Blog Archives

Thought Experiment 82: The Freeloader

2/27/2017

Lovable leeches.

Ah now here's a thought experiment aimed squarely at an issue that often comes up in evolution.

--------------------------------------------------
Eleanor was delighted with her new broadband connection. Having been used only to dial-up, she loved the fact that now her internet connection was always on, and also that surfing and downloading was so much quicker. And it was a bonus that it happened to be completely free.
Well, to say it was free was perhaps a little misleading. Eleanor paid nothing for the service because she was using her neighbour's WiFi connection, otherwise known as a wireless Local Area Network. This enabled any computer within a limited range, as long as it had the right software and hardware, to connect without cables to a broadband internet connection. It so happened that Eleanor's apartment was close enough to her neighbour's for her to use his connection.
Eleanor didn't see this as theft. The neighbour had the connection anyway. And she was only using his excess bandwidth. In fact, a neat piece of software called Google Magpie made sure that her use of the connection never slowed her neighbour down by more than a negligible amount. So she got the benefit of his connection, but he didn't suffer as a result. What could be wrong with that?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 244.
---------------------------------------------------

Just this past week, I received a comment on an old post about how "the rational strategy for an individual is to be as much of a free rider as they can get away with." I dismissed that comment rather quickly, but on Friday I'll have a chance to examine this issue in a little more depth. What do you think? Is Eleanor's behaviour really a problem? When exactly does freeloading need to cost?

4 Comments

Response to Thought Experiment 81: Sense and Sensibility

2/24/2017

0 Comments

Gallifrey, home of the Time Lords in Dr. Who.

Perhaps a better question...

In Julian Baggini's explanation of how he came up with this week's thought experiment, he noted that, "The conundrum 'If a tree falls in a deserted forest, does it make a sound?' is one of the oldest in philosophy. Because it has become so hackneyed, it is useful to be able to reconsider the problem from a new angle."

Okay, so let's see what he's come up with.

--------------------------------------------------
The humanoids of Galafray are in many ways just like us. Their sense perception, however, is very different.
   For example, light reflected in the frequency range of the spectrum visible to humans is smelled by the Galafrains. What we see as blue, they sniff as citrus. Also, what we hear, they see. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is for them a silent psychedelic light show of breathtaking beauty. The only things they hear are thoughts: their own and those of others. Taste is the preserve of the eyes. Their best art galleries are praised for their deliciousness.
   They do not have the sense of touch, but they do have another sense we lack, called mulst. It detects movement and is perceived through the joints. It is as impossible for us to imagine mulst as it is for Galafrains to imagine touch.
   When humans first heard about this strange race, it did not take long for someone to ask: when a tree falls in a forest on Galafray, does it make a noise? At the same time, on Galafray they were asking: when a film is shown on Earth, does it make a smell?

Source: A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge by George Berkeley, 1710.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 241.
---------------------------------------------------

So, Baggini has replaced a question about how one sense responds to the world with a question about how multiple senses might make sense of the same universe. That seems simple enough to solve for anyone with a perspective informed by evolutionary philosophy. But before we get to that, let's trace the history of this problem so we understand the context first.

As noted in the source citation above, the tree in the forest problem was first mentioned by the philosopher George Berkeley in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. In that book, he "largely seeks to refute the claims made by Berkeley's contemporary John Locke about the nature of human perception. Whilst, like all the Empiricist philosophers, both Locke and Berkeley agreed that we are having experiences, Berkeley sought to prove that the outside world (the world which causes the ideas one has within one's mind) is also composed solely of ideas."

In my brief blog post about George Berkeley, I noted that this strange view of the world was an inevitable attempt to solve the unsolved mind-body problem in a new way. Descartes had said the mind and the body were two separate and distinct types of things—i.e. dualism. Spinoza (and others) said these were both one material thing—i.e. monism. But Berkeley said these were all one thing, and they were all mind—i.e. idealism. To Berkeley, things only exist when they are perceived. This may sound ludicrous, but in section 23 of his Treatise, Berkeley preempted objections to this idea when he wrote:

‘But’, you say, ‘surely there is nothing easier than to imagine trees in a park, for instance, or books on a shelf, with nobody there to perceive them.’ I reply that this is indeed easy to imagine; but let us look into what happens when you imagine it. You form in your mind certain ideas that you call ‘books’ and ‘trees’, and at the same time you omit to form the idea of anyone who might perceive them. But while you are doing this, you perceive or think of them! So your thought-experiment misses the point; it shows only that you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind; but it doesn’t show that you can conceive it possible for the objects of your thought to exist outside the mind. To show that, you would have to conceive them existing unconceived or unthought-of, which is an obvious contradiction. However hard we try to conceive the existence of external bodies, all we achieve is to contemplate our own ideas. The mind is misled into thinking that it can and does conceive bodies existing outside the mind or unthought-of because it pays no attention to itself, and so doesn’t notice that it contains or thinks of the things that it conceives. Think about it a little and you will see that what I am saying is plainly true; there is really no need for any of the other disproofs of the existence of material substance.

This is clever, which is why Berkeley has a place in history at all, but really he's just saying that you can never know what is happening when we aren't looking at something. When discussing the phantom possibilities of such trees in forests, Albert Einstein is reported to have asked his fellow physicist and friend Niels Bohr "whether he realistically believed that 'the moon does not exist if nobody is looking at it.' To this Bohr replied that however hard he (Einstein) may try, he would not be able to prove that it does, thus giving the entire riddle the status of a kind of an infallible conjecture—one that cannot be either proved or disproved."

