computational power to uncover the fundamental question, so a much bigger computer, running for much longer, should be built to accomplish the new task. That computer eventually became known to human beings as “Earth,” and it was destroyed just five minutes before it achieved its objective, for the mundane purpose of building an interstellar bypass to ease local traffic (the plans to do so, and the forms to complain about, had been locked in a basement on Alpha Centauri for 50 years). If you want to know the rest of the story, you better get going reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Mostly Harmless, Life, the Universe and Everything, and So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, which all together comprise the standard Adams canon in this respect.

But back to Pawlak and Joll’s essay in the volume exploring the philosophical underpinnings of the Guide. The authors set out to explore the possible meanings of the above mentioned ultimate question of life, the universe and everything (henceforth, UQLU&E), together with some of the answers that philosophers and scientists have come up with so far.

To begin with, according to Pawlak and Joll, UQLU&E could mean that one is interested in life’s character. This could be that of a comedy, a tragedy, or an unintelligible farce; or it could be about suffering, or struggle; or perhaps the character of life is just whatever you make of it. Needless to say, my strong intuition is that the character of existence is whatever we make of it, because there is no independent intelligent agency that might have set things in motion for any particular reason (I do occasionally entertain the so-called simulation hypothesis, which would entail a different answer, but I guess I don’t take such an alternative seriously enough for sustained consideration — at least not without a couple of martinis).

Naturally, if one is a religious believer of some sort one also thinks that the character of life is likely to be one of the others mentioned by Pawlak and Joll, depending on your taste in matters of gods and the supernatural (if you are Christian, you may go for suffering; if a stoic perhaps for struggle; if an Ancient Greek comedian,  for comedy, and if a tragedian, for tragedy). The point is that the sort of answer you pick for the character of existence, following Pawlak and Joll’s reasoning, is entailed by a particular choice for the second meaning of the question: life’s cause.

Choices on offer here include god(s), some combination of scientific explanation (Big Bang followed by Darwinian evolution — Pawlak and Joll here seem for some reason to think that these two are independent alternatives, but they are clearly not), or “something else.” It is hard to imagine what a third alternative might look like (again, except for the Tron-like scenario offered up by the simulation hypothesis!), so we really have just two competitors — though they do come in a number of possible flavors: supernaturalistic or scientific explanation. Again, it will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I think this is another slam dunk, in favor of the latter possibility. This is for a number of reasons, but the fundamental ones include: a) a “supernatural explanation” is really an oxymoron, as invoking supernatural forces explains precisely nothing; b) there is no evidential or conceptual reason on earth why anyone should take the existence of gods seriously; and c) we do have a number of very good, if always incomplete and revisable, scientific accounts of the causes of the universe.

Which brings us to Pawlak and Joll’s third meaning of the UQLU&E: the purpose of life. The link the authors suggest is that the cause (second meaning) is explained by the purpose, but I actually think they've  gotten things exactly backwards here: once we agree on a most likely cause for life, the universe and everything, then we can reason about the possible options concerning its purpose. These options include some sort of assignment by a higher being, a type of purpose that can be found or discovered by us, or a purpose that can be made up or constructed by us. Notice that these three possibilities really are containers of sorts, each representing a family of possible answers. For instance, even if we agree that the cause of the universe is the creative act of a god, and that that implies a particular purpose for us that was present in the mind of that god when it created the world, it doesn’t follow that the purpose in question is of any particular type. Depending on the (unknown, and likely unknowable) character of said god, our purpose could vary from mere entertainment to the fulfillment of a cosmically narcissistic desire for attention. (Similarly, if the simulation hypothesis is correct, we may turn out to exist for the programmers’ entertainment, or perhaps to satisfy their scientific-philosophical curiosity about what happens in different “possible worlds.”)

My preferred answer here is, not surprisingly, that we make up the purpose of life as we go, and that we have a (not unlimited) number of options. More specifically, I think that a good way to think about the purpose of one’s life is within the virtue ethical framework first established by Aristotle and other Ancient Greek philosophers: that purpose is to live a eudaimonic, i.e., a morally right flourishing existence. Other options provided by other philosophies include, of course, the existentialist idea of living an authentic life, the stoic discovery of the distinction between what one can and cannot do, the Epicurean quest for ataraxia (similar to the Buddhist one for Enlightenment) and so on. The issue of the purpose of existence is an excellent reason to study philosophy, just like the issue of the cause of our existence is a splendid reason to study science.

Finally, Pawlak and Joll bring us to the fourth interpretation of the UQLU&E: what is life’s import, i.e., what should one do with one’s life? They vaguely say that this latter sense of the UQLU&E is related to the other three, because those three have “some relevance” to the fourth one. But I think the relationship is actually more specific than that: the issue of the import of life follows directly from the issue of the meaning of life.

Pawlak and Joll here provide a panoply of choices to their readers. Perhaps the import of life is that we should not bother to do anything (Camus’ famous contention that suicide is the most important question in philosophy comes to mind), or we should just live and let live (not the most awful advice, really), or strive to minimize suffering, or to create beautiful things; or perhaps we should think of life itself as a work of art, to labor on throughout our existence; or maybe we should concentrate on increasing our knowledge, or striving to achieve “oneness” with all things (whatever that means), or finally to “do what thou wilt, and that is the whole of the law.”

