Evolutionary Philosophy

Joining a Circle of Evolutionary Philosophers

3/26/2022

Big news folks!

Over the last couple of months, I've been working with evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson and philosopher Andy Norman to create a sort of "Vienna Circle" for evolutionary philosophers. The time has finally come to take these ideas to the big leagues.

This is going to be part of an amazing community called Prosocial World, which you'll have to join to take part. So, in this post, I'll share some information about Prosocial in general, and then you can read the specific call to action for my project.

I'll continue to write on this website, of course. But for far more interaction with a growing group of other evolutionary thinkers, please do consider joining us. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me. We plan to start our first activities in April, so do act now!

Summary

Prosocial World is an independent non-profit organization whose aim is to promote positive change around the world. Based on the work of Nobel Prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom and grounded in contextual behavioral science, evolutionary science, and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), Prosocial uses a practical, step-by-step approach to help energize and strengthen groups.

These methods can help any group become more cooperative and adaptable at achieving its valued goals and entering into prosocial relations with other groups. Since its formation two years ago, they have trained over 650 group facilitators from more than 30 nations and are creating “field sites” for stewarding cultural evolution around the world.

In February 2022, Prosocial World launched an online platform called Prosocial Commons where groups of all sizes can come together to communicate with one another as they use the prosocial methods to reach their goals. To join the Prosocial Commons, please begin by making a financial donation using the link at the bottom of this page. This can be anything within your means and exemptions can be made for anyone who truly can't pay anything.

The Movie

Award-winning filmmaker Alan Honick has produced this great 7-minute video summary.

The Book

A book about these ideas was published in 2019 by Paul W.B. Atkins PhD, David Sloan Wilson PhD, and Steven C. Hayes PhD.

Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups

"A groundbreaking, comprehensive program for designing effective and socially equitable groups of all sizes—from businesses and social justice groups to global organizations."

David's Long Introduction

Written on Charles Darwin's 212th birthday, this essay by David Sloan Wilson gives a history of the formation of Prosocial World and the other organizations that directly preceded it. This essay also traces the intellectual history of PW all the way back to Darwin himself.

Paul's Short Introduction

Prosocial co-author, and organizational psychologist Paul Atkins wrote "A Short Introduction to the Ideas and Process Behind Prosocial" which gives you just what the title says in a 12-minute read.

Steven's 7-minute Introduction

Prosocial co-author, psychologist, and the developer of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Steven Hayes features in a 7-minute video about the prosocial process called Linking individual behavior change to social transformation.

Introducing the Prosocial Commons

Introducing the Prosocial Commons contains an announcement from David Sloan Wilson about the creation in February 2022 of a new online platform for bringing Prosocial members together. There is also a link here for the 2-hour webinar that was held to launch this platform. The highpoint of the webinar is a series of short introductions by people who are part of the PW community, giving a vivid impression of the diversity and sense of meaning about what they are building together.

In just a couple of weeks, six projects were already proposed for this platform:

Global Online EvoS with campus chapters
Feeding our Future
Creating a volunteer workforce
Art, Evolution, and Action
Toward a Circle of Evolutionary Philosophers
Local community chapters

This is a good start, but more can still be accommodated. If there is a new project that you would like to propose, join now and do so on the project section. A project need not be large. For example, a group for organizing a monthly book club could consist of just a few people.

A Note About the Platform

The digital platform we'll be using for Prosocial Commons is run by hylo. This is "the Community Platform for People on a Mission. Hylo helps groups and networks build community and a better world, together. Free. Open Source. No Ads. Own Your Data."

As if that wasn't good enough, hylo can also be used to create homes for each group that forms within Prosocial, in addition to the "mother" Prosocial group. Hylo is exceptionally well suited for communication among all these groups.

A Note About Making Contributions

Think about the mindsets that are often used to persuade people to donate to good causes.

Sometimes there is an appeal to self-interest—what’s in it for the donor—such as exclusive access to content, merchandise, a burnished reputation. Let's call this a “Me” mindset.

Sometimes there is an appeal to the common good, such as alleviating the suffering of children, mitigating climate change, or reducing inequities. Let’s call this a “We” mindset.

What mindset should we cultivate for the Prosocial Commons? Perhaps we can authentically cultivate a “We & Me” mindset, in which we work for a common good that includes our own welfare. Helping others need not be sacrificial. We can be part of something larger than ourselves, sharing in all of its benefits.

if we really want to support Prosocial World’s mission to “consciously evolve a world that works for all”, then we want to grow as fast as possible. It seems reasonable to expect everyone to make a financial donation within their means, as a signal of their more general intent to contribute to the group. This literally builds a Prosocial World by being prosocial.

Sounds amazing! I can report that the first few weeks have been great.

And now, here is my project:

Towards a Circle of Evolutionary Philosophers

The Vienna Circle began meeting in 1924, partially inspired by Einstein’s revolution in the field of physics. The group sought to create a similar revolution in philosophy, determined to ground truth in empirical findings using logical positivism. Their ultimate failure in this quest became an important historical example for the limitations of knowledge, but the Vienna Circle still serves as a shining example of the power of small groups acting with purpose towards a goal. (Other than the tragic murder of one of their founders!)

Now, inspired by recent revolutions in evolutionary biology, the time is right for another group of philosophers to come together and focus on the implications for their field. Early philosophers after Darwin may have once poisoned the well for such endeavours with their abhorrent and tragic beliefs such as eugenics and Social Darwinism, but they were digging in the wrong place based on naïve and poorly understood versions of evolution. With the advent of the modern synthesis, the extended evolutionary synthesis, multilevel selection theory, and a host of other findings about the major transitions in the evolution of cooperation among living organisms, a much more mature evolutionary philosophy can now be developed.

This is already happening in isolated pockets around the world. Just a handful of prominent examples illustrate this clearly:

Dan Dennett has been writing about Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and the metaphysical implications for consciousness and free will for decades.
Michael Ruse has written dozens of books on evolution and philosophy and edited The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics.
The term evolutionary epistemology was first coined in 1974 by the psychologist Donald Campbell and has had notable developments from philosophers including Michael Bradie, Nathalie Gontier, and Andy Norman.
David Livingston Smith edited a superb collection of essays in 2016 titled How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism.
The philosopher Denis Dutton published numerous books and essays on aesthetics and his TED Talk “A Darwinian Theory of Beauty” has been viewed over 2.6 million times.
During the 10 years he’s written Evolutionary Philosophy, Ed Gibney has published peer-reviewed papers on evolutionary ethics and evolutionary politics, which propose ways that evolutionary perspectives can help us bridge David Hume’s is-ought divide and rebuild the collapsed harm principle from John Stuart Mill which underlies theories of justice in liberal societies.
Even the field of classical logic has been built on three laws of thought that only hold for static views of the universe, which, of course, have been completely undermined by Darwin.

From this brief list, we can see that all of the major branches of philosophy have been affected by evolutionary thinking. Dan Dennett’s “universal acid” has reached every one of them. Yet these exciting developments are seldom seen together by specialized philosophers or their students. This is because university departments necessarily contain diverse perspectives and are often still dominated by Continental or Analytic philosophers who sometimes ignore or are downright hostile to evolutionary and other scientific studies.

This project contends that there is now a huge opportunity to bring all of these evolutionary perspectives on philosophy together. Such a collaboration could provide great benefits to the field of philosophy, to the intellectual underpinnings of the activities of Prosocial World, and to the study of the survival and flourishing of life in general.

Prosocial World (PW) is a nonprofit dedicated to “consciously evolving a world that works for all.” It was co-founded in 2020 by David Sloan Wilson as an amicable spinoff from his previous nonprofit, the Evolution Institute. With its online magazine This View of Life, over 15 full and part-time staff, and a new major grant from the John Templeton Foundation, PW is in an excellent position to serve as the online hub of a circle of evolutionary philosophers.

Elsewhere on PW, EvoS programs have demonstrated the benefit of bringing a cross-disciplinary group of scientists together from all backgrounds (both physical and social) in order to view their subjects through the lens of the latest findings of evolution. Movements are also sprouting to bring such evolutionary views to the study of topics in the humanities like art and religion.

What is to be done here? In the development of this circle of evolutionary philosophers, we can follow much of what the Vienna Circle did. Their group included academic and non-academic philosophers, as well as scientists and thinkers from a variety of other disciplines. They included teachers as well as students. They met regularly to discuss important papers and ideas. Some members wrote a manifesto for the group (which others vehemently disagreed with—a sign they weren’t using the prosocial process!). They organized conferences. They started a peer-reviewed journal. And numerous influential books were produced from this intellectual environment.

Now, with advances in technology, we can do all this and more, drawing from a worldwide audience of interested participants. Anyone eager to learn about and apply “this view of life” could join in. Altogether, this would eventually construct an independent and virtual philosophy department within the broader “Evolution University” of Prosocial World. If such a department did form, it would be unique in the world, and likely impossible to replicate in any existing universities.

The information above lays out a long-term vision for this circle of evolutionary philosophers. We can only get there through many iterations of projects and growth. And we must start from square one not knowing who will take part in this circle or how fast it will spread. As such, this particular initial project will embark upon a co-created “learning journey” to begin to explore this vast territory with practical applications in mind. The steps accomplished will very much depend on who is taking them, but a firmer plan for the future will be one of the main goals we seek.

This exploratory process will take place as part of the Prosocial Commons (PC), a new support-and-engagement group that has been formed within PW for implementing new initiatives such as this one. The initiatives will take place as part of a 12-week ‘generation’ of activity that will begin in April. The minimal commitment for becoming involved includes:

Attend a single one-hour online meeting per week.
One hour of preparation for each meeting.
Notification if this commitment cannot be met on any given week.

This is a very modest commitment per capita that can result in a very large public good. Working in appropriately structured groups with meaningful objectives and a minimal commitment by each member is usually a highly rewarding experience.

Joining the Prosocial Commons requires making a financial donation to PW that can be anything within one’s means, with exemptions for those who truly can’t afford to pay anything. This creates a common pool of financial resources for the PC without imposing any financial barriers to entry. Members of the PC are free to join other initiatives or to nominate initiatives of their own. In general, we expect a high degree of synergy between initiatives, which will be in communication with each other during the 12-week cycles of activity.

To join in this exciting new collaboration, begin by taking just these two steps:

1) Go here to make your donation to PW to become a member of the Prosocial Commons.

2) Go here to register for this project and provide some basic information about yourself and your interests.

Thank you for becoming part of this bold experiment in cultural evolution! We look forward to varying it, selecting it, and replicating it with you.

Ed Gibney
Evolutionary Philosopher
www.evphil.com

Andy Norman
Author of Mental Immunity
Executive Director, CIRCE

David Sloan Wilson
President, Prosocial World
SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus

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An Evolutionary Perspective on the Meaning of Life

2/7/2022

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Last week, I wrote a small piece for the North East Humanists' bulletin, which I thought I should share here. There's much more to say about the topic, but I hope you enjoy it.

At the end of 2021, the BBC Radio 4 show The Moral Maze had a special episode titled “Meaning” to discuss the meaning of life. This show usually draws from a handful of regulars for their four panellists, but for this show they brought in Will Self, an author and journalist; Bonnie Greer, a playwright, novelist, and former Chancellor of Kingston University; Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury; and Alice Roberts, the President of Humanists UK.

The written introduction to the show is very thought provoking:

“The end of one year and the beginning of another can be an obvious moment for people to set goals and reset priorities. The pandemic, from which we are yet to emerge, has put much into perspective and has doubtless prompted many to ask the question: where am I going with my life? What’s it all about? While none of us can truly know the meaning of life, most of us are meaning-seeking creatures who have our own ideas about what gives life meaning – God, nature, the arts, human relationships, good food, scientific progress. Is meaning essential to a life well lived or do we put too much pressure on ourselves in trying to create it?”

The entire 43-minute episode is worth listening to, but I wanted to share and reflect on the final words from Alice Roberts. Near the close of the program, she said,

“I think that what’s interesting is the diversity we’ve heard. Both amongst ourselves on the panel, but also from the witnesses. I think that what makes human life meaningful, in a much broader way, is all this diversity. So, we’ve got religious people for whom religion and its tenets are important and may suggest a meaning in life. And then we’ve heard from a nihilist. As a Humanist, I think I can live an ethical and fulfilling life using my own reason and empathy and my own moral sense as a guide. But I don’t think there will ever be just one meaning of life. There are as many meanings as there are different people.”

This is a typical response from Humanists, reflecting the humility we have about our place in this universe. We profess no certainties taken from any sacred texts that provide religious meanings for life. As such, Alice provided a good representation of Humanists UK. But without more context, this can come across as relativistic. Who’s to say that any of those religious meanings of life aren’t proper? Based on many campaigns from Humanists UK, I think it’s safe to say we Humanists think plenty of religious meanings for life don’t fit the bill. But how do we explain this?

One concept that I think is helpful comes from a paper written by the philosopher Dan Dennett. In a 2009 article titled, “Darwin's ‘strange inversion of reasoning’”, Dennett described the way our understanding of the world has been completely turned upside down compared to the way that creationists think about it. Dennett quoted a passage from a contemporary critic of Darwin who just couldn’t believe what was being proposed. That critic wrote:

“We may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole [Darwinian] system, that, in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. This proposition will be found, on careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory [of Evolution], and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin's meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all of the achievements of creative skill.”

As Dennett makes clear, this intended criticism actually turns out to be a wonderful description of what is going on in the world. There has been no “Absolute Wisdom” from on high designing the world in a beautiful, top-down fashion. Instead, Darwin’s “bubble-up theory of creation” explains very clearly how life has found its way forward through myriad trials and errors conducted in “Absolute Ignorance”. In exactly the same way, there is no singular, top-down “Meaning of Life” that comes booming down to us from on high. Instead, meanings are also built up through trials and errors. Over the millennia of human culture, we have discovered some that survive better than others. And we are still testing others out, which is why Alice was right to say, “There are as many meanings as there are different people.” Only some of these meanings, however, lead towards more survival and flourishing for life on this planet. And that is what we can use our reason to try and figure out.

For much more on this topic, I highly recommend the work of philosopher John Messerly. He wrote a book in 2013 called The Meaning of Life, and he published a synopsis of it on his website called “A Philosopher’s Lifelong Search for Meaning.”

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Overview of Mental Immunity by Andy Norman (Part 2 of 2)

1/14/2022

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Hi again! It’s time for my second post about Andy Norman’s great new epistemology book, Mental Immunity. In my last post, I covered parts one, two, and three of the book, which explained the new science of cognitive immunology. I absolutely loved it. I ended that post by asking if Andy had succeeded in “the search for a better way to think,” as he proclaimed on the cover of the book. I superficially said that he had, but in reality, that raises a much deeper question of what exactly “better” is. Dealing with that, and with some other deep questions, is the task of the fourth and final part of Mental Immunity.