Infallible? Yes. But only because it is completely unscientific by being unfalsifiable. There are, however, infinite such nonsenses, like Bertrand Russell's teapot orbiting the sun, the flying spaghetti monster, or all historical notions of God for that matter. As with all such cases, the burden of proof for such strange ideas must fall on the person advocating the notion, since such things cannot be disproven. But of course, Berkeley's tree winking in and out of existence has never received such proof. His disproof of materialism fails.

Later—once the original intention of this "hackneyed conundrum" was confined to the dustbin of fictional inventions—the problem of the tree in a forest morphed into a question that is easily answered by having clear definitions. For example, the word 'sound' historically referred "exclusively to an effect in the mind. Webster's 1947 dictionary defined sound as: "that which is heard; the effect which is produced by the vibration of a body affecting the ear." This meant (at least in 1947) the correct response to the question: "if a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it fall, does it make a sound?" was "no". However, owing to contemporary usage, definitions of sound as a physical effect are prevalent in most dictionaries. Consequently, the answer to the same question is now "yes, a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it fall does make a sound".

So, the same scientific definitions of cause and effect can be referred to for all possible senses, and they must take into account the evolutionary history of any creature sensing its environment. If some long-ago, proto-Galafrain, multi-celled organism first produced chemical reactions in response to light waves, and that eventually led to blue light "tasting" the same to them as the organic compounds that exist in our citrus fruits, then yes, things that we humans "see" could be "smelled" by Galafrains, as long as we are clear whose senses we are talking about. From our current perspective, such Galafrains may seem to have an odd and overly complicated way of adapting to one's environment, but maybe our own sensory perceptions are more strange than we realise. We won't really know that until we can travel somewhere like the seven new exo-planets discovered this week and find new forms of life that do not share our evolutionary history. Until then, we'll just have to confine these sci-fi imaginings to the material world of our minds.

What do you think? Can you hear what I'm saying?

0 Comments

Thought Experiment 81: Sense and Sensibility

2/20/2017

2 Comments

Can you dig it?

If a philosopher philosophises in a blog that no one reads, does he make a stink about it? Read on. That will make sense in a minute...depending on what senses you bring to the table that is.

--------------------------------------------------
The humanoids of Galafray are in many ways just like us. Their sense perception, however, is very different.
   For example, light reflected in the frequency range of the spectrum visible to humans is smelled by the Galafrains. What we see as blue, they sniff as citrus. Also, what we hear, they see. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is for them a silent psychedelic light show of breathtaking beauty. The only things they hear are thoughts: their own and those of others. Taste is the preserve of the eyes. Their best art galleries are praised for their deliciousness.
   They do not have the sense of touch, but they do have another sense we lack, called mulst. It detects movement and is perceived through the joints. It is as impossible for us to imagine mulst as it is for Galafrains to imagine touch.
   When humans first heard about this strange race, it did not take long for someone to ask: when a tree falls in a forest on Galafray, does it make a noise? At the same time, on Galafray they were asking: when a film is shown on Earth, does it make a smell?

Source: A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge by George Berkeley, 1710.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 241.
---------------------------------------------------

Knowing how little I wrote about George Berkeley, it's not surprising this week's thought experiment is a bit silly. It's a good one to demonstrate the importance of having an evolutionary perspective though, so I'll be back on Friday for a quick analysis of this. Can you already taste it?

2 Comments

Response to Thought Experiment 80: Hearts and Heads

2/17/2017

2 Comments

If David Hume made motivational posters...

I promised on Monday that this would be an easy thought experiment for regular readers, and the excellent comments on that post confirmed what I expected. So, let's make this a quick one.

--------------------------------------------------
Schuyler and Tryne both sheltered Jews from the Nazis during the occupation of the Netherlands. They did so, however, for quite different reasons.
   Tryne was a woman whose acts of kindness were purely spontaneous. Suffering and need spoke to her heart and she responded without thinking. Friends admired her generosity of spirit, but sometimes reminded her that the road to hell was paved with good intentions. "You may feel moved to give money to a beggar," they would say, "but what if he then spends it all on drugs?" Tryne was unmoved by such worries. In the face of human need, all you can do is offer a hand, surely?
   Schuyler, in contrast, was known as a cold woman. The truth was that she didn't really like many people, even though she didn't hate them either. When she helped others, she did so because she had thought about their plight and her duties, and concluded that helping was the right thing to do. She felt no warm glow from her good deeds, only a sense that she had chosen correctly.
   Who of Schuyler and Tryne lived the more moral life?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 238.
---------------------------------------------------

As David Hume said, reason is the slave of the passions. But as psychologists now know, emotions are driven by rational appraisals too. In other words, there's a bi-directional feedback loop between reasons and emotions. These connections aren't always consciously known or personally understood, but the link is always there. Our job as philosophers is to improve the functioning of this system by improving the logic behind our evaluations so that our emotions motivate us in the right direction.

As an example of how this system can work poorly, we see in this thought experiment that Tryne gives in to short term desires at the drop of a hat. She is motivated primarily by a logical appraisal that tells her: "if you need something, I will be the one to give it to you." That's a very simple and kind stance to take, and it may work out much of the time, but it is susceptible to manipulation and it does not think about long term consequences.