Once again, this is the sort of quest for which philosophy will equip you well. Indeed, you may have recognized a number of philosophical precepts in the above list: some sense of becoming one with all things is a major goal of Buddhism and other mystical approaches; to minimize suffering is one of the laudable goals of a number of religious traditions; to treat your life as a work in progress, as well as to use it to increase your knowledge is the eudaimonic ideal mentioned above. The point is that the answer to the question of purpose is a matter of one’s theoretical philosophy, while the issue of the import is best treated as one of practical philosophy, and the two are obviously intimately connected.

The nice table that Pawlak and Joll have put together may also serve to illustrate one of my recurring interests on this blog: the exploration of the nature of the relationship between science and philosophy. I have said above that the cause aspect of the UQLU&E is best dealt with by science, while discussions of both purpose and import are more clearly philosophical in nature. Notice, then, that the availability of a sound scientific account of the causes of the universe does favor certain philosophical approaches to purpose and import and disfavor others. But the scientific answers strongly underdetermine the philosophical options on offer. That is, if we agree that the universe came about because of the Big Bang, and that human life is the result of a process of Darwinian evolution, we can exclude some options under purpose and import, but we are still left with pretty much no guidance on the remaining alternatives. Does the choice of a eudaimonic life follow from the Big Bang? Clearly not. Is a quest to minimize suffering, or to become one with all things logically entailed by Darwinian evolution? Again, not at all. So the scientific answers pertinent to some aspects of the UQLU&E constrain, but by no means pinpoint, the philosophical answers, reflecting what I think is a general picture of the relationship between the two disciplines.

What, then, is the status of the first of Pawlak and Joll’s considered meanings of the question of meaning, the one concerning character? As we have seen, they suggest that life’s character might be explained by the causes of life, and I think they are correct. Since I prefer the scientific causal explanation, I am left with only the option that the character of life is whatever we make of it. But that, in turn, is a philosophically broad container which, again, is underdetermined by the underlying scientific answer, thereby again fitting the general scheme just proposed. As Douglas Adams would say, so long, and thanks for all the fish.

I just don’t get it. One more on Mary and the Zombies

by Massimo Pigliucci

Can science explain consciousness?, asks a recent New York Times column by philosopher Gary Gutting. Well, it depends on what one means by “explain,” “consciousness,” and “can.” No, I’m not trying to play semantic games, but I keep being frustrated by philosophers who think they have discovered something profound, while in fact they are just playing with words. I don’t get it, and it doesn’t help my life long quest to bridge the gap between science and philosophy, since it makes it far too easy for scientists to mock and dismiss the latter.

Gutting’s column is about two classic thought experiments in the philosophy of mind: one concerns Mary the neuroscientist who grows up without color perception and then suddenly experiences color; the other regards the possibility of beings, “Zombies,” who look and talk like you and me and yet have no consciousness, nobody’s “up there” in their brains, so to speak. The first thought experiment is due to Frank Jackson, the second to David Chalmers.

Both situations have been discussed at Rationally Speaking before (see links above), and Gutting summarizes the basics of each in his post too. What I am concerned with here is what we are supposed to take from these philosophical exercises, particularly when it comes to the question of what science can and cannot (potentially, if not now) tell us about consciousness.

Here is what Gutting suggests we should learn from Jackson’s and Chalmers’ speculations, respectively:

At that moment, Mary for the first time experiences the color red and now knows what red looks like. Her experience, it seems clear, has taught her a fact about color that she did not know before. But before this she knew all the physical facts about color. Therefore, there is a fact about color that is not physical. Physical science cannot express all the facts about color.

If a zombie-twin is logically possible, it follows that my experiences involve something beyond my physical makeup. For my zombie-twin shares my entire physical makeup, but does not share my experiences. This, however, means that physical science cannot express all the facts about my experiences.

Let’s unpack both conclusions carefully, starting with Mary. The (apparent) force of Jackson’s hypothetical situation relies on an equivocation about the word “fact.” Mary had studied all the scientific facts about how the brain works, but those facts do not equate with having the first person experience of actually seeing color, just like I can study all the facts involved in, say, learning how to swim, and yet feel surprised by my body’s reactions the first time I actually touch the water and begin to swim. Mary’s experience is not a “fact” in the same sense as a scientific understanding of sensorial experience is made of “facts” [1]. What is happening to Mary is that her understanding of what it means to see color is being augmented: before she began perceiving color, her understanding was limited to scientific facts; afterwards it is being complemented by the experience of actually seeing color. To say that science cannot “explain” the latter is, again, to equivocate on what it means to “explain.” Scientists actually have a pretty decent, if partial, explanation of color perception, one that details all the neural components that have to be in place for such experience to take place. But when we switch to the first-person feeling of perception we consider something that is, by its very nature, not a matter of scientific explanation at all. In other words, to charge science with failure of “explaining” first person experience, when one really means the feeling resulting from, not the mechanism that allows, such experiences, it so make a category mistake.

What Jackson’s thought experiment shows is not that science fails to explain consciousness, but rather that there are certain phenomena that are simply outside the domain of science (I know, I know, in some circles such a possibility is considered heresy!), such as first person experiences. To confuse the two would be like blaming the New York Yankees for never having won an NBA tournament: of course not, they are a baseball team, not a basketball team.