And there is where I had some real questions and potential differences with Andy. To try and resolve them, I followed up on several of the footnotes from the book after I finished reading it. In particular, I found Andy’s 1997 paper “Regress and the Doctrine of Epistemic Original Sin” to be very illuminating. Still, I had more questions, so I had an extensive back and forth with Andy over email. And I’ve thought about that exchange continually for a few months now while I’ve carried on with my other epistemology research. I’ll leave the details of my private exchange private, but I think I’ve hit upon some good ways to resolve any issues we left outstanding. (At least to my mind.)

A good place to start is with Andy’s humble pleas about his daring proposal for a “New Socratic model of reasonable belief.”

(p.319) My philosopher friends will pick at it. That’s okay: it’s more a heuristic than a fully worked-out theory, and I welcome efforts to refine it.
(p.342) By all means, explore the space of possible challenges, and give voice to those I’ve missed. Delve deeper than I have, and bring overlooked challenges to my attention. But don’t make sport of hoisting my petard; be a friend, and lead me away before it blows. Better yet, guide us all to a better alternative.

Those are wonderful words that should really be in the preface of all works of philosophy. (I’ve said something very similar on the Purpose page of my website.) And in that spirit, let me use this post to try to lay out a few of my personal alternatives for Mental Immunity. I’ll leave it to posterity to decide if these are “better” or not. In summary, I have found that there is one main concept that separates Andy and I, and one supporting concept that needs more consideration. Otherwise, we’re practically perfectly aligned.

First, the supporting concept. In order to claim that one infectious idea is good while another mind-parasite is bad, you really need a way to define good and bad. You could just go the amoral, instrumental route and say you’re only concerned with whether an idea is good or bad for its goal. For example, most of us would say it’s a morally bad idea to fly planes into an office tower, yet we may readily admit that it was a good tactic relative to the terrorists’ beliefs. That would be one way to deal with the issue of value judgments—by basically ducking them. However, Andy wants to do more than that. He wants to be able to judge which ideas are really good and which ones are really bad. And that requires an ethical judgment. What does he use for his criteria? In his discussion with Jamie Woodhouse at Sentientism, Andy said the fact-value distinction can be crystalised by one simple sentence — “Well-being matters.” — and this will be the topic of his next book. That’s great to hear about another book because this needs a lot of consideration. Well-being is a highly contested idea with a long history of philosophical attempts to define it, so it seems to me that Andy has merely kicked the can down the road until he can deal with that definition. Fine. In my recent paper about rebuilding the harm principle, I defined well-being as “that which makes the survival of life more robust” (with harm moving in the opposite direction towards fragility, death, and extinction). I believe this is the long-sought objective grounding for ethics, which I’m happy to discuss at another time. For now, let me just insert this into Andy’s work wherever I think he needs it and then I find much closer alignment with it.

Now for the main concept keeping us apart. Truth. In my work, I say we should drop all claims for it, whereas Andy is happy to keep using that word throughout his work. For a discussion about epistemology, that sure sounds like a big deal! As with so much in philosophy, however, this boils down to definitions. In the excellent Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on truth, there are several theories of truth that are considered — the Correspondence Theory, the Semantic Theory, the Deflationary Theory, the Coherence Theory, and the Pragmatic Theory. There’s no need to wade into that discussion right now since these deal with the ontology of truth—what is it?—whereas we’re presently concerned with its epistemology—can we know truth? For me, that answer is a resounding no, because, as the IEP article lays out, "most philosophers add the further constraint that a proposition never changes its truth-value in space or time.” In other words, the word truth in philosophy means an eternal and unchanging fact. But because we live in an evolving world where we cannot know what revelations the future will bring, that rules out certifying any proposition as true. And as the IEP article says in its section about knowledge, “For generations, discussions of truth have been bedevilled by the question, ‘How could a proposition be true unless we know it to be true?’” According to that a strict requirement, they cannot.

To drive this point home, I discovered a striking fact in Julian Baggini’s recent book How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy. While discussing the recent problems with Russia and its campaigns of misinformation, Baggini noted on p.355 that, “Even the Russian language helps to maintain the elasticity of truth, for which it has two words. Istina is natural truth, the truth of the universe, and is immutable. Pravda, in contrast, describes the human world and is a human construction.” I studied Russian for a few years, and there is some debate about these definitions, but wouldn’t it be helpful here for philosophers to actually make this distinction and nominate a word for the specific meaning of istina in the sense given here? As it stands, philosophers mix these up all the time and it creates real unsolvable problems. For example, there is this passage from elsewhere in Baggini’s book when he is talking about the pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce:

(Baggini, pp.84-5) Given that most convergence on truth is in a hypothetical future, in practice this means what we now call truth is somewhat provisional and relative. “We have to live today by what truth we can get today, and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood,” wrote Peirce. The worry is that if we take this seriously, we are left with a dangerous relativism in which anyone can claim as true whatever they happen to find useful. Truth becomes a matter of expediency and it is then impossible to dispute the truth claims of others, no matter how wild.

Such wild relativism is exactly what Andy wants to fight in Mental Immunity, and he comes up with a novel way to defend his own truth claims. But I think a clearer definition of the word truth, and an avoidance of any connotation of istina, would help to finish the fight even better. Unfortunately, the word truth doesn’t even make it into Andy’s otherwise very extensive 17-page index. The deeper concept of truth is just not something he’s considering here.

So, what’s the right approach for defining truth? Do we deflate truth to mean pravda so it’s compatible with reality, or do we insist that it is istina, and then eliminate it from our usage as an illusion that’s incompatible with reality? This is the kind of choice that Dan Dennett has faced with both consciousness and free will. For the former, as it is widely used, Dan says consciousness is an illusion and we can eliminate it. For the latter, he considers the concept of free will to be so important that we need to deflate it into “the free will worth wanting” in order to keep it in use. Dan spelled that out explicitly in his paper “Some Observations on the Psychology of Thinking About Free Will” while he reacted to Daniel Wegner’s book The Illusion of Conscious Will. He wrote:

I saw Wegner as the killjoy scientist who shows that Cupid doesn't shoot arrows and then entitles his book The Illusion of Romantic Love. Wegner does go on to soften the blow by arguing that "conscious will may be an illusion, but responsible, moral action is quite real" (p. 224). Our disagreement was really a matter of expository tactics, not theory. Should one insist that free, conscious will is real without being magic, without being what people traditionally thought it was (my line)? Or should one concede that traditional free will is an illusion—but not to worry: Life still has meaning and people can and should be responsible (Wegner's line)? The answer to this question is still not obvious.

Similarly, should the word truth only be used for the unerring eternal truths of what really, truly, actually exists (my line) or should the word truth be used for what we think is correct right now while remaining open to revising it later (Andy’s line)? Based on Dan Dennett’s two examples, the correct answer may depend upon the situation. Both choices have their advantages and drawbacks. But to me, religious believers are going to hang on to their usage of the word "true" as unerring and eternal. So, we who see that that is not tenable need to be the ones to avoid its usage. We have plenty of other options at our disposal — accurate, correct, verifiable, factual — and this gives us plenty of opportunities to be loud about admitting we simply can never get to the unerring certainty of truth. And that instils the humility necessary to ensure continued inquiry and dialogue, which is so important for building shared consensus.

I didn’t arrive at this explicit conclusion until after my email exchange with Andy, but I think it fits in with the two big fundamental positions that he and I did agree upon: 1) knowledge is provisional; but 2) we still can establish reasonable beliefs. It remains to be seen whether my "truth" is the right one to insist upon.

Now that I’ve laid out my own definitions for truth and goodness, I can now go over the last part of Andy’s book and interpret it in a way that I think is satisfying to us both and builds upon our two foundations of agreement. As before, I'm not going to provide a formal review of this book. I'll just share some selected excerpts that I jotted down and insert a few of my own thoughts and interpretations where necessary. All page numbers are from the 2021 first edition from HarperCollins.

Mental Immunity by Andy Norman

(p.258) When I speak of a “better” understanding of reason’s requirements, I mean one that is clear, explicit, vetted, defensible, well functioning, and shared. What makes these the right qualities to focus on? Well, look at the way reasoning works, and think about ways to improve that functioning. Do this, and it quickly becomes apparent what “better” ought to mean in this context.

Andy starts with this bare instrumental usage of the term better. Unfortunately, terrorists could probably use these criteria to say they are thinking well too. They provide clear, explicit, defensible, shared, and well functioning arguments for how to apply sharia law for the salvation of human souls. We need some more criteria if we want to judge their beliefs as mind-parasites. I think my definitions of good and harm make this very clear they fall in the bad category.

(p.262) When [Socrates] wanted to determine the worthiness of a claim, he’d test it with questions and see how it fared. The implied standard in such an approach is this: judgments that can survive critical questioning might merit acceptance, but those that can’t don’t.

I love to see the use of the word “survive” in these descriptions of epistemology. That's a key term in evolution and it fits right in with my JBS theory of knowledge.

(p.268) While useful for combatting confused and mistaken judgments, the Socratic picture is less than ideal for building common knowledge. Actually, this understates the problem. The Socratic conception turns out to be profoundly corrosive of the very possibility of positive knowledge.

Andy thinks this is a problem, but to me this is okay because positive knowledge is not possible. As I wrote in my review of Why Trust Science? by Naomi Oreskes, “Oreskes jumps into this story…with Auguste Comte—the father of positivism—and what she calls ‘The Dream of Positive Knowledge.’ If anything could be trusted, it would be a scientific finding that had been absolutely positively proven to be true. Unfortunately, as Oreskes makes clear with her retelling of the history of science, such dreams have proven fruitless.” We have to accept this situation with humility and move on with the best we can get…which can still be very good.

(pp.276-81) 300 BC to 1500 CE … During this extended period, three basic epistemologies gained and lost influence: Aristotle’s, that of the Academic skeptics, and that of Christian philosophers. Each made an uneasy accommodation to the Platonic picture of reason. Each developed an influential standard of reasonable belief—one that gave rise to a distinctive set of reason-giving practices. And each of these epistemologies—initially a “solution” to the quandary of basic belief—went on to shape Western civilization in ways both subtle and profound. … Aristotle’s answer was clever but evasive: our apprehension of first principles is “immediate”—that is, direct and unmediated. In other words, we simply behold them and know them to be true. We know this answer to be problematic. … Aristotle was playing a kind of shell game, hiding his lack of a deep solution to the regress problem. … According to leading scholars, Academy philosophers employed a skeptical strategy that “…attempted to show that all claims are groundless.” “For over two hundred years,” writes one of them, “’Why do you believe that?’ became the leading question in philosophical discussion. ‘You can have no reason to believe that’ became the skeptical refrain.” … We’re talking now about a radical skepticism, one that obliterates the distinction between reasonable and unreasonable belief, thereby undermining healthy mental immune function. … Epistemology had painted itself into a corner and made itself all but irrelevant to practical thinkers. … This led early Christian thinkers to try a different tack…we must accept some things on faith. In the same way that God can halt the regress of causes (by being the Creator, or Prime Mover), faith in God can halt the regress of reasons. Just as God provides the true basis for existence, faith provides the true basis for knowledge. This faith-based understanding…helped entrench an orthodoxy that discouraged challenges to church teaching. It excused stubbornly dogmatic thinking and compromised mental immune systems across Europe. … For centuries thereafter, academic skepticism made it hard for the well educated to have the courage of their convictions. [An] option…to try and steer a middle path between skepticism and dogmatism…is to argue that certain beliefs really are properly and objectively basic, or foundational, for us all. … When pressed…foundationalists have tended to wave their hands and employ techniques of distraction. This has diminished rationalism and prevented it from becoming an influential movement.

This is an incredibly helpful summary of the historical problems and developments within epistemology. These are the efforts that Andy is trying to reconcile and surpass. (As am I.) Framing this issue as the need to find the middle path between skepticism and dogmatism is extremely clarifying.

(p.283) If we hope to establish anything “firm and lasting in the sciences,” Descartes wrote, we must first raze the foundations of received opinion, and build all of knowledge afresh upon beliefs that cannot be doubted.

This, of course, is an impossible goal now that we see how life arose in the middle of the evolution of the universe, which leaves us in a position where we cannot actually gain the type of knowledge “that cannot be doubted.” The cosmological revolutions that Darwin wrought need to trickle down to our epistemology as well.

(p.283) Descartes’ architectural metaphor gave modern thinkers a convenient way to cast the central philosophical problem of the age: On what foundation does true knowledge rest? But it also did something more subtle and far-reaching—something that has, until now, escaped notice: it projected a gravitational field onto the space of reasons.

This is a very interesting observation from Andy! He’s right that knowledge is spoken about as having gravity and requiring a foundation. But actually, it is only ever free-floating, using sets of hypotheses that we continue to test and refine. There is just no “bedrock of truth” down there.

(p.286) In sum, the Platonic picture not only survived the Enlightenment, it traversed it in grand style. It was borne along by the foundations metaphor and its attendant assumption of epistemic gravity. It helped generate one of the defining problems of the age, a difficulty that modern philosophers ultimately failed to solve. Only now can we see why: the Platonic picture has long created cognitive immune problems. It leads us down the garden path to an extreme and impractical skepticism, which again and again compels reactionaries to embrace a ferocious dogmatism. In this way, it renders some mental immune systems hyperactive, and others underactive.

This is a good summary of Andy’s diagnosis of the problem with epistemology. The framework he set up earlier—as needing to thread the needle between skepticism and dogmatism—lines up perfectly with a cognitive immune system that is dysfunctional at either end of the spectrum. The middle path is the way forward. I would only add that acknowledging the merits of skepticism doesn’t necessarily lead all the way to extreme and impractical skepticism. I think it keeps one from ever contemplating the temptations of dogmatism. Therefore, my methods of defining knowledge as justified beliefs surviving our best tests also results in a mental immune system that is neither underactive nor hyperactive.

(p.288) Empiricism, it turns out, is more problematic than it appears. For one thing, it’s often appropriate to question perceptual judgments. … More generally, our senses can deceive us. … Perceptual judgments can, but need not, bring reasoning to a close. How are we to know when they do and when they don’t? Second, perceptual beliefs seem an inadequate basis for the full breadth of our knowledge—a corpus that includes not just matters of empirical fact, but also mathematical truths (e.g. the Pythagorean theorem), counterfactuals (“If average global temperatures rise two degrees, sea levels will rise”), causal laws (“Smoking causes cancer”), things about the near future (“I will go to the store tomorrow”), ethical knowledge (“Honesty is the best policy”), basic things about other people’s minds (“Joe is happy”), and so on. Indeed, it is exceedingly difficult to give a convincing account of how causal knowledge, knowledge of the future, knowledge of right and wrong, and knowledge of other minds are grounded in empirical evidence.