Schuyler, on the other hand, seems motivated primarily by the desire, the want, the emotion to do what is right. Somewhere during the course of her life her emotional response system learned the lesson that it should not light up simply for short-term wants. She has a greater emotional desire to "be the kind of person who does the right thing." This may make her seem "cold" to some since she doesn't react with a "warm glow" to instant gratification, but she clearly walks the wiser path.

As I mentioned on Monday, Baggini closed his discussion of this thought experiment with the following words:

The trite solution to the dilemma is simply to say that goodness requires a marriage of head and heart. ... This is almost certainly true, but it avoids the real dilemma: is it how we feel or how we think that is more important in determining whether we are morally good human beings?

To me, this is a dualistic mind-body fallacy. Baggini thinks minds and hearts are separate things. But how we feel is ultimately driven by how we think. Hearts and minds always work together on some level. It may not be easy, but our job is to make sure they work well together and towards what we know to be good.

2 Comments

Thought Experiment 80: Hearts and Heads

2/13/2017

11 Comments

Regular readers of this blog won't have much difficulty sorting out this week's thought experiment. Heck, if you value philosophy at all, you probably won't either. See what you think of this.

---------------------------------------------------
Schuyler and Tryne both sheltered Jews from the Nazis during the occupation of the Netherlands. They did so, however, for quite different reasons.
   Tryne was a woman whose acts of kindness were purely spontaneous. Suffering and need spoke to her heart and she responded without thinking. Friends admired her generosity of spirit, but sometimes reminded her that the road to hell was paved with good intentions. "You may feel moved to give money to a beggar," they would say, "but what if he then spends it all on drugs?" Tryne was unmoved by such worries. In the face of human need, all you can do is offer a hand, surely?
   Schuyler, in contrast, was known as a cold woman. The truth was that she didn't really like many people, even though she didn't hate them either. When she helped others, she did so because she had thought about their plight and her duties, and concluded that helping was the right thing to do. She felt no warm glow from her good deeds, only a sense that she had chosen correctly.
   Who of Schuyler and Tryne lived the more moral life?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 238.
---------------------------------------------------

Pretty straightforward. As you can see, there's no other source material for this one, which would imply it's an invention of Baggini himself. So, let's hear how he ends the discussion of this one to see what exactly he would like us to consider:

The trite solution to the dilemma is simply to say that goodness requires a marriage of head and heart. ... This is almost certainly true, but it avoids the real dilemma: is it how we feel or how we think that is more important in determining whether we are morally good human beings?

So what's your non-trite solution to this dilemma? I'll be back on Friday with a heart-felt response of my own.

11 Comments

Response to Thought Experiment 79: A Clockwork Orange

2/10/2017

2 Comments

Here's another creative vision.

This week's thought experiment isn't terribly deep philosophically, but I loved it because it gave me a chance to watch a classic movie from a genius director. It's amazing what you can do with creative vision.

---------------------------------------------------
The Home Secretary had been told in no uncertain terms that his plan was "politically unacceptable." But just because it was similar to something a well-known novelist had described in a work of dystopic fiction, that was no reason to dismiss it out of hand.
   Like the Ludivico process in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, the new Crime Aversion Therapy programme took repeat offenders through an unpleasant, though not lengthy, treatment that left them repulsed by the very thought of the types of crime they had committed.
   To the Home Secretary it seemed not so much a win-win situation, as a win-win-win one: the taxpayer won, as treatment was cheaper than prolonged and repeated imprisonment; the criminal won, as life was better outside than inside prison; and society won, because previously troublesome blights on the community were turned into law-abiding citizens.
   And yet the civil liberties brigade bleated on about "brainwashing" and denying the essential liberty and dignity of the individual—even though the programme was entirely voluntary. What, thought the Home Secretary, was there to object to?

Source: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, 1962.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 235.
---------------------------------------------------

At first blush, this new Crime Aversion Therapy may seem unobjectionable. The treatment is effective and voluntary, it is presumably reversible, and from a utilitarian perspective it benefits everyone involved. In the movie, however, we see some critiques and downsides that must be addressed if we want to fully endorse the procedure. As I watched the film last night, I noted five different issues that I think must be considered:

The Retribution Objection — One of the guards in the film was upset that Alex (the main character who was jailed for murder) was going to be let free so soon after his crime. He thought there should be "an eye for an eye." Otherwise it was "brutally unjust" to the victims of the crime. Later, when the unintended consequence of ruining Beethoven for Alex is discovered, the same guard comforts himself by saying, "Oh well. Can't be helped. That's the punishment element I guess."
The Voluntary Objection — When Alex is officially presented with paperwork to go through with his treatment, he is screamed at by one of the guards who says, "Don't read it! Just sign it!"
The Free Will Objection — The prison chaplain questioned the outcome of such a treatment. He asked, "Does it really make a man good? A man must choose to be good. Otherwise he is not a man." Similarly, someone at Alex's post-treatment demonstration asks about choice, and worries that Alex can't choose.
The Incomplete Objection — Once Alex returns home, he discovers his old room has been rented out. He storms off after a fight and gives his parents a major guilt trip. He can still be verbally cruel to others. Later when he is being tortured by someone playing Beethoven's 9th symphony, Alex tries to commit suicide by jumping out a window. He can still be violent towards himself.
The Diminished Objection — Post treatment, Alex is first tested in front of an audience by having a man beat him up and force him to lick his shoe. Alex cannot fight back. A naked woman approaches him willingly--but he cannot touch her. After his release, he tries to strike someone who is rude to him, but he gags and retches as soon as he raises his fist. A hobo he once beat up recognises him and leads a gang of homeless people to assault Alex, who can only lie there and take it. Policemen come to break up the scene, but they are old friends of Alex who have a grudge against him. They take him to the woods, beat him, and nearly drown him. Again, Alex cannot fight back.