Now to Chalmers’ zombies: contra Gutting’s summary above, nothing concerning the physical world follows at all from considering my the possibility of my zombie-twin. That is because at best Chalmers has shown that there is no logical contradiction between talking and interacting like a human while at the same time not having conscious experiences. But logical constraints are too weak to tell us much about physical constraints, and even the latter only set boundaries within which biological phenomena evolve in part as the result of contingent events. What Chalmers (and Gutting, and several others) don’t seem to understand is the simple proposition that the problem of consciousness is a biological, not a logical one. In a sense, this too is an issue of category mistake: confusing logical with physical and contingent possibilities. In this case too it isn’t that philosophy shows that science cannot do something, but rather that the domain of science does not extend to that of logic, which is eminently philosophical. (Of course, scientific reasoning is still bounded by logic.) Yet another case of blaming the Yankees for something they couldn’t possibly do...

None of the above should be construed as a dismissal of thought experiments (which, incidentally, have a place also in science), but rather as a clarification of what thought experiments are about. Hypothetical scenarios simply do not have the power to discover new facts about the world. If that were the case, then we wouldn’t need empirical science, or at the very least the role of empirical science would be greatly diminished in comparison with what it actually is (I’m looking at you, string theorists...). Rather, thought experiments are helpful to bring to the fore our assumptions about certain matters, as well as to unpack the logical entailments of those assumptions. When well done, they represent good philosophy (or good science, depending on the experiment). But when one uses them beyond their scope to reach grand conclusions about what practitioners of another field can and cannot do, one ends up just looking silly.

————

[1] Just like, say, a mathematical “object” is not the same kind of thing as a physical object like my laptop computer. And that’s quite irrespective of one’s opinions on the ontology of mathematical objects.

Disobedience Succeeds Essence

by Steve Neumann

There is much that life esteems more highly than life itself... — Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Jean-Paul Sartre distilled his existentialism into the maxim “existence precedes essence.” He meant that the human being has no predetermined nature, divinely-ordained or otherwise, and that each human being is solely responsible for defining herself. Sartre said that the first principle of (his) existentialism is that “man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”

University of Washington psychology professor David Barash recently published a nice meditation on the notes of consonance between evolution and existentialism in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Barash ultimately concludes that a 

...philosophy of “human meaning’ can coexist quite well with a science of “genetic influence.” 

Happily, Barash’s notion of human meaning includes the idea that, even though we are completely natural creatures shaped by evolutionary processes, we still retain a unique human freedom. I say happily because Barash doesn’t conclude that humans have contra-causal free will, nor does he jump to the opposite, fatalistic conclusion that no matter what we do, the outcome will be the predetermined same, so why bother. His idea of human agency is roughly the same as mine. As he says:

Within a remarkable range, our evolutionary bequeathal is wildly permissive.

I like Barash’s word choice of “wildly” here. Ironically, though much of my free time is spent thinking about how to persuade people that the difference between us and other animals — even dogs — is a difference of degree and not of kind, I often worry about us forgetting how dissimilar we are to all other animals, at least in one significant regard: that is, freedom. And what I like most about Barash’s article is the notion of freedom as the freedom to disobey. As Agent Smith puts it to Neo in the second Matrix film:

Smith: I killed you, Mister Anderson, I watched you die — with a certain satisfaction, I might add. And then something happened; something that I knew was impossible, but it happened anyway: you destroyed me, Mister Anderson. Afterward, I knew the rules, I understood what I was supposed to do but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was compelled to stay, compelled to disobey. And now here I stand because of you, Mister Anderson, because of you I’m no longer an agent of the system, because of you I’ve changed — I’m unplugged — a new man, so to speak, like you, apparently free.

Neo: Congratulations.

Agent Smith disobeyed his programmed nature and found out what he really wanted: in his case, the destruction of the Matrix (and of all life, unfortunately). Barash also specifically argues for a type of contra-natural disobedience:

On the basis of evolutionary existentialism, I would therefore like to suggest the heretical and admittedly paradoxical notion that, in fact, we need to teach more disobedience. Not only disobedience to political and social authority but especially disobedience to some of our troublesome genetic inclinations.

Disobedience has a long history in the human species. Even the ancient Hebrews, it can be argued, intuited the need for disobedience by sneaking the wily, skeptical serpent into their creation story. They had their god include the serpent in that paradisal garden, where his new and naive human creations were within arm’s reach of the fruit of both god-like knowledge and immortality. Now, the common Christian response is that God wanted his creations to have the possibility of disobedience — that is, free will — to freely love Him or reject Him, and which would presumably have more authenticity thereby. But I don’t think having the freedom of disobedience need be interpreted in terms of love, in a religious context or not. Disobedience, in my opinion, is first and foremost a route to knowledge, particularly self-knowledge. And it’s self-knowledge the existentialists have traditionally been most concerned with, seeing how it leads to one’s having the ability to define oneself. But Sartre (and existentialists in general) countenances an extreme freedom of the will as the driver behind the quest for self-knowledge, so much so that he assigns ultimate responsibility — and blame. As he says:

If people throw up to us our works of fiction in which we write about people who are soft, weak, cowardly, and sometimes even downright bad, it’s not because these people are soft, weak, cowardly, or bad; because if we were to say... that they are that way because of heredity, the workings of the environment, society, because of biological or psychological determinism, people would be assured.

As a quick aside, I think it’s interesting to note here that Sartre brings up this particular objection back in the cultural backdrop of 1946. It sounds more like the pejorative Twinkie Defenses of the late 1970’s and onward. But I digress. Sartre goes on to say that

...when the existentialist writes about a coward, he says that this coward is responsible for his cowardice... he’s like that because he has made himself a coward by his acts.