I actually found this criticism of empiricism difficult to follow. Where else can knowledge come from but our senses? There isn’t another natural possibility. I personally found it easy to link these examples of the full breadth of our knowledge to perceptual beliefs. Even logical rules and mathematical truths are shown to work over and over again by empirical evidence. If gods intervened regularly with supernatural interruptions to reality, how would we ever develop theories about the laws of nature? Perhaps I’m missing something about the claims of empiricism, but I think it holds together.

(pp.291-2) The ethic of belief that prevails across much of the world today is a variant of empiricism. It centers on the notion of evidence, so philosophers call it “evidentialism.” The core idea is simple: to be genuinely reasonable, a belief or claim must be backed by sufficient evidence. … (This is the same idea W.K. Clifford defended, so the Western tradition’s “Big 4” pictures of reasonable belief are, on my telling: the Socratic, the Platonic, the Humean, and the Cliffordian.) … Where did evidentialism come from? Empiricism, I think, matured into evidentialism. In a way, it’s just empiricism generalized.

This distinction was new to me, so maybe there is indeed some hair-splitting work to be done on definitions here.

(p.294) Evidentialism entails the illegitimacy of beliefs not supported by sufficient evidence. It’s not hard to imagine this standard working well to sort responsible from irresponsible claims about what is. Indeed, it has a long and distinguished track record of doing just that. Unfortunately, we can’t say the same about its treatment of claims about what ought to be. In fact, it’s quite hard to see how evidence alone can license any claim about right or wrong, good or bad.

Actually, my paper on the bridge between is and ought would solve this. To me, the right way to derive oughts are by looking at how life must act in order to stay alive. That is the only context in which oughts make sense. There just aren't any oughts for rocks. Oughts only apply to living things. And we have gained all sorts of natural evidence for what promotes more and more robust survival for life (i.e. well-being).

(pp.296-7) Reason can have nothing to say about our most basic ends and values. Our core ends and values, it seems, must be determined by something utterly nonrational: preferences, desire, faith, or the like.

This is a common position among philosophers who steer clear of Hume’s guillotine, but this is an example of where I might try to improve Andy’s arguments. First of all, I don’t know of anything that is utterly nonrational. That sounds like something supernatural to me. Reasons and emotions are not mutually exclusive things. I’m not a dualist about them. Instead, it’s clear that reasons and emotions are related to one another. They feed off one another in a bi-directional manner. There are reasons we feel emotions, and, as Hume said, reasons are the slave of the passions.

(p.299) For some years, the philosopher Alvin Plantinga has been arguing that, in many cases, rational belief simply doesn’t require evidence. Or, for that matter, any supporting argument. … If arguments like this go unanswered, the evidentialist ethos will eventually wither and die. Plantinga’s case, though, is presently gaining influence: it’s anthologized in popular introduction to philosophy textbooks, and is routinely taught to thousands of undergraduates.

WTF?! That sure is a sorry state of affairs for philosophy. And Andy is right to dedicate a book to fighting it.

(p.301) Plantinga then points out (correctly, in my view) that “no one has yet developed and articulated…necessary and sufficient conditions for proper basicality.” His point, stripped of jargon, is simple: no one has yet spelled out what may properly be deployed as an unargued premise. Rationalists seem to owe us such an account, for they propose an argument-centred standard of rational permissibility. To function capably as rational beings, we need to know when it’s okay to treat a claim as admissible, yet not in need of further argument. Rationalists, though, have yet to provide such an account. … Can evidentialism be repaired? Can we resolve the quandary of basic belief, and revive the rationalist project? The answer, it turns out, is yes. But only if we make a clean break from the Platonic picture of reason.

That’s a bold claim! In my main post to date about knowledge, I said that a free-floating hypothesis that has yet to be disproven is the best we can do to start building our knowledge, and that has proven to be awfully good. But let’s see what Andy has in mind.

(p.306) I took the Socratic standard and plugged in the concept of challenges. That yielded what we might call the “New Socratic standard" — The true test of a good idea is its ability to withstand challenges.

This is very good. I’d say it’s the equivalent of Oreskes’ description of science arriving at broad consensus after debates from all manner of people, but, as Andy has done, we can extend this from scientific knowledge to all of knowledge. That aligns very well with my own conception of knowledge as justified beliefs that are surviving.

(pp.309-10) How do we know whether a given challenge arises? … The solution involves distinguishing two kinds of challenge. One kind seeks to invalidate a claim by presenting reasons against the claim at issue…I call them “onus-bearing” challenges. … The other sort of challenge is simpler. Sometimes, a challenger offers no reasons against but instead just asks the claimant to provide reasons for. … These simpler challenges are naked grounds for doubt, so I call them bare.

This is a key move for Andy in his attempt to stop the infinite regression of asking why, which otherwise leads to radical skepticism. It's a nice distinction to make about challenges to beliefs.

(p.311) Entire schools of ancient philosophy managed to convince themselves that iterated bare challenges undermine all claims to knowledge. They became indiscriminate critics and lost the support of more pragmatic thinkers.

This may be an accurate representation of history, but I don’t think iterated bare challenges are the only way that skepticism arises. There are Descartes’ evil demons, sci-fi speculations that we are in the matrix, Baggini’s thought experiment about hypnotists, Arne Naess’s description of efforts to claim truth as “trying to blow a bag up from the inside,” or Fitch’s paradox of knowability which concludes that in order to know any truth you must know all truths (which we cannot). Andy claims in a footnote to have dealt with these objections in an earlier paper, but I could not find it. I believe that skepticism still holds for any claims of unarguable truth. And that's how I stop any moves towards dogmatism.

(p.312) For example, “We should treat each other kindly” is by no stretch of the imagination a “fact present to the senses.” Nor is it a “fact present to memory.” (Most philosophers don’t even consider it a fact.) It’s plainly true, though, and those who assert it are under no obligation to prove the point.

This is representative of the kind of passages in Mental Immunity that I think could be strengthened by the two arguments I made in the beginning of this post about goodness and truth. First of all, it seems to me that we have lots of evidence from our senses that treating each other kindly leads to good outcomes. (Except when we are enabling bad behaviour and then we may need to be cruel to be kind.) So, this is where my supporting definition of good and harm can be put into play. Secondly, saying “it’s plainly true” does not make it so. To me, that sounds like Plantinga’s derided argument above that “rational belief simply doesn’t require evidence.” It’s also a signal to consider one of Dan Dennett’s 12 best tools for critical thinking —the ‘surely’ operator. As Dan says, “Not always, not even most of the time, but often the world ‘surely’ is as good as a blinking light in locating a weak point in the argument.” Surely, that applies in this case to the word "plainly" as well. Instead, I would have found it much better for Andy to simply avoid the use of the word true here, and say “treating each other kindly is a very well supported guide for most behaviour.”

(p.317) There’s wisdom embedded in our pre-theoretical grasp of how reasoning should go, and any theory that hopes to strengthen mental immune systems must take account of it.

Andy doesn’t say what a “pre-theoretical grasp” is, but I can strengthen this by defining it as an innate valuation of survival. In my series on consciousness, I found the most basic level of consciousness to be built using “affect” or the valance of what is good or bad for life to remain alive. If that’s the wisdom Andy meant to tap into, then I can get on board with that.

(p.319) I can now deliver the long-awaited mind vaccine: A belief is reasonable if it can withstand the challenges to it that genuinely arise.

This is intended to come as a big crescendo in the book. Presented here in such a short format, that may sound like question-begging. But when you dig into Andy’s book and learn what he really means for challenges to genuinely arise, this is essentially equivalent to my JBS theory that knowledge can only ever be justified beliefs that are currently surviving our best tests. Therefore, I’m happy to accept this end point for Andy’s argument. (Even if I quibble with how he got there.)

(p.319) My philosopher friends will pick at it. That’s okay: it’s more a heuristic than a fully worked-out theory, and I welcome efforts to refine it.

I’m repeating this plea from above to put it in better context. When I first read this, it came across to me as a bit of a backtrack after an entire book filled with very bold claims. But yes, we can refine and strengthen this heuristic into a full theory. I would call that a theory of evolutionary epistemology, but that may just be me. No matter what we call it, Andy is on to something really big here.

(pp.320-24) Where the Platonic picture nudges us into the “How do I validate this?” mindset of those prone to confirmation bias, the Socratic nudges us into the “What should we make of this?” mindset of the genuinely curious. … I see this as the model’s primary virtue [number one]. … The shift to a Socratic conception of reasonable belief, then, could mitigate, not just confirmation bias, but our proneness to ideological derangement. Let’s call this virtue 2. Virtue 3: The New Socratic model also implies that it’s not enough to mindlessly repeat the question “Why?” … Virtue 4: Notice next that the model directs us to consider both upstream and downstream implications. … Virtue 5: The model modulates mental immune response. In fact, it’s carefully designed to temper the impulse to question and criticize. … Virtue 6: The New Socratic Model promotes the growth mindset. For it primes us to learn from challenges. … Virtue 7: The model sanctions open-mindedness and scientific humility. For no matter how well you understand an issue—no matter how familiar you become with the challenges that arise in a domain—it’s always possible that a new challenge will arise and upset the applecart. … Virtue 8: The model also tells us what we must do to merit the courage of our convictions: become intimately familiar with the challenges to a claim that arise in a domain, and make sure that you can successfully address them. … Virtue 9: The model points to more effective ways to teach critical thinking. … Virtue 10: The model expands the purview of science. For the machinery of challenge-and-response allows us to treat any claim as a hypothesis.

Yes! I love all these virtues and agree they are present and helpful. I would even go so far as to call all of these changes, challenges, and growth to be evolutionary. : )

(p.337) Still others object that the account deploys unexplained normative language, and thereby fails to fully explicate the concept.

I’m not surprised he’s faced these objections without a better explanation of what “better” actually means. I really think my evolutionary ethics can help here.

(p.337) I insist that all claims are, and forever remain, open to onus-bearing challenges. We should never close our minds to the possibility that telling grounds for doubt might come along and invalidate a belief.

Agreed! And that’s why I drop truth from my criteria for knowledge. But I admit that entirely depends on your definition of truth.

(pp.344-5) This story—the one our descendants might someday tell—might continue: In short order, our understanding coalesced into know-how. We learned to test claims with a certain kind of question: to seed minds with ideas that can withstand such questioning and weed minds of those that can’t. In effect, our forebears modified an ancient inoculant, produced a mind vaccine, and administered it widely. In this way, they curtailed the outbreaks of unreason that once terrorized our ancestors. They learned how to cultivate mental immune health, and transformed humanity’s prospects.

What an inspiring vision! Imagining a future with a healthy mental immune system modulating back and forth between more and less validated claims is much easier to see take hold in a society than any utopian visions for "perfecting man’s rationality." This really may prove to be a major conceptual breakthrough.

(pp.346-50) Here, then, is a kind of “12-Step Program” to cognitive immune health. … Step 1: Play with ideas. … Step 2: Understand that minds are not passive knowledge receptacles. … Step 3: Get past the self-indulgent idea that you’re entitled to your opinions. … Step 4: Distinguish between good and bad faith. … Step 5: Give up the idea that learning is merely a matter of adding to the mind’s knowledge stockpile. … Step 6: New information is like a puzzle piece; you must find where it fits and how it connects. True wisdom requires you to clarify and order your thoughts. … Step 7: Don’t use “Who’s to say?” to cut short unsettling inquiries. … Step 8: Let go of the idea that value judgments can’t be objective. … Step 9: Treat challenges to your beliefs as opportunities rather than threats. … Step 10: Satisfy your need for belonging with a community of inquiry rather than a community of belief. … Step 11: Upgrade your understanding of reasonable belief. … Step 12: Don’t underestimate the value of ideas that have survived scrutiny.

Fabulous. Once again, I’d modify these ever so slightly with my additional points about truth and goodness, but I love to see the final emphasis being placed on ideas that survive scrutiny.

So, there you have it. As a nit-picking philosopher, I had a few issues with minor pieces of Andy’s arguments. It turns out that he, like every other philosopher so far, hasn’t solved all of the deepest problems in our field. But Andy still ends up in a very good place and he gives us incredibly helpful information along the way. As such, I highly recommend reading Mental Immunity on your own to get the full experience of actually improving your own mental hygiene.

And with that, it's time for me to get going on my own paper about evolutionary epistemology. I've got several projects in the pipeline right now so give me some time for that. In the meantime, have a great 2022. May you maintain or gain your full mental health.

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Overview of Mental Immunity by Andy Norman (Part 1 of 2)

1/7/2022

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After my quick overviews of three books about epistemology — Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch, Knowledge and its Limits by Timothy Williamson, and How to Talk to Science Denier by Lee McIntyre — I’ve finally arrived at the most interesting and thought-provoking book on the subject that I’ve read. And that is Mental Immunity by Andy Norman. Over the last few years, I’ve been lucky enough to personally get to know Andy a little bit after he reached out to me when I published an article in The Humanist magazine proposing some changes to their definition of humanism. I’ve also attended a few of the monthly discussions he leads for This View of Life called Examined Lives. (Those are great. Go sign up for them now. I’d join in every month if the timing worked better for me in the UK.) So, Andy’s a prominent humanist and involved with evolutionary projects. If I ever decided to go for a PhD in philosophy, Andy would be one of the first people I’d turn to for advice. As such, I was very excited to order and receive a copy of his book about a topic that I’ve been personally working on as well. And yet, I had no idea about the level of ambition in this book. It really does shoot for philosophical immortality! Which I really admire.

With all this in mind, I really need a few posts to cover Mental Immunity. There is already a ton of stuff out there for this book since Andy has done loads of publicity for it. The Media Appearances and Events page on his website lists almost 50 public discussions, including one with the granddaddy podcaster of them all, Joe Rogan! I haven’t listened to all of these discussions (sorry, Andy, I’m not a stalker), but from what I can tell by their summaries, they generally stay confined to roughly the first three-quarters of the book, since that covers what the title focuses on—cognitive immunology—and that is a new and important idea all on its own. Once that has been well and truly introduced, however, the final part of the book tries to solve some fundamental problems of epistemology by modifying a Socratic idea into something Andy calls a mind vaccine, which he proposes could improve the way we all think, and that would improve the lives of trillions of us and our descendants. Those are some big goals!

So, I’ll need another post to discuss that last part of Mental Immunity, but back in October, Andy was kind enough to fill in for a last-minute cancellation and give a talk to my North East Humanists group. That talk, like many of his other ones, stayed mostly confined to the cognitive immunology portion of the book, and I wrote a recap of that for our November bulletin. For this blog post, then, let me just repeat what I wrote there, lightly editing it for this outlet.

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As a fellow Humanist, Andy said we often think that a lack of ‘critical thinking’ is at the root of all the bad ideas out there today. Misinformation and disinformation are spreading like wildfire. An outlandish example is the QAnon conspiracy that the world is secretly being run by a cabal of paedophiles that can only be thwarted by Donald Trump. But bad information has serious consequences too. It has clearly impacted the 700,000 US and 140,000 UK Covid deaths, which could have been much fewer according to the performance of comparable countries.