Let's tackle these one at a time.

First, anyone who raises the retribution objection is not looking forward. When I blogged about my thoughts on Justice, I noted this theoretical starting point:

Since justice is a public good, its provider—the government—must have a monopoly on force. Progress is maximized in the long-term when there is freedom from oppression and maximum participation (i.e. a minimization of criminals who in essence defect from society). In a cooperative society concerned with the long-term survival of the species, which understands the workings of evolution and therefore insists on tit for tat justice and never allowing cheaters to win, the various means of punishment should be doled out as necessary and appropriate in an escalating order of: restoration, rehabilitation, and finally incapacitation as a last resort. The focus of these punishments is the education of the criminal and the deterrence of future offenses by the populace. Seeking retribution gives way to short-term emotions of vengeance that were useful in nature before the public good of justice was provided for by the state. Now, the emotions of the victim of a crime must not be allowed to override the use of reason to create justice and stability for the long term.

Second, experimentation on prisoners is indeed problematic because "their consent cannot be said to be completely voluntary, due to their compromised and dependant status." However, there are established guidelines that can be followed about how to involve prisoners in research, so it can be done. While Alex was clearly not given such considerate treatment to ensure that his participation was completely voluntary, that doesn't mean we couldn't do better in our thought experiment.

Third, the fear of taking away the prisoner's free will to choose to do wrong seems misdirected when you consider the alternative of incapacitation through incarceration. The criminal cannot be allowed to continue committing crimes in a functioning society, so either he (and it's overwhelmingly "he" according to crime statistics) loses his freedom to take some outside actions, or he loses his freedom to take all outside action. If other forms of rehabilitation do not work, then we can see why a criminal would voluntarily choose the new Crime Aversion Therapy. Once one drops the invented moralistic worries about gods demanding that their creations have free will to choose to love and obey them, then rational decisions can be made about what actually works.

Fourth, the incomplete objection may apply to Alex, but since I don't consider suicide to be a criminal offence, his powers to hurt others actually seems limited to the non-criminal variety. In our theoretical realm of philosophical thought experiments, perhaps we can stipulate that the Crime Aversion Therapy is more accurate than the Ludovico process in A Clockwork Orange.

Finally, however, we come to the most difficult objection—that of Alex's diminished capacities. In A Clockwork Orange, we just don't see anywhere near the level of precision required to stop Alex from committing crimes while still allowing him to be able to defend himself from others' crimes. This is a problem as it's a fundamental feature of humankind that I think would be very difficult to reprogram. In my journal article on morality, I wrote:

Our intuitive moral feelings are often in conflict because of the debates that rage within us regarding the self vs. society, or society vs. the environment, or the short-term vs. the long-term, or just the fundamental choices between competition and cooperation. This is what drives the two faces of humankind. We are neither inherently good nor inherently evil—we are capable of both, a flexibility we must have in order to have the power to choose between alternate paths that are right some of the time and wrong some of the time.

This power to do the exact same thing for evil or for good is a flexibility that makes us humans extremely adaptive. It makes us extremely dangerous too. But taking away that power without taking away our flexibility seems impossible. I know I closed Monday's post on this thought experiment, though, by saying the following:

We're told by philosophers that the rules for their thought experiments demand that we have to suspend concern about the likelihood of something happening, and that we must consider the events depicted as long as there is even a slim chance that the events in the thought experiment could occur. It seems to me that the development of a scientific treatment that could strongly influence the future behaviour of people is at least theoretically possible.

So, if some new Crime Aversion Therapy comes along that really can overcome all the objections I've listed, then sure, why not? We non-criminals seem to successfully navigate moral dilemmas all the time, so why can't we figure out how that happens and replicate it for habitual criminals? Again, I think this is exceedingly difficult, but not impossible. In the meantime, we're left wondering what reader John A. Johnson asked about in the comments to my blog post on Monday:

Indeed, we cannot foresee all of the consequences of techniques to reform criminals, but what is the alternative? To try nothing at all? Clearly, the criminal justice system is already engaging in practices that it hopes will reform criminals.

John's right so let's close this fun thought experiment by looking at some of the options we already have for improving the criminal justice system. Currently, the best practices are being seen in something that criminologists call Scandinavian Exceptionalism. One way to see the outcome of this exceptionalism is in the relative numbers of the prison population rate per 100,000 of national population in economically developed countries:

Scandinavian Countries
Sweden 60
Norway 72
Denmark 73
Finland 58
Iceland 47

European Countries
England & Wales 148
Germany 78
Italy 100
Belgium 108
Spain 144

North American Countries
Canada 142
U.S.A. 707

The Scandinavian countries have roughly half as many incarcerations as European countries. And OVER TEN TIMES FEWER than those in America! (This is what American exceptionalism really looks like.) But there's a differences in prison conditions too:

(1) Nordic prisons tend to be smaller,
(2) officer/inmate relations are better and more egalitarian,
(3) the quality of prison life is better (the quality of the food provided, the hygienic conditions, the amount of personal space and the quality of visiting arrangements are all superior in the Nordic prisons),
(4) prison officers are better trained, and
(5) prisoners in the Nordic countries are more likely to be involved in education or vocational training programs that are more often directed at preparing them for life after release.