From a certain perspective, this is undeniably true: a human being can’t become anything without acting in some sense; but the real crux of the issue is how responsible the individual is, if at all, for who she has become. Like Barash, I think existentialism of a certain strain is compatible with our condition as evolved biological animals. And it’s the idea of disobeying our nature that gives us both the opportunity and the freedom to become what we want. As Nietzsche put it in an early fragment (1872), “Homer’s Contest”:

When one speaks of humanity, the idea is fundamental that this is something that separates and distinguishes man from nature. In reality, however, there is no such separation: “natural” qualities and those properly called “human” are indivisibly grown together. Man, in his highest and most noble capacities, is wholly nature... Those of his abilities which are awesome and considered inhuman are perhaps the fertile soil out of which alone all humanity... can grow.

Here, as I see it, the concept of “humanity” is the result of the exploitation of the “wildly permissive” freedom bequeathed us by our evolutionary history, as Barash notes. The individual human being needn’t be metaphysically free in the existentialist’s sense in order to cultivate her animal nature. And while it may be prudent to assign a certain degree of responsibility for the way people “create” themselves, I don’t agree that the coward, for instance, has made himself into a coward on purpose, so to speak. So, for me, something like cowardice isn’t necessarily a fault of the individual so much as the result of a weak will. And I think one’s will can be educated and strengthened, because even the weak-willed individual has, thanks to the evolutionary bequeathal, the freedom to disobey his essence. Of course, the question is exactly how does that happen — how does the weak-willed person educate and strengthen his will? Traditionally, various modes of asceticism have been employed. But there is also a good amount of simple luck involved: one may or may not be exposed to an array of interpersonal and environmental experiences that likewise may or may not sway one’s motivation to do or not do something conducive to educating or strengthening one’s will. 

In a note from 1887 Nietzsche had this to say about asceticism:

I also want to make asceticism natural again: in place of the aim of denial, the aim of strengthening...

To make asceticism natural again is to expropriate it away from its religious roots, where the goal was to tame the human animal and make it obedient to both celestial and terrestrial authority, and now to use it to educate one’s will by imposing restraints on one’s genetically-influenced impulses. So, in a sense, making asceticism natural again involves paradoxically making one’s nature obedient in some ways in order to disobey that nature in other ways. And these other ways relate to the existential quest for human meaning and self-creation. I suppose you could also look at it as a more refined type of asceticism: instead of bludgeoning one’s entire natural endowment into submission, one can pick and choose which impulses to quash and which ones to amplify. And even if one’s life circumstances are stifled or constricted, one still possesses the capacity for disobedience, or what we might call “revolt” in Albert Camus’ parlance. 

In Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, we see that the absurd Greek hero is  condemned to “ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight”; and Camus explicitly ties Sisyphus’ plight to that of the proletarian worker of his day. Revolt or “scorn” at circumstances is still possible even if one has no hope for a different future. And while Camus seems to believe that even freedom from creating meaning in one’s life is a good thing when seen in a certain light, I think you could also argue that the hour where Sisyphus contemplates his fate, which is what Camus says interests him most, is the timeless moment in which meaning can be created. Our own Sisyphean disposition can allow us to contemplate all kinds of strategies and “games” while toiling at moving one’s rock to the top of the mountain. In fact, in a way we could play with the existentialist’s own phrasing and say that one is condemned to be creative. Consider this: the human brain is a veritable whim-generating machine; we can’t stop thoughts from occurring to us, nor can we stop thinking altogether. When Camus says that “the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart” and that therefore we must “imagine Sisyphus happy,” I would say that it is precisely the brain’s propensity for spontaneous activity that is the source of the human — and even animal — impulse to play. 

What is play? The essence of play is, to my mind, the compulsion to experiment and explore; or, in other words, to revolt and discover. Not only does play merely pass the time, but the imagination can create worlds within worlds. Consider what the human imagination has produced thus far: philosophies, religions, artistic vistas, staggering technologies, etc. As William Blake noted: “what is now proved was once only imagined.” The act of imagining something new does a certain violence to what already exists: it destroys, betrays or at least dispenses with what has already been established. In a sense, the imagination disobeys the essence of what already exists, the accumulated and codified mores that are generally accepted. Combining the imagination and a revised asceticism involves a great deal of courage: the courage to disobey interpersonal, cultural, and biologically-determined patterns of thought and behavior, thereby incurring or inviting the wrath and opprobrium of one’s milieu — and possibly even of Nature herself.

And psychological harm is not the only danger: just as Nietzsche said that life oftentimes values more than existence itself, one may very well lose one’s life through stratagems of disobedience. But isn’t the value of one’s life, the meaning of one’s life, more important than the mere duration of it? Essence doesn’t precede existence, and neither does existence precede essence; they’re contemporaneous and they grow or perish together. But disobedience, properly executed, succeeds both essence and existence. 

I’ll leave you with our modern-day, popular culture Sisyphus, Neo, near the end of the final installment of The Matrix Trilogy:

Smith: Why, Mr. Anderson, why? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you’re fighting for something, for more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom, or truth — perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson, vagaries of perception, temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose — and all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself. Although, only a human mind can invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson, you must know it by now. You can’t win, it’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson, why — why you persist??

Neo: Because I choose to.

Massimo's Picks

* It is surprisingly difficult, no, make that currently impossible, to buy a fair trade smart phone.

* The concept of epistemically transformative experiences, applied to whether or not to have children.

* Why assessment exercises in higher education are either tautological or lead to an infinite regress. Remind me to tell my Dean... Oh, wait, already done!