There are many ideas for why this is happening—ignorance, gullibility, lack of critical thinking skills, polarisation, skilled disinformation, social media filter bubbles, and online search algorithms. What is missing from these explanations, however, is an empirical investigation of why some minds work well and don’t succumb to bad ideas. As Andy wrote in Psychology Today, Why Aren’t We All Conspiracy Theorists? Could we use this evidence to actually strengthen people’s minds? Such study has been called cognitive immunology, which can help us achieve mental immunity.

The formal history of this field began in the 1960’s with the psychologist William McGuire who studied the propaganda efforts of the Eastern Bloc’s military against the West. He noticed that minds act like immune systems. Weakened ideas can pre-inoculate a mind against stronger versions of harmful ideas. McGuire identified these ‘cognitive antibodies’ as part of what he developed into an ‘inoculation theory’. As is often the case with scientists trying to separate facts from values, this early work was quite amoral. McGuire simply studied how to guard against new ideas. But later researchers—e.g. John Cook, Sander van der Linden, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Josh Compton—have laid the groundwork for how to guard against bad ideas. And Andy Norman’s book Mental Immunity draws on his career in philosophy studying epistemology and ethics to expand on this greatly.

The way cognitive immunology describes it, bad ideas are a kind of mind parasite. Just like biological parasites, they require a host, they cause harm to that host, and they spread to other hosts. Minds also act like immune systems by spotting and removing these harmful ideas. And clearly, minds can function better or worse at the two tasks of filtering out bad ideas and letting in good ones. Minds cannot simply focus on one of those tasks; they must find the right balance between too much acceptance and too much rejection.

According to Andy, we can learn to enhance these cognitive immune functions. But the concept of ‘critical thinking’ isn’t enough. As an example, Andy told a joke about Fred the flat-Earther who dies and goes to heaven. (We’re all Humanists and don’t believe in any of this, but Andy said it’s just a joke so we can continue.) After his initial processing, Fred gets to stand in front of God and ask him one question. Fred asks whether the Earth is round or flat, to which God replies that it is indeed round. Fred’s response? “This conspiracy goes even higher than I thought!”

The point of this joke is that Fred the flat-Earther isn’t devoid of critical thinking skills. He’s actually thinking too critically. One of Andy’s friends, Lee McIntyre, has recently published a book titled How to Talk to a Science Denier in which he writes about going undercover to a flat-Earth convention. It turns out that the attendees there think we’re the ones who are gullible. They ask questions that we’ve never thought about. In many ways, they’re more critical than us. So simply saying “be more critical” can be bad advice. It can actually trigger a kind of autoimmune disorder which attacks perfectly good ideas. This is why mental immune health has become a much better concept to Andy than critical thinking skills, which he has taught for 20+ years.

It turns out that tens of millions of people are like Fred, warped by poor mental immune systems. They have been surrounded by bad cultural immune systems leaving them susceptible to bad ideas. How did this happen? One reason is that cultural sayings like “everyone is entitled to their own opinion” or “values are subjective” lead to poor mental immune functioning. These cultural ideas act as ‘disruptors’ to individual cognitive immune systems. And yet, they are extremely prevalent.

One question that often pops up for this subject is whether this is all just a metaphor. For Andy, the answer is a clear no. To him, this is real, and we are at the beginning of a scientific revolution that sees this. Andy has spent his career studying scientific revolutions and knows that they have signs, which we are beginning to see for cognitive immunology. The first microscopes allowed people to see microbes and that led to many scientific revolutions, including the understanding of our bodies’ immune systems, which saved millions and millions of lives. Cognitive immunology can do the same again and improve the lives of billions of people for generations to come.

As part of Andy’s work with his new research centre CIRCE (the Cognitive Immunology Research Collaborative), experts are coming together to develop this new science, learn how to map so-called infodemics, and then study how to disrupt them. CIRCE is trying to develop principles for cognitive hygiene that can help us all in the fight against bad ideas. Some early findings include the following:

It’s easier to prevent poor thinking than to fix it. An ounce of ‘pre-bunking’ is worth pounds of cult deprogramming.
Belonging to a ‘community of inquiry’ can help a lot. Typical communities include Humanists, scientists, or philosophers. Join in!
Religions can often lead to closed minds since they encourage identifying with ideas that are set in stone and this triggers over-reactions of ‘identity protection’ whenever those ideas are questioned.
It’s better to hitch your identity to the act of inquiry, rather than to any specific beliefs since those can always change with new information.

Andy finished his talk by asking us a question. As Humanists who are committed to thinking well and improving the well-being of others, what can we do to bring about the cognitive immunology revolution? How can we try to reduce the blight of bad ideas on all future generations?

(Editor’s note—sharing Andy’s talk or book is a good start!)
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There is a lot more worth reading in Mental Immunity, but that pretty much covers Parts I, II, and III. While I was preparing for this post, though, and listening to Andy’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, something else occurred to me. So much of that discussion, just as it was for our North East Humanist discussion, was about how real mind-parasites and mental immunity are or whether these are just helpful analogies. It struck me that a Tinbergen analysis might actually prove helpful here. As a reminder, the pioneering ethologist Nicholaas Tinbergen said, “to achieve a complex understanding of a particular phenomenon, we may ask different questions which are mutually non-transferable. … What that phrase ‘mutually non-transferable’ really means in this case is your classic 2x2 matrix with 2 options for each of 2 different variables. … Setting up this 2x2 matrix yields the following four areas for consideration:

Mechanism (causation). This gives mechanistic explanations for how an organism's structures currently work. (Static + Proximate)
Ontogeny (development). This considers developmental explanations for changes in individuals, from their original DNA to their current form. (Dynamic + Proximate)
Function (adaptation). This looks at a species trait and how it solves a reproductive or survival problem in the current environment. (Static + Ultimate)
Phylogeny (evolution). This examines the entire history of the evolution of sequential changes in a species over many generations. (Dynamic + Ultimate)”

So, for mind parasites and mental immunity, I would say that Andy has three of these aspects covered. He can describe them from a functional perspective; he could trace the ontogeny of ideas within a single person’s life; and he could give the phylogenetic history of the ideas throughout our cultural history. But we simply don’t understand brains, neuroscience, or consciousness enough yet to (literally) flesh out the picture of mechanisms for these memes. This is a common problem for all studies of cultural evolution at the moment, however, and the rest of the picture is so compelling that it’s still worth using these evolutionary lenses to look at mind parasites and mental immunity as real things, rather than mere analogies.

What do you think? Is Andy on to something here? Does Mental Immunity help with the subtitle on its cover — the search for a better way to think? I think it definitely does and I’m looking forward to discussing that some more in my next post.

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Overview of How to Talk to a Science Denier by Lee McIntyre

12/31/2021

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Happy New Year! And good riddance to 2021. Between the January 6th attack on the Capitol and the spread of the anti-Covid-vaccine movement, it’s been another bad year for epistemology and truth-seeking. My last post looked at an epistemology book from a famous philosopher that didn’t offer much help about this situation, but now I’ve got two great books that come to the rescue. I’ll save Mental Immunity by Andy Norman for last, but before I get to that, let me go over a book called How to Talk to a Science Denier, which was written by Andy's friend Lee McIntyre. You can hear Lee talk about HTTTASD on Michael Shermer’s podcast, which I highly recommend if you don’t have time to read the book, but I was lucky enough to receive a pre-print copy from Lee’s publicist and I found it very enjoyable.

As before in this mini-series on epistemology, I'm not going to provide a formal review of this book. I'll just share some selected excerpts that I jotted down and insert a few of my own thoughts and interpretations where necessary. All page numbers are from the 2021 proof edition from MIT Press.

How to Talk to a Science Denier by Lee McIntyre

(TOC) Introduction; What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention; What Is Science Denial?; How Do You Change Someone's Mind?; Close Encounters with Climate Change; Canary in the Coal Mine; GMOs: Is There Such a Thing as Liberal Science Denial?; Talking with Trust; Coronavirus and the Road Ahead; Epilogue

This Table of Contents shows you what topics are covered in this book. I don’t know about you, but I got very excited reading this.

(p.xii) In June 2019, a landmark study was published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour that provided the first empirical evidence that you can fight back against science deniers. … two German researchers—Philipp Schmid and Cornelia Betsch—show that the worst thing you can do is not fight back, because then misinformation festers. The study considered two possible strategies. First, there is content rebuttal, which is when an expert presents deniers with the facts of science. Offered the right way, this can be very effective. But there is a lesser-known second strategy called technique rebuttal, which relies on the idea that there are five common reasoning errors made by all science deniers. And here is the shocking thing: both strategies are equally effective, and there is no additive effect, which means that anyone can fight back against science deniers! You don’t have to be a scientist to do it. Once you have studied the mistakes that are common to their arguments--reliance on conspiracy theories, cherry-picking evidence, reliance on fake experts, setting impossible expectations for science, and using illogical reasoning—you have the secret decoder ring that will provide a universal strategy for fighting back against all forms of science denial.

This is the core idea of the book. If you pay any attention at all to claims from science deniers, you'll see these five mistakes pop up over and over. And it seems possible to make progress against poor arguments by simply pointing these issues out to people. You don’t need to be an expert in epidemiology or voting booth technology or earth sciences. But no matter what, you should continue to talk to people.

(p.xiv) In his important essay “How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail,” professional skeptic and historian of science Michael Shermer recommends the following strategy: From my experience, (1) keep emotions out of the exchange, (2) discuss, don’t attack (no ad hominem or ad Hitlerum), (3) listen carefully and try to articulate the other position accurately, (4) show respect, (5) acknowledge that you understand why someone might hold that opinion, and (6) try to show how changing facts does not necessarily mean changing worldviews.

And when you do engage with people, these top tips can help keep it civil.

(p.xv) In my most recent book, The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience (MIT Press, 2019), I developed a theory of what is most special about science, and outlined a strategy for using this to defend science from its critics. In my view, the most special thing about science is not its logic or method but its values and practices—which are most relevant to its social context. In short, scientists keep one another honest by constantly checking their colleagues’ work against the evidence and changing their minds as new evidence comes to light.
(p.9) In my earlier book, The Scientific Attitude, I had argued that the primary thing that separates science from nonscience is that scientists embrace an attitude of willingness to change their hypothesis if it does not fit with the evidence.

These are great points that fit right in with my review of Why Trust Science? by Naomi Oreskes. It’s important to remember that epistemology is a normative discipline, meaning it is concerned with the norms of behaviours that we find acceptable and useful for producing knowledge. As McIntyre notes, the values and practices of truth-seeking and fallibilism are core aspects of the scientific method, and I would extend those as necessary for all epistemological efforts.

(p.13) Conspiracy-based reasoning is—or should be—anathema to scientific practice. Why? Because it allows you to accept both confirmation and failure as warrant for your theory. If your theory is borne out by the evidence, then fine. But if it is not, then it must be due to some malicious person who is hiding the truth. And the fact that there is no evidence that this is happening is simply testament to how good the conspirators are, which also confirms your hypothesis.

Bingo. McIntyre does a great job of pinpointing why conspiracy thinking leads to a bad place where beliefs get stuck and become immune to change.

(p.17) “What evidence, if it existed, would it take to convince you that you were wrong?” I liked this question because it was both philosophically respectable and also personal. It was not just about their beliefs but about them. … Instead of challenging them on the basis of their evidence, I would instead talk about the way that they were forming their beliefs on the basis of this evidence.

This is another key point of HTTTASD. This question is an excellent way in to the mind of science deniers. It's also the kind of question that can slowly eat away at others long after your personal interaction with them.

(p.28) We used to laugh at anti-evolutionists too. How many years before Flat Earthers are running for a seat on your local school board, with an agenda to “teach the controversy” in the physics classroom? If you think that can’t happen—that it couldn’t possibly get that bad—consider this: eleven million people in Brazil believe in Flat Earth; that is 7 percent of their population.

Gah! Watch out for bad thinkers subverting democratic institutions.

(p.39) Why do some people (like science deniers) engage in conspiracy theory thinking while others do not? Various psychological theories have been offered, involving factors such as inflated self-confidence, narcissism, or low self-esteem. A more popular consensus seems to be that conspiracy theories are a coping mechanism that some people use to deal with feelings of anxiety and loss of control in the face of large, upsetting events. The human brain does not like random events, because we cannot learn from and therefore cannot plan for them. When we feel helpless (due to lack of understanding, the scale of an event, its personal impact on us, or our social position), we may feel drawn to explanations that identify an enemy we can confront. This is not a rational process, and researchers who have studied conspiracy theories note that those who tend to “go with their gut” are the most likely to indulge in conspiracy-based thinking. This is why ignorance is highly correlated with belief in conspiracy theories. When we are less able to understand something on the basis of our analytical faculties, we may feel more threatened by it. There is also the fact that many are attracted to the idea of “hidden knowledge,” because it serves their ego to think that they are one of the few people to understand something that others don’t know.

This is an aside from the points about epistemology that I am focused on at the moment, but understanding the psychology behind the bad beliefs does help me sympathise a bit more with the people who hold them. And that can give me more patience too.

(p.42) There are myriad ways to be illogical. The main foibles and fallacies identified by the Hoofnagle brothers and others as most basic to science denial reasoning include the following: straw man, red herring, false analogy, false dichotomy, and jumping to a conclusion.

That's another good checklist for noting the errors that people make.

(p.48) When I was at FEIC 2018, I noted a disproportionate number of people who had had some sort of trauma in their lives. Sometimes this was health-related, other times it was interpersonal. Often it was unspecified. But in every instance the Flat Earther referred to it as in some way related to how they “woke up” and realized that they were being lied to. Many of them embraced a sense of victimization, even before they became Flat Earthers. I have found very little in the psychological literature about this, but I remain convinced that there is something to learn from this hypothesis. I came away from the convention with the feeling that many of the Flat Earthers were broken people. Could that be true for other science deniers as well?

Maybe so! One of the big takeaways from Why Trust Science? was that scientific communities are aiming for broad consensus — broad across all kinds of diversity and all manner of investigations — and this requires good faith efforts and trust in one another. It makes a lot of sense, therefore, that once someone loses faith and trust in others as a result of a personal trauma, then they could easily lose their ability to join in with consensus beliefs too. If so, that is doubly damaging.

(p.49) We now stand on the doorstep of a key insight into the question of why science deniers believe what they believe, even in the face of contravening evidence. The answer is found in realizing that the central issue at play in belief formation—even about empirical topics—may not be evidence but identity.

This is another key takeaway from HTTTASD. And it makes complete sense in light of the discussion above about knowledge building towards consensus rather than truth. We only recognise the good faith efforts of people who we trust to be in our in-groups. That identity can be quite flexible and broad enough to include “anyone trying to tell the truth,” or it can be so rigid and narrow as to only include “those who see the world as I do.” Obviously, the former leads to better outcomes, so be careful who you identify with.