These are all part of a holistically different approach to social and criminal justice that just works. Recidivism rates—the focus of this week's thought experiment—are 20-30% in Norway vs. 40-70% in the United States. So until we can get the (near) impossible of a Criminal Aversion Therapy that works, we should really look at Why Scandinavian Prisons are Superior. Please follow that link to read an outstanding article in The Atlantic on this issue, but here are a few tidbits to whet your appetite:

Suomenlinna Island has hosted an “open” prison since 1971. The 95 male prisoners leave the prison grounds each day to do the township’s general maintenance or commute to the mainland for work or study. Serving time for theft, drug trafficking, assault, or murder, all the men here are on the verge of release. Cellblocks look like dorms at a state university. Though worse for wear, rooms feature flat-screen TVs, sound systems, and mini-refrigerators for the prisoners who can afford to rent them for prison-labor wages of 4.10 to 7.3 Euros per hour ($5.30 to $9.50). With electronic monitoring, prisoners are allowed to spend time with their families in Helsinki. Men here enjoy a screened barbecue pit, a gym, and a dining hall where prisoners and staff eat together. Prisoners throughout Scandinavia wear their own clothes. Officers wear navy slacks, powder-blue shirts, nametags and shoulder bars; but they carry no batons, handcuffs, Tasers or pepper-spray.
An important caveat: Nordic prisons are not all open facilities. I’ve heard men describe Scandinavian closed-prison conditions in ways that echo those of the American prison where I have led a writing workshop since 2006: officials intent on making life onerous, long hours in lockup, arbitrarily enforced rules.
The most profound difference is that correctional officers fill both rehabilitative and security roles. Each prisoner has a “contact officer” who monitors and helps advance progress toward return to the world outside—a practice introduced to help officers avoid the damage experienced by performing purely punitive functions: stress, hypertension, alcoholism, suicide, and other job-related hazards that today plague American corrections officers, who have an average life expectancy of 59.
This is all possible because, throughout Scandinavia, criminal justice policy rarely enters political debate. Decisions about best practices are left to professionals in the field, who are often published criminologists and consult closely with academics. Sustaining the barrier between populist politics and results-based prison policy are media that don’t sensationalize crime—if they report it at all.
Over the past four decades, Republicans and Democrats have waged a “tougher on crime than you” arms race built upon white unease with the disruption of the old racial order brought about by the civil rights and Black Power movements. Once segregation was declared unconstitutional and black activists began to demand equal rights, white fear called out for “law and order.” Seeking votes and profits, politicians and media have encouraged the white public’s worst fears of becoming the victims of black perpetrators. Under the guise of the wars on drugs, crime, and terror, the urban poor and disenfranchised, especially young black men, have been rounded up in mass numbers, largely for non-violent drug crimes, of which middle-class whites have been consistently shown to be equal perpetrators.
In 1993, Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie (a major influence on Scandinavian penal policy) had already unpacked this phenomenon. In Crime Control as Industry, Christie concluded that the more unlike oneself the imagined perpetrator of crime, the harsher the conditions one will agree to impose upon convicted criminals, and the greater the range of acts one will agree should be designated as crimes. More homogeneous nations institutionalize mercy, which is to say they attend more closely to the circumstances surrounding individual criminal acts. The opposite tendency, expressed in mandatory sentencing and indiscriminate “three strikes” laws, not only results from, but widens social distance. The harshness of the punishment that fearful voters are convinced is the only thing that works on people who don’t think or act like them becomes a measure of the moral distance between these voters and people identified as criminals.
No imprisoned American has to be told she has been left to the whims of under-screened and under-trained staff, most of whom are also from impoverished circumstances. They see staff rewarded with promotion for harsh treatment of prisoners and on the way to solid pensions. They know that it doesn’t matter what potential for shame, for self-castigation, penitence, or desire to make amends resides inside any American prisoner. Parole decisions are made by political appointees who watch the backs of their patrons. The system itself breeds cynical resentment. Witnessing the humiliation, racism, and physical assault perpetrated against prisoners—by staff, or tolerated between prisoners—can overfill the psychological space where reflection and self-searching might occur.
Now imagine yourself in a prison that commands a view from a tourist brochure. Your cell phone lies on a shelf, next to a TV and CD player, inside a prison that lets you go to paid work or study. There is no perimeter wall. Prison staff will help you with free-world social services to cover a missed month’s rent on your family’s apartment. Another will help you look for work, or for the next stage of education. Imagine yourself a prisoner who knows he is in prison for what he did, not because of his color or class, or because, lacking the resources for a proper defense, he plea-bargained under threat of near-geological years of incarceration. But also imagine living on this lovely island knowing, every minute of every day, that this is not your home, these people are not your family, your friends, your children, and you are always one misstep from a cell in a closed prison. You have strict curfews. In town you carry an electronic anklet. Yet nothing here feels unfair or unreasonable. You have, after all, committed a crime serious enough to make a range of other remedies untenable. Nothing you can see or touch or smell or taste, and no interaction with staff gives you anything to blame or resent about the system that brought you here. This is the polished glass nightmare. Every emotional discomfort, every moment of remorse that you might try to cover with resentment of the system, everything you try to grip onto to crawl away from personal responsibility slides back into the pit of the self. Judges and prosecutors are unelected professionals who are under political pressure only to minimize prison populations. The message everywhere you look and walk is the same. You did this to yourself.