* Are Neil deGrasse Tyson and the American Museum of Natural History afraid of a philosopher? It sure looks like it...

* The Masters of our society have a visceral distaste of public education and the common good. Time to get rid of the Masters?

* A majority of Austrians think the Nazi would be elected if they were allowed to run today. Thereby demonstrating that human beings really do learn precisely nothing from history.

* The right of Israel to exist should not be questioned, but the right of a Jewish state to exist very much should.

* Why libertarians are profoundly wrong about the existence and functioning of markets.

* The real life Frankensteins that inspired Mary Shelley.

* A neuroscientist talks about neuro-hype.

* Why Ray Kurzweil's new book is a piece of crap, part I.

* Why Ray Kurzweil's new book is a piece of crap, part II.

The Heuristics of the Hyperhuman

by Steve Neumann

How many men at this hour are living in a state of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day? Is it not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom? — Samuel Butler, Erewhon: or, Over the Range (1872)

As a guide dog mobility instructor, I’ve had the opportunity over the years to attend the annual conventions of the two largest membership organizations of and for the blind in the United States: the American Council of the Blind and the National Federation of the Blind. It was at the 2006 convention of the latter organization where I watched futurist Ray Kurzweil unveil his K-NFB Reader that provides portable text-to-speech technology for the blind. At the time, I had read Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines, and had just finished reading his The Singularity is Near. 

I’ve always been a fan of science fiction, ever since I read Asimov’s Foundation series in junior high school. I think what appeals to me most about science fiction is the fecund ingenuity and unabashed experimentalism. So Kurzweil’s writing resonated on that level. And truth be told, I was pretty much on board with many of his predictions about future technology, if not with the time frame for them. But I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of the Singularity itself.

I assume readers of this blog are familiar with the concept of the Singularity, but here’s a simple definition just in case: the creation by humans of a superintelligence that exceeds our own so significantly that we can’t even fathom what will happen after it occurs. Or as Sheldon Cooper put it, “when man will be able to transfer his consciousness into machines, and achieve immortality.” Whatever the merits or demerits of the concept of the Singularity may be, there has been an increasing amount of coverage of it and its implications, primarily with regard to “existential risk.” One of the standard bearers of the futurist camp, Nick Bostrom, was recently interviewed about his work at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University; philosopher Russell Blackford at Talking Philosophy posted about the forthcoming book The Transhumanist Reader, for which he himself contributed a chapter; and author Matt Ridley gave his assent to Kurzweil’s latest book, How to Create a Mind, in the Wall Street Journal. However, philosopher Colin McGinn has a rather scathing review of How to Create a Mind.

The overall transhumanist consensus, it seems clear to me, is that the Singularity is a foregone conclusion, with discrepancies within the movement only concerning the timing of it. It eerily reminds me of talk of the Rapture when I was growing up in a fundamentalist Christian church: the Rapture would be sudden and indescribable. And while futurists are optimistic about the progress researchers have been making in the two most relevant Singularity disciplines of computer science and neuroscience, they’re much less optimistic about the potential consequences of the event. Their primary concern is about risks. As Bostrom put it in the above linked interview in Aeon:

[these are risks] for which there are no geological case studies, and no human track record of survival. These risks arise from human technology, a force capable of introducing entirely new phenomena into the world.

And thinkers like Bostrom believe a superintelligence is precisely the kind of phenomenon that could easily introduce them. They’re not simply referring to things humans have already introduced or are about to introduce into the world, like dangerous new materials or superbugs for which we have no natural biological defenses. Bostrom and others are trying to think past these more commonplace maladies.  

The main motivation for attempting to come up with strategies and remedies for hard-to-imagine existential threats, potential species-ending threats, seems to be primarily a moral one. Bostrom again: 

Toby Ord is wrestling with a formidable philosophical dilemma. He is trying to figure out whether our moral obligations to future humans outweigh those we have to humans that are alive and suffering right now.

Even if the Singularity-Rapture doesn’t come to fruition as expected, the prospect of significant existential change can be used as a sort of case study for the moral evolution of our species. 

We humans seem to have enough trouble trying to work out the moral calculus involved with current utilitarian concerns, even within our own countries. Additionally, Americans in particular seem to have difficulty walking the line between obligations to ourselves and obligations to others, between the individual’s interests and those of society. 

And how do we fulfill our perceived obligations to others? I suppose there are two ways: actively and passively; or, in other words, performing actions that benefit others (+A), and refraining from performing actions that harm others (-A). For simplicity’s sake, +A generally include the sacrifice of one’s time, effort and material resources, or any combination of the three, for the benefit of others. One may have plenty of time but be incapable of physical effort and possessed of no significant material resources; or, conversely, one might not have the time but have a surfeit of material wealth. And so forth. But even when we benefit others, we naturally adjust the variables in our moral equation with a view to balancing it. The wealthiest philanthropists don’t give away all their wealth; the poorest philanthropists don’t give away all their time (unless, of course, it’s their job and they’re supported by the charity of yet others; or they actually work for a charity). So even when we attempt to fulfill our duties to others we seem to be mindful of fulfilling our duties to ourselves. 

What I’m getting at here is that, while I may agree with Bostrom, et al., that it is certainly wise to spend time pondering potential existential threats and their solutions, I think it would also be wise to spend an equal amount of time pondering how to prepare ourselves morally and psychologically for future exigencies. Within the context of this topic, however, I would regard morality and psychology to be essentially synonyms. 