(p.54) Once you decide who to believe, perhaps you know what to believe. But this makes us ripe for manipulation and exploitation by others. Perhaps this provides the long-awaited link between those who create the disinformation of science denial and those who merely believe it.

Yes! And if you remember from my overview of Kindly Inquisitors, two foundation stones for the liberal intellectual system are “no one gets final say” and “no one has personal authority.” Once you commit to these, you join a team that is far more protected from disinformation. Fake news fizzles out here very quickly after a few checks and balances by your other teammates. If, however, you join a tribe that forms around revealed truths from authority figures, then you become much more susceptible to disinformation. This has got to be a major reason why conservatives retweeted Russian trolls about 31 times more often than liberals in the 2016 election. (Other possible reasons do exist for this too.)

(p.56) Science denial is an attack not just on the content of certain scientific theories but on the values and methods that scientists use to come up with those theories in the first place. In some sense, science deniers are challenging the scientist’s identity! Science deniers are not just ignorant of the facts but also of the scientific way of thinking. To remedy this, we must do more than present deniers with the evidence; we must get them to rethink how they are reasoning about the evidence. We must invite them to try out a new identity, based on a different set of values.

This is a brilliant point from McIntyre. We need to be much more explicit about the epistemological values and methods we are using. We have to be clear that anyone can join in with them, and this is precisely why they work. Just shouting “trust the science” isn’t going to work when “science” is such an underdefined term for the general public. (And that includes too many scientists doing the loud shouting too.)

(p.68) Schmid and Betsch tested four possible ways of responding to subjects who had been exposed to scientific misinformation: no response, topic rebuttal, technique rebuttal, and both kinds of rebuttal. … The clear result of this study was that providing no response to misinformation was the worst thing you could do; with no rebuttal message, subjects were more likely to be swayed toward false beliefs. In a more encouraging result, researchers found that it was possible to mitigate the effects of scientific misinformation by using either content rebuttal or technique rebuttal, and that both were equally effective. There was, moreover, no additive advantage; when both content and technique rebuttal were used together, the result was the same.

What a fascinating study. Good to know.

(p.119) According to one recent study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, entitled “Red, White, and Blue Enough to be Green,” the persuasive strategy of “moral framing” can make a big difference in making the issue of climate change more palatable to conservatives. By emphasizing the idea that protecting the natural environment was a matter of (1) obeying authority, (2) defending the purity of nature, and (3) demonstrating one’s patriotism, there was a statistically significant shift in conservatives’ willingness to accept a pro-environmental message.

And that is a good data point about this strategy in action.

(p.175) My message in this book is simple: we need to start talking to one another again, especially to those with whom we disagree. But we have to be smart about how we do it.
(p.176) Those who are cognizant of the way science works understand that there is always some uncertainty behind any scientific pronouncement, and in fact the hallmark of science is that it cares about evidence and learns over time, which can lead to radical overthrow of one theory for another. But does the public understand this? Not necessarily. And lying to someone—for instance, by saying that masks are 100 percent effective, or that any vaccine is guaranteed to be safe—is exactly the wrong tactic. When scientists do that, any chink in the armor is ripe for later exploitation, and deniers will use it as an excuse not to believe anything further.
(p.177) I have long held that one of the greatest weapons we have to fight back against science denial is to embrace uncertainty as a strength rather than a weakness of science.

Yes! And this is exactly why I explicitly want to remove the claims for Truth from the JTB theory of knowledge. Embrace our uncertainty. That’s how we remain flexible in our thinking and begin to pay attention to what it really takes to builds up confidence.

(p.180) What if we taught people not just what scientists had found, but the process of conjecture, failure, uncertainty, and testing by which they had found it? Of course scientists make mistakes, but what is special about them is that they embrace an ethos that champions turning to the evidence as a way to learn from them. What if we educated people about the values of science by demonstrating the importance of the scientist’s creed: openness, humility, respect for uncertainty, honesty, transparency, and the courage to expose one’s work to rigorous testing? I believe this kind of science education would do more to defeat science denial than anything else we could do.

Agreed. I really enjoyed the main points that McIntyre drives home in HTTTASD. And there are numerous examples in the book (which I’ve left out of this short blog post) that are absolutely worth the price of admission. I especially enjoyed his stories about attending a Flat Earth convention. Amazing. If you’ve got any science deniers in your life, I highly recommend picking up a copy of McIntyre’s book to help you deal with them. Maybe we’ll all have a better 2022 because of it.

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Overview of Knowledge and Its Limits by Timothy Williamson

12/24/2021

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Consider this your lump of coal for Christmas for anything naughty you've done this year.

In my last post, I kicked off a short series on epistemology books with an overview of Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch. I found that one really useful, and I have two other excellent books that I'm itching to explore in this series, but first I feel the need to cover one that I really disliked since I think it's still illustrative of the problems that exist with this topic of knowledge. That book is Knowledge and Its Limits by Timothy Williamson. Williamson is the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University and he cracked the top 10 in two lists of the most cited philosophers in history, as discussed in a recent blog post by Eric Schwitzgebel. Keen followers might remember that I got to meet Tim in 2018 at a local event when I was asked by The Philosopher to write and present a short review of Doing Philosophy by Williamson. Tim was a most impressive thinker and a very gracious man to interact with four amateur philosophers and our impressions of his work. He obviously has done an enormous amount of good in the field of philosophy so I was excited to dive into his 2002 book on epistemology which sounded by the title like it might agree with my position that we cannot claim to have justified, true, beliefs (the traditional definition of knowledge). As it turned out, however, I think there's a reason Tim is a professor of logic and not one of epistemology.

As before, I'm not going to provide a formal review of this book. I'll just share some selected excerpts that I jotted down and insert a few of my own thoughts and interpretations where necessary. All page numbers are from the 2009 paperback edition from Oxford University Press.

Knowledge and its Limits by Timothy Williamson

(p.v) If I had to summarize this book in two words, they would be: knowledge first. It takes the simple distinction between knowledge and ignorance as a starting point from which to explain other things, not as something itself to be explained. In that sense the book reverses the direction of explanation predominant in the history of epistemology.

These are the very first sentences in the book, coming in its new Preface, and they explain why one of the blurbs on the back cover said "Williamson is to be commended for turning the theory of knowledge upside down." I didn't immediately grasp what Williamson meant by this, so I kept going through all 300+ pages of the book, but I might just as well have stopped right here. What Williamson is saying is that anything you know...you know! That's it. There's no need to fight over what counts or doesn't count as knowledge. This doesn't actually turn epistemology upside down; it throws it out the window! Williamson takes what is traditionally a normative study of the how's and why's of what we accept as knowledge and he settles for mere bald descriptions and assertions. By the end of the book, it became apparent to me that this is exactly what one might expect from an analytic professor of logic who wants crisp neat lines and unassailable starting points which he can use to build crystal palaces of thought by applying his rigorous formulas. Spoiler alert, that's not the way a gradually transitioning evolutionary world works.

(p.4) It will be assumed, not quite uncontroversially, that the upshot of that debate [among epistemologists] is that no currently available analysis of knowledge in terms of belief is adequate.
(p.6) Sceptics and their fellow-travellers characteristically suppose that the truth-values of one’s beliefs can vary independently of those beliefs and of all one’s other mental states: one’s total mental state is exactly the same in a sufficiently radical sceptical scenario as it is in a common-sense scenario, yet most of one’s beliefs about the external world are true in the common-sense scenario and false in the sceptical scenario.
(p.19) The point about the conjunctive proposition that p is true and unknown is that, in virtue of its structure, it is not available to be known in any case whatsoever. The argument for this conclusion was first published by Fitch in 1963. Contrapositively, he showed that all truths are knowable only if all truths are known. This is sometimes known as the Paradox of Knowability.

Williamson starts by acknowledging the skeptical problem of knowledge. (If you can see it through the jargon.) Philosophers haven't been able to prove that any beliefs rise to the level of true knowledge. Skeptical scenarios can always be imagined which would make our current beliefs false. Therefore, the only way to know if anything is true is to know everything that is possible to know. And it sure seems like that is impossible in a growing and changing universe where we are limited to our subjective viewpoints of the here and now with no way of ever knowing what we don't know.

Sounds pretty irrefutable, right? So what does Williamson offer to combat this?

(p.21) Knowing is a state of mind. That claim is central to the account of knowledge developed in this book. … A state of a mind is a mental state of a subject. Paradigmatic mental states include love, hate, pleasure, and pain. Moreover, they include attitudes to propositions: believing that something is so, conceiving that it is so, hoping or fearing that it is so, wondering whether it is so, intending or desiring it to be so. One can also know that something is so. This book concerns such propositional knowledge.
(p.27) Nothing said here should convince someone who has given up ordinary beliefs that they did in fact constitute knowledge, for nothing said here should convince her that they are true. The trick is never to give them up. This is the usual case with philosophical treatments of scepticism: they are better at prevention than at cure. If a refutation of scepticism is supposed to reason one out of the hole, then scepticism is irrefutable. The most to be hoped for is something which will prevent the sceptic (who may be oneself) from reasoning one into the hole in the first place.

The trick?!? So we're just supposed to ignore the centuries of arguments about philosophical doubt? Williamson wants us to confine ourselves to "propositional knowledge." But this is the kind of knowledge that simply takes for granted the propositions that are used to construct a logical argument. For example, take the two propositions A) "Socrates is a man" and B) "all men are mortal." Accept these, and you know for certain that C) "Socrates is mortal." Sure, that's one way to arrive at certainty. But only in "logic space" as opposed to reality. Logic space tells us nothing about how to evaluate the truth of the propositions. And without that, then any old proposition will do. If we were to accept the norm of taking propositions for granted, then we would slide immediately into a vicious relativism where anything can be claimed as true. I'm sure Williamson doesn't want that, but as soon as he gets off his perch and gets into debates about which propositions are to be disallowed, then he's going to need traditional epistemology. Only that can tell you why a proposition such as "all men are not mortal" should be treated as false.

(p.34) The main idea is simple. A propositional attitude is factive if and only if, necessarily, one has it only to truths. Examples include the attitudes of seeing, knowing, and remembering. Not all factive attitudes constitute states; forgetting is a process. Call those attitudes which do constitute states stative. The proposal is that knowing is the most general factive stative attitude, that which one has to a proposition if one has any factive stative attitude to it at all.

This proposal from Williamson isn't simple at all! Cutting through the dense obfuscation, he has simply smuggled in the claim to know "truths" while ignoring the entire debate about how we know which truths are true. (Spoiler alert, we can't say for certain.)

(p.101) Since it is logically possible for the deer to be behind the rock at one moment and not another, their present-tensed belief may be true at one moment and false at another. By standard criteria of individuation, a proposition cannot change its truth-value; the sentence ‘The deer is behind the rock’ expresses different propositions at different times.

I just want to flag up this point that "a proposition cannot change its truth-value." That's an important part of the definition for truth that must be considered, and it's also a point that I may raise in an article about evolutionary logic some day. For now, just notice the problem of this "standard criteria" in philosophy.

(p.138) Thus, the reasoning by which they rule out a last-day examination is unsound, for it assumes that knowledge will be retained in trying to refute a supposition on which it would not be retained.

This is a diversion from the epistemological problem of knowledge that I'm concerned with, but it is an example of the narrowness of Williamson's logic-driven approach so I wanted to mention it. I've cut this passage short, but essentially Williamson tries to solve the surprise test paradox by saying, "A ha! Your argument rests on knowing that a test is coming, but since you might possibly forget that knowledge, then your argument isn't fully airtight. Thus, (*pushes up glasses*), I can ignore the paradox." This is utterly pedantic and misses the entire point of the argument. But when logic is your only hammer tool, every problem gets nailed with it. For a more direct treatment, see my own response to this thought experiment.

(p.180) Uncertainty about evidence does not generate an infinite regress of evidence about evidence about . . .. In order to reflect adequately on one’s evidence, one might need evidence about one’s evidence, and in order to reflect adequately about the latter evidence, one might need evidence about it, and so on. But this regress is merely and harmlessly potential. We cannot in fact realize infinitely many levels of adequate reflection; at best, further reflection enables us to realize finitely many further stages. At some stage, one must rely on unreflective causal sensitivity to evidence.

This is the heart of Williamson's long argument — that one must rely on unreflective causal sensitivity to evidence. No matter how much logical notation he hides behind (and there is a lot of it), this is a stunningly weak point to rest one's epistemology upon. I thought an unexamined life was not worth living. So how is an unreflective philosophy worth listening to?

(p.184) In recent decades, questions of knowledge seem to have been marginalized by questions of justification. According to Crispin Wright, “knowledge is not really the proper central concern of epistemologico-sceptical enquiry… We can live with the concession that we do not, strictly, know some of the things we believed ourselves to know, provided we can retain the thought that we are fully justified in accepting them.” Similarly, John Earman argues that accounts of knowledge are irrelevant to the philosophy of science, because in it ‘the main concern is rarely whether or not a scientist ‘knows’ that some theory is true but rather whether or not she is justified in believing it’.

That's right. Building cases for justification is good enough for scientists, but that's all our knowledge can ever be as well. It is time for a turn to humble pie in epistemology.

(p.189) Why does it matter what counts as evidence? Consider the idea that one should proportion one’s belief in proportion to one’s evidence for it. How much evidence one has for the proposition depends on what one’s evidence is. More precisely, a theory of evidence is needed to give bite to what Carnap calls the requirement of total evidence: “[I]n the application of inductive logic to a given knowledge situation, the total evidence available must be taken as a basis for determining the degree of confirmation (1950: 211).”

This is another excellent point to consider. We need a theory of evidence for determining degrees of confirmation. Sounds like a job for another evolutionary hierarchy! Not one of needs or of consciousness or of free will, but one of knowledge. I'll be working on that for sure for my paper to come out of all this research.

And with that, I've reached my limit on Knowledge and Its Limits. Let me know if you have any other questions or thoughts about it in the comment section below. Until next time, merry Christmas! Hope you liked pressing on this lump of coal as we try to make diamonds with clarity.

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Overview of Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch

11/30/2021

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As some of you know, I was working on a conversation about evolutionary epistemology with David Sloan Wilson last year, but that has stalled for a number of reasons. While I do still hope it will resume (David has apologised and promised to get back to it!), I have decided to carry on with my own research towards what I think will be my next academic paper. So, I've been working through lots of essays on the subject as well as a few key books, which I thought I'd review here as a way of building towards my own eventual contribution. As a reminder for where I stand on this, my most important blog post to date about epistemology is the one titled Knowledge Cannot Be Justified, True, Belief. The ideas there are the ones I will be expanding on in my paper, and they provide the lens through which I will be reviewing these other epistemological works.

First up is Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch, which was published in 1993. Rauch is an American author, journalist, and activist. After graduating from Yale University, he worked at the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina, the National Journal, and The Economist, in addition to being a freelance writer. He is currently a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution as well as a contributing editor of The Atlantic.