Powerful. More powerful than Crime Aversion Therapy? Maybe not. But we already have it.

If only we'd use a little creative vision.

2 Comments

Thought Experiment 79: A Clockwork Orange

2/6/2017

4 Comments

Should we try to keep our eyes open to this?

Okay my droogs, we've got a pretty uncontroversial thought experiment this week based on a popular book and movie. See what you make of this:

---------------------------------------------------
The Home Secretary had been told in no uncertain terms that his plan was "politically unacceptable." But just because it was similar to something a well-known novelist had described in a work of dystopic fiction, that was no reason to dismiss it out of hand.
   Like the Ludivico process in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, the new Crime Aversion Therapy programme took repeat offenders through an unpleasant, though not lengthy, treatment that left them repulsed by the very thought of the types of crime they had committed.
   To the Home Secretary it seemed not so much a win-win situation, as a win-win-win one: the taxpayer won, as treatment was cheaper than prolonged and repeated imprisonment; the criminal won, as life was better outside than inside prison; and society won, because previously troublesome blights on the community were turned into law-abiding citizens.
   And yet the civil liberties brigade bleated on about "brainwashing" and denying the essential liberty and dignity of the individual—even though the programme was entirely voluntary. What, thought the Home Secretary, was there to object to?

Source: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, 1962.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 235.
---------------------------------------------------

As a reminder, we're told by philosophers that the rules for their thought experiments demand that we have to suspend concern about the likelihood of something happening, and that we must consider the events depicted as long as there is even a slim chance that the events in the thought experiment could occur. It seems to me that the development of a scientific treatment that could strongly influence the future behaviour of people is at least theoretically possible. But would it be objectionable? Why or why not? What parameters or situations might be required to think about before going ahead with such a plan? I'll be back on Friday to discuss.

4 Comments

Response to Thought Experiment 78: Gambling on God

2/3/2017

0 Comments

....maybe not, Einstein, but the universe can play dice with gods.

When I wrote about Jesus during my examination of the survival of the fittest philosophers, I wrote the following parable as an homage to Jesus' preferred method of simple communication:

On one occasion, a very loud host on Fox News asked a theological expert, "This latest scientific research is tampering with the will of God. What does the bible have to say about this?"
The theological expert responded in a rising volume, "The liberal left don't want to hear this, but they are clearly risking damnation and the fires of hell for our world by ignoring the sacred words of God handed down to us from the prophets. Now THAT is a global warming I think we really ought to be afraid of."
A secular atheist had been offered up to the show as a punching bag for the audience. Rather than face the non-sequiters of his attackers, he asked a simple question. "If your orthodox policies led to everlasting heaven for your followers, but their lack of inclusive, cooperative progress led to the extinction of the species and the loss of untold billions of future beings, would god be happy with that?"
The theological expert replied with great certainty, "God works in mysterious ways and we must serve him no matter what the price is as the cost of entry into his kingdom of love."
The secular atheist told him, "Then go and do likewise with your flock."

Keep this in mind as we go through this week's thought experiment.

---------------------------------------------------
And the Lord spake unto the philosopher, "I am the Lord thy God, and though you have no proof I am who I say I am, let me give you a reason to believe that will appeal to your fallen state: a gamble based on self-interest.
   "There are two possibilities: I exist or I don't exist. If you believe in me and follow my commands and I exist, you get eternal life. If I don't exist, however, you get a mortal life, with some of the comforts of belief. Sure, you've wasted some time at church and missed out on some pleasures, but that doesn't matter when you're dead. But if I do exist, eternal bliss is yours.
   "If you don't believe in me and I don't exist, you have a free and easy life, but you will still end up dead and you won't live with the reassurance of belief in the divine. If I do exist, however, it's an eternity of hot pokers and torment.
   "So, gamble that I don't exist and the best is a short life, while the worst is eternal damnation. But bet that I do exist, however unlikely that is, and the worst is a short life, but the best is eternal life. You'd be mad not to."

Source: Pensées, by Blaise Pascal, 1660.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 232.
---------------------------------------------------

Known more famously as Pascal's Wager, the original text of this thought experiment "is long-winded and written in somewhat convoluted philosophy-speak, but it can be distilled more simply:

If you believe in God and God does exist, you will be rewarded with eternal life in heaven: thus an infinite gain.
If you do not believe in God and God does exist, you will be condemned to remain in hell forever: thus an infinite loss.
If you believe in God and God does not exist, you will not be rewarded: thus a finite loss.
If you do not believe in God and God does not exist, you will not be rewarded, but you have lived your own life: thus a finite gain."

It's true that Pascal's Wager is considered "groundbreaking because it charted new territory in probability theory, and marked the first formal use of decision theory," but it was written over 350 years ago. We therefore shouldn't be surprised that it has plenty of faults.