I consider myself to be a type of virtue ethicist, though other virtue ethicists may not consider my taxonomy of virtues to be virtues. As a virtue ethicist, I’m concerned with the individual first, and then with others; but I would note that this focus is closer to a Nietzschean conception rather than the more popular (at least among politicians of a certain temperament) Objectivist one. I do think that one has to be a certain sort of person before one can effect any kind of durable change in others or in circumstances. And while I believe that a philosophical education is essential to this end, I’m not advocating an oligarchy of philosopher kings, Zeus forbid. And I should also point out that I don’t necessarily agree with thinkers like Savulescu and Persson who argue for “moral bioenhancement” where 

[o]ur knowledge of human biology – in particular of genetics and neurobiology – is beginning to enable us to directly affect the biological or physiological bases of human motivation, either through drugs, or through genetic selection or engineering, or by using external devices that affect the brain or the learning process.

I do agree, however, that moral education can “enable us to act better for distant people, future generations, and non-human animals.” But at what is this education aimed, and which normative approach is preferred or being deployed — deontological, consequentialist, or virtue-ethical? 

The predominant approach seems to be consequentialist. In other words, futurist thinkers are asking what the consequences of our current decisions regarding the transhumanist movement will be for posterity. As a result, their efforts are focused on the nature of the new technologies themselves. For example (and in its simplest form), they’re asking questions like, How can we program artificial intelligence to have a favorable regard for biological human existence? While I think this is something to be concerned with to some degree, I’d like to see an equal focus on individual character.

Here I’d like to make a distinction between the Transhuman and what I’ll call the Hyperhuman. The former is best represented by the essays in The Transhumanist Reader, noted at the beginning of this post; while the latter is closer to Nietzsche’s conception of the Übermensch. The conception of the Hyperhuman is similar to Nietzsche’s in that one must be able and willing to cultivate one’s psychological “raw material” into something better, where “better” means “overcoming oneself.” The idea of overcoming oneself is, at least in my opinion, the essence of morality. 

For brevity’s sake, to overcome oneself is to subdue or sublimate one’s animal nature into something more humane; and this, to my mind, involves engaging with the uniquely human projects of philosophy, certain forms of asceticism, and the various arts. It’s a little difficult to say with more precision exactly how the conception of the Hyperhuman is similar to Nietzsche’s because, while he certainly had a project in the works devoted to fleshing out the details of his vision of the Übermensch, he lost his mental faculties and died before he could finish it. So all we have left are his notes about “discipline and breeding” and the like, and often contradictory secondary literature purporting to know what he would have gone on to think and to say. 

From what he had published in his lifetime, however, it seems Nietzsche espoused a type of virtue ethics inspired by his affinity for classical Greek culture:

“You shall always be the first and excel all others: your jealous soul shall love no one, unless it be the friend” — that made the soul of the Greek quiver: thus he walked the path of his greatness. — Thus Spoke Zarathustra

In other words, we might say that the ancient Greek sought to bring all his mental and physical capacities to bear on the project of making himself into a better person, and thereby inspiring both envy and possibly a motivation for the “others” to do the same. And this would apparently create a type of “moral arms race” that would elevate the cultural standard in general. So under this conception, even a focus on oneself has salubrious effects on others. 

Bostrom, in his paper A History of Transhumanist Thought, briefly mentions Nietzsche as a potential philosophical precursor of the transhumanist movement, but notes that what Nietzsche had in mind 

was not technological transformation but a kind of soaring personal growth and cultural refinement in exceptional individuals.

This is undoubtedly correct; but at the same time I’m inclined to wonder what a mind like Nietzsche’s, which existed in a 19th Century world, would have thought about the effects of 20th or even 21st Century technology on the moral psychology of the individual. I would say that current and anticipated technological developments could be a stimulus for the kind of personal growth and cultural refinement Nietzsche encouraged. The recipe for personal growth is necessarily different for each individual, so I don’t think there can be any top-down plan for building the type of character required to meet the challenges of future technological change. 

Is authentic moral education even possible, or are we merely stuck with a superficial veneer of improvement and enhancement? And if all we’re left with is appearance and not authenticity, is that enough for our species to be equal to future existential challenges, whether they come from a superintelligence or from a super-catastrophe? 

Though I’m certainly no technological expert, I believe that the predictions of the futurists are overstated; so I think our species has the time if not the proper motivation to overcome itself in time for any near-Singularity type of change. And while Bostrom believes that “philosophy has a time limit,” I’m more inclined to agree with his interviewer that “[c]omputer science could be 10 paradigm-shifting insights away from building an artificial general intelligence, and each could take an Einstein to unravel.”

But if, as Nietzsche seemed to believe, the most fulfilling objective of one’s life is a type of self-realization, doesn’t the increased mechanization of life and society threaten to hamper the chances for such a life-project? As a lover of science fiction, I have a certain affinity for the practical and existential possibilities of technological advancement; but I worry that the increasing pace of those advances will seduce us into a slavish dependence and fascination that will tear us away from the project of self-realization, which is what I believe will be necessary to flourish in — or even survive — the future we ambivalently anticipate. As much as I love my Macbook, my iPhone, Google, and all the other fruits of the Internet and software application developers, I must confess that it requires increasing exertion on my part to remain focussed on the “life of the mind.” Quantity all too easily dethrones quality. And the effort to focus on what’s important seems to have become not a daily battle but a moment-to-moment battle.