That isn't the typical profile of someone I'd look to for thoughts about epistemology, but Rauch had a new book out in early 2021 called The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, which I've heard him speak about on a couple of podcasts. Those conversations were excellent and they spurred me to go back to his original work. From what I've seen of the reviews of his new book, he's basically updating the same core ideas from Kindly Inquisitors in light of the modern war on truth by Putin, Trump, and other demagogues around the world. That's great, but Kindly Inquisitors does a fantastic job reviewing the history of the search for truth, and it sets down some good ideas about epistemology, so I'll stick to reviewing that one from Rauch for now.

Rather than provide a full review, I'll just share selected excerpts from Kindly Inquisitors and insert some of my own thoughts and interpretations where necessary. All page numbers are from the 2013 paperback edition with a new forward from George Will.

Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch

p.4 We have standard labels for the liberal political and economic systems—democracy and capitalism. Oddly, however, we have no name for the liberal intellectual system, whose activities range from physics to history to journalism. So in this book I use the term “liberal science,” for reasons to be explained later.
p.5 The liberal regime for making knowledge is not something most of us have ever even thought about. … What is the right standard for distinguishing the few true beliefs from the many false ones? And who should set that standard?

It's a great idea to name this epistemology (and it's alternatives), although I'd probably propose something different than "liberal science". I'll have to work on that later. For now, I'll just add that I thought many of the answers Rauch is looking for were in Naomi Oreskes' book Why Trust Science?, which I discussed in my published review of that book. In short, Oreskes builds the argument that the requirements of "what it takes to produce reliable knowledge" are fivefold: 1) consensus, 2) method, 3) evidence, 4) values, and 5) humility. This fits well with Rauch's views, as we will see below.

pp.5-6 To the central question of how to sort true beliefs from the “lunatic” ones, here are five answers:
- The Fundamentalist Principle: Those who know the truth should decide who is right.
- The Simple Egalitarian Principle: All sincere persons’ beliefs have equal claims to respect.
- The Radical Egalitarian Principle: Like the simple egalitarian principle, but the beliefs of persons in historically oppressed classes or groups get special consideration.
- The Humanitarian Principle: Any of the above, but with the condition that the first priority be to cause no hurt.
- The Liberal Principle: Checking of each by each through public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right.
p.12 The biologist and feminist theorist Ruth Hubbard says, in a phrase that could come from any of a variety of contemporary writers on knowledge, “The pretence that science is objective, apolitical, and value-neutral is profoundly political.”
p.30 This essay proposes a more fundamental, and more radical, kind of answer to the enemies of criticism. It requires thinking of science in a way which at first may seem strange—in a very broad way, and particularly in a political way. It requires thinking about science as a set of rules for social behaviour, rules for settling conflict. To think that way means, to begin with, understanding what the rules of the game are, and how philosophers like Descartes and Hume launched a social revolution no less than a philosophical one.

This is an excellent reminder that epistemology is a normative discipline. It's not descriptive—it's not about what we know. Instead, it's about how we know that we know things. What are the norms of behavior that lead to agreements about knowledge? As Rauch is getting at here, the scientific method may play a very broad role in this discussion and should not be confined merely to the realm of scientific facts. Is this "scientism"? Yes, but in the good sense; not the pejorative one spat out by religious scholars.

p.31 Read The Republic, putative wellspring of Western values, and you find that once you look past the glittering façade of Plato’s rhetoric you are face to face with the ethic of the totalitarian regime. It was that Republic of Plato’s which John Locke, David Hume, and the other founding fathers of the liberal epistemological regime rebelled against and, eventually, overthrew.
p.33 Plato believed that knowledge comes from wisdom, and so knowledge belongs especially to the especially wise—to the true philosophers, who are rare indeed. The real philosophers are the people “who are capable of apprehending that which is eternal and unchanging, while those who are incapable of this, but lose themselves and wander amid the multiplicities of multifarious things, are not philosophers.”
p.41 “One man is wiser than another and … the wiser man is the measure,” Plato says. To each, then, according to his wisdom: appoint the extraordinary thinker as arbiter of truth. Plato’s logic stood dominant for two thousand years. At last it was upended by an innovation in social thinking which audaciously replaced extraordinary philosophers with ordinary critics.

Count me among the philosophers who don't believe in such "true philosophers." Our post-Darwin view of the universe wipes out "that which is eternal and unchanging" and with it any claims to know that kind of truth. Just as Darwinism removed heavenly designers from nature — a view characterized as "a strange inversion" from top-down to bottom-up — the same must be done to our notions of knowledge. Knowledge is built from the bottom-up, agreement by agreement, never ultimately reaching a state of perfection, as opposed to being revealed or adjudicated from the top by some wise man.

pp.42-43 Sceptical doubters have been around since at least the days of Socrates himself and of Pyrrho of Elis (fourth century B.C.), who is supposed to have made it his aim to withhold judgment on all matters on which there were conflicting views, including the matter of whether anything was known. … As Plato had understood almost two millennia earlier, the problem of knowledge could tear society to shreds, and indeed, as Catholics and Protestants bloodied each other in battles across Europe, it did so. … Perhaps more brilliantly and ruthlessly than anyone before or since, Montaigne argued in 1577 that for man to attain knowledge was hopeless.
p.44 In 1739, David Hume, the brilliant twenty-eight-year-old enfant terrible of modern philosophy, came along with his bulldozer and made a ruin of the last pillars of certainty about the external world. … Knowledge has not been the same since. Hume demolished the logical underpinnings of all naïve claims, and most sophisticated claims, that we can have any certain knowledge whatever of the objective world.

Yep. And yet people are weak and seek certainty from their political, religious, philosophical, and economic leaders, many of whom are all too happy to oblige with far-too-sure pronouncements.

p.45 The “scepticism” upon which liberal science is based is something quite different. (To distinguish it from the kind which says that we should never conclude anything, philosophers often call it “fallibilism”.) This kind of scepticism says cheerfully that we have to draw conclusions, but that we may regard none of our conclusions as being beyond any further scrutiny or change. … This attitude does not require you to renounce knowledge. It requires you only to renounce certainty, which is not the same thing.

Yes!! Shout that from the hilltops with certainty! 😁 Seriously, it's not a contradiction to say that fallibilism is and always will be the correct way to treat knowledge...as far as we can tell.

p.47 Why did the sceptical fires not leave society in disarray, unable to believe anything, as seemed to happen during the sceptical crisis of Montaigne’s day? The answer is: because the fires cleared the ground for a new and extraordinarily powerful game—the game of liberal science.
pp.47-49 The scientists and scholars of the Enlightenment were showing that uncertain knowledge is possible. … Freeman Dyson wrote: “The Royal Society of London in 1660 proudly took as its motto the phrase Nullius in Verba, meaning “No man’s word shall be final.” … With nullius in verba we have reached one of the two great foundation stones of the liberal intellectual system. … First, the sceptical rule. … No one gets final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it. … Second, the empirical rule. … No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement.

These two rules are the heart of Rauch's work, and from what I can tell they remain unchanged in his 2021 book The Constitution of Knowledge. They work well as simple statements of how inquiry works.

p.50 Suppose a group needs to decide which of several conflicting ideas is right. ... First, each school of thought places its opinion before the group. Second, friends and enemies of the ideas begin testing and criticising, poking and prodding, checking and cross-checking. To check, players can do all kinds of things. Their tests can include real experiment, thought experiment, plausibility, simplicity, generality, utility, logical consistency, beauty—always understanding, however, that whatever test they use has to be a test that I or anyone else also can use, at least in principle (no personal authority). If, for you, a theory passes the test of experiment or beauty, then it must do the same for me and for others, or else the theory has not checked out conclusively. Third, everyone is entitled to modify one of the original ideas or to suggest a new one. Fourth, the opinion which emerges as the survivor is the winner—only, however, for as long as it continues to survive (no final say). Thus the liberal game of science. Whenever you and others agree to follow those rules, there are a million things you might do to investigate reality—but whatever you do will look a lot like science.

In other words, the scientific method could actually be extended and called the epistemological method. I'll have to defend that view another time, but here I want to focus on the fact that this passage ends up being a near perfect description of my own formula for answering the Gettier problem of knowledge. As a quick reminder about that issue, Plato defined knowledge as having three components—it must be justified, true, belief. Gettier, however, showed us examples that made us question if we could ever justify a belief to the point that we knew it was true. Since then, decades of epistemology work has tried and failed to do so, which is why I say we ought to abandon truth as one of the criteria for knowledge. Truth may be the guide we aim towards, but we will never be able to prove that we have it. What's left, then, is my formula for knowledge as justified beliefs that are currently surviving our best tests. Rauch never mentions the Gettier problem in his book, but his fourth step in this passage above almost perfectly describes my replacement for Plato's JTB theory as K=JBS.

p.51 The game of science is not just for “scientists”. It encompasses the defining ethic of the whole vast culture of critical, liberal inquiry.
pp.55-56 “One man’s experience is nothing if it stands alone,” the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce wrote a century ago. “If he sees what others cannot, we call it hallucination. It is not ‘my’ experience but ‘our’ experience that has to be thought of, and this ‘us’ has indefinite possibilities.” … No one better understood the social implications of science’s liberal idea of objectivity.

More good points about how the scientific method can be extended to all knowledge inquiries. But is it exclusionary to do so?

p.56 The creationist, or UFO-watcher, or minority separatist, or whoever, can [each] go off and play his own game. As he walks away, he leaves his challenge behind: “Who gave you the right to set the rules? Why is your ‘science game’, with its rules built by comfortable, secular, European males, the only game in town—especially if it hurts and excludes people?

The goal is not to hurt people, but the two principles that Rauch identifies above ("No one gets final say." and "No one has personal authority.") make it very clear that no one is actually excluded from this game. This is exactly why it gets us as close as we can come to independent and objective knowledge. If that is injurious to any ancient, exclusive claims of knowledge, then so much the better for overturning them. This is the logical progression of authority being reduced from many polytheistic gods, to one single monotheistic deity, and then right on down to zero figures of unquestionable revelation.

p.57 If you had to pick a three-word motto to define the liberal idea, “order without authority” would be pretty good. The liberal innovation was to set up society so as to mimic the greatest liberal system of them all, the evolution of life. Thus, a market game is an open-ended, decentralized process for allocating resources and legitimizing possession, a democracy game is an open-ended, decentralized process for legitimizing the use of force, and a science game is an open-ended, decentralized process for legitimizing belief.

This does a great job of pointing out how how evolution has worked — it is open-ended and decentralized — but Rauch fails to recognize that evolution is not always good! The evolution of life is just an amoral fact, which we should not passively accept as some kind of argument for libertarianism. (That would be a big violation of crossing the is-ought divide.) Living systems discover many ways to manage and regulate their internal and social lives for the good of individuals and groups. That's an element of the evolution of life that we ought to mimic too.

pp.57-58 Most of us think of science as a kind of machine whose equations and labs and research papers inexorably grind out data and theories and inventions. But philosophers of science have moved sharply away from that view, and toward what has become known as evolutionary epistemology. Evolutionary epistemology holds that our knowledge comes to us not from revelation, as religious traditions maintain; not from deep reflection by the wise, as in Plato; nor even from crisp experiments that unambiguously reveal nature’s secrets, as in the mechanistic view of science that prevailed until this century. Rather, our knowledge evolves—with all the haphazardness and improvisation that “evolving” implies. In evolutionary epistemology, hypotheses and ideas evolve as they compete under pressure from criticism, with intellectual diversity providing the raw material for change.

Yes! This is another description of my JBS theory of knowledge. And, in an analogy to natural selection, I label these changes in knowledge coming from criticism as a form of rational selection.

p.59 The theory of political liberalism and the theory of epistemological liberalism were fathered by one and the same man, the father of liberalism itself. John Locke proposed, three hundred years ago, that the legitimacy of a government resides not with the rulers but with the rolling consent of the governed. … Locke himself never explicitly linked his philosophy of knowledge with his philosophy of politics, but the kinship is not hard to see. To begin with, he was one of the greatest of all the fallibilists.
p.60 In passages which today define the morality of liberal science, Locke preached the sermon which every generation learns with such difficulty and forgets with such ease: “We should do well to commiserate our mutual ignorance, and endeavour to remove it in all the gentle and fair ways of information, and not instantly treat others ill, as obstinate and perverse, because they will not renounce their own, and receive our opinions. … For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or the falsehoods of all he condemns?”

Nice. If only our populations of voters were to take this to heart and stop listening to authoritarian demagogues.

p.72 The constant threat to any social system from choosing between ideas is schism. That was the threat which the geologists of two hundred years ago were confronted with. Their success in coping with it illustrates an important point. One of liberal science’s greatest triumphs is what it has not done: split apart. We do not have two or ten incompatible kinds of physics or history, each denying the legitimacy of the others; there has been no Great Schism in science.

This is an excellent and overlooked point! Surely a schism in science would have happened by now if it was going to. Instead, the norms of science have evolved slowly and effectively.

p.77 No one, however, has managed to say just what reason is, and where it differs from faith. (Why is it “reason” for a layman to believe Darwin’s story about human development but “faith” to believe the Bible’s story?) The truth is that liberal science rests upon faith in its rules; it is not a system for doing without faith but a system for managing it.

No!!! This very much depends on your definition of faith, but a good one to distinguish it from reason is "belief without evidence." Understood that way, faith is not like reason at all. Liberal science doesn't "rest" on anything. It is always active. It starts with hypotheses and maintains that all of them are fallible and could one day be disproven. We have reasons to believe the ones we hold. That's entirely different than acting on faith alone.

p.82 However, a critical intellectual system cannot fill our spiritual needs and does not pretend to; it sends us off to fill them privately as best we can. It is incomplete—utterly so—as to providing for our souls.

Gah! No! This is blind, religious hogwash and very sad to see. Any "spiritual needs" that "provide for our souls" are fictional inventions that can only pretend to soothe. Too often, they blind us to reality and lead us into extinction. The incredible story of life evolving and surviving is enough to give us purpose and goals at the top of our evolutionary hierarchy of needs.

pp.116-117 To believe incorrectly is never a crime, but simply to believe is never to have knowledge. In other words, liberal science does not restrict belief, but it does restrict knowledge. It absolutely protects freedom of belief and speech, but it absolutely denies freedom of knowledge: in liberal science, there is positively no right to have one’s opinions, however heartfelt, taken seriously as knowledge. Just the contrary: liberal science is nothing other than a selection process whose mission is to test beliefs and reject the ones that fail. A liberal intellectual regime says that if you want to believe the moon is made of green cheese, fine. But if you want your belief recognized as knowledge, there are things you must do. You must run your belief through the science game for checking. And if your belief is a loser, it will not be included in the science texts. It probably won’t even be taken seriously by most respectable intellectuals. In a liberal society, knowledge—not belief—is the rolling critical consensus of a decentralised community of checkers, and it is nothing else.