The most obvious fault comes from the error of trying to calculate probabilities when infinity and imagination are both involved. Like the simulation hypothesis (which I have heard far too much about already — seriously scientists, stop putting actual probability numbers on this!), there are an infinite number of other possibilities that demand your wager if you are being serious about betting your finite life on an afterlife. Besides any number of new alternative hypotheses still waiting to be invented (more flying-spaghetti monsters please!), there have already been many other gods invented, which readers pointed out in the comment section to Monday's post. Baggini also explained this fault clearly when he wrote:

The wager makes sense only if there really are two possibilities, but, of course, there aren't. There are many gods to believe in and many ways of following them. Evangelical Christians, for example, believe that you will go to hell if you do not accept Jesus Christ as your saviour. So if you place your divine bet on Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism, Judaism, Confucianism, or any other religion, you still lose if Christ turns out to be king of heaven. The stakes remain the same, of course: eternal damnation is one possible outcome of making the wrong choice. But the problem now is that you can't insure against this highly improbable eventuality, because if you pick the wrong religion, you're damned anyway.

Another common objection to Pascal's Wager is what reader John A. Johnson and I had a long discussion about in the comment section to Monday's post. This is something that Pascal called "the inability to believe." Like Pascal, I think that people who are currently unconvinced either way about God's existence might possibly be able to change their beliefs by deciding they wanted to believe. Today, we know this as the fallacy or phenomenon of motivated reasoning. It can be used in either direction—and I prefer to show the motivation for disbelief—but Pascal exhorted such people to:

Endeavour then to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness. (Pensées, Section III, Note 233)

In addition to these two most common objections, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes several others that have been made, including: problems with the decision matrix; the probability assigned to God's existence; the expectation that utility ought to be maximised; the logical validity of the argument; and moral objections to wagering for God. Really, any of these defeat Pascal's Wager (which, by the way, he didn't actually say was convincing), but I think there is one more objection from an evolutionary philosophy perspective that needs to be added. The crux of that objection can be seen in the refutation of this premise:

"...bet that I do exist, however unlikely that is, and the worst is a short life"

As you can see in my parable written above, "a short life" is NOT the worst thing that can happen by following a belief in a vindictive God who punishes disbelievers with eternal hell. Following such a God can conceivably lead to extinction. We could get there through nuclear war with infidels, through runaway global warming because faith trumped facts, through ecosystem collapse after actions that relied on God's Word telling us man has dominion over all the Earth, or lots of other religious-fed potential calamities. Any of these doomsday scenarios would lead to the loss of an infinite amount of well-being in the world, so Pascal's Wager is no longer simply a tradeoff between finite sacrifice and infinite gain. The finite sacrifice could lead to infinite loss as well.

This point was hinted at a few weeks ago when Sam Harris met with Richard Dawkins for two evenings of conversation in a sold out auditorium in Los Angeles. Each night, they took questions from the internet and from the audience for 90 minutes, and there was one question during the second evening that was particularly relevant to the point that I'm making. Here is the transcript from that question, which occurred at the 1 hour 8 minute mark:

-------------------
Q: On religion. There are so many people throughout the ages where you can picture a man, he lives his life, he makes his meaning based on the religion he's been presented with as a young person, and he finds peace in that. For a lot of the dogmas and beliefs of the religion he's presented with, he may not really subscribe to them and he may not read all the texts—he just doesn't think about it all that much. But he finds peace in that. So my question for you is, what's the harm? I know beliefs have impact and beliefs have consequences, but my question for you is, what's the harm of an individual, or so many people throughout the ages who live their lives finding peace, having religion, who live and die and believe as they do?

[Audience Member: Read their books! (Applause)]

SH: Well, actually there is something that will be familiar to many of you that I think is worth saying at this point, which is, the problem with dogmatism is that you actually can never be sure what the harms will be. They can be astonishingly bad all of a sudden. And the state of being dogmatic—the state of believing things strongly despite an absence of evidence or even in the face of counter-evidence—that is the state of having no error-correcting mechanisms in your worldview. I mean, you're simply not available to reality, so you are just going to continually bump into hard objects wherever you go. My favourite example of this, I've said this several times but it's just worth pondering, is that you can have a dogma which on its face may be the most benign and life-affirming dogma there is. So, take the dogma that life starts at the moment of conception and all human life is sacred. All of it is sacred. We just have to privilege the human being from the moment of conception as being an entity that has to be treated as an end in itself and never as a means. Now what harm is going to come from that? That's the most life-affirming and most careful disposition you could possibly have. But then we get something like embryonic stem cell research. Or then we have the family-planning needs of women and girls who get raped. And all of a sudden the people who are sure, based on pure dogmatism, that a soul—which if you could hold it in your hand would be invisible to you, if you could hold a thousand in your hand they'd be invisible to you—those souls in those fertilised ova are just as important as the souls in this room. That's a dogma that is responsible for an immense amount of harm and yet you wouldn't have foreseen it. So the problem is, to have a way of thinking about the world that doesn't allow you to reliably navigate, because you are not basing your worldview on evidence and argument. That's the problem, and it's always surprising.