Ian’s Picks

by Ian Pollock

* Intrade recently shut down, for reasons that have yet to be clarified but look pretty suspicious. This is a big disappointment for prediction market fans like me, because they have the potential to be really useful and salutary for our political discourse.

* Luke Muehlhauser’s fairly comprehensive FAQ on decision theory.

* Cosma Shalizi’s fantastic linked notebooks on... a whole bunch of topics.

* Hyperphysics is a concise compendium of physics knowledge, an excellent reference.

* The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on torture. One interesting aspect is that the article (unlike most in the SEP) comes to some fairly strong conclusions: (1) an absolute moral prohibition on torture is implausible, and (2) institutionalized torture is a terrible idea.

* I am halfway through Red Plenty by Francis Spufford. It’s hard to pigeonhole this book into a genre, but its aim is roughly to novelize a discussion of how the Soviet economy of the 60s worked (or not). Highly recommended.

Experimental philosophy is not an elephant

by Massimo Pigliucci

There has been quite a stir in philosophical circles over the last several years caused by the emergence of a new sub-field referred to as experimental philosophy (colloquially, “XPhi”). I was actually at one of the first symposia that a young crowd of energetic philosophers had organized to get things started back in the early aughts. More recently, I had a nice chat on my podcast with one of the movers of experimental philosophy, Joshua Knobe. Despite my initial sympathies, however, I’ve developed a bit of weariness for the whole approach, and I recently had to confront my reservations head on.

The occasion for the confrontation has been the fact that I am writing a book for Chicago Press on whether and how philosophy makes progress, and the last chapter (yet to be written) features a discussion of philosophical methods, including XPhi. The fodder for the considerations that follow was conveniently provided by a recent popular defense of XPhi by Mark Phelan, which appeared in the magazine Philosophy Now, entitled “Experimental philosophy as an elephant.”

The thrust of Phelan’s article is that XPhi is a growing elephant whose observers can’t seem to grasp more than a part at a time, while they are stumbling in the dark trying to figure it all out. It’s a bit of an uncharitable characterization of critics of the approach, which together with its description as a “movement” (why not just a field of inquiry?) by its supporters contributes to irritating rather than welcoming people from the outside. Be that as it may, let’s get to the meat of Phelan’s defense of XPhi.

Phelan takes on four common criticisms — or misconceptions, depending on how you see them — of XPhi in turn: the charge that it is really a bunch of social science surveys attempting to settle philosophical issues by majority vote; the idea that it really consists of a type of meta-philosophy; the perception that it deals only with the role of intuitions in philosophy; and the conclusion that whatever XPhi is, it just isn’t philosophy.

Is it just philosophy by survey? That perception, as Phelan acknowledges, comes from papers that explore how people (often lay people, not professional philosophers) assess the concept of knowledge. This, as is well known, has classically been defined by Plato as “justified true belief.” As philosophers also know very well, Edmund Gettier published a paper back in 1963 in which he provided (very, very convoluted) examples of situations that seem to satisfy Plato’s definition, and yet that do not really seem like they should count as actual knowledge. (No need to get into the specifics here, but you can learn more about it, as usual, over at the SEP.)

Phelan summarizes the results of one of the relevant XPhi papers, using a thought experiment featuring the hypothetical characters of Bob and Jill: “[the authors] found that around 60% of people from East Asia and the Indian Subcontinent think – unlike most professional philosophers in the West – that Bob does not merely believe but really knows that Jill drives an American car in the above case. On the other hand, three-quarters of Westerners share with the (Western) philosophers the intuition that Bob does not know but only believes that Jill drives an American car.”

Phelan correctly interprets this to mean that we now have (interesting) empirical evidence [1] that (lay) people in Asia have a different concept of knowledge from professional philosophers in the West. But notice that this isn’t a particularly illuminating comparison at all: what we want to know — philosophically speaking — is whether Asian philosophers have a different conception of knowledge than Western ones, and if so why (i.e., how they justify it by argument).

Moreover, while Phelan’s point was that XPhi studies of this sort do not pretend to settle philosophical issues by survey, he then turns around and suggests precisely that: “[the results] challeng[e] the purported universality of analytic philosophy’s methodology and findings ... [the authors] argue from their results to a challenge for analytic epistemology.” If that’s not doing philosophy by survey I don’t know what is!

My take on this first part is that lay people’s opinions about technical philosophical issues are entirely irrelevant to the practice of philosophy, just like the opinions of lay people on Fermat’s last theorem, or on the structure of Hamlet are entirely irrelevant to the practice of professional mathematics or literary criticism. It is interesting to know how (lay) people think of philosophical, mathematical, or literary questions, in terms of the social science of common knowledge, but social science of common knowledge is not philosophy (or math, or literary criticism).

Is it “just” meta-philosophy? Apparently, one of the things XPhi is “accused” of is being a type of meta-philosophy, rather than philosophy per se. That sounds strange to me, however, because meta-philosophy — i.e., reflecting on the practices, methods and goals of philosophy — is a type of philosophy anyway. Here Phelan’s “defense” is that some XPhi is meta-philosophical, but not all of it. Fair enough. The problem is with the examples he picks to illustrate the non-meta-philosophical aspects of XPhi. For instance, he refers to research by Eddy Nahmias and collaborators on “the phenomenology of free will.” The authors interpreted the results of their survey of (lay) people’s conceptions about free will as providing some support for a compatibilist notion of free will. But, just as above, why on earth would lay opinion about a technical philosophical issue provide “evidence,” slight or not, for that position? The survey is interesting because it tells us about the variety of people’s intuitive positions about something like free will, of course. But that seems to me to qualify as philosophically-inspired social science, not as philosophy.