This is another wonderful illustration of my JBS theory in action. It's a shame Rauch didn't attempt to use Gettier to help explain this clearly. If you don't have any justifications (J) that come from the ongoing scientific method, you are just left with BS. And that is not knowledge.

pp.146-147 When activists insist on introducing the “gay perspective” or the “black perspective” or the “women’s perspective” into a curriculum or a discussion, they really mean introducing the activists’ own particular opinions. Those minority activists want power and seek it by claiming to speak for a race or a gender or an ethnicity. Accept their premises, and knowledge comes in colours.

Written in 1993, this may be (if I'm being generous) a prescient warning against the excesses of claims about "my truth" that we see from some activists who demand they cannot be challenged. However, In line with the values of the scientific method, all of these other perspectives must certainly be listened to, respected, and valued. They may also be impossible or very difficult to perceive for people that do not inhabit the same embodied subjective experience. So, in that sense, knowledge does indeed come in colors. For an extreme example that proves the point, it's uncontroversial to say the knowledge of a bat has a different flavor than our own. Surely we can extend that principle to the differences among the varieties of human experience, even if our requirements for social cohesion demand that we strive for consensus and integration across the full and complicated spectrum of those varieties.

p.171 Knowledge, then, is often empirical, but it is always social. By its very nature, it transcends individual effort. “We are all putting our shoulders to the wheel for an end that none of us can catch more than a glimpse at—that which the generations are working out,” wrote Pierce. ... Half a century later, Popper pioneered the insight that the social process of checking is evolutionary in nature. Hypotheses provide raw material; competition to withstand the rigors of public criticism then weeds out the many errors, and what survives on any given day is our knowledge. As in biological evolution, we cannot assume that any result is final. “We should not dismiss the possibility that we may have to be content with improving our approximations forever,” wrote Popper.

Fantastic. I'm excited to have this confirmation that evolutionary epistemology is the way to go. What do you think? Can we reach consensus on that?

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Consciousness 24 — The FAQs of Consciousness

10/3/2021

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Here it is! Finally, after 19 1/2 months, I've reached the end of my series on consciousness. This project started on a bit of a whim when I was looking for something interesting to dig into during the Covid lockdown. But I also had a hunch that there were some big evolutionary ideas to uncover about this topic. I had been listening to a lot of podcasts about consciousness and I felt like the time was right for a quick exploration.

Boy was I wrong!

This has been by far the hardest philosophical topic that I've focused on during my 10 years of writing. And after all that, I shared the summary of my evolutionary theory in my last post about consciousness. I think this could really make an important contribution (no one I know of has attempted a Tinbergen analysis of this phenomena before), but did that summary answer all of the questions about this topic? Hardly! So that's what I'm sharing here now to wrap up this series and finally turn my attention to other things.

During my research I gathered a huge list of questions that typically arise about consciousness. I whittled them down and felt they could best be organised into 5 groups: introductory questions, those from impartial sources, those coming from other naturalists, questions coming from those who doubt or disbelieve naturalism, and finally the many questions that have come from David Chalmers. Answering these questions in this order takes us on the best journey, but my answers ended up filling 43 pages with over 23,000 words. That's a lot even for me!

Rather than string these out over several digestible posts, I decided it was better to be able to see all the questions at once. After that, I have provided a pdf version of the answers so you can download them and read them in whatever way you prefer, in whatever order you like, and on as many questions as you care about.

Thanks to everyone who came along with me on this journey. In particular, thanks to Mike, James, and the two Eric's — your attention and expertise kept me going far longer than you ever could have wanted, but it was exactly what I needed to get where I thought I should go.

As always, questions and comments are very much appreciated in the comment section below. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did writing it!

INTRODUCTORY QUESTIONS
1. What would a good definition of consciousness look like?
2. What’s your definition?

QUESTIONS FROM IMPARTIAL SOURCES
3. Why do we think consciousness is a physical phenomenon?
4. How could minds possibly arise from matter?
5. Does consciousness contain non-physical information?
6. And what about Hume’s missing shade of blue?
7. Is consciousness so mysterious that it is beyond our ability to understand it?
8. What about Zombies?
9. How is our conscious experience bound together?
10. What can the neural correlates of consciousness tell us?
11. Are other animals conscious?
12. Can machines be conscious?
13. So, “what is it like” to be conscious?
14. Do we have immortal souls?
15. Do we have free will?

QUESTIONS FROM OTHER NATURALISTS
16. Can’t we just get by with a very rough definition of consciousness?
17. What about the various parts of living systems? Which ones are conscious?
18. Is the United States conscious?
19. How do we know we don’t have “inverted qualia”?
20. How do you solve the mind-evolution problem?
21. Does consciousness have a purpose?

QUESTIONS FROM THOSE WHO DOUBT OR DISBELIEVE NATURALISM
22. Why doesn’t a chair feel my bottom?
23. How can consciousness survive sleep?
24. How could consciousness have possibly emerged from lower organisms?
25. Is conscious experience outside of the realm of science?
26. Are minds everywhere? What about panpsychism?

QUESTIONS FROM DAVID CHALMERS
27. What are the easy problems of consciousness?
28. What is the hard problem of consciousness?
29. What does it take to solve the easy problems of consciousness?
30. Is the hard problem really different than the easy ones?
31. Can we see an example? Is the binding problem hard or easy?
32. How have people tried to answer the hard problem?
33. So, what else is needed and why do physical accounts fail?
34. Is this the same problem we faced with vitalism?
35. So, is consciousness just fundamental?
36. If we accept consciousness is fundamental, then what?
37. Is this fundamental view a sort of dualism?
38. If consciousness is fundamental, shouldn’t it be simple to describe?
39. What about Chalmers’ own theories?
40. Is consciousness all about information processing?
41. So, can we make progress and answer the hard problem of consciousness?

The FAQs of Consciousness.pdf
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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?
Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective
Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution
Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy
Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory
Consciousness 10 — Mind + Self
Consciousness 11 — Neurobiological Naturalism
Consciousness 12 — The Deep History of Ourselves
Consciousness 13 — (Rethinking) The Attention Schema
Consciousness 14 — Integrated Information Theory
Consciousness 15 — What is a Theory?
Consciousness 16 — A (sorta) Brief History of Its Definitions
Consciousness 17 — From Physics to Chemistry to Biology
Consciousness 18 — Tinbergen's Four Questions
Consciousness 19 — The Functions of Consciousness
Consciousness 20 — The Mechanisms of Consciousness
Consciousness 21 — Development Over a Lifetime (Ontogeny)
Consciousness 22 — Our Shared History (Phylogeny)
Consciousness 23 — Summary of My Evolutionary Theory

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Not My Final Thoughts on Free Will

8/2/2021

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In case you haven’t been following Sam Harris closely, that title for this post is a subtle dig at Sam’s “Final Thoughts on Free Will” podcast back in March. Evolutionary thinkers can never (as far as we know) claim to have reached a final truth, so they ought not to say they’ve ever reached a “final position” on any topic. However, we do come to conclusions for now, and it is time now for me to wrap up my posts on free will. As a quick reminder, that series has included:

If you read the 17,500 words in all those posts, you’ll have seen that there is already a large zone of agreement on this issue between hard incompatibilists like Caruso and Harris and compatibilists like Dennett, Kaufman, and myself. From my review of Just Deserts:

Both are naturalists (JD p.171) who see no supernatural interference in the workings of the world. That leaves both [sides] accepting general determinism in the universe (JD p.33), which simply means all events and behaviours have prior causes. Therefore, the libertarian version of free will is out. Any hope that humans can generate an uncaused action is deemed a “non-starter” by Gregg (JD p.41) and “panicky metaphysics” by Dan (JD p.53). Nonetheless, both agree that “determinism does not prevent you from making choices” (JD p.36), and some of those choices are hotly debated because of “the importance of morality” (JD p.104). Laws are written to define which choices are criminal offenses. But both acknowledge that “criminal behaviour is often the result of social determinants” (JD p.110) and “among human beings, many are extremely unlucky in their initial circumstances, to say nothing of the plights that befall them later in life” (JD p.111). Therefore “our current system of punishment is obscenely cruel and unjust” (JD p.113), and both [sides] share “concern for social justice and attention to the well-being of criminals” (JD p.131).

My previous six posts also led to this conclusion in my summary of Freedom Evolves:

I basically found that I agreed with Dan that free will is not the magic libertarian thing that many ordinary folks believe in. But neither is it the fatalistic determinism that these folks see as the only other choice. Instead, there is something in between these extremes where more and more degrees of freedom have evolved into something that explains the phenomenology of what we experience, which Dan calls "the kind of free will worth wanting." [And] I think I have a few things to add to Dan's position on this, some details which make it clearer.

Another way to see the need for this compatibilist conclusion would be to look at a word cloud for all of the issues that get discussed during free will debates. I don’t have the time or resources to put lots of relevant texts into a computer program that would generate such a cloud showing the frequency with which each idea is used, but I did at least gather a list of many of the relevant concepts while I was going through the books and papers and interviews I’ve covered in this series. Please don’t read this entire list, but a quick scan is helpful:

Anyone trying to carve a neat and tidy definition of free will out of that mess—either to reject free will or to accept it—will forever be faced with a bunch of “whataboutism” from people holding other positions. There are just too many concepts bound up here. Any simple affirmation or denial of the phrase “free will” is going to feel too blunt to cover it all. To me, following the standard playbook of analytical philosophy and “defining one’s terms” just is not going to get us very far. Consider the following quotes from the world of biology where free will is clearly located. (My emphases added in bold.)

“In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation.” (Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species)
“Neither Mayr nor Tinbergen provide a detailed account of how to integrate different areas of biological inquiry, but both provide enough discussion to make it clear that they have in mind a general practice that philosophers of science have characterized in some detail under the label ‘functional analysis’. The canonical account of this practice among philosophers of science is Robert Cummins’ (1975, 1983) account, according to which functional analysis consists in breaking down some capacity or disposition of interest into simpler dispositions or capacities, organized in a particular way.” (Conley)
“Reduction, unlike analysis, ignores a system’s organization (1982), which Mayr characterizes as the interaction between components (Mayr 2004). Organization explains the emergence of new characteristics that could not be predicted from knowledge of the isolated components of a system, but analysis provides a middle ground between reductionism and holism (Mayr 1982). Mayr claims that ‘all problems of biology, particularly those relating to emergence, are ultimately problems of hierarchical organization’ (Mayr, 1982, p. 64).” (Conley)

So, for free will, we need a deep “functional analysis” where elements of that emerging property are listed out for separate consideration. In this way, nuances can be captured and lassoed into an evolving understanding of all the issues. Now, where have we seen a hierarchical organisation of a complicated emergent biological process before?? Hmmm. This quote from one of Dan Dennett’s papers should help you remember:

“It is no mere coincidence that the philosophical problems of consciousness and free will are, together, the most intensely debated and (to some thinkers) ineluctably mysterious phenomena of all. As the author of five books on consciousness, two books on free will, and dozens of articles on both, I can attest to the generalization that you cannot explain consciousness without tackling free will, and vice versa.”

In my nearly finished series on consciousness (summarised here), I explained how a Tinbergen analysis is the proper way to explore and explain that complex emergent phenomenon. And since free will and consciousness are so tied together, a Tinbergen analysis is useful here too. This is the extra detail I would add to the free will debate beyond Dan Dennett’s generally excellent contributions that I have discussed so far. I hinted at this in my review of Just Deserts with the following passages:

[M]ost philosophers [rely] on classical logic, which says A is A, not-A is not-A, and the law of the excluded middle says there is nothing else possible in between. Such rigid definitions work well in the precise worlds of mathematics and Newtonian physics, but not in the fuzzy world of biology. In that realm, the ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen gave us his Four Questions which are now the generally accepted framework of analysis for all biological phenomena. To understand anything there, Tinbergen says you have to understand its function, mechanism, personal history (ontogeny), and evolutionary history (phylogeny). As a very simple example, philosophers could tie themselves in knots trying to define ‘a frog’ such that this or that characteristic is A or not-A, but it’s just so much clearer and more informative to include the stories of tadpole development and the slow historical diversion from salamanders. So, is free will more like a geometry proof or a frog?
Tinbergen’s perspective gives us a few additional tricks. It isn’t luck that I grew up to be a person rather than a horse. Once I was conceived, the evolutionary history (phylogeny) that led up to me put a lot of constraints on my personal development (ontogeny). Luck may explain all the differences between me and every other person out there, but we needn’t worry about luck when describing all the things we have in common. There are hordes of characteristics that all humans share, but the one that is most important for this debate is our capacity to learn. The extreme neuroplasticity we have (a mechanism of free will) is what enables all but the most unfortunate humans to sense and respond to their environments (a function for free will) to the point where they slowly, slowly become a unique self.

For details on how I developed answers to Tinbergen’s four questions for consciousness, you need to see posts 18 (Tinbergen), 19 (Functions), 20 (Mechanisms), 21 (Ontogeny), and 22 (Phylogeny). Luckily, there’s no need to go into so much depth for free will now. Since the groundwork has been laid for consciousness, a quick sketch will suffice to show how free will folds very neatly into this view and then expands perfectly logically during the developments of consciousness. Essentially, it is clear that degrees of freedom only open up for living organisms, and they expand along as more and more levels of consciousness are developed. I don’t expect that to sound controversial, but the details are hopefully helpful to the discussion.

I think it’s easiest to grasp this table by focusing on the Functions column. Going from top to bottom, there is (1) no free will before the emergence of life. Once (2) life is established, the phenomenon of affect provides innate valences for making in the moment reflex choices between good or bad options for life. As (3) complex multicellularity develops mechanisms to learn and act on (unconscious at first) intentions, then life gains the freedom for choosing different actions in the present based on things it has learned in the past. Continuing on, the (4) development of brains enables modelling predictions of the world, which gives life freedom to choose between alternate futures. As all of these abilities lead to (5) the dawning of self-awareness, living organisms can begin to develop autobiographical narratives that inform choices over longer and longer time horizons depending on the quantity and quality of memories and predictions that have been developed. Finally, in the (6) realm of human language, we Homo sapiens have gained the freedom to be influenced by an infinite array of abstract representations. At this level, we can now see strategic planning of actions for decades of a life, which clearly drives the feelings of free will that exist in folk psychology.

This brief rundown does not begin to address all of the items in the word cloud shown above for the free will debate. But I’ve already touched on most or all of those in my other posts, so hopefully this final summary just provides a “hierarchical organisation of capacities” (a la Mayr via Conley above), which helps us see the slow step-by-step emergence of degrees of freedom that starts from absolutely nothing but eventually grows to the enormous range that philosophers have contemplated for millennia. Slapping a line on this chart and declaring “here lies free will” or “you must be taller than this degree of freedom in order to be free” would seem to be a very silly exercise. Yet that appears to be what people do when they declare “free will” to absolutely exist or not. Taking all of the facts together, however, by using a “functional analysis” that is typical of the philosophy of science, there is hopefully now a bit more grandeur in the evolutionary view of the emergence of free will. If this brief summary prompts any questions about specific items in my word cloud above, please ask them in the comment section below. Otherwise, I’ll consider myself free to pursue some other topics for now.