RD: By the way, a good way to tease people who think that the soul enters the body at conception is just confront them with monozygotic twins. Which twin has the soul? [Laughter] And which twin is the zombie? [More laughter] Sam is, of course, perfectly right that there are all sorts of unforeseen evil consequences. But I have another answer to this very well thought out question, which is that I'm not really all that sure that I really care whether it does harm or not. I care about whether it's true. [Applause] And even more strongly than that, I care that children are brought up denied access to the very, very beautiful truths which we are uncovering, which science in particular has been uncovering over centuries. We live in a wonderfully privileged century from this point of view. We live at a time when not everything is known, but an enormous amount is known. And it's a great privilege for those who live, who are born in this century, to be told what we do know about the world, about the universe, about life, and about how we've come to be here. But it almost makes you weep to think of children who are being deprived of this by ignorant, bigoted parents who are teaching them nonsense because, I don't know, because it's comforting, or because it comes down through the families, their tradition, or it's in the Holy Book. I mean, what a tragedy for the children concerned, to live their lives deprived of the wonder of knowledge.
-------------------

Sam and Richard are right. Very right. But religion is not going away in its entirety any time soon. Nor would there be a desperate need to get rid of it if only religion were to reform a few fundamental things. As evidenced by its long history and worldwide diffusion, religion is a very complex, all-encompasing, shape-shifting worldview that has managed to do plenty of good. As such, it has resisted all previous efforts to throw it away, including recent high-profile attempts made by several best-selling books in the years since 9-11. The so-called "unholy trinity" of New Atheists have thoroughly pointed out the many faults of religion in books such as The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, The End of Faith by Sam Harris, and God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens. These books have proved to be powerful and persuasive to many skeptical questioners, but there are still billions of faithful people who stand by their religious views. Why is that?

I believe a list of religion's virtues, both real and claimed, both justified and unjustified, can help explain what motivates their motivated reasoning. Based on many personal experiences with this subject, and a bit of focused research, I've come up with the following list of things people value about their religion. By organising the entries according to which of the six branches of a philosophy they fall under, it becomes easy to see that religion comprehensively has answers for everything:

RELIGIOUS WORLDVIEWS BENEFIT FOLLOWERS BY:
1. Epistemology - What do I know?

Explaining gaps in the knowledge of nature*
Simplifying life*
Promising that God (and prayers to Him) can change the world*

2. Logic - How do I know it?

Being a source of unquestioned knowledge and authority*
Giving a permanent argument that is never wrong*

3. Metaphysics - Where do we come from?

Explaining the origins of the universe
Explaining what happens after death

4. Ethics - What is good?

Providing moral codes
Encouraging a long-term focus (on the next life or the afterlife)
Providing hope for immortal life
Giving comfort in the face of death
Imparting humility in the face of the sublime
Encouraging charity towards the less-fortunate
Inspiring virtue from the biographies of saints, sinners, prophets, and holy men
Venerating wisdom over folly
Giving courage and inner strength to act for beliefs
Providing reasons to act boldly and take leaps of faith into the unknown
Encouraging love towards others
Imparting the discipline of regular practice

5. Aesthetics - What is beautiful?

Creating magical wonder in the universe
Being a permanent source of love, affection, and attachment
Connecting people to beauty through songs, art, and architecture
Giving meaning for life

6. Political Philosophy - How do we act?

Teaching history
Reminding us throughout the year to rest and reflect
Giving opportunities to gather with others
Promoting communal cooperation
Defining in and out groups
Guaranteeing invisible, all-seeing justice
Offering forgiveness for past mistakes
Compelling obedience to authority figures
Promoting social stability
Providing traditional rituals and ceremonies for traditional events of life
Describing methods for political governance (especially non-Christian)
Challenging corrupt secular hierarchies

That is a long list of benefits for a worldview. No wonder people are resistant to give up their religion! And almost all of these entries are laudable (even though many are stuck and partially misdirected). The only entries that I think are completely wrong are the ones with the asterisks next to them, which all happen to be confined to the epistemology and logic of religion. Since religion draws its authority from revelation, faith without evidence, and eternal dogma, this is not surprising. But all of the good that has come from the accepted dogma is hard for many people to argue with. I personally think that every single one of these other benefits can now be replaced by mixtures of evolutionary philosophy, secular humanism, sacred naturalism, scientific inquiry, and other rational pursuits. But that can only happen if the mistaken epistemological and logical foundations of religion are discarded. There are many mysteries in the universe and there are things we may never be able to discover answers to—our accounts of knowledge must be open to this fact and be willing to evolve. If a religion were to acknowledge this and give up any claim to unquestioned authority, perhaps the rest of the good that religion can do would be better aimed and more easily accepted. If only someone would say, "We don't actually Know, with a capital K, but here is what we think will work based on all the wisdom of the ages."

What do you think? Is my list of religious benefits comprehensively made and accurately categorised? Could they all be replaced if current authoritarian religions reformed their fundamental flaws or just disappeared? Will that ever happen?

Do you want to make a bet on it?

0 Comments

Thought Experiment 82: The Freeloader

Response to Thought Experiment 81: Sense and Sensibility

Thought Experiment 81: Sense and Sensibility

Response to Thought Experiment 80: Hearts and Heads

Thought Experiment 80: Hearts and Heads

Response to Thought Experiment 79: A Clockwork Orange

Thought Experiment 79: A Clockwork Orange

Response to Thought Experiment 78: Gambling on God

Stay in Touch

Blog Philosophy

Archives