Is it all about intuitions? The problem with the use of intuitions in philosophical discourse is a vexing one, although I think there is a bit of confusion even among philosophers about what we mean by philosophical intuitions and what role do they actually play in philosophical arguments. Phelan admits that quite a bit of the XPhi literature is, in fact, about intuitions, and has the goal of “broadening the sample class of those whose intuitions matter” (although, one more time, why exactly is it that the intuitions of non-philosophers should matter at all when it comes to technical discussions within philosophy?). But his strategy is, again, to argue that that’s not all that XPhi practitioners do. Here he cites the work of Eric Schwitzgebel, who published a number of papers on whether moral philosophers are more ethical than other people. The answer, disturbingly, seems to be no (though see footnote 1 for the possibility of quibbling about the proper contrast groups, the way the research is conducted, etc.). For instance “Schwitzgebel and colleagues found that professional ethicists are no more likely to vote, or respond to student emails, than are non-ethicist philosophers and professors. Audiences in ethics sessions at philosophical conferences are generally just as likely to behave discourteously as audiences in non-ethics sessions. And ethics books (even obscure ones) are more likely to be missing from library collections than are books from other philosophical sub-disciplines.” It isn’t entirely clear to me that not responding to students’ emails is unethical (it depends on the specifics of the context), and there are rational arguments against voting. It’s also debatable that other professors are the best contrast group here, since the range of behavior is likely to be much smaller than in the population at large, which means that one would need very large sample sizes to pick up a statistically significant difference. And perhaps it is students of ethics who steal books about ethics, because they haven’t learned their stuff yet!

The point is: what are we supposed to make of such findings? The idea, I take it, is to challenge statements by some moral philosophers that studying ethics makes someone a better person (Socrates comes to mind). But how often is such statement made anyway? And shouldn’t we be testing it in the population at large, rather than just among academics? And which understanding of ethics would that be? Does it make no difference whether the ethicist in question is a utilitarian or a deontologist? At any rate, this kind of research can certainly function as a corrective against facile broad statements by philosophers about the utility of what they teach (but then why pick on philosophers and not educators in general?). But is it philosophy? No, it’s social science of philosophical statements.

Is it not philosophy? And we finally get to the crux of the matter, the criticism that whatever XPhi is, and however valuable some of this research may be, it simply isn’t philosophy. Phelan’s strategy here is twofold. On the one hand, he says that XPhi practitioners do deploy the standard tools of philosophical reasoning, they simply wish to augment the tool kit. On the other hand, he questions the idea that philosophy is “essentially normative” and that XPhi violates principles such as the famous is/ought distinction made by Hume.

Unlike some critics of XPhi, I do not think that its practitioners are poor philosophers or are otherwise deficient technically or intellectually. But none of the examples discussed above — or the additional ones brought forth by Phelan in his article — seem to me to augment standard philosophical practice. The results of XPhi inquiries are often interesting, and sometimes even surprising, but they all fall much more naturally under the rubric of social science research (carried out on philosophically inspired topics).

As for the second point, XPhi here hasn’t really invented anything new. W.V.O. Quine, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, already put forth a model of philosophy as a kind of science, going as far as (mistakenly, I think) suggesting that epistemology, for instance, is but a branch of psychology.

It isn’t -  and that’s not so much because philosophy is prescriptive (though it certainly is, in many cases — epistemology and ethics being two obvious ones), but because philosophical analysis is a matter of critical reflection on empirically underdetermined issues. If an issue can be univocally resolved empirically, it’s science.

For instance, the question of, say, how many planets are present in the solar system is an exquisitely empirical one, and the answer is found in astronomy, not in any branch of philosophy. The only philosophical aspect of said question, as far as I can see, is a discussion of why astronomers count certain celestial bodies as planets and others as “planetoids” (give me back Pluto, damn it!), which is informed by (philosophical) considerations about the definition of concepts characterized by fuzzy boundaries.

Take, in contrast, the question of how to think about ethical problems. While empirical input from science is certainly pertinent (e.g., in discussions about abortion, when, exactly, does the fetus begin to feel pain?), the bulk of the activity is one of critical reflection based on logically constructed arguments — i.e., it’s philosophy.

The model that I have been proposing for a while, then, is one of weak continuity between philosophy and science, where the practice of each does inform the other, without either being encompassed by the other. Science is (no longer) a branch of philosophy, and philosophy isn’t a branch of science, pace Quine and the XPhi practitioners.

The positive lesson to be taken from XPhi is that philosophers need to be careful when they make what are essentially empirical statements, things like “it is common intuition that...” Well, is it common? How do you know? Ask XPhi! But this doesn’t license the leap to the idea that lay people’s intuitions are pertinent to anything other than social science and that they somehow augment or provide additional tools for the understanding of technical philosophical matters. At least, no more than the opinions of lay people in cosmology, mathematics, or literary criticism do in those respective fields.

————

[1] Throughout this post I will take XPhi’s empirical results at face value, because I am concerned with what the role of the field is with respect to philosophy in general, not with its specific findings. But of course, as in the case of any empirical finding — especially if it pertains  to social science — there can be quite a bit to quibble about in terms of representativeness and size of samples, the way questions are posed, the statistical analyses of the data, etc.