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Summary of Freedom Evolves

6/25/2021

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Time to get back to the subject of free will. If you remember, I reviewed Just Deserts by Dan Dennett and Gregg Caruso for 3 Quarks Daily back in March. Then, I shared some passages that didn't make the final cut for that article. Next, while I was on this topic, I reviewed parts 1 and 2 of Scott Barry Kaufman's debate with Sam Harris about free will. And finally, I shared some thoughts on Sam Harris’ "Final Thoughts on Free Will" (that was the title of a podcast he posted in March). I finished that last post by saying:

"Okay, that’s enough from Sam. He has helped me see more issues that need to be discussed, but it’s time for me to put them all on the table in my next and final post in this short series about free will."

Well, as I began writing up that last post, I decided I really needed to go back and read Dan Dennett's full book from 2003, Freedom Evolves. I had read several of his papers on free will, and I'd read Just Deserts very closely (which Dan himself tweeted was his "latest and best defense" of his position on free will), and I basically found that I agreed with Dan that free will is not the magic libertarian thing that many ordinary folks believe in. But neither is it the fatalistic determinism that these folks see as the only other choice. Instead, there is something in between these extremes where more and more degrees of freedom have evolved into something that explains the phenomenology of what we experience, which Dan calls "the kind of free will worth wanting." I think I have a few things to add to Dan's position on this, some details which make it clearer, but I needed to go check Freedom Evolves to be sure. So, here are the main quotes (about free will) that I pulled from that book, along with just a few comments from me about them as well.

p. 25 Determinism is the thesis that “there is at any instant exactly one physically possible future” (Van Inwagen 1983, p.3).

This is the succinct definition that Dan lays out at the beginning of the book which all naturalist / physicalist / materialist philosophers must recon with. This is really the crux of the free will issue. We humans feel that we have alternatives and that we make choices, but if there is only one physically possible future, then how real are these choices? If they are not real, then is free will really just an illusion?

p. 59 [Dennett's imaginary foil Conrad says,] “Determined avoiding isn’t real avoiding because it doesn’t actually change the outcome.” [Dennett replies:] From what to what? The very idea of changing an outcome, common though it is, is incoherent—unless it means changing the anticipated outcome. ... The real outcome, the actual outcome, is whatever happens, and nothing can change that in a determined world—or in an undetermined world!

Dan is making the point here that we cannot change the past, and we cannot accurately anticipate the future. So, a determined world feels exactly the same as an undetermined world and we shouldn't get so worked up about which one we are in. But what struck me from this passage was the question of whose prediction are we talking about here? If no one is actually able to anticipate the future (more on this later), then the determined outcome is literally non-determined. Ahead of time, no one has actually determined it. Therefore, to worry about determinism is like worrying about someone who never reveals their guesses about the future but still annoyingly insists on repeating after the fact, "I knew you were going to do that. I knew you were going to do that."

p. 75 Now that we have a clearer understanding of possible worlds, we can expose three major confusions about possibility and causation that have bedeviled the quest for an account of free will. First is the fear that determinism reduces our possibilities.

That's right. Determinism doesn't remove any of the possibilities that have been opened up by previous actions in the universe.

p. 84 Philosophers who assert that under determinism S* “causes” or “explains” C miss the main point of causal inquiry, and this is the second major error. In fact, determinism is perfectly compatible with the notion that some events have no cause at all.

What Dan really means here is that some events have no known singular cause. He uses some examples like stock market fluctuations or legal cases where there are multiple attempted murderers to show that many events are simply overdetermined by several various things, which makes it impossible for us to say that any one thing caused the event.

p. 88 Consider a man falling down an elevator shaft. Although he doesn’t know exactly which possible world he in fact occupies, he does know one thing: He is in a set of worlds all of which have him landing shortly at the bottom of the shaft. Gravity will see to that. Landing is, then, inevitable because it happens in every world consistent with what he knows. But perhaps dying is not inevitable. Perhaps in some of the worlds in which he lands headfirst or spread-eagled, say, but there may be worlds in which he lands in a toes-first crouch and lives. There is some elbow room.

That last sentence is, of course, a reference to Dan’s 1984 book Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, which argues that our human-specific evolutionary history has carved out quite a lot of (elbow room) space for decisions to be made beyond the determinable knee-jerk reactions of simpler animals. This sounds great, but what doesn’t get emphasized from Dennett is that this perceived freedom is perhaps just due to ignorance. Could a super-intelligent being from another world scan the entire life history of the man in the falling elevator and know for sure that he will try a toes-first crouch because he once saw it in a movie as a teenager? Sure. I guess that’s possible. Does that matter to the choice the man is trying to make as he is falling towards his potential death? It shouldn’t, because that man cannot possibly know about it.

p. 89 At last, we are ready to confront the third major error in thinking about determinism. Some thinkers have suggested that the truth of determinism might imply one or more of the following disheartening claims: All trends are permanent, character is by and large immutable, and it is unlikely that one will change one’s ways, one’s fortunes, or one’s basic nature in the future.

Well, those thinkers are just making an obvious error. A fixed future doesn’t mean an unchanging future. It just means that the changes are conceivably all knowable ahead of time. So, no one should have a fixed mindset vs. a growth mindset.

p. 91 Every finite information-user has an epistemic horizon; it knows less than everything about the world it inhabits, and this unavoidable ignorance guarantees that it has a subjectively open future. Suspense is a necessary condition of life for any such agent.

Coming back to the point made above, Dan is showing how our ignorance about the future is always guaranteed.

p. 91 Footnote 6 Laplace’s demon instantiates an interesting problem first pointed out by Turing, and discussed by Ryle (1949), Popper (1951), and McKay (1961). No information-processing system can have a complete description of itself—it’s Tristram Shandy’s problem of how to represent the representing of the representing of…the last little bits. So even Laplace’s demon has an epistemic horizon and, as a result, cannot predict its own actions the way it can predict the next state of the universe (which it must be outside).

So, in fact, that ignorance is a logical fact of every enclosed system. Nothing can get outside of everything it knows in order to truly know everything that might affect it. Therefore, not even Laplace’s demon could determine the future of its determined universe. And that kind of ignorance is vital to our feelings of freedom. This ends up being similar to something I said in my article “Mortality Doesn’t Make Us Free Either”:

“If there is any hope for the kind of spiritual freedom that Hägglund longs for, it could only be in the epistemological uncertainty that exists between certain mortality and certain immortality.”

p. 92 Do fish have free will, then? Not in a morally important sense, but they do have control systems that make life-or-death “decisions,” which is at least a necessary condition for free will.

This hints at the evolutionary development of free will, which I intend to expand upon in my next post in a way that also aligns it with my summary of the development of consciousness. Furthermore, according to my view of evolutionary ethics, these “morally important” decisions are all life-or-death decisions. We humans are just able to consider longer time horizons and wider circles of moral concern. But the decisions we make are still moral or immoral if they lead to more robust or more fragile survival. (That’s my argument anyway. Lots of moralizers can be mistaken about what they think is moral or immoral.)

p. 94 The question that interests me: Could Austin have made that very putt? And the answer to that question must be “no” in a deterministic world.

Correct. But no one knows which putts will be missed ahead of time, so we still plan and try to make them. And we learn from misses about what to do differently the next time we are in similar situations.

p. 122 If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything. [See Footnote 6]
p. 122 Footnote 6 This was probably the most important sentence in Elbow Room (Dennett 1984, p. 143), and I made the stupid mistake of putting it in parentheses. I’ve been correcting that mistake in my work ever since, drawing out the many implications of abandoning the idea of a punctate self.

Great point. This is exactly the trap that Sam Harris falls into when he refuses to see consciousness as embedded in our entire bodies with lots of unconscious processing. He has a very tiny (dualistic?) view of the self.

p. 125 The idea that someone who has been tested by serious dilemmas of practical reasoning, who has wrestled with temptations and quandaries, is more likely to be “his own man” or “her own woman,” a more responsible moral agent than someone who has just floated happily along down life’s river taking things as they come, is an attractive and familiar point, but one that has largely eluded philosophers’ attention.

This is a great point that philosophers would not miss if they used the evolutionary framework of a Tinbergen analysis. The personal development of every individual (their ontogeny) is a vital part of the whole story of the development of free will.

p. 127 We should quell our desire to draw lines. We don’t need to draw lines. We can live with the quite unshocking and unmysterious fact that, you see, there were all these gradual changes that accumulated over many millions of years and eventually produced undeniable mammals. Philosophers tend to take the idea of stopping a threatened infinite regress by identifying something that is—must be--the regress-stopper: the Prime Mammal, in this case. It often lands them in doctrines that wallow in mystery, or at least puzzlement, and, of course, it commits them to essentialism in most instances.

Great passage! This is drawn out much further in Dan’s paper about Darwinism and the overdue demise of essentialism.

p. 135 Where is the misstep that excuses us from accepting the [incompatibilist’s] conclusion? We can now recognize that it commits the same error as the fallacious argument about the impossibility of mammals. Events in the distant past were indeed not “up to me,” but my choice now to Go or Stay is up to me because its “parents”—some events in the recent past, such as choices I have recently made—were up to me (because their “parents” were up to me), and so on, not to infinity, but far enough back to give my self enough spread in space and time so that there is a me for my decision to be up to! The reality of a moral me is no more put in doubt by the incompatibilist argument than is the reality of mammals.

This points out how incompatibilists attempt to rely on a version of the Sorites paradox to make their case, but that is an unsolved paradox for a reason! Imagine if I tried to start with the claim that I am responsible for my decisions, and then went back and back and back and back, claiming my responsibility continued to hold for each small step along the way, until eventually I took responsibility for the Big Bang. That is of course nuts. But that is essentially the exact same logic that incompatibilists are using on their side of the argument. They are just using it in the opposite direction. But if that trick doesn’t work for me, then it doesn’t work for them either. A new approach to the problem must be used. (Read the link above on the Sorites paradox to see a glimpse into an approach informed by evolutionary logic.)

p. 223 Love is quite real, and so is falling in love. It just isn’t what people used to think it is. It’s just as good—maybe even better. True love doesn’t involve any flying gods. The issue of free will is like this. If you are one of those who think that free will is only really free will if it springs from an immaterial soul that hovers happily in your brain, shooting arrows of decision into your motor cortex, then, given what you mean by free will, my view is that there is no free will at all. If, on the other hand, you think free will might be morally important without being supernatural, then my view is that free will is indeed real, but just not quite what you probably thought it was.

This is an excellent synopsis of Dan’s argument. And it is basically consistent with his strategy for consciousness too. He says folk notions of consciousness are an illusion, just as folk notions of free will are an illusion. I believe he’s right that our definitions of these terms must evolve.

p. 223 In my book Brainstorms, one of the questions discussed was whether such things as beliefs and pains were “real,” so I made up a little fable about people who speak a language in which they talk about being beset by “fatigues” where you and I would talk about being tired, exhausted. When we arrive on the scene with our sophisticated science, they ask us which of the little things in the bloodstream are the fatigues. We resist the question, which leads them to ask, in disbelief: “Are you denying that fatigues are real?” Given their tradition, this is an awkward question for us to answer, calling for diplomacy (not metaphysics).

This is a great example of the confusion that arises when Western languages use too many nouns. As I said in my review of Just Deserts, “We may not have free will, but we are a will with an infinite degree of freedom (subject to certain restrictions).” It may help somewhat to consider this issue as the act of a verb.

p. 225 I claim that the varieties of free will I am defending are worth wanting precisely because they play all the valuable roles free will has been traditionally invoked to play. But I cannot deny that the tradition also assigns properties to free will that my varieties lack. So much the worse for tradition, say I.

Yep! The tradition must evolve.

p. 237 The conclusion Libet and others should draw is that the 300-millisecond “gap” has not been demonstrated at all. After all, we know that in normal circumstances the brain begins its discriminative and evaluative work as soon as stimuli are received, and works on many concurrent projects at once, enabling us to respond intelligently just in time for many deadlines, without having to stack them up in a queue waiting to get through the turnstile of consciousness before evaluation begins.

Yep again! I was very glad to see this as I independently arrived at the same conclusion in my post about Libet. Good evolutionary thinking leads to the same places.

p. 238-9 Conscious decision-making takes time. If you have to make a series of conscious decisions, you’d better budget half a second, roughly, for each one, and if you need to control things faster than that, you’ll have to compile your decision-making into a device that can leave out much of the processing that goes into a stand-alone conscious decision.

I thought this was an interesting precursor to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.

p. 243 As David Hume pointed out so vigorously several centuries ago, you can’t perceive causation. You can’t see it when it happens outside, and you can’t introspect it when it happens inside.

Excellent observation.

p. 273 A proper human self is the largely unwitting creation of an interpersonal design process in which we encourage small children to become communicators and, in particular, to join our practice of asking for and giving reasons, and then reasoning about what to do and why.

This is a nice point to make about our ontogeny. Morality concerns others. It is built by them too. We could not develop selves or morality in isolation.

p. 279 The hard determinists say that our world would be a better place if we could somehow talk ourselves out of feeling guilty when we cause harm and angry when harm is done to us. But it isn’t clear that any feasible “cure” along these lines wouldn’t be worse than the “disease.” Anger and guilt have their rationales, and they are deeply embedded in our psychology.

My analysis of what causes our emotions adds a lot of details to clarify this. Emotions (when they are working properly) do arise from reasons and we would be wise to recognize and hold on to the good reasons while discarding any poorly driven emotional responses. Properly aimed anger and guilt help shape individuals and societies to act towards more robust survival. Determinists think we can eliminate these and other emotions tied to notions of free will, but it is only the mistaken supernatural beliefs that need to go.

p. 287 The self is a system that is given responsibility, over time, so that it can reliably be there to take responsibility, so that there is somebody home to answer when questions of accountability arise. Kane and the others are right to look for a place where the buck stops.

This is a nice description of how free will and moral responsibility are socially constructed in a bi-directional manner.

p. 290 We now uncontroversially exculpate or mitigate in many cases that our ancestors would have dealt with much more harshly. Is this progress or are we all going soft on sin? To the fearful, this revision looks like erosion, and to the hopeful it looks like growing enlightenment, but there is also a neutral perspective from which to view the process. It looks to an evolutionist like a rolling equilibrium, never quiet for long, the relatively stable outcome of a series of innovations and counter-innovations, adjustments and meta-adjustments, an arms race that generates at least one sort of progress: growing self-knowledge, growing sophistication about who we are and what we are, and what we can and cannot do.

Yes! This makes for a good summary of the evolutionary steps that both free will and our understanding of it take. Next time, I’ll do my best to help grow that knowledge and sophistication just a tiny bit further.